Every day you come to work, open your email, process paperwork, return calls and head to meetings. Have you ever really paused for a moment to look at all the stuff that surrounds you?
Yeah, things may look a little chaotic but you’ve probably got a system going and you know exactly where everything is. Some desks might look shipshape and others like a tornado ripped through your office. Either way it’s your life and because of that it’s worth documenting. You could take a picture… but that’s too easy.
This week for our Visual Meditation, take a few minutes to sit back and appreciate all the little things in life. Specifically all the stuff that surrounds you every day at your desk! Sketch it out for us, scan it and upload it to our xBlog activities Group on Flickr.
- Exercise: Draw your desk area and all the objects usually found there. Use labels if necessary.
- Flickr tag: xonmydesk
Seen on Dave Gray’s site: “A short, 5-minute chat with Jason Fried about nature and how it influences his work.”
A refreshingly different and light podcast touching on design and creativity, nature and springtime, inspiration and solutions, evolution and adaptation, complexity and simplicity — with sketches!
Wouldn’t it be great if you could come to work and really focus on just one thing? Your sole function would be geared toward doing just that one thing — and doing it really, really well.
Yeah. Okay. Back to the reality of spinning plates, burning fires and high priority emails that seem endless. Your job requires doing many things at once, but you only have two arms. But what if you had four? Or six?
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Or, the nib cursor
I love my iPad, but the finger-only interface has been a continuing frustration for me. As an artist and designer, I want to do things that I can easily do with a pen and paper, like write, scribble and sketch. But these are not things we typically do with our fingers, any more than we eat soup or salad with our fingers.
Apple apologists will say that you can sketch and write with the iPad, and indeed we can. Yes, and indeed we can also eat salad or even soup without utensils if it’s absolutely necessary. But that’s not ideal, is it? Over the years we’ve developed tools, like forks, spoons, knives and yes, pens, that make life easier. We should expect no less from our interface designers.
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Remember when you were little and Halloween meant canvassing a 3-mile radius of your home in order to see just how much candy can be packed into one pillowcase? Inevitably your costume was made by your mother in a way that was not nearly as cool, gory or princess-y as you’d like but that never stopped you in your search for sugary rewards.
This week for our Visual Meditation, take a few minutes to think about your favorite (or not-so-favorite) Halloween costumes through the years. Sketch one, scan it and upload it to our xBlog activities Group on Flickr.
- Exercise: Draw yourself in the one costume that most stands out. Use labels if necessary. Bonus points for labeling the candy you most liked and disliked.
- Flickr tag: xhalloween
Happy Halloween!
In a recent post titled Ubiquitous Service Design, Peter Morville raised some interesting questions about how we might design for a world where everything is, or potentially can be — smart. A world where your refrigerator knows what you had for lunch and when the lettuce will be out of date. A world where your car gives you suggestions for getting better gas mileage or tells you a better way to get where you’re going.
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Every one of you has a unique gift. You may not always feel that way, but you do. It’s what sets you apart in business meetings, social gatherings or who knows — maybe even crime fighting. Let’s just call it your superpower.
This week for our Visual Meditation, take a few minutes to think about your unique gifts that you use to thwart problems and and get things done.
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Here’s a brief (seven minutes) description of the workshop XPLANE founder Dave Gray will be giving at UI15 in November: Visual Thinking for User Experience.
It’s a new workshop on effectively communicating design ideas. Wireframes don’t help us with the Why, only the What of our designs. Dave’s simple sketching techniques are powerful tools for communicating your design’s rationale. You’ll learn solid strategies for visualizing your ideas, which will help you identify issues while creating great new experiences. (Psssst! If you register for the conference using the promotion code “GRAY” you will save 400 bucks on the conference — or 50 bucks on any one day!)
And if you’re in Philly for IDEA, don’t miss today’s conference kick-off with Dave and his Gamestorming co-authors James Macanufo and Sunni Brown. They’ll be talking with Peter Morville and sharing insights from their new book — discussing how Gamestorming can address the cross-media challenges of ubiquitous information architecture.
After the panel conversation, they’ll facilitate break-out sessions in which participants will work together using methods like sketching and bodystorming to explore ideas for visualizing and mapping complex, blended (offline/online) products and services.
Follow them on Twitter to keep up on what’s up at #idea10!
Whenever we start a new client engagement, we begin by working to understand our target audience. Who are they? And what is it that they are looking for?
Another way to frame that question is to ask, “What keeps them up at night?.” If you can figure that out, then you can begin to understand how to best address their needs. If you’re striving for solutions, it’s best to begin with the end in mind and work backward from there. So what keeps you up at night? How about a little Visual Meditation doodle therapy to clear your head?
Okay pencil and paper ready?
Sketch it, scan it and upload it to our xBlog activities Group on Flickr.
- Exercise: Draw a big head and fill it with the things you worry about
- Optional: Add a speech bubble
- Flickr tag: xworries
At XPLANE we love to draw. In fact, our entire approach relies on drawing as a means to get people thinking, talking and sharing so we can better understand all the information that resides in their heads — or in an organization or elsewhere.
Visual language is a very powerful way of doing that because words can be deceptive. Pictures however, can be universal and help bridge those communication gaps. As our founder Dave Gray says “If it can’t be drawn, it can’t be done.”
Even prehistoric people used drawing to communicate and to understand their world. They used cave paintings to develop strategies and maps for hunting buffalo and finding water, or simply to relate to their world. Our ability to draw is innate. Every five-year-old in the world knows they can draw, enjoys it and will not hesitate to show off their abilities — sometimes on walls! The problem is that as we get older we talk ourselves out of drawing because we’re not as good as we think we need to be — or we’re told that “that’s for kids.” So even though it’s fun and can be very therapeutic, we’d rather not be embarrassed about it so we let it go.
Well, forget all that. We want to encourage all of you to draw and we have some simple exercises that we think will help get you going. Let’s call them “Visual Meditations.” They are short, weekly drawing exercises developed to encourage visual thinking and to reignite your innate ability to draw and communicate with pictures.
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