useum

A list of books I recommend in my talk, Becoming an Agent of...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:38:20 -0400

A list of books I recommend in my talk, Becoming an Agent of Change in your Organization:

Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
You and Your Research by Richard Hamming

If I forgot one, please @10ch me and let me know.

I have had so much fun designing our next experimonth...

Thu, 24 May 2012 15:08:12 -0400

I have had so much fun designing our next experimonth investigation, a game called Frenemy. We’re working with social scientists around the world to create a game that’ll give them data to study about how people cooperate and compete. Sign up to play and help me test out the game so that we can make it better and run it worldwide next year.

Think of an object you wouldn’t trade even if someone offered you more than $100,000. Describe it.

Mon, 07 May 2012 16:19:00 -0400

I’m testing out some software and I thought useum readers would be a good place to start. Consider the question above and record your answer. Feel free to do so anonymously by hitting send w/o entering your email or a message. Thanks.

For Experimonth: Race, we have a confessional, where people can...

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:44:00 -0500

For Experimonth: Race, we have a confessional, where people can write about something they don’t feel comfortable posting on Facebook and we have a closed group where those confessions go and experimonthers can talk about them.

So far there have been over 7,000 words written and I took a moment this morning to visualize the top 100 in this word cloud.

Sorry for the long-time-no-post, but here’s a new...

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:11:00 -0400

Sorry for the long-time-no-post, but here’s a new thing.

We’ve created an Experimonth Headquarters space at the museum to see how a project that was born digital fares on the floor of the museum. So far, we’ve realized it in a number of ways, one of which is this skin tone visualization. Visitors pick paint swatches, match their skin tone as best they can, and slap it up on a sticky wall. This visualization was from this past weekend.

After my recent trip to Games for Change, I came back home and...

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:48:00 -0400

After my recent trip to Games for Change, I came back home and realized vine borers had gotten into my summer squash and any hopes I had for celebrating sneak zucchini onto neighbors’ porch day were gone. I was pretty frustrated and felt like giving up on the garden — just for a minute, but still, the thought was there. It wasn’t a day later, after I’d replanted squash seeds to try again, that I realized that learning’s biggest enemy is not failure, or frustration, but rather giving up.

I’m attempting to learn Processing again. This time with a longer timeline and a bigger book.

4/3 … or “I don’t need Christmas this year, I’ve been to...

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:00:00 -0400

4/3

… or “I don’t need Christmas this year, I’ve been to Eyeo”

When I think back to my childhood, all of the good Christmases sort of merge together in this one really awesome event where I spent lots of time in magical anticipation and where the holiday itself exceeded my ridiculous expectations and surely raised them for the next year. This was sometime before I got all Charlie Brown about things and started to complain about the commercialism and reasons for the season and agonize about what to get people or how to react when I open gifts. At one point in my life Christmas was better than I expected it to be and I expected it to be the most awesome thing ever.

Eyeo has been the same sort of expectation exceeding event — a Christmas for a conferenced-out Charlie Brown — and it has been that way from the beginning. I suspended my jaded outlook on conferences for this one, willingly. I told complete strangers about how excited I was about it, months ahead of time. I expected it to be the most awesome thing ever.

And it sort of was. As I tweeted at the end of day one, it seemed like the creators looked at how conferences are typically run and asked in every way, “How could we do this better?”

The days began at 10am — waking wasn’t stressful and the extra time allowed for a brief check-in with email before being away from it for several hours. There were enough breaks, but they weren’t too long, leaving me with the sense that I needed to *do* something in between them. There was another break at the end of the day to check-in with work again before festivities continued into the night.

Each morning was filled with inspirational talks, each afternoon with hands-on workshops, each evening with blockbuster speakers and free alcohol. Wash, rinse, repeat.

What I’ll take away:

#1 - As readers may already know, I spent last December trying to learn Processing and ultimately gave up on it, frustrated with the lack of practicality in the tutorials I was following. I decided to give it one last chance by attending a Data Viz-specific workshop with Jer and Eyeo.

Over the past two weeks, I feel like Processing won an argument I’d been having with it for months.

Beck in December: Whine, whine, whine… Processing you’re too hard!

Processing in June: Suck it up, Beck. Good work is hard.

So I’m going to try again. There are just too many awesome things to be done to not try.

