Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Some Rules and Hints for Teachers and Students

Some Rules and Hints for Teachers and Students
----------------------------------------------
By Corita Kent

cf. The Next Whole Earth Catalog, ed. by Stewart Brand (Point/Random
House, 1980), p. 540

Rule 1: Find a place you trust and then, try trusting it for a while.

Rule 2: General duties of a student---pull everything out of your
teachers; pull everything out of your fellow students.

Rule 3: General duties of a teacher---pull everything out of your
students.

Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.

Rule 5: Be self-disciplined---this means finding someone wise or smart and
choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way.
To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Rule 6: Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there's only
make.

Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something.
It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually
catch on to things.

Rule 8: Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're
different processes.

Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's
lighter than you think.

Rule 10: "We're breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do
we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities." -- John Cage

Hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to
classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies
carefully, often. Save everything---it might come in handy later.

(found this on the net attributed in whole to John Cage, have not verified
the Kent attribution at the top - or the fidelity of this text to it - but
it seems relatively convincing since it has a page number. In any case
thought these were worthy of pondering and discussion. Some parts I find
vague or don't make sense to me, but I particularly liked the hints and
rules 7 and 8)

Saturday, September 23, 2006

How To Run A Brainstormer

"The best way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas."
- Linus Pauling

I ran my first brainstormer this past august in the lab where I am doing
my graduate studies, the biomotion lab. Our supervisor, Niko, was going to
be away for a month, so I thought it was a good opportunity for us to take
charge a bit and think of ways we could be doing things differently around
the lab.

I was inspired by a neat book, The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, about
an incredibly creative design company called IDEO, who were behind eg the
original apple mouse, the Palm V, the TiVo, and many other product
designs. Once they developed a radical new shopping cart prototype in 5
days for a Nightline challenge. Anyway they use brainstormers, as they
call them, as an integral part of their day-to-day process.

Here are the guidelines I used to run our brainstormer, mostly derived
from ideas in that chapter (though they don't lay it out like this):

BEFORE

* Having the boss gone really helps. The book actually recommends sending
him or her out for snacks, I'm not sure for the whole thing or just while
you're getting started. But the point is to try to set up an atmosphere
where people don't feel they are getting judged on the quality of the
ideas they shout out.
* Choose the room. With a table to write on and walls to stick stuff to,
but ideally kind of cramped - I think that helps the creative energy.
* Bring in toys: prototypes, diagrams, anything remotely relevant to
the subject that could spark ideas. All I could think of was a
crude floorplan I drew to help us think about possible alternative
space arrangements
* Figure out a clear statement of the purpose of the brainstormer. Should
be focused, but without presupposing what kind of solutions there will be.
I chose "How can we make the lab work better?"
* Prepare the room. I put big pieces of paper on every wall and spread them out across the desk, with tons of
felt pens around. The idea being people can sketch away to work on and
show their ideas.
* Write up your purpose statement at the top of one of the sheets of
paper, and then put up any rules or slogans you want people to keep in
mind. I wrote up "QUANTITY NOT QUALITY" - somewhat tongue in cheek, but I
thought that's what we as a group needed to hear to get uninhibited.

DURING

I acted as the facilitator to the session. My job was to stand up at
the front and write down on a big piece of paper every single idea that
anyone said, and to keep up the energy and focus of the session, by
asking questions, encouraging elaboration, etc. Here's
what I followed:

* Announce a strict time limit, and a goal for the number of items. We
went with 40 minutes (you probably don't want to go over an hour), and a
goal of 50 ideas.
* Number the items as you put them up.
* Have the rule no discussion allowed, and especially no criticism,
thinking of the problems with a suggestion. I had to stifle this a few
times.
* Encourage silly and extreme. As long as the purpose is up there and the
pacing is kept up, I think joking around is really good for creativity
(the book has a couple of examples of creative solutions that started off
as jokes). I made sure to write up all the silly suggestions too ("A
wading pool")
* Don't worry about repetition or overlap. Write them all down as their
own item.
* Ask questions and solicit contributions based on the concept of "build
and jump". This is a bit tricky to explain, but felt totally
natural to do. You encourage more and more ideas in a particular
vein ("ok lets hear some more ideas about what we could be doing with the
space layout"), until they start to peter out. Then jump to a different
area, either a totally new one or an area you were exploring earlier. It
works well to physically go back to that area in the list - spacial
memory.

So there are a few things to keep in mind as the facilitator, but it was
really easy, I'm pretty sure any member of the group could have done the
job just as well.

It felt like a success, in fact it felt electric. The actual count of
ideas after the 40 minutes: 53. Everyone contributed some, including
people who almost never speak up during lab meetings. We found out about
people's problems or preferences that we would never have known about, and
came up with creative solutions to them. Out of the 53, at least 10 were
great ideas for improving lab workings, or at least the beginnings of them
- and those are 10 great ideas we might never have come up with otherwise.

AFTER

This is the part where there's more I have to think about: what's the next
step after a brainstormer? Anyway here's what we did. We left the 53 ideas
up in that meeting room for a week or two, and some people added more
ideas to the list, at least 10-15. I moved one of the sheets into where we
have our lunch, and we ended up chatting about it a bit while eating for a
few days. At the next lab meeting we went through and mined it for 5
projects that seemed easy and valuable, and 1 or 2 people volunteered to
lead each of them. Eventually I took down the sheets and consolidated them
into a best-of list with repetitions taken out that I put on our wiki (the
subject of a future blog entry)

The best measure of the success of this session: as of now, three of those
projects have been accomplished. About 3 more are still moving forward
actively. And we've all got a little bit more into the mindset of, "what
could be different? how can we make things work better?"

