Creative Mornings in Austin
/Creative Mornings in Austin...did the 'talk' on Friday. You gotta understand this is at 8am, and the vibe is intense curiosity. Everyone leaves and dashes off to work. More pics here.
A genius from SXSW 2014
/There are many, many things you grab and stash in your head from SXSW in Austin, Texas....and today I caught Stephen Wolfram, a certified genius (link to smartest man on earth). And for your enjoyment here are few of his widgets. One is here specifically for my friend Peter who has taken up the habit recently of looking people in the eye and projecting their age at death. And since he's a kind soul, he pushes it into the high 80 and 90's. My prediction was 95.5. But according to Wolfram's widget I have a 31% chance of living past 90 and a 3.8% chance of living past 100. I'm also in the 99th percentile for my height.
The beginning of collecting personal data....part 1
/Almost four years ago I started collecting data. It began with daily timekeeping. Everywhere you looked, on the subway, sitting in restaurants, even walking down the street, we had become obsessed with constantly checking our phones. Described by the writer, Linda Stone as ‘continuous partial attention’ it felt like something had shifted in our daily routine, time felt more sliced and fragmented than ever. This deserved some study, and the best way to understand something is to measure it. #quantifiedself But keeping track of time, minute-by-minute is even harder than it sounds. After several amateurish attempts I googled methods to track daily time, and found Ben Lipkowitz. He had not only had been logging his time since 2005, he generously and fastidiously shared all of online at www.fennetic.net. Go take a look, it’s all still there. He stopped recording at the beginning of 2011, but the html files and graphics of page upon page of detailed time logs 24 hours a day for more than 5 years are all documented, annotated and available online.
Rather than be totally intimidated by Ben Lipkowitz’s prodigious talent and relentless recordkeeping, I instantly snagged and downloaded all of his data and combed thru it for patterns. My theory that the rhythms of daily time are familiar and visually appealing held true.
Undeterred by the difficulty of tracking how you spend your time, I decided to focus on data gathering using gadgets that do all the work for you. Forget manual recording. Sensors would only get smaller, cheaper and more invisible over time. Maybe I could try to live just a little bit in the future and use myself as a test subject using sensors and devices that did the data collection with no effort on my part. And voila! My very next purchase in early 2010 was a Zeo sleep tracker. It was brilliant, all I had to do was strap the headband on and fall asleep. In the morning, I had minute by minute record of deep, REM, light and awake sleep states using a finely calibrated dry EEG sensor.
Sleep had always been described as 90 minute cycles, and I imagined sleep as big blocks of uninterrupted time. Turns out sleep is similar to waking hours, there is a definite pattern, with much more activity than you’d imagine. It’s ragged with shorter 5, 10, 15 minute bursts of deep sleep and REM sleep than I thought. I wake up a lot. My brain is pretty busy at night, evidently sleep rhythms are not so different than waking rhythms. (Will post more sleep patterns works in next post...to be continued).
A data portrait of a company
/This is a data portrait of a company. A digital company that makes some of the most talked about mobile apps in the world, and here they are in an historic building in downtown Austin. Thirteen23 asked me to make the experience of stepping out of the elevator into their lobby, something special that instantly communicated the simplicity, warmth and human-ness of their design sensibility. Set in an incredibly large open space, the place is strangely quiet except for occasional laughter, ok…sometimes really loud laughter. Turns out much of the collaboration between developers and designers is in chat rooms, that they hold open on their massively large mac screens through-out the day.
Lickety-split Doug Cook sends out a ‘bot’ to capture meta-data on when, size, who and which project for thousands of chat sessions. We decide on 30 days of chatroom metadata. Using wood, italian laminate samples from Abet Laminati, and lasercut dowel holes…all was hand built and installed by ‘me’. Developers are all shades of warm orange and yellow, designers are shades of blue, project manager shades of purple, management is charcoal grey. The 65 feet of lobby represents 24 hours and 30 days of over 6500 chat sessions which are ‘raining’ down, with the shortest messages near the ceiling and the longest near the floor. It tells the story of how these talented people interact as a team. See more pics here.
3 artists describe the show at Texas State University (Jan-Feb 2014)
/James Sterling Pitt, Deb Sokolow and Laurie Frick. Curated by Mary Mikel Stump at TSU.
