More and more these days I am finding that reconsidering the “what problem are we REALLY trying to solve” is everything. We can struggle for years in the weeds when a shift in perspective and boom! The fog clears, patterns emerge, resolution soars, and noise plummets.

But all too often, we simply ignore the POV (and the person offering it) that’s even a tiny step beyond the one we’ve already declared The Way It Is. I realize that a lot of creativity/innovation/brainstorming techniques are based entirely on surfacing fresh perspectives, but I keep finding that the time between stumbling upon a new lens and actually taking it seriously is loooooong. Years, even.

Wondering how to speed that up. I am trying a few things, but also realizing that even with my OWN “new” perspectives, it takes several years before I take myself seriously

In any case, I am finding answers to my current challenges in what Alan Kay was talking about in the ’70′s and ’80′s. I think of all those early Parc folks and, wow, what must it be like for THEM to wait such a long time to see the realization of what they imagined/knew. And sad to consider where they thought we would be by now, so far in the “future”…

Absolutely love the milk story. Thank you.

I have it – seems to make sense.

Legs need oxygen, lack of exercise, funny tingly sensations..

Hope you’re keeping well!

No, it would show up on their Twitter feed. Good comment about books – there have always been more books than available time/attention. And the majority of them have always been middling at best anyway.

I don’t know if you’ve read Hamlet’s Blackberry yet, but author William Powers offers a history of people (including Socrates, Seneca and Shakespeare) struggling with – and sometimes overcoming – information overload.

I know that screens often unintentionally take time away from life … and thus far, I’ve been unable or unwilling to take significant time away from the screens of my life … but this book – and insights offered in Tiffany Shlain’s movie, Connected – have helped heighten my awareness of the costs.

BTW, one of the most provocative quotes about information overload I’ve heard was shared by Paul Dourish at CSCW 2006:

One of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought forth into the world.

— Barnaby Rich (1580-1617), writing in 1613 (!); quoted by de Solla Price in his 1963 book “Little Science, Big Science.”

Focused attention. Seeing in-to things.
When you’re looking at something, how closely are you tuned?
––––
I was watching people watch. This is a habit.

That is, studying people as they “study” — watching to see how people are paying attention. This couldn’t be any more in-depth or capable interpretation of the ongoing analysis of watchful friend, Linda Stone, and her studies of “attention.”

But it’s more to an inherent curiosity that I’ve got about people and how they see things, and what they do when they see them. How they do, or do not, pay attention. With people that I work with, clients, those that I observe on the subway, walking the street, studying their eyes, for what they see, and what they do not.

That lead me to think about context in connection — how people sense things in relationship to design. Sitting through hundreds of hours of focus sessions — or dozens of anthropological visits, you begin to get a sense of what to “look for.” The whole body is a sensing organ — watching the eyes is one channel of consideration; but what about everything else. What are the degrees of engagement, alertness, fascination, deep gaze, dream sight, disconnected focus, continuous sight? Working on launch programs — building a story, a product, a place — and watching it go live, linking into the observation of visitors, guests, audience — I ponder the question: who’s synced into the “real time” of the moment — and who is just “passing by”?

When you really get into watching people watching people [or things], you begin to study how other creatures examine. Spiders, for example — try getting close enough to a spider that you can track the movements of that body, sensing yours. Dragonflies. Lizards. Hummingbirds. How deep, the dog’s study? The cat? But being a student of raptors, corvids and other larger intelligent birds, I cast my gaze there.

Pondering the focused link, the attention of one engaged, what would be the most powerful visible parable? One, to note, the owl. Get close enough to watch a raptor watch — and you realize there are layers to seeing in to things. The attached imagery is incredible to watch — the liquidity, the fluency, the grace. http://www.dogwork.com/owfo8 But more so, the focus.

And the design, of how it works…Owl coming in — from one hundred feet, one thousand frames a second — for the strike right at the camera, only a minute long. The head, the gaze never moves — and the last two or three seconds are amazing, watching the feathers ruffle and the wings swell.

The idea of looking, a metaphor of seeing — when you look at something, how far do you look in? Looking out, is looking in — even etymologically, to look is the modern turn on an old, perhaps first millennium expression of a German dialect, lugen “to look out.”

In my earlier days as a falconer’s “valet,” I recall looking into the eyes of the raptors that I hand-roosted (and that’s all that I was entitled to do — being a carrier of these birds. They looked out, through me, to the far lands, and to the mammals that scurried in the grass fields beyond where I stood, holding them.

Look out. Look in. Look beyond.

tsg | NYC

blog is: http://www.girvin.com/blog/?p=8215#more-8215

“The Airbus’s stall alarm is designed to be impossible to ignore. Yet for the duration of the flight, none of the pilots will mention it, or acknowledge the possibility that the plane has indeed stalled—even though the word “Stall!” will blare through the cockpit 75 times. Throughout, Bonin will keep pulling back on the stick, the exact opposite of what he must do to recover from the stall. ”

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877

cultivating not-knowing, a worthy life goal.

hope to watch the further evolution of “inattentional blindness” writing and thinking.

enjoy,

gregory lent

Sometimes that old saying “You can’t see the forest for the trees” comes to mind. So much of it depends on how you use your mind to get past what you are seeing in the moment and to eventually look at the big picture. For some of us, living and working outside of our comfort zone helps to see what most others often cannot see inside their own circles. Lately, the question that has been haunting me more and more as I get older: Does this ability go away as one gets older and more “set” in one’s ways? Or are there those among us who manage to stay in this Perpetual Inattentional State for our entire lifetime? It goes to the heart of creativity, inventiveness and fascination.