Design Communicator

I found another job that sounds truly fantastic: Design Communicator at Cooper

I tried to copy and paste a snippet, but I can't choose just one snippet. The part that made me laugh was this (emphasis mine):

We’re looking for candidates with 4+ years of professional experience related to high-tech products and services. Right now, you may be a product or project manager, information architect, technical writer, user researcher, usability engineer—or a dilettante in a high-tech job who knows there must be a better way to design and develop products.

They want someone who enjoys synthesizing ideas and is a strong writer. Gosh, that sounds familiar.

I figured I was shut out of any kind of technology design work, because I don't have a degree in computer science or in design. No idea I could get paid for the process of analyzing, finding elegant solutions to things, and explaining it to other people. I thought those were things you just did in the course of your real work, whatever it was, if you had time to improve things -- not something you could get paid to apply to various kinds of "real work," even though that's exactly how I think about it all the time.

Papers

I am so angry, and yet so happy that this exists.

You see, I've been more and more fed up with EndNote's user interface. I kept thinking "Someone ought to make this an iTunes-like interface" and today, I sketched out my own design for the user interface. I guess now I can scan it and post it, since I won't be making it.

And then I come home to a new issue of MacWorld, and what do they highlight but a piece of software called Papers.

Someone already made it. Last year they made it. Last year they won Best Scientific Computing Solution at WWDC for it.

I am so angry, because I wanted to make it. And yet so happy that this exists and I can use it.

IDEO

In today's career news, I now want to work for IDEO so bad. They do what I spend all my time thinking about.

I bet there are other companies out there who do this. I need to find out who they are.

Books that changed my life

This post was highlighted on Lifehacker today: one man's list of books that changed his life, and why. He and Lifehacker ask the question: What books have changed your life? How? Below the cut are my answers; what are yours?

• On Dialogue, by David Bohm. That book taught me more about watching how my own thoughts and emotions work than any amount of books on Zen meditation -- and watching your own reactions helps you communicate with others. It strongly questions the Cartesian dualism between mind and body (which recalls the Manichaean heresy) -- and when you understand your body and its physiological responses as fully part of your thinking process, it changes a lot about the way you think.
  
• Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, by Albert Einstein. I acquired this book during my senior year of high school; working through it was what brought me to realize that I enjoyed doing physics, and that I was good enough at it to consider majoring in it. It's an accessible, introductory text; you might be surprised by how much you can understand even if you do not do math or science for a career. Remember that I had had all of one calculus course and one Physics 101 course when I read it.
  
• Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person, by Mary Caroline Richards. I might not like it so much now; it's a very New Age, hippie kind of book. I read it at thirteen, and it probably helped save my life. I was visiting my grandmother the summer after eighth grade. I had had an eating disorder for all of eighth grade, helped along by crushingly low self-esteem, feeling completely out of control of my life, boxed in on all sides.
  
  I convinced my grandmother to take me to a poetry reading at a small used book store in Myrtle Beach. I was the only one who showed up, but instead of feeling uncomfortable, the bookstore owner made me feel like it was awesome that I was there. We read poems out of books for a few hours, and he made me a fancy coffee which he refused to let me pay for. That night I bought Centering. It was a key part of my transformation into someone confident, happy, and feeling in control as I went into high school.
  
  That week at my grandmother's, I looked at myself in the mirror after a shower, and suddenly it hit me that I was going to kill myself if I didn't stop starving. It took me a long time to work through it, but I can say today that I am many, many years recovered and I will never go back. You'd think the book had nothing to do with it -- but it did.
  
• The New Testament: A Historical Introduction To The Early Christian Writings, by Bart Ehrman. It completely changed the way I read the Bible, exploding a lot of misconceptions I'd been taught growing up. It is not the book for you if your life philosophy depends on taking the Bible literally, but it puts the New Testament in a historical context that made it absolutely come to life for me -- and gave me a real perspective on where present Christianity comes from. It changed my entire thought process about Christianity.
  
• American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. It was the first Gaiman I'd ever read, and he's now one of my favorite authors. Moreover, it takes a really different tack in thinking about religion and how it works -- one that informs my thoughts about it now.
  
• Finally, Getting Things Done by David Allen. Sometime during my last two years of college, keeping track of everything in my life became overwhelmingly stressful, leading to lots of anxiety as I struggled to get everything done.
  
  I didn't find GTD until I had started grad school. Learning to keep all my "stuff" outside my head absolutely changed my life. After I did my first brain dump, I could sleep at night, without my mind whirring and churning away as it tried to ping me to remember this or that. This book also helped me realize that if I have to put forth a lot of overhead effort for any organizational system, the system is doing it wrong (and gave me a healthy lack of patience for anything that forces me to bend over backwards to use it). A well-designed system is easier to use than not to use. The big key is that GTD doesn't force you into any particular system. You can implement its principles on sheets of paper and file folders, in email, or by all kinds of specialized software (some free, some not). You're free to find the implementation that works transparently for you. Finding it was a major breakthrough for both my career and my mental health.
  

Fractal wrongness

Fractal wrongness is defined here. A terrifically useful concept, especially for the internet.

"It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time."

Thanks to Lee, commenting at Making Light, for introducing me to it.

And because this xkcd comic is never not appropriate: "I can't. Someone is wrong on the internet."

Edward Tufte

I'm currently reading Edward Tufte's book The Visual Representation of Quantitative Information.

I want to become an engineering professor solely so that I can require my students to read this book. I want to force all my colleagues to read it. It's brilliance.

Tufte also wrote an essay called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, included as one chapter in his book Beautiful Evidence. That essay, in particular, should be memorized by everyone working in academia, government, and industry. If I have to watch one more Important Scientific Presentation broken out into annoying, arbitrary bullet points -- and especially if it's done in Comic Sans -- I am going to scream.

Tufte argues that PowerPoint should almost always be scrapped in favor of handing out printed copies of briefing papers, and holding meeting discussions based on those. He recommends a reading period at the beginning of the meeting.

I'm currently putting together a presentation of a recent review paper, for purposes of journal club. I think there's a place for a visual presentation of my summary of the paