Tuesday, December 22, 2009

re-organizing

As I found myself ripping out of the New York Times, Paul Samuelson's lengthy obituary for future reference,  I found myself forced to confront old habits and my laggard adaptation of new technologies.  After all I am a creature of habit, and I continue to derive comfort from perusing the NY Times in its concrete fully delivered at my doorstep version.  I also enjoy the choices that the editors have made on story placement, including the choice of break in its continuity that forces me  put my interest into pause while I determine the level of my interest to either immediately flip further into the newspaper to resume reading or to glance about the rest of the page for further opening paragraphs before continuing on.


I've had an online subscription to the NYTimes for over a decade, and it's true that when my time is limited it's an easy way to get a glance at the news...but in spite of their offers to permit me to customize my home page or the digest that I receive daily to include topics of interest, I haven't.  I enjoy the serendipity of reading the paper as laid out by the editors.  Why you ask, especially if you've been to my home and noticed that I'm reluctant to throw away the paper until I've had a chance to at least peruse it, which means it inevitably piles up and creates a backlog, similar in size to the unread New Yorkers, that are also available to me online. 


In preparation for my family's descent I was forced to clear space and thus pack away my fully arrayed scribbles, magazines opened to specific articles and books that I've been reading as part of my ongoing research.  I organize globally very reluctantly, once put away or separated neatly I find it difficult to re-access. The ubiquity of new tools and technologies on the web offer solutions and repositories simple enough to use permitting both easy retrieval, tagging or reminders as to the contents' topics, and most advantageous ability to share these with others.

When I first explored delicious and digg, I honestly didn't fully get a good feel for its future value.  In part, because my scepticism exceeded the perceived value of the benefits.  After all how many times had I relied on a technology solution only to have it fully displaced and rendered obsolete and all the infromation lost. For example, I'm not talking about storing data on floppy disks though I could, I'm talking about diskettes that stored some very valuable code that I'll never be able to read in part because I didn't realize that the disk itself would in time be unreadable.  I didn't want to risk storing tags and precisous articles for future reference in a website that would disappear? 

Well Delicious seems to have had some stability and the benefits are now clearly flattening my skepticism.  I've been tagging much more actively and what's even better is having my own personal library at my fingertips.   Though the NYTimes prefers that you use their own storage files for articles, I routinely move them to delicious as I prefer one repository rather than multiples.  I'm not likely to give up tearing articles out of the paper, but you can bet that I'll also be tagging them.  I've also recognized that for sharing with various teams articles of interest, emailing them is ridiculous.  I have embraced using wikis and ushering as many of my ad hoc network committees to utilize a shared site.  I was able to instantly index using my tags on delicious to find articles of interest to share on collaboration and post them on a wiki site for further consideration of the group.  Using this shared workspace will allow us to keep track of comments and decisions without having to keep a stack of emails.  The technology is now got my attention and I'm doing what I can to give it more traction as ultimately it will save me from having to re-organize later. 

Thursday, October 1, 2009

story sharing

I dropped into the IIT ID Design Research Conference for the express purpose of listening and learning and seeing what new strategies for myself might emerge.
I was not disappointed though I didn't get an opportunity to listen in on the talks, I did catch up with a couple of friends who summarized what I missed.
My intention was to talk to students in order to prepare for teaching in the winter. I wanted to learn firsthand what ideas were exciting them and to hear the language they use to express their own thoughts.

I owe a couple of thanks.
one to serendipity...it's never enough to think by merely being in a place at a given moment that something will come. Rather, so much of life and conversation is owed to how much we are willing to expose our thoughts, probe beyond the surface level of noise, whether visual or tactical and purposefully engage in a conversation.
secondly my hats are off to the student organizers who quite willingly were able to put me in touch with other students. I was able to determine that I could readily establish some common ground, engage in active listening and discovered great joy at the prospect of deepening relationships with the diversity of students attending IIT ID.

But this is all filling time and space and though I could go on, I want to share the art of questioning.

I met a series of students who asked logically, rationally what was my preferred methodology.
Since I don't have a design methodology and rather than use the canned answer "it depends," I opted to explore the question. I talked about collaboration, and found myself expressing what is often a barrier to collaboration...individuals need to be right and therefore unwilling to give up ground or to actual present a position. Conversely, if we were to openly listen to someone's tweak, question and challenge of our position, we might find new ways to incorporate the new aspects or dimensions of their input and arrive at a new shared understanding/new position.

But something more interesting ocurred. I listened to the students and asked if they really meant what they said about story...and of course one covered for the other making an honest apology for the other's misstatement. But as we deconstructed the comment, the other began to understand that story is too easy a metaphor and as a result not very evoking of a greater understanding. we than pondered story in a variety of genres and that's where it became clearer what and why story really is about for the individual ...the natural narrative.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

learning in decision-making

People sometimes stumble upon the truth, but usually they pick themselves up and hurry about their business....Winston Churchill

For the last few days, I've had the pleasure of revisiting the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, research I first experienced as a graduate student studying with Hillel Einhorn. Thus, the reason I include the Churchill quote. Check out the article I wrote on this topic for smartpeople magazine

How and whether we make sense of information when presented is a function of the length and care exercised when we engage BOTH of our thought systems--the intuitive and the reasoning portions. The rapidity in which we reach a conclusion or recognize a person, situation indicates the likely absence of a full evaluation of all the information received as input. In contrast if we tried to more fully process the multitudes of input we acquire in any given moment, we would be momentarily paralyzed, incapable of making any decision irrespective of its magnitude. Plenty of our natural responses are involuntary..for example, walking while talking. One explanation of autism, expresses the inability of the brain to invoke the automatic response resulting in the inability of the brain to filter or suppress inputs based on their familiarity.

But when the input is a little less familiar, or we seek to engage our internal reasoning additional time and reflection is needed. It is also why feedback and engagement from more than one sensory input helps us further distill and draw deeper value from the information presented. Multi-sensory engagement, not mere passive input further aid and thus enhance our decision making ability.

Our rapid fire automatic response capabilities are often quite useful. Then again, the first answer, judgment or expectation that our brain provides may cut short the full contextual evaluation that may serve us better. By taking a few more moments, days or even weeks to evaluate the fit or association of the information we've obtained relative to the the context in which we encountered it may lead to a more robust "rational" decision.

Gut instincts represent an ability to think and process information quickly. In the case in which they reflect responses learned over time , they enable an autopilot function. In a crisis or emergency, the automatic, rather than the delayed, engaged information process is critical. For example, the nurse who recognizes heart attack symptoms quickly, the firefighter who can unconsciously react to subtle cues not overtly apparent to the casual observer or the inexperienced firefighter.

Acquiring experience is inevitable, but learning from the experience is not.