I have a half a library of notebooks that have  acted as drawing boards and kept me company all throughout this year.

My favourite is the one I use on Fridays.

Fridays for me are for compassion and conversation- being there, in the moment, for both.  I’ve been fortunate in this downturn to have the opportunity of a four day week, and all the sums seem to have turned out in my favour. That extra day to play and give back….

Here are some snippets of the conversation notes:

• (note): expectations are  premeditated resentments (SHARE!!!)
• (note): what effects/ impacts handwriting on a day-to-day basis?
• (note): eating wild boar prosciutto with an ex vegan chef talking fish and chipocrates
• haiku and origami
• (List): Something fun, funny, relevant, timely. Entertain and Inform. Stuff that matters. Generosity, giving, sharing, real experiences, genuine interactions. Belive in something. Progress+ Passion+Playfulness
• (coffee morning list): Cognitive Edge/ Dave Snowden, Top 50 Arts videos on YouTube , Rolling Stone interview between William Burroughs and David Bowie, Laurie Lock Lee, Nancy White, Johnnie Moore, Dave Pollard

There’s a lot of organic flow chart diagrams unpopulated with text- empty buckets quickly drawn that I must have been using to explain a concept to someone. They all look completely mad though now.

The compassion scribbles are different. They’re witness to time spent in wards and waiting rooms:

• (List): scrabble, a bag of furry ears, 2 word dictionary, Julia + Julia

They’re longer, they’re less visual and more first person. The time between breaths. Pen and paper can bind, can help close open wounds.  Reading these notes reminds me how fresh those scars are. Luckily I’m a big believer in scars. They are a map of how you came to be and a measure of who you are.

BBH London has posted a series of “audio walks” on the Johnnie Walker Web site, in which folks like Richard Branson, Ranulph Fiennes and, yes, John Hegarty are heard ruminating about life and work while walking around places that mean something profound to them, personally or professionally.

In the clip, BBH founder Hegarty strolls through Carnaby Street and Soho in London, recapping his career. He covers lots of ground—why he was petulant and angry as a young creative, his advertising philosophy now, the interplay between inspiration and fear, what he learned about business from playing tennis,

I’m sure that everyone is under the ‘oh… can you get back to me before Christmas’ pump right now.

While it’s awesome for revenue that people are realising the ‘if you don’t use it you lose it’ nature of most marketing budgets it is astounding to me that rigour and strategy can tend to go out the window.

Like trying to find a present at the last-minute, trying to come up with innovation and excitement for a blue sky briefing in 24-48 hours (even for a six or seven-figure budget) is kinda hard. Bowerbird ways and kaizen ‘how can we do this better next time’ practices can help build a cache of ideas and tactics that can pay real dividends on their investment.

I’m more than happy to spend other people’s money. I’m really glad to have  thinking already charted up and mostly costed that as ‘value ads’ that never got the time of day…which only need the current context so that they can now contribute to the bigger picture

Don’t be afraid of the zeros at the end of your estimates. Big thinking doesn’t cost you more and sometimes there is a big present under the tree waiting to be unwrapped.

Maybe the greatest art director ever was Helmut Krone. At the end of his life, someone asked him why advertising had become so predictable.

“We were anti-establishment. But nowadays the kids want to be part of the establishment.”

It reminded me of a Picasso quote:

“When the avante garde becomes the establishment, you’re in trouble.”

And the wrong kind of trouble. The dull, boring kind.

Now there’s more reason and more opportunity than ever to create controversy, and free advertising.

Isn’t that what creative people enjoy?

As Steve Jobs’ said

“It’s more fun to be a Pirate than to join the Navy.”

Loving the  binary definitions…..

Chart from Fast Company

For crazy amounts of case studies- be sure to explore Peter Kim’s lists, with 500 examples in each Master List 1, Master List 2 and Master List 3.

I’m a bit of a  bricoleur – I love collecting random facts and lists and  etmymologies and anything that will add colour and movement to the improvisational nature of most of my expressions whether it be my paid work or cooking or scaring people at dinner parties…well anything really.

@charlesfrith: New etymology last night. Conspire = breath together; con spire. Sweet eh?

You can’t make good decisions unless you have great choices, and I’m a big fan of stocking up on those. Adding articles into Delicious is a great example that kind of bowerbird behaviour, and this combined with feeding my favourites on Flickr, my Google reader starred items and other caches of bits and pieces that have caught my eye helps me create collages pretty quickly.

It means that you need to have the discipline to contribute to your stock pile every day- but when fast strategy is required it really does become a pirate’s treasure just waiting for you to dig up. Tag ho!

Dr. Lene Nielsen outlines her approach to developing personas:

Having worked with personas before the method ever came to be known as personas there are, from my research and practical experience, three important areas that have to be considered: the data material, engagement in the personas descriptions, and buy-in from the organization which is part of the development process whether it is redesign or a development from scratch. This is the rationale behind my development of 10 steps to personas, an attempt to cover the entire process from initial data gathering to ongoing development.