#2 - I’ve always leaned toward sharing my work and when asked to share code or PSDs, I always oblige. Now I’m going to make it explicit. I registered a new domain name during the last session of the festival and am committed to launching it with my first processing project. More details about this one soon.

#3 - The start of something. At the end of his last talk, Jer compared Eyeo to the root node of a Cascade and said that he hoped that in 10 years, we’d all look at Eyeo as the root node to really successful projects careers. I want that as much as he does and can see the trajectory unfolding already.

#4 - The end of something. As much as I enjoyed myself and was inspired by Eyeo, I think it would be sort of awesome if it didn’t ever happen again. Or if it didn’t happen again for another 10 years. The line-up was awesome, the energy, the time, the place… it all worked. It doesn’t have to be bigger or better. In fact, I think it would be more special if it stayed what it was. Eyeo, avoid the mistakes of Christmases past. Let us miss you.

3/3 The third and final day of Eyeo was no exception to the...

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:32:40 -0400

3/3

The third and final day of Eyeo was no exception to the inspiration I’ve come to expect from the festival. The day was a bit shorter than the previous two, lacking an afternoon workshop and evening sessions, but the morning and midday were jam-packed without any break, so it was still a full day.

Up first was Nicholas Felton, who goes by the online moniker “Feltron” (I’d always thought his last name was Feltron, but it isn’t). He talked about the data collection process he goes through to create his annual reports and I found it comforting to see how laborious the process is for him. There are many people, of which Nick is one, that just. work. hard. It’s nice to see that effort is required to create such beautiful pieces.

After Nicholas, Mark Hansen, who I first heard about at a conference back in 2008 and have even exchanged a few experimonth-related emails with, spoke about programming people instead of pixels through a project he’s collaborating with the Elevator Repair Service. Using Processing, he’s remixed three books into one play/reading and then serves up the lines to the actors via iPhones, live. The actors, who know the books intimately, read them in the new order. The whole thing takes about eight hours and in addition to remixing sentences and their order, he also assigns the actors various locations, which have them move about the performance space (picture a large place like the NYPL), sometimes joining together, something moving apart. It’s a very interesting expression of data and while I’m not sure how applicable it is to my work, it has definitely pushed the boundaries of what output I see possible from a piece of code.

After Mark, Jer Thorp spoke about several projects he’s done in the year he’s lived in New York. Jer’s so smart and approachable, I’m really becoming a big fan. It was great to see Cascade through his eyes: I see now that it’s a reader/story analysis tool for NYT staff, not necessarily a toy for the end user. What will stick with me most from his talk, however, was the process he went through to visualize the names of 9/11 victims for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum (I won’t go through his talk as it’s well documented here). What I loved most about his process was that he used Processing to figure out the solution to a problem, without making Processing the product of that solution. I also appreciate how the visualization wasn’t done after Processing had everything figured out. (He created a interface for the output so that the visualization was editable by the architects before becoming final.)

Aaron Koblin was up next and he showcased several awesome projects that I never realized were done by the same person. The sheep drawing, Johnny Cash and Wilderness Downtown projects were all, at least in part, his creation. He also showed a number of projects that I’d never seen, but were similarly delightful. In the science museum world, we have citizen science. Aaron’s work is like citizen art. Lots of people create small parts, which comprise a whole that they’re often unaware of until it’s complete. There is a gestalt that is really moving about these varied, but cohesive expressions. Like Jake’s talk the day earlier, I was on the verge of tears at several points.

The last talk of the day was a panel, Data Viz & Social Justice. Laura Kurgan, who pointed out that no data is raw, immediately earned lots of head nodding from me. As did an audience member who later asked the question — What are we doing to communicate that in our visualizations? And why aren’t their error margins in them? – to which the audience spontaneously applauded.

In my work with scientists, I’m exposed to different approaches to data. Some scientists don’t even look at data until they have their questions and hypotheses defined and documented. Others consider the inability to shift gears while exploring the data a major weakness in research methodology. I don’t know where I am in that continuum, but I don’t hear us (designers, developers, data viz geeks) talking about it at all. Someone mentioned that these sorts of things should be covered in a future Eyeo. I do and do not agree (more on that in my final Eyeo installment).

After the wrap-up, which involved lots of clapping, I spent the afternoon over at the Walker and then out to dinner with friends new and less new. My thoughts on the festival in general and what I’ll take away will be posted tomorrow.

