Liz:

Today, few markers mark time. We make our own markers, using light as a guide on some days, milestones and deadlines on more frenetic ones. But it’s the rare person who, at 6PM, can walk, head high, out of the studio or office, turning day into night and one thing into another. Marking the fact that it’s time to play.

And a nice moment of serendipity to find, days after, this NPR piece:

Now here is the thing: arcs collapse time, for they make time, as measured by the ticking of a clock and the turning of pages on the calendar, irrelevant. They organize time, and everything else, according to their own requirements. The baseball player is counting time with pitches and innings; it doesn’t matter how long the game took in minutes and hours. The basketball player measures time in relation to quarters, fouls, time outs, and baskets, and so on.

We don’t create serendipity so much as develop a sensibility for it. The more we are plugged in and bound up in multitasking, the less room we seem to have for drawing the connections necessary for serendipity. A space of repose, room to breath and to walk and to roll around ideas we’ve recently come across – is important enough to make time for, every day.

“what’s wrong w/ gameification:

1: games are not fun because they are games, they are fun because they are well designed! Sturgeon’s Law “90% of everything is crap”

2: rewards are not achievements, this is just bad psychology. Vendors who sell this have a Pavlovian model in mind. “it’s so 1940″ as Deterding said…exemplified by showing game on which there’s big button called “earn 1,000,000,000,000 $” you can click & win. Based on the reward model, this would be the best game. As described by Raph Koster, “fun in games arises from mastery”.

3: competition is not for everyone! …problem is also that gameification has side-effects: creates unintended behavior, people game the system & it messes w/ implicit social norms. When people take gameification too directly, they generally miss that games are about: fictions, make believe, talk, & freedom to play (”whoever plays plays freely, whoever must play cannot play!“). Playing = “as if” & playing is fun because of the autonomy.”

(via rgreco)

This is why I think Gowalla’s sticker collecting mechanic, for example, is more interesting than Foursquare’s – it’s not a simple metric of arbitrary “points”, everyone has their own emotional reactions and attachments, and there’s an element of surprise and spontaneity.

I also think that it’s not good enough.

I have a strong hunch that designing rulesets, frameworks for exploration and play, will be the next great design challenge. What’s so powerful is that you’re trying on a specific way of thinking, of moving, of performing. It’s pervasive and it’s engaging.

It’s like when you first learn about using grids in design – it limits the possibilities to a few variables, but then you get to explore those specific options, and you begin seeing everything around you differently.

As of now, we only go through these massive perspective shifts a few times in our lives. Maybe when you first go to college, or when you go to art school, or first start dabbling in design. Imagine how amazing it would be to develop multiple ways of seeing the world, and to be able to switch between them on the fly.

“Games” will be a huge tool for this, because they have an internal environment that has an implicit ruleset, that you can interact with and get immediate feedback. Right now, we’ve had some good tries (Flower, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari Damacy, and Limbo), but they have yet to be nuanced and maturity.

Graphic design is visceral, and its success depends upon immediate impact.

Games are engaging, pervasive, and their success will depend on clarity and depth in their structure.

babyrabbit:

• 100A is good.
• Kyle, my instructor, is inspirational.
• I am getting better at time management.
• Think too hard and the project becomes more than I can handle. Better to just go and do it, because I’m gonna have to do another iteration anyway.
• Design is an iterative process; good ideas are developed, never just straight up hatched from the get go.
• I can sleep and stay (somewhat) sane and still do well.

Of course, all of this can change in a heartbeat! And now, I return to not procrastinating. 

I had a crazy idea this summer (and still do!) to make a handbook or magazine or wiki for arch studio friends to share their collective wisdom for later generations. Here’s what I have to add to Amy’s list:

• Your studios will always give you too much work. Your instructors don’t really expect you to finish everything, but they absolutely demand that you are thoughtful, precise, persistent, and bold.
• Also, the point of giving you so much work is to force students to just start. Starting is the hardest part for me. I can think about a problem forever. Far better to just generate ideas, even bad ones.
• Someone once said, “Delete unimportant things. Even if you love them.” Be ruthless about editing down your ideas. (This is why generating a lot of them is good, you have room to maneuver.) Whittle and cut away and erase until you’re crying inside (and maybe outside). Otherwise, you’re not doing enough.
• Design is iterative. Good design is also layered. Draw new connections and build on your old ideas after every final review, don’t throw out everything. (But don’t be afraid to throw out a few things.)
• During your final reviews, your ideas stand alone. Nobody gives a shit about your feelings, your ego, or what you were “trying to do”. Either your work is, or it isn’t. Don’t be defensive. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. (Being too tired to care helps.)
• Plot early. (Days ahead.) Then work on your models the night before.
• Do not take 140, 150, 160 with a studio. They won’t get the attention and time they deserve.
• For the sake of your sanity, take classes just for shits. Branch out. Take something you have a passing or deep interest in. Never, ever commit yourself to a semester with all architecture courses or you will not be a very likable person. (This was at least true for myself.)
• It’s not true that arch majors can’t have a life outside of studio. You just can’t do everything. Be ruthlessly selective. Find out who your core group of friends will be. Make time for them. Make sure they’re not all studiomates. 
• The strangest things happen past 2 in the morning, when electricity is thickest in the air and your mind is too tired to filter it out. Be aware and open.

Website for the Berkeley Engineers and Mentors student group.

Role: Design, CSS frontend
Type: Website

linedandunlined:

From historian Daniel Boorstin’s introduction to The Image, his book from 1961:

When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect — we even demand — that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house to not only shelter us, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or to take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great and vast and varied and prepared for every challenge; yet we expect our “national purpose” to be clear and simple, something that gives direction to the lives of nearly two hundred million people and yet can be bought in a paperback at the corner drugstore for a dollar.

We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellence,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a “church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be a God.

Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never have people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

splinterend:

The boundary between reality and fantasy is porous and unstable; everything, including inanimate objects, is alive and responds magically to wishes and fears. There are mysteries and secrets everywhere, as in the lives of children, who are kept in the dark about fundamental realities – sex, death, money, and the whole complex mystery of their parents’ desires and disappointments – Elizabeth Dalton, from the Introduction to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, published 2003 by Barnes & Nobles Classics

Disney is a staple to American cinema. The name itself is a brand, hailing nearly fifty animated theatrical releases with its recent film, The Princess and the Frog, it’s 49th, and another unveiling this fall, Tangled, it’s golden 50th. 

But these recent films come nowhere near to the dare and darkness of some of the original Disney animated films, the fears evoked so deeply by fairy-, folk- and morality tales. Yes, they began the tradition of integrated musicals into animation that lasted for decades until arguably the turning of the 21st century, but these films – from Snow White to Sleeping Beauty – are in a class of their own, films that will likely stand the test of time because they tap into the subconscious of our childhood that we will never fully understand or ever let go of. 

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