I hope you will try running a brainstormer yourself someday, in your lab
or office, and that you'll tell me how it goes. As long as you define a
fairly specific objective statement, it could be used for a huge range of
purposes. I predict you'll find your group as a collective is far more
creative and good at solving problems than you ever imagined.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Prelude to the Zillion Folder Filing System



I'm going to write a post soon about the wonderful, lifechanging filing philosophy I think of as Zillion Folder Filing, but before I get to that I wanted to show this picture of Jim Davies' implementation of the same system, derived like mine from David Allen's Getting Things Done. This is his filing drawer for life in general, and below is a picture of his drawer for scientific papers, in his new system where each author gets their own folder.

Some Web Essays For Grad Students

From Nature, a bunch of substantial essays with hints for graduate
students in science and graduate supervisors, including time management
and collaboration. Probably good ideas in there for people in other lines
of work as well.

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/magazine/editors-choice.html

They also have an article that links to this terrific document "Guide for
PhD students (and post-docs) aiming for a successful career in science" by
people at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research:

http://www.qimr.edu.au/research/labs/georgiat/Guideforphds.doc

"Doing a PhD should be fun, rewarding and be seen as a privilege. It's
the only time in your life that you can spend 100% of your working time
learning to do research, finding out new things, having freedom to pursue
new areas and getting paid for it, without any administrative or other
responsibilities. Those who stick it out do so because, despite the
relatively poor pay, long hours and lack of security, it is all we want to
do because of the intellectual satisfaction it brings, the excitement of
discovery, the freedom to make your own work schedule, the opportunities
for travel, the pleasure of being in an international community of
like-minded people and (for some people) the possibility that we might
actually help the human condition!"

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

8 Tricks I Learned about screenwriting

From this guy, http://jamesgunn.com, who wrote Slither. I don't want to be
a screenwriter, but it's writing and it's very hard, so I still found
some inspiration in this:

"Remember, these are 8 TRICKS, not 8 RULES. I believe each of these gives
a person a greater chance at becoming a successful screenwriter. But NONE
of them are NECESSARY to becoming a screenwriter (although the last one
comes pretty close.) Here goes:

1) Write at least 3 hours a day 6 days a week.

2) Move to Los Angeles. Of if you can't do L.A., move to New York.

3) Spell check, of course, but also make a pass checking for "its" and
"it's", "their" and "there," "your" and "you're", and so on.

4) Don't even think about trying to get an agent until you have completed
your best possible work.

5) Don't blame others for your failures as a screenwriter. By assessing
your own responsibilities, and learning from your failures, you
supercharge yourself and become unstoppable!! (NOTE: it's good to read
this trick out loud and pump your fist up in the air while doing so).

6) Got friends who like to cut you down and tell you "this isn't possible"
and "that can't be done"? Lose 'em.

7) On the flipside, have 3 good objective readers, who are very honest,
even harsh, and who have your best interests at heart. (Mary Harron agreed
with this trick, but added that you should make sure the objective readers
at least somewhat share your tastes -- that is, they have the same goals
you do).

8) FINISH WHAT YOU START. Are you doubting what you write? Are you
starting to think it's crap? Good! That's a part of being a writer! We are
doubting, tortured, angst-filled souls, and all it takes to be a writer is
to write in the face of that!! "

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Can you call on doozer power?



The Doozers are a race of beings in Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock universe. They are green and about six inches tall, and wear little yellow hardhats. Unlike the Fraggles, who play all day, the doozers are seen labouring to build elaborate structures made out of glass sticks. They stay in the background of the show much of the time, so it's neat when you occasionally get a glimpse into their highly structured society. In one episode, we see the doozer community coming together for the ceremony wherein young doozers receive their helmets, initiating them into adulthood. It's also an occasion for reaffirming the basic values of doozer life. I think it's beautiful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=262kfAoZmog
(I love the doozer moms in their working class sunday-best hats) The song they all sing takes the form of a call and answer, of all the things that a doozer does, and one verse goes:
Can you build a doozer tower? (Yes we really can)
Can you call on doozer power? (Yes we really can)
That part struck me when I heard it again recently, as I'm finishing my thesis. What is doozer power? I imagine it as an ability to work hard, but joyfully, and with purpose. To work as though that's what you were made to do. You just have to watch these cheerful little guys are, marching along with their work crews, or sitting in tiny construction equipment moving things into place with great satisfaction. Even though their constructions will quickly be eaten by fraggles ("Ah it does my heart good to see architecture being enjoyed" says one doozer watching a fraggle chow down) they take enormous pride in it.

Another great doozer song has the lines, "Every day the world is new, there's dreams to pay attention to, and building is the surest way we know (two three four)" Maybe "calling on doozer power" is what you do when you feel your will or inspiration flagging, to give you that extra juice, reminding you of what you're about: dreaming things up and then making them real by planning, cooperating, and building, constantly building.

--

Jim has a different, and as usual interesting take on doozer power: maybe it's the power of the doozer community, the aid that you can call upon if you really need it. That's an inspiring thought too.