“ Advances in our understanding of emotion and affect have implications for the science of design. Affect changes the operating parameters of cognition: positive affect enhances creative, breadth-first thinking whereas negative affect focuses cognition, enhancing depth-first processing and minimizing distractions. Therefore, it is essential that products designed for use under stress follow good human-centered design, for stress makes people less able to cope with difficulties and less flexible in their approach to problem solving. Positive affect makes people more tolerant of minor difficulties and more flexible and creative in finding solutions. Products designed for more relaxed, pleasant occasions can enhance their usability through pleasant, aesthetic design. Aesthetics matter: attractive things work better.
April 7, 2009
March 10, 2009
“ When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I’ve looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
“ You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking — and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking — don’t settle.
“ …you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever — because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
February 8, 2009
“ Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
“ Worrying doesn’t help.
February 3, 2009
“ Online collaborative tools are fostering new literacies and social behaviours. In the near future, students entering design education will be of a generation weaned on multidimensional, interactive and participatory media, with an understanding and expectations of the world that will differ profoundly from that of the generations preceding them. This demographic shift heralds far-reaching, systemic challenges for our educational system.
February 2, 2009
“ If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
via: Kelly Eidson on Twitter, original source unknown
November 30, 2008
“ I want everything we do, that I do personally, that our office does, to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that thats worth anything, or whether the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares, as against ugly things.
November 29, 2008
“ not until we can meet our energy needs (which we will be able to do with nano-engineered solar panels and fuel cells, which can capture the only 1% of 1% of sunlight that falls on the earth to meet 100% of our energy needs in a clean, renewable fashion), overcome disease and death, overcome poverty, and a few other problems. Only technology - advanced, nanoscale, distributed, decentralized, self-organizing, increasingly intelligent technology - has the scale to solve these problems that the human species has struggled with for eons.