You can have a look at the entire article here, and see a larger version of her chart here.

Thank to Ian Lyons for the find.

In the West Wing episode “Constituency of One” the VP says to  Will:

“I admire speech writers. They have to have the tendency to doubt and the capacity to believe in equal measure….”

and I can’t help but think that these are one of the base pairs in the DNA strands of planners.

I often have people ask if I need to 100% believe in the product I’m working on- or  if  cynicism feeds good work.

Yes and no.

You need to doubt that the problem put in front of you is the one that need solving, you need to doubt that you have enough insight into a group of people of which you are not part and whose behaviour and reactions you’ll need to understand. You need to doubt the ‘known knowns’.

You also need to believe- that what you’re doing can help keep businesses sustainable, can create great culture and good working environments inside of organizations and that the siren call of the manifestations of our entrepreneurial spirits will write the kind of future we’ll want our kids to live in. You need to believe in answers.

As for the balance between the two? All things in moderation- including moderation. Passion will out. Know what feeds yours.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant.
One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries.
The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

I was out with some friends the other night and we were having a chat about licensing – and I was being pretty vigorous about supporting copyright holders in their efforts to make sure they got paid.

My thought is basically this:

When it’s your IP that someone else is making money off, you’ll understand

from why i am not afraid to take your money, by amanda fucking palmer:

listen.

artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art.

artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of cash-handling in the public eye.

artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks.

please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money.

dead serious: this is the way shit is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it.

I can see a lot of the thinking that might well have been inspired by the presentation given by Matt Jones at Design by Fire 2009 called “we have all the time in the world” - but Bud  has taken this seed, personalized it, brought it to life within the context of message creation and the potential of the ideas of  how we experience ‘time’ to help craft more effective opportunities for calls to action.

Seriously- lovely work.

No wonder finding the right one is so hard……

Simplicity. Clarity. Fun.

Yum.

I’m a bit fond of innovation and I have quite a big crush on the MIT  High-Low Tech group.

It seems they’ve tasked themselves to integrate high and low technological materials, processes, and cultures.

What I love about this aim is that they’re engaging diverse audiences in designing and building their own technologies- paper architects, fashion and textile designers as well as the usual suspects.  By situating computation/ technology/ agile deployment in new cultural and material contexts they’ve created a wonderful story that might just facilitate the democratisation of engineering.

The project demonstrates a belief that the future of technology will be largely determined by end-users who will design, build, and hack their own devices.

The goal is to inspire, shape, support, and study these communities. To this end the group explores the intersection of computation, physical materials, manufacturing processes, traditional crafts, and design. And they ask themselves bloody good questions.

Have a look at some of the projects (a complete list so far here):

• living wall: project site
  • This project experiments with interactive wallpaper that can be programmed to monitor its environment, control lighting and sound, and generally serve as a beautiful and unobtrusive way to enrich environments with computation.
• teardrop: a kit for paper computing: project site
  • What interfaces might we build if we could sketch functional systems directly on paper? What will circuits look like when they are painted or drawn instead of etched or machined? This project explores the creative and practical potentials of paper-based computing.

Spotted this on the great Kitsune Noir blog.  It’s a design piece by Jessica Hisch.

I think you might use it like sending letters to Santa- fill it out and set it in fire.

Downloadable version here.

The Perfect Gift for a Man – 30 Stories about Reinventing Manhood :

Well-known author of the book Raising Boys, Steve Biddulph:This is one hell of a book. Born out of a triple j week  focusing on men’s lives, and created by its listeners, it’s a remarkable piece of work.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the current suicide rate for men in Australia is more than three times the rate of women. But research shows that encouraging men (and young men in particular) to share their feelings and their experiences has a huge impact on their health and wellbeing.

Please buy this wonderful book for the men in your life – regardless of whether they need it or not. Encourage them to read it and to share it with their mates, with their uncles, fathers and sons.

You can buy the printed book from Blurb.com or you can purchase the eBook version from The Perfect Gift for a Man website. ALL the profits from the book are being donated to The Inspire Foundation.

You can also find out more about the book and see the social media release here.

And dip you toes into some of the chapters here (make sure you have some tissues):

found on the pretty fabulous Me Against Them

A  freak stranglet from the Large Hadron Collider is interfering with many potentials incuding my ability to get my thoughts down in post form. Time is not my friend right now. Perhaps the future is merely being kind.

There are heaps of speaker notes in the presentation- loads of chewy thinking:

Our relationships to each other, the cities and places we inhabit and navigate have been transformed in the last few years by the technology, products and services that we have designed — but what about that last one of the three — time?

“People, places, time. The triumvirate of factors at play in mobile, social, locative services might be familiar at the surface level to designers and developers.

Using examples from the development of Dopplr.com and other services — alongside historical and science-fictional perspectives — Matt Jones explores what we might call neochronometry and illustrates some directions we could take as interaction designers to treat time as a material.”