2/3 If the Eyeo Festival were the golden ratio, we’d already be...

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 02:05:11 -0400

2/3

If the Eyeo Festival were the golden ratio, we’d already be past the part of ideal transition and focus. There’s only one more party and five more chances to hear folks share their work and wisdom. While today’s sessions brought more inspiration and insight, I made better picks yesterday. Maybe my brain is just getting full. Highlights:

Jake Barton, who’s work I first learned of back in 2007 and who I had the pleasure of meeting briefly in Los Angeles last year at AAM, spoke about Story Corps, Change By Us and the 9/11 Memorial Museum in his talk Read/Write/Speak Memory. Jake’s work has a relentless tenderness to it and this morning’s list of examples were no different. There were several times in the course of his presentation where I fought back tears and rubbed my arms to erase the goosebumps.

It wasn’t all sappy, though… Change By Us had me re-imagining my museum as a place where every visitor and staff member is given a post-it notepad and told to make suggestions, ask questions and share ideas about the space. As with most of the projects people have shared here this week, Jake’s code will be open source and I hope to see how well it works with our museum’s campus.

Perhaps one of the biggest things I will take away from Jake’s talk today is the notion of asking a client (or visitor or participant or colleague) to critique something instead of approve it. I like how that approach compliments a definition of failure as not something associated with shame, but rather something that indicates progress.

Right after Jake, Zach Lieberman took the stage for his talk, Drawing, Movement, Magic. Zach’s talk was impossible to take notes for — so many examples and concepts so new to me that it would’ve taken too long to conceptualize into meaningful doodles or sentences — face projection, eye-movement graffiti, screaming contest apps, temporary media lab space, nighttime projection involving dance, Surface tables and mobile phones. I have the sense that Zach’s work will sit with me in the way a good movie has you thinking about the characters for days after.

Later in the day, Jer Thorp spoke of his use of transitions in visualizations, sharing many examples with complete and commented Processing code. One example closely resembles a series of sketches I’ve made of blog posts and I am eager to see if I can reuse it to create dynamic views of the data.

This brings me to a request for future Eyeo Festivals: I’d like a dedicated space for folks who are inspired by shared code to go and play with it and to get help by folks who know lots about code since we’re all in the same space. I felt this way yesterday with the ProtoSnap, too. There’s no way I’m going back to my hotel room to work on code when there’s so much energy and stuff happening at the conference, but I wonder how much more enthusiasm I’d be able to retain for the plane ride home, or the weekend that follows, if I got something started while I’m still here.

There’s something in the air at this conference that has people realizing that they can change the world. Part of it is surely being around folks who already have.

1/3 I am fortunate to be attending the Eyeo Festival, a three...

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 02:45:00 -0400

1/3

I am fortunate to be attending the Eyeo Festival, a three day event focused on design and information, interaction and display. It’s the first one ever and it’s happening in Minneapolis right now. Because there was so much good today, I’m going to chronicle my highlights for future reference and reflection.

At the end of his talk,Truth and Beauty, Moritz Stefaner quoted Buckminster Fuller who said, “When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” I love the thought that truth is beautiful, and trusting that we have an innate ability to know and recognize beauty. Also, Moritz has created visualizations of argumentation and debate through Wikipedia’s “Keep or Delete” conversations that may inspire some of the ways we look at visualizing the discourse analysis we’re doing on blog posts.

In a later talk, Nick Felton and Jer Thorp discussed data and identity in a panel, Auto/Biography: Data, Identity and Narrative. As Nick talked about his most recent annual report chronicling the life of his father, he mentioned that without the receipts that his father kept for years, he wouldn’t have had access to the data he used to tell the story of his life. Later, Jer talked about Open Paths and XML archives of email on your Mac laptop and how ownership of data is important and interesting. I found the two concepts related and wonder who is educating folks about ways to keep the “shoebox of receipts” version of our accumulated data, especially since so much of it is owned by for-profit companies.

In a very nerdy* talk, Jesse Louis-Rosenberg and Jessica Rosenkrantz spoke about computational biology and using it to design everyday objects like jewelry, lamps, plates and cups with 3-D printers and other maker-friendly fabrication equipment. I instantly thought of the educational potential using biological processes to design everyday objects could have in informal science learning.

