Hey there! Brian Dys here — I’m a visual and visceral person at heart. Ever since my mom lent me her old film camera, I fell in love with photography. All of my creative musings were exemplified by my second brain, the computer. This journey is a topsy-turvy ride of creative pursuits — from electronic music to UX design.
I enjoy every dull and wild moments of it — yes, this life of mine that I share with a woman named Jaycelle and a boy named Bryce. Take a peek into my kaleidoscope!
But why follow the Mongol horde deep down the rabbit hole? Why not research Willard’s sooty boubou, or any of the other theoretically interesting subjects Wikipedia’s “random article” button tosses my way? Why does curiosity beckon us this way, and not that?
But is there a better term that would describe a non-specialist person whose chief skill is curiosity, generalist knowledge and an ability to integrate various disciplines and their specialists to solve a problem? As it happens, there is – and it comes to us from a science fiction novel from 1950.
The Nexialist approach: Van Vogt and the idea that ‘specialisation is for insects’
Feature factories are deeply unsatisfying for craft obsessed designers as it turns them into “short order chefs”. It feels like we’re somehow skipping the parts where we feel we can add the most value to both the companies we work and the users we serve.
@andybudd on Twitter
They have to feed you every six hours. So if I can stack six hours on six hours on six hours, and just focus on getting to the next meal, it doesn’t make matter how much I’m in pain, doesn’t matter how cold I am.
Why Emotionally Intelligent People Embrace the Small World Rule to Achieve Huge Goals
But Tversky’s point is that if your job is to be creative and think through a tough problem, then time spent wandering around a park or aimlessly lounging on a couch might be your most valuable hours. A little inefficiency is wonderful.
Casualties of Perfection
I’ve always been a dreamer. My mum taught me to never give up and to reach for the stars. On July 11th, it’s time to turn that dream into a reality aboard the next Virgin Galactic spaceflight, in the company of this brilliant crew of mission specialists.
How do we quantify the informal effects of people physically working alongside each other – making and losing friends, falling in love?
If working from home becomes the norm, housing inequality will deepen
Consistent effort over time is more sustainable than pushing your limits to work as fast as possible. To do our best work, we need mental downtime, space for self-reflection, and a realistic schedule we can actually keep up with.
An ode to slowness: the benefits of slowing down
All of this does not imply that you can choose your own reality. Firstly, you can choose what questions you ask, but the answers are given by the world. And even in a relational world, when two observers communicate, their realities are entangled. In this way a shared reality can emerge.
A new quantum paradox throws the foundations of observed reality into question
1. Use base components for variant sets
10 Figma Best Practices to 10X Your Workflow
Studies have shown that 90% of error in thinking is due to error in perception. If you can change your perception, you can change your emotion and this can lead to new ideas. Logic will never change emotion or perception.
Bedtime procrastination becomes revenge bedtime procrastination when the decision to delay sleep is in response to a lack of free time earlier in the day. Staying up late and carving out some leisure time even if we feel tired and need sleep becomes a way of getting revenge on daytime hours with little free time.
The psychology of revenge bedtime procrastination
If we removed the contents of the universe, we would remove space and time also. This is the “relational” view of space and time: they are only the spatial and temporal relations between objects and events. The relational view of space and time was a key inspiration for Einstein when he developed general relativity.
Does a chair exist if nobody sits on it? Relational quantum mechanics says ‘NO!’
When handling risks, it is important to be aware of what we don’t or can’t know for sure. The Precautionary Principle is not intended to be a stifling justification for banning things—it’s a tool for handling particular kinds of uncertainty. Heuristics can guide us in making important decisions, but we still need to be flexible and treat each case as unique.
The Precautionary Principle: Better Safe than Sorry?
The filing cabinet contributed to the rise of a popular nontechnical understanding of information as something discrete and specific. Critically, it illustrates the moment in which information gained an identity separate from knowledge, an instrumental identity critical to its accessibility.
The Filing Cabinet
The more we describe successful people as having guru-like powers, the more everyone else looks at them and says, “I could never do that.” Which is unfortunate, because more people would be willing to try if they knew that those they admire are probably normal people who played the odds right.
Career ladders help you make more consistent, fair decisions around promotions. This improves employee recruitment, engagement, and retention, while reducing bias and improving the quality of your workforce.
