Denver pop culture from my youth

Wow, I am having some trippy flashbacks to being a sad, skinny kid in Denver in the 80s. Except, thanks to this rad discussion on Boing Boing, I feel sort of happy and sentimental about it all. In fact, now that I think about, Denver was just the sort of weird, down and out place where really interesting kitsch and counterculture flourished like mold in a petri dish. Ah, petri dishes! Now I am thinking about the science unit in 4th grade, when we grew spores and did experiments with mealworms. I named my mealworm Ben, after my next door neighbor / boyfriend Ben Thompson.

I think I may have just this moment passed through some critical adult rite of passage when childhood memories suddenly go from being embarrassing and painful to nostalgic and bittersweet.

(Thanks to Chris for the link.)

When did steampunk become so hot? I am tired of it already. Just saw an ad for a “steampunk headboard" on craigslist. Snooze.

Inspiration all around...

I don’t know why, but I feel so inspired right now to do weird, new, interesting, arty things. A couple of things have got my mind racing…

Inspiration #1 
Finally got around to reading NY Times Magazine article from earlier this month about young fashion bloggers (very young. like 13. or 12!) Then I spent some time this morning reading the blog of aforementioned bloggers. Holy cow, these ladies have style. And they can write! They’re so uninhibited. It kind of puts me to shame. Two favorites: style rookie and childhood flames

Inspiration #2
I’ve been thinking since visiting London earlier this summer and seeing an exhibit on the fashion photographer Tim Walker that included his notebooks — which were basically just collage books with clippings from other fashion mags, and old books, and other random objects, like seed packets (!) — that I need to start keeping collage books of the stuff that inspires me. so today I started! I took the free sketchbook that we got when we did graphic facilitation training at work and pulled out the handy dandy glue stick, and just started pasting pictures in. then i wrote little annotations and little arrows pointing to what I like in each picture. the whole thing made me feel light and floaty. that’s a good thing, right?

Inspiration #3
I finally, after meaning to for a while, did a little research on Central Saint Martin’s College, which appears to be the origin of every cool artiste out there, including this one and this one.  Turns out they have an MA in “Creative Practice for Narrative Environments," which could just be the dream program for combining the interior/space/architectural design thang with the interaction/user experience/information design thang.  Might be time for me and my sweetheart to move to London.

Kate Rutter shows you how to build your very own seat at the strategy table

I love this post from the ever clever Kate Rutter. She’s so good at (gently) calling people out on their shit. Here, she has a little fun with the coveted “seat at the table."

While I’m charmed by the way she delivered that message, what’s more important is her basic point, of course. Rather than lamenting how hard it is to get a seat at the table in business strategy discussions, we designers and IAs and UX folks should do bold, interesting work (backed up with a good understanding of business metrics and goals), and then trust that the good ideas will spur the right conversations.

Thank you, Antonio

Yesterday, when I came home from work there was a box from Amazon waiting for me. What could it be? I hadn’t ordered anything.

As it turns out, it was a generous and unsolicited gift from Antonio, whom I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. Antonio, if you’re reading this, please email me so I can send a proper thank you (my about page has contact info). In the meantime, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Gifts! How I love gifts!

Scaling Mt. Email

Climbing Mt. Email

I spent almost the entire day dealing with email. Yet somehow I have more in my inbox than I did this morning. It occurred to me today that eventually we’ll all reach a point when we receive more email than we actually have time to respond to — when the inflow outpaces our capacity. Then we’ll all need personal assistants! But who will be the personal assistant’s assistants? Actually, Mt. Email is the wrong imagery. It’s more like an email glacier. On the top, up where it’s warmer, a sludge of email flows through my inbox relatively quickly. But down below, where it’s colder and denser, there are emails that were deposited and then froze there somewhere back in the last ice age. Those I may never respond to, but not for lack of trying.

On 3 minutes...

I know I vowed last week that I would write every day for three minutes. I did this exactly one time. Uh, sorry about that.

As it happens, last week was a little rough. Events were fortuitously timed to make me rethink how much I want to share every little thought as it comes to me.  Basically, I was called out (albeit, indirectly) for talking too loudly about a lot of nothing. It burned hot and shameful.

I suddenly became very conscious that in the semi-public pontificating I’ve been doing lately, I don’t know who I’m talking to, or what about. Not really.  This makes me feel sort of sad and confused when I think about the writing and speaking I’ve been doing for work, but it makes me feel even more upended when I think about this blog. Ugleah has an identity crisis. What’s the purpose of this web site? Is it all for me? Just a place to dump my thoughts and reflections? Am I trying to share some ideas with a bigger group of people? And if so, about what, really? Being a wide eyed girl in a big city? Or someone with a UX day job? Or just some poor schmo who gets frustrated sometimes and doesn’t know what to do about it? 