After lunch and much internal debate about which workshop to attend next, I chose to explore Arduino ProtoSnap with SparkFun. In the workshop, we connected to the panel and programmed it to blink and fade LED lights based on input from light sensors. We also toyed around with using the buzzer to make sounds that respond to various inputs. Towards the end, we saw a processing script that interacted with the arduino in a simple, but impressive way (push a button to draw new circles and change their color depending on how much light was available in the room). It was a great introduction to the hardware and software environments of arduino and the best part was that we got to take home a ProtoSnap for a $20 donation to one of my favorite science museums.

Natalie Jeremijenko began the evening sessions, speaking about the complexity of our environment and how we impact and interact in it. I’d never seen her work and found many of her projects inspiring, particularly from a science museum-y point-of-view. Her work with hacking robo-dog toys to sniff out pollutants, the importance of wetlands, and the potential reality of personal flight, are all readily explorable within my science museum’s community.

It’s possible, however, that the reason I’ve found Eyeo so great so far, is because the day ended with such a compelling and inspiring presenter. Golan Levin spoke on Gestural Computing and Speculative Interactions, showing examples of computers with senses like vision and hearing. I found his work relevant and progressive in a way that instantly opened my mind to new ways of thinking. Perhaps more than anything, Levin helps me better understand what I want to be when I grow up.

Circling items in tomorrow’s agenda is just as fraught as today’s and I’m sure it’ll be as rewarding. ’Til then.

* Meant only in the very best of ways.

I just wrote a post over at Experimonth: Mood about participant...

Wed, 11 May 2011 15:16:00 -0400

I just wrote a post over at Experimonth: Mood about participant compliance that I think folks who follow useum may be interested in.

In short, we retained 86% of our participants throughout the experimonth and they were 81% compliant with texting in data.

Lots more info and charts on the post proper.

Experimonth: Mood is trucking along and I thought in celebration...

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:55:00 -0400

Experimonth: Mood is trucking along and I thought in celebration of our 10,000th mood rating data point collected, I’d let folks over here at Useum know how things have progressed.

Technical difficulties were rife in the beginning. I’ve learned a lot about SMS and the infrastructure that supports our ability to send and receive the 300 text messages for each participant over the course of a month. I still don’t really understand how everything’s connected, but I do know enough to do some things differently next time (like getting a short code so that carriers don’t reject our text messages due to spam filters).

This blog is definitely a team effort. We have three co-hosts for the Experimonth: myself + the researcher + an exhibit developer and a web developer who’s handling all the bugs and feature requests. We’re still working out the kinks in getting posts reviewed for scientific accuracy (something I’m not used to in the kind of writing I typically do), and no combination of project management software (we’re currently shuffling between Flow, Dropbox and Google Docs) + email + in person meetings has proven to fit just right yet.

Traffic to the site has decreased as the month’s gone on, though mood rating compliancy is till through the roof at 80%+. I’ve got some new graphs and features planned that I hope will re-energize participants to visit the site throughout the latter two weeks.

My favorite part of the month so far is reading comments from the participants. I’m floored at how forthright folks are about their own life and experimonth experience. I hope we get a good turnout at our wrap-up event so that I can meet these creative and thoughtful people in person.

More soon!

Here’s a look at Experimonth: Mood registrations over the...

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 22:20:00 -0400

Here’s a look at Experimonth: Mood registrations over the four days we recruited participants.

We announced the project on Monday at 10am through updates to Facebook and Twitter, hoping to get 40 non-museum staff registrations by Friday. Right away were invited to do guest posts for Quantified Self and Scientific American (thanks to Nina, Paul, Bora and Anton for their parts in that).

We had a couple days to prepare for the potential influx of attention, so we made calls to and tested our service providers and readied the site for a pay option of $6.47 to participate (we didn’t budget for more than 200 users and that’s the cost per).

Here’s how the community grew one registration at a time over the four days:

Day One: We announced the project at 10am and had a bunch of new users right away. Registration was steady throughout the day, Facebook referrals (204) were three times that of Twitter (65). Our highest day by one registration, we added 53 participants. We had 17 participants (beta testers and staff) prior to announcing the project.

Day Two: We didn’t do anything to promote the project on day two in preparation for the potential number of signups through QS and SciAm referrals. Registrations were slow in the middle of the night and slow, but steady throughout the day. We added 19 new participants.

