Colour Coded Career Planning: Coding at it’s best

I did official career planning today. There are quite a few competencies to choose from in this exercise. Yes multiple frameworks collide over our very heads and competencies rain down upon our very heads. Over whelming if you aren’t ready for it but I recommend a technicolour dreamrainbow of highlighters to help you conceptualize and prioritize.

Yes I say put out all your rubriks, matrices, frameworks, spreadsheet, and bulleted lists. Get to highlighting in any order of sense you can convince yourself will work and make yourself some real live proactive goals that you can work towards. Ah how mighty is the power of organization that it has saved a wretch like me. Here comes the photo a second time just because it has all the highlighter of the rainbow.

Highlighters make the world go round

With a few minutes and a selection of colours you can quickly organize and complex system and prioritize your focus points within the larger structure.

Corporatelandia

Hey Ya’ll take a look at my wonderfully orchestrated corporate photo. Who is that girl? I swear no photo-shopping occurred and that I really do look that professional and most of the time I even act it.

The Cumulative Effect of Design

The cumulative effect of design is epic. I am not going into the can be, should be, would be. Simply the cumulative effect of design is epic.

When you first glance at something and you instantly understand it then it is legendary. All that Apple hub-a-lub is exactly what it is because there was an epic effect created by layers and layers of design, technology, and human insight. It is the insight I am interested in most of all.

I am obsessed with design for humans and interactivity. I am specifically trained an focused on the understanding of people and their needs and motivations, but because this is a business world we live in I am spending more and more time integrating what customers want and the businesses goals. It sounds so simple as I write it down here, but it is not.

Business goals and customer wants are simple enough to reconcile when you are directly catering to you customers in order to extract the cash, but modern business is ever so much more complicated. For example what is your “customers” are really your employees? You want them to perform their task as efficiently as possible but they hate the tools you provide to accomplish the task. Your customers could be the volunteers who work with your organization. How do you get people to stay engaged and happy working for free?

It is the cumulative effect of design that makes software seem like your buddy, your work seem like play, and makes your days bearable and sometimes if we are lucky better for us all.

Oh for usabilities sake.

I am so silly. I am a usability geek, and then I took a look at my own blog:

usability

Yup! That's pretty darn hard to read with all the confusing colours and funny fuzzy grey text no?

Well now I thought I should start practicing what I am preaching, hence the new blog theme in simple big black and white characters. Hopefully mush easier to zoom in on and generally less clutter.

 

 

Bot chat is like most chat, even bots miscommunicate

Here is a video of two bots having a chat by Igor Labutov, Jason Yosinski, and Hod Lipson of the Cornell Creative Machines Lab. I find it wonderful that two bots, created by man and machine, still have the same issues communicating that most of the world does. In fact if you try to read into it and blow the metaphors out of proportion you see how this robo chatter can relate to the entire history of the western world, just think like an undergrad, I know you can do it.

Really do watch the video its so funny.

Check out the original engadget post that Cora Albrecht shared on G+, after all that’s where I learned of this cool thing.

Tactile Cookware by Neora Zigler

I’ve been wowed this morning by this brilliant set of tactile cookware designed by Neora Zigler. Just scroll down through this page, Tactile Cookware, and you can see in photos the design process at work.

You really have to watch the video to do it justice.

Wallabies are warru where I am going

I am going to the outback. No, this is not a holiday, though I am taking holiday leave to accomplish this. No, I am not going to Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) to eat Kangaroo. No, I am not a tourist. Though it is nice to be touristy sometimes, its never really been my style, I tend to assimilate instead.

I am joining an expedition to trap endangered black-flanked rock wallabies for cross-breeding. So where do Black-Flanked Rock Wallabies live? Well deep into the bush, in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara. Yep, that’s where I am headed. See you in a week and a half.

This is a Wallaby a.k.a.Warru at the Monarto Zoo

 

everytimezone.com

I just wanted to post something that makes my international citizen mundi life easier: http://everytimezone.com/. It is a well designed and thoughtful way to eliminate messy timezone math, which even if you are a genius mathematician you are bound to mess you occasionally.

The simplest way to know what time it is, almost everywhere

 

 

Nowadays what project isn’t Agile?

Seriously, everything is Agile it seems, and a lot of it is simply called ‘design thinking.’  One reason could be that you have to work in the Agile manner in order to compete in constantly disrupted markets. Beyond that, it might be the oldest artifact of design thinking turned business process. According to the all powerful wiki, Agile started sprouting in 1957. (Don’t know what Agile is? I wiki-ed it for you  here )

Furthermore working agile-style applies to many domains, not simply software or web development. It helps eliminate the expensive downtime of people with super specialized skill sets sitting and waiting for “their turn,” something that is bound to increasingly occur as complexity envelopes us. You might not think about it often, but the things we use and depend on everyday are the products of A LOT of highly specialized skilled people. A company generally wants to profit somewhat from the products it makes, and hence working un-Agile-ly is simply a high cost and high risk maneuver, considering the state of economies and market competition.

I personally like it because its so personable and has a veneer of Buddhist thought to it. I am an iteration junkie, maybe that grew out of obsessive compulsiveness and perfectionism, but in an iterative cycle you can always go back and fix a little, just straighten it up you know what I mean?

Another reason I might be a fan of Agile is that I am a firm believer in the awesome Dwight D. Eisenhower’s idea that,  ”Plans are nothing, Planning is everything.” How many times does the wrench get thrown in the works? Followed by the whole toolbox’s worth of knots and kinks, which is an apt analogy because so often your own tools are what complicates and works against you during a project. I think I’ll lead the Agile life, it’s all just an iteration you know?

Agile, it's just so bendy and zen how could you not love it?