Wanderings in the Labyrinth

Shelly has a post back from December 8th about how there are 10 modern technology items that he’d like to replace with older tools.  One of the tools on his list is a thermostat.

This on is on my list too, curiously enough. Because back in early November, my house was without power for four days, and it was not only dark, but cold.  Turns out, my heat is gas, and the gas would have worked fine in my house — except that the thermostat was electric.  Neither the furnace nor the hot water heater shut down during the power outage, so they weren’t electric.  The hot water heater just worked right through the blackout.  Since the power was out, the thermostat didn’t work, and the gas heating system registered the thermostat as being off, i.e., heat wasn’t needed.  It got fairly cold in my house as a result each night for four nights.

We live in a world of tremendous complexity, and it’s important to remember that complexity is a response to extra energy in a system.  If you discover that you have corvée labor and a massive number of overseers, you wind up building pyramids or ziggurats.  If you discover you have the largest coal reserves in Europe, you build railway systems.  If you discover you have oil reserves, you build the largest industrial system in the world.  If you have both gas heat and electric, you use both to manage the heating and cooling in your house.

It turned out to be a mistake.  When one failed, the whole system failed.

Shelly asked us to consider what modern-day tools we’d like to replace with older versions.  I think there’s something to be said for learning how old tools and machines work.  I’m talking about ‘tools’ here in a very broad sense. It’s really more along the lines of ‘tools and techniques’ really, but I’m trying to find some online links that will help me achieve some goals.

So I’m deciding on a few projects I want to complete in 2012.

1. Replace the thermostat in my house with a mechanical model.
2. Learn to use a slide rule instead of a calculator. (buy me a slide rule!)
3. build and learn to use an astrolabe.
4. Work out with yoga and tai chi instead of at a gym.
5. Write with pens and paper more using Italic handwriting instead of on a computer.
6. Learn to make more ruler-and-compass constructions part of my regular art practice.
7. Do a better job with my five year diary project. (I don’t have nearly enough entries from this past year; losing it for all spring and summer didn’t help).
8. Read more (though I don’t need an app for it); watch less TV.
9. Play more music on my own.
10. Cook more for myself and for others.

I had a one-on-one meeting with one of my peers in the design world a while back.  I shouldn’t call him a peer, really.  Coach, perhaps?  He’s a lot better at some of the actual work of design than I am, and he’s been doing it longer.   He’s really helped coach me through the design process, even as I’ve coached him to understand the metacognitive challenges of trying to teach people to reflect on what they’re learning, and how they’re learning it.

Still, neither of us is trained as a designer.  We’ve come to that role accidentally, as Accidental Creatives, and discovered:

1. We LIKE being creative; and
2. We are CAPABLE creatives.

We both are what IDEO, and Tom Kelley, call “T-shaped people”: we have broad wealth of knowledge and experience (that’s the top of the T), but we also have deep knowledge that is unmatched in our respective disciplines (That’s the vertical of the T).  That doesn’t mean that, as untrained designers, we don’t hit pitfalls; but being untrained designers gives us advantages that others don’t.

I’m drifting from my topic.  That’s because most design work takes place within what I like to call “the metacognitive envelope” (if I ever start a rock band, that’s our name.  You read it here first; you can’t take our name.)  When you’re in the Metacognitive Envelope, you’re so busy using so much of your brain — creativity, memory, willpower, visual processing, language processing — that you can’t at the same time observe the process your brain is going through.  It’s like licking your own elbow.  Your focus is on solving the design challenge, not on what types of thinking you’re doing, or in what order.

The vast majority of what we did was put ideas on paper.  I can’t say that all the ideas were good.  A lot of them weren’t.  I can’t say that all the ideas were bad, either, though.  Most of them, as individual ideas, were not at all important.  Some of them were only good because they were in context with other ideas of similar quality.  

The point I’m trying to make, ultimately, is that we came up with the mindset of success first.  We talked ourselves into believing there was a great solution, we could find it, and that people would be impressed with the results. The forward-leaning intent to find great results preceded the great results.

And we got great results.

I wish all my projects turned out like this.  More, I wish I had an easy way of teaching this process to my students.

Before flying

Originally uploaded by anselm23

My mom made me take this glass of rancid-looking pink stuff before flying yesterday. She knows I usually catch the sickness of whatever is passing through the airplane or airport on any travel day. The more airports I pass through, the worse off I feel.

Yesterday, I went from Tampa to Hartford without any difficulties. There wasn’t even any traffic on the highways. I didn’t wait in line to go through security; there were extra seats on the plane; the flight that I thought had two layovers was actually non-stop.

Immune Defense, an encomium to an elephant-headed god, and good wishes for safe travels got me through!