Day Three: We began the day by load testing our server to make sure we could handle a lot of traffic if it came our way. This testing inadvertently broke our registration form and when I updated Twitter and Facebook for locals to signup before the 200 free registrations were filled, the site was down and we didn’t know it. You can see the window of dotlessness on the chart. We fixed the form and told folks of our error, but I’m sure some registrations were lost.

Around 3pm, both the QS and SciAm posts went live, but traffic did not balloon like we anticipated. We ended up with 53 referrals (visits, not registration) from QS and 36 from SciAm over two days. We added 42 more participants on day three.

Day Four: We updated Twitter and Facebook with “there are still free spots” messaging and got a pretty good bump. I’m unsure if there’s any significance to the gap between 2-4, but the traffic of the site was a little low then, too. We added 52 participants.

—

At the end of the four days, we ended up with 166 new registrations. Our total number of participants is 183, 160 of which are not museum staff (four times my original goal). The site’s traffic analytics show 703 unique visits in those four days, so nearly a quarter of the visitors actually signed up.

The press was exciting, but didn’t really wallop us like we feared/hoped. We certainly have more participants as a result, but the project remains largely local and manageable in size.

###

Here’s the source data if you want to reference/play with it.

I vowed to keep Experimonth: Mood registration as simple as...

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 08:44:00 -0400

I vowed to keep Experimonth: Mood registration as simple as possible by only requiring name, phone number and email to sign-up.

The name because I have a theory that communities where folks use their real name have more accountability. In this way, all participants go by their first name and last initial except for co-hosts (full name) and readers who are not participating (whatever they input on the comment form).

The mobile number and email were required for the text messaging and weekly mission communications.

The downside is that I don’t have too much information about the participants. I hope to fill in the gaps with questions on the blog and requests to fill out profile information, but the only thing I’m assured is name, phone, email.

This graphic takes advantage of area codes — an implicit but likely inaccurate location measure given the numbers are mobile. It’s still interesting, and I hope it will prompt the group to put their zip code info in their profiles so I can more accurately chart their participation.

Guest Blog: Museum Brings Citizens and Scientists Together Through Blogging Project: Experimonth

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:51:22 -0400

Guest Blog: Museum Brings Citizens and Scientists Together Through Blogging Project: Experimonth

Today we are opening registration for our first official...

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 08:00:00 -0400

Experimonth: The Science of Mood

Community data in realtime.

Today we are opening registration for our first official museum-hosted Experimonth and I am super excited about it.

Experimonth was the culmination of many ideas and personal experiments by museum staff members and their families and friends. The seeds of what became Experimonth were planted in July of 2008 when two brave museum animal keepers experimented with a weeklong Diet of Corn. That idea then became the catalyst for another diet-related experiment in December of 2008, the Raw Diet (initially the Beet Diet). Discussions in Durham bars (the Pinhook and Broad St. Cafe) and over email raised awareness and excitement for the Raw Diet, and due to the timing (New Years), turned into Experimonth, an entire year of month-long blogging experiments, mostly centered around New Years Resolutions.

A year and some months later, the idea to turn this personal project into a mission-driven (a.k.a. science as a way of knowing) web community was spawned and work began to figure out a model that would pair local researchers with our community in meaningful ways.

Experimonth: Mood is the first attempt at this pairing. Dr. Frances Ulman and a team of museum staff have co-created the experimonth — from the daily challenge (record mood via SMS), the weekly mission (complete a special assignment), the visualizations of participant data, the blog posts, and details of the in-person wrap up even in early May.

I invite you to participate (registration closes at 200 participants) and welcome your responses and suggestions. I’ll surely be blogging about the experience both here on useum and on the experimonth site proper.

Matt Haughey, creator of one of my favorite web community...

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 21:56:00 -0400

Matt Haughey, creator of one of my favorite web community environments, MetaFilter, recorded his recent SXSW talk so that folks who weren’t there for it could still hear about the lessons he’s learned after 11 years of community moderation.

The talk is about 40 minutes long and I recommend spending the time to watch it. There’s a fair bit about team moderation that doesn’t apply to me or my museum (yet), but I still took a lot from it. My highlights:

Part I: In order to be a good moderator, Matt says you need to do the following:

Be a model citizen: Be active and involved and participate with the spirit and manners you want other participants to model.

Don’t be overprotective: If you imagine a thread of dialogue in your community as a concert — the moderators can be the bouncers/security at the front of the stage, promoting the idea that if they aren’t clearly present and intimidating, things will get out of hand; or moderators can be planted within the audience, cheering and singing and participating, but also committed to ensuring everyone else’s right to do the same.