Career Ladders 101 (Founders Series: Part 3)
Instead, at work, seek to contribute. Find the hottest, most vibrant part of the economy you can and figure out how you can contribute best and most. Make yourself of value to the people around you, to your customers and coworkers, and try to increase that value every day.
Interview: Marc Andreessen, VC and tech pioneer
Everything is sales also means that everyone is trying to craft an image of who they are. The image helps them sell themselves to others. Some are more aggressive than others, but everyone plays the image game, even if it’s subconscious. Since they’re crafting the image, it’s not a complete view. There’s a filter. Skills are advertised, flaws are hidden.
Harder Than It Looks, Not As Fun as It Seems
Advancing in seniority and experience is not about moving ‘up the ladder’ but rather about widening your circles of impact and influence — whether as a people manager or hands-on expert.
Become Better, Together
We can visualize the relationship between challenge and skill with the experience fluctuation model. If the activity is too hard, you’ll feel anxious. If the activity is too easy, you’ll feel relaxed or bored. To truly feel in flow, you need to perceive a high challenge and match it with high skill.
Learning a project’s subject matter is especially challenging for UX research consultants, who work on projects with various clients, in different industries and domains. Often, when a project begins, you won’t have much time to learn the subject matter. It’s understandable that clients are sometimes skeptical that a consultant can come in and understand their business in a short time.
Learning Complex Subject Matter
To borrow a metaphor I heard in a slightly different context one time: Utility-class frameworks are like bumper bowling for styling. Use the classes and it’ll work out fine. You might not get a strike, but you won’t get a gutter ball either.
If we’re gonna criticize utility-class frameworks, let’s be fair about it
When we treat “the beginning” as something sacred, we give it more power than it deserves. The beginning can start in the middle, or even at the end.
Where do I even begin?
Seizing the middle is a chess strategy embodying the value of forward thinking. It involves using pieces to commandeer the middle of the board. A player can then restrict their opponent’s movements by controlling the maximal number of pieces in the game.
Seizing The Middle: Chess Strategy in Business
For hybrid presence to be seamless, though, a number of questions remain. Who’s at home, but available? If you’re in a remote conversation, how can you include people in the physical office? Conversely, if you start a water cooler chat in the office, how can you include remote teammates? Crucially, how do we create presence while still respecting privacy?
Research suggests that the more ideas we generate, the more creative they become. Focusing on one thing at a time too early in the creative process defeats the purpose of the exploration phase. Networked thinking requires to keep many open loops to connect ideas across various work streams. Only when you have spent enough time identifying patterns and connecting ideas together should you pick one work stream to focus on.
Should we really focus on one thing at a time?
Psychological safety, loosely understood as “group trust”, is the best-studied social dynamic of effective teams. Coined by Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School, this phenomenon has been extensively studied by Google, which found it to be the key factor in team productivity, as it creates an environment in which teammates can speak their minds without fear of backlash.
Hybrid Anxiety and Hybrid Optimism: The Near Future of Work
We looked at this as an important and unsolved problem. We asked ourselves: could we use technology to create the feeling of being together with someone, just like they’re actually there?
Project Starline: Feel like you’re there, together
You might expect that a judge’s decision would have something to do with how serious the crime was or how much time had been served already, or how many times a prisoner had gone to jail before. But these researchers found something else that had a huge effect on a judge’s ruling: lunch.
How Information Graphics Reveal Your Brain’s Blind Spots
Whenever you’re provided with a set of data, when solving for a problem in an interface, you’ve got to consider the audience. What do the users need from the data? How do you organize the information in a way that facilitates findability? How do you search for the item and where does it reside to enable browsing?
The information architecture of sand
This all changes once we are using taxonomies for inference. Feeding data tagged from a taxonomy as input for AI or ML presupposes a certain (that is: strictly standards-compliant) rigidity of the structure. Algorithms rely on rigorously structured input to produce good output, and less-strictly-structured input will provide poor output if we, as part of the input file, tell the system that dog food is a dog.
Taxonomy Theory and Practice
What is of interest is the use of three to draw similarity and semantically link the items. Haikus presented in English also use three-line stanzas, and there is the rule of thirds in photography, just to point out two other examples. There seems to be something elemental in using a tripartite structure to convey meaning.
Triples, Triads, and Semantics