Here’s what excites me. I like the idea of sharing my observations in a medium that’s open and unmediated.  I like the thought of becoming a better writer and a better thinker and, frankly, a better person, by exploring my ideas in a slightly riskier, more public forum.

Here’s what deflates me. I hate the thought that that probably entails saying more stupid things than smart things. Am I merely creating a record of my half baked, mushy thought process for all the world to see? Probably, yes. That sucks.

3 minutes a day, even though it sounds easy, doesn’t really give me enough time to develop any ideas. And poorly developed ideas are my most hated personal gremlin. I have too many of them already, privately, shamefully, without broadcasting them to the world.

So I hereby renounce the 3 minute proclamation. I think I’m just going to try to write stuff as it comes to me, and take as long as I need to make some sense of it.

Interesting discussion on IXDA about success metrics for an in-house UX group

While I’m not sure if I agree with the actual metrics themselves (number of layouts delivered seems sort of meaningless and easy to inflate, as Scott Berkun points out in the discussion thread), but I’m interested in the basic idea of regularly measuring yourself as a group (or as a team of one, natch), and gauging your own progress against that.

Even just asking your clients in a regular and structured way about how happy they are with your contribution and how much they think you’ve improved their product and/or process would be kind of groovy.

"Can In-house Design Departments Be Respectable?"

3 mins / Montana bound

Montana

I worked from home today, trying to get email and time entry and other odds and ends done, and felt incredibly guilty all day long. What’s wrong with me? I was productive! I swear! It’s just that if I’m not physically in the office, I worry that people won’t believe that I’m actually working. I think this comes from some kind of second generation lapsed Catholic guilt. My beloved grandmother’s influence is strong.

I’ve been feeling weird and strange about all things work related all day, as a matter of fact. Is this just the post conference funk? After being so sociable and voluble all last week, I feel strange and delinquent and anti-social this week. It’s causing me to seriously reconsider my public/private life balance. I’m having strange fantasies of quitting my job and moving to Montana. Montana, which I’ve never visited, is code in my house for opting out of one’s present life and starting fresh as a simpler, quieter person. I escape into this fantasy about once a week.

Ah, scrap it

I feel weird about using my blog to shill for panel pickers and the like. Please ignore the previous post. Hell, I’m taking it down. Blogs are weird. I am weird. Ok. Must stop typing now.

5 minutes

Here’s a personal and embarrassing admission: I’m pretty self conscious when I post to my blog. If you look through this site, you’ll see that I’ve been posting my photos for a lot longer than I’ve been posting my words, and that’s because I have more ego and self-esteem bound up in my words. I labor over what I write. I think more about the impression it’ll make on other people. They don’t just flow. They’re hard won.

But the thing is, for a long time, I’ve wanted to write more often. I’ve wanted to just feel free and easy posting whatever comes to mind whenever it seems to come. 

I’ve been doing The Artist’s Way off and on for the past few months. (More embarrassing admissions.) One very interesting thing about the Artist’s Way, which is basically a program for sparking your creativity, is that you’re required to write “morning pages" every day — 3 pages of stream of conscious writing first thing in the morning before your internal editor has fully awoken.  So, taking a tip from morning pages, I think I’m going to start forcing myself to write an evening blog post. Every day. For 3 minutes. No editing. No self consciousness. Just write whatever comes out. Starting tomorrow. Today would count, except I’ve already gone on for five minutes. So, 3 minutes of unadulterated stream of conscience begins tomorrow. Brace yourself, world.

Jake Barton: my new hero

Sitting here at UX Week. This morning featured a really inspiring presentation from Jake Barton, of Local Projects.  They’ve done work on StoryCorps and the  National September 11 Memorial Museum and other really amazing interactive public installations.

I am officially inspired.

Jake showed how physical space design and interactivity can be merged to create not just a tangible feeling for the person in the space, but really among people in and through and as a byproduct of that space. It’s like exhibit design for the big wide world.

I’ve never felt terribly intrigued by museum/exhibit design because it seems sort of irrelevant when you think about the masses who never set foot inside a museum (and also probably because I was secretly insecure about being so uncultured and ignorant compared to all those lovely art history girls at Barnard).  But this seems like a way to bring all the richness of of that experience out into the world and share it with everybody.

This physical + interactive thing seems to combine my lifelong fasctination with the design of physical spaces and the interaction design that has come to figure so prominently in my adult life.  Wow! Wow! I’m so excited. Ok, calm down, Leah.

Comedy of errors

I just spent the last 5 minutes watching a man on the bus try to tear into a bag of dried fruit. First he tried to rip it open for the top. Then he tried to use his teeth. Then he grabbed opposite ends and pulled with all his might. At last, he got it open. It looks like he’s enjoying some dried pineapple right now. I don’t know why, but the whole scene filled me with delight. So much comedy! So much drama! Finally, victory! Life is sweet.