Give participants a place to vent and offer feedback: Incorporating a parallel space for commentary about the community can be helpful not only in giving participants a place to be heard, but also helpful in keeping other content areas on topic.

Highlight the best of your site: While this seems like a no brainer, creating a space where the very best examples of community interaction are showcased gives prospective users a good view into the site’s activity and gives current users something to strive for.

Part II: As MetaFilter’s evolved over the years, so has Haughey’s approach and toolset for moderating its community. He spends the second half of the talk outlining and elaborating on the following process:

1. Identify both the things you want to have happen on the site and the things you want to avoid.

2. Inspect what it looks like when those good/bad things happen and look for patterns.

3. Build custom community management tools that recognize those patterns so that you can react quickly.

###

MetaFilter is a community that feels safe and smart, and one that I frequently look to when designing my own projects. I envision scenarios where we use Haughey’s approaches not only for community moderation, but also evaluation and learning outcomes. Kudos for him for being so forthright and open about his site and its operation.

The goal we have with any tech project at the museum is to...

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 09:33:14 -0500

The goal we have with any tech project at the museum is to clearly see a path where the project can transform from duty to outlet for the content creator. We look to see where creating content on behalf of the museum would be a natural and positive addition to their workload, skill set or reputation.

After we’ve identified that, we enter a period of varying length where I handhold that creator until he or she feels confident to do the job, both in terms of the technology involved and in terms of speaking as a voice for our institution. This may involve making the project private (or staff-only) for a period of time, or it may involve us sitting together side-by-side creating content together until he or she gets the hang of it.

Once they feel confident, I let go. I’m there for moral support and cheerleading, but otherwise I trust them completely. This last part is required because their creations are better when they take risks and risks are harder to take if the trust and support isn’t there. It’s my goal to have everyone at my museum trust that I’d have their back if they made a mistake or took a risk that backfired. I consider it a success, even, when that happens because it means they’re pushing us to do new things – and they’re giving me the opportunity to deliver on my promise to support them.

Every Friday, I meet up with various museum staffers and...

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 23:10:00 -0500

Every Friday, I meet up with various museum staffers and occasionally folks from the community and even sometimes members from our board of directors at a local bar called The Pinhook.

And most every Friday, we draw something together. Originally this activity was a way to nudge my colleagues into drawing (even if it made them uncomfortable) while also serving to relieve some social pressure by giving the group something to focus on besides conversation. In the time since, we’ve created dozens of drawings (maybe hundreds, I should count them) and the rules of the exercise have evolved based on the experiences and ideas of the participants.

The exercise began as a bar napkin version of the game layer tennis and looked like this:

We called the first iteration “napkin tennis.”

And then, as I began to use sketchbooks more in my own work and carry them around with me everywhere, we started sketching in whatever sketchbook I had with me, and they expanded, looking like this:

I’ve scanned several of these drawing and uploaded them on Flickr.

After a suggestion from a colleague based on a game he played with his brother when they were growing up, it evolved into three stages: 1) draw a squiggle; 2) turn the squiggle into something that’s no longer abstract; and 3) “finish it.” Here’s an early version of that:

Original Squiggle

Squiggle turned into “Picasso guitar,” then “finished” to become a robot.

And then, based on the suggestion of another colleague, we started using three different color markers so that the evolution of the picture could be seen after the drawing was complete.

After a too brief visit to Seattle last week to speak with some museology students at UW and share in a happy hour with them afterwards, a new version of the game has emerged: turn it into a puppy. Same rules as the squiggle game with the three colors, but all drawings need to end up looking like a puppy. Here were a few examples of last week’s drawings:

Several more of these are uploaded to Flickr.

And all the while and without fail, they bemoan their inability to draw.

Who I Follow: Merlin Mann of 43 Folders

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:31:01 -0500

Who I Follow: Merlin Mann of 43 Folders:

People often ask me who I follow and I never have a good answer, so I’m going to start an occasional series on Useum where I highlight certain folks I find particularly insightful. I’ll tag each of them “follow” so that they can be found collectively.

The first spot is reserved for one of my very favorites: Merlin Mann of 43Folders. I’ve followed Merlin for years and even shared a meal with him once and his thoughts on creativity and knowledge work always resonate with me.