jeweled platypus

 

thursday, september 29, 2005
A list because I say so

These are books that changed something about how I think:

  1. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman
  2. The Evolution of Useful Things, by Henry Petroski
  3. Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas R. Hofstadter
  4. Six Degrees, by Duncan J. Watts
  5. Light and Color in the Outdoors, by M. G. J. Minnaert
  6. How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand
  7. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs
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monday, august 01, 2005
Thirty books in fourteen pages

moleskine and stickers on my jeans

This past Christmas, my mom gave me a moleskine and a Fisher space pen. HERE’S A PICTURE OF MY CAT. I mean, once I held the little notebook, I realized I had to fill it up somehow; normal moleskine things wouldn’t work. Sketches were out - I draw about twice a year and enjoy it both times. Written thoughts get typed into TextEdit. To-do lists go on index cards (groan). I had another idea.

One of my “someday” projects is to make a good book tracker app, including metadata for analysis: dates read, number of pages, year created, rating, blah blah blah. But until that happens, this is part of how I fill my moleskine. I give each book half a page and a little box where I draw its cover with colored pencils. So I hate covers like Six Degrees - impossible to draw. King Rat? The Kite Runner? I can do those. Some covers, however, end up looking like crap. That’s OK. It’s just meant to break up the endless blocks of tiny writing where I complain about authors using the word “teeming” eight times in two hundred pages. Example:

[The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco]
Eco is boring and impenetrable, but I needed something to read. Mom lent this to me a long time ago. I liked parts of it - more parts than in Foucault’s Pendulum. Odd, dreamy, allegorical, confused. I liked the bits about Baroque science; reminded me of the Neal Stephenson cycle. But the battles? the Lady? the priests or whatever? Boring!

The reviews are sometimes pretentious and spoilery and that is why I don’t show most of them to people. I like my system, though, because re-reading old pages tells me something about myself mixed in with the books. But if I don’t record things right away, I lose my ideas and sometimes the order I read them in - sometimes even the cover drawing when I have to give back an obscure book. MY NEXT PROJECT IS KNITTING A MOLESKINE-IPOD COZY.

more moleskine and stickers and jeans

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sunday, august 08, 2004
Skating constraints

The measures taken to prevent skateboarding.

The Eagle Rock Branch Public Library had a problem with skateboarders. Kids from the neighborhood and nearby elementary and high schools loved the stairs and railings and curbs. A boy got hurt.

So they added a big square planter in the middle of the stairs. That didn’t stop the skaters. Soon, they glued little speedbumps onto the curbs and bought new, bumpy railings. They added some awkward fences. And now, the front of the library is permanently empty and ugly.

They could have just removed the curbs (so what if the grass spills over a little?) and turned the stairs into a slope (there’s enough room). No railings, no planter, no fences, and nothing for skateboarders to play on.

With the proper use of physical constraints there should be only a limited number of possible actions — or, at least, desired actions can be made obvious, usually by being especially salient.

(From The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman, p. 83.)

This is what happens when you make the undesired actions obvious instead.

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saturday, april 17, 2004
sneaky ways to get people to do things

from pp. 103-104 of poemcrazy, by susan g. woolridge:

American Indians—at least Plains people, who, paradoxically, value both communality and individuality above almost everything—simply don’t tell their children or each other what to do. According to my Osage friend, the poet Duane BigEagle, Plains people may say, “If you don’t brush you teeth, you’ll get cavities,” or, “If you touch the hot stove, you’ll get burned,” or even more simply, “The stove is hot.” But it’s up to the child to decide whether or not to touch the stove and accept the consequences. Rarely do the Osage say, “Brush your teeth,” or “Don’t touch the stove.”

The Osage have such reverence for individuality, Duane says, that even at peril to their own lives they won’t tell someone else what to do. If four Osage people are in a car and the driver is heading off the road, all the passengers will say is, “There’s the edge!” never, “Don’t drive off the road.” If they’re raised traditionally, Duane adds, they won’t even think it.

i’ve found that this works pretty well. people tend to be more willing to do something if they decide to do it.

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I’m Britta Gustafson.


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