I picked up this magazine in an airport and found a couple good tips inside.
* Tape previous cut pieces together to make a cut on another face.
* Save X-acto blades in wine corks
* Make metal rings by winding rod around a cylinder, then cutting once along the centerline and reattaching.
“Creativity is just connecting things…[but] a lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” – Steve Jobs, 1996
“Futurists perform a quirky, but necessary, task in modern society: we function as the long-range scanners for a species evolved to pay close attention to short-range horizons.” – Jamais Cascio.
From [Ed Catmull’s talk](http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/inside-pixars-leadership/) at the [Economist Ideas conference](http://ideas.economist.com/):
> I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures.
> One of the protections is the notion that they have the final say so. Now this is a very hard thing to say because we say we are filmmaker led. The reason its hard is if they can’t lead the team, we will actually remove the person from it.
> We will support the leader for as long and as hard as we can, but the thing we can not overcome is if they have lost the crew. It’s when the crew says we are not following that person. We say we are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say ‘we are not following’.
I love [this contest idea](http://designforthefirstworld.com/):
> Dx1W is a competition for designers, artists, scientists, makers and thinkers in developing countries to provide solutions for First World problems.
While my lovely wife works tirelessly to help the rest of the world develop, I’m working in the “first world” to make sure there’s a worthwhile and sustainable lifestyle for them when they arrive. The current example we’re setting in the U.S. (low rankings on [health](http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html), [happiness](http://www.happyplanetindex.org/explore/global/index.html), and [world respect](http://www.scribd.com/doc/24369375/Reputation-Institute-Country-Rep-2009-Complimentary-Report)) doesn’t seem like a worthy goal for the rest of the world.
Efforts like [Design for the Other 90%](http://other90.cooperhewitt.org/) are valuable and important, but I love that designers from that 90% are trying to help us too.
[This interview with Eagleman by the Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/apr/04/david-eagleman-40-afterlives) contains a lot of great bits, many which resonate with my recent thinking. Eagleman is the author of [Sum](http://futuryst.blogspot.com/2009/03/alternative-afterlives.html), which I greatly enjoyed.
> I’m using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human – it turns out that it’s a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.
This is similar to my philosophy on concept design–tell yourself (and others) that this is the “future” experience, when really that’s just a technique to help you think about what you wish things were like today.
> Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty…I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
As I get older I feel like I “know” less and less. I always expected it to be the opposite, but this feels right.
> I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism. But, as Voltaire said, “uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position”.
I’ve often said that my job title is designer, but that what I’m paid to do is tolerate uncertainty. It’s uncomfortable and hard to do, but most important projects require a significant period of uncertainty and very few people are willing to endure that.
This is basically my New Year’s Resolution every year. But he actually did it.
My favorite thing about working with stock image and music sites is seeing the same photo you used for a project show up in someone else’s work, or hearing the music you’ve repeated endlessly while editing a video project pop up in a commercial on tv.
It’s like being part of a big community of people who recognize each other by little noises and visual hints. Kinda like [the Cylon’s music](http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/The_Music) in Battlestar Galactica, I guess.
“The process of making is the point of it. The object looks good if the process felt good.” – Origami artist, [Between the Folds](http://www.truefilms.com/archives/2009/12/between_the_fol.php)
Just saw a fascinating presentation by [Bear McCreary](http://www.bearmccreary.com/) (of [Battlestar Galactica](http://www.syfy.com/battlestar/) fame) at work. Among many interesting stories was his description of how he composed the adaptation of All Along the Watchtower used in one of the show’s most climactic scenes, [the piano in the bar](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c2ZJPKz5u8).
Apparently the inclusion of the song was director Ronald D. Moore’s idea, and over several seasons it became an increasingly important part of the plot (which I won’t spoil here). But that meant that the musical score for the show was now also something the characters were aware of, so Bear worked with the writers to weave his music into the story. And for the piano scene itself, the writers called him up while he was working on a particularly difficult cue and asked him to describe what it’s like to tease out a piece of music that’s stuck in your head. His responses went almost directly into the script.
I think as media continues to evolve, we’ll see even more examples where connecting music to plot, and to the other aspects of a story, leads to a more interesting and holistic experience. Learning ways to do this is an exciting opportunity for designers from all parts of the spectrum.
The entire presentation was captivating, including a bit where Bear taught the piano theme to someone from the audience, just as was done in the show, and his description of how he sees music while watching a scene (first he sees the overall shape, then starts to fill in the pieces). Hopefully it will be published online for more to see; I’ll link to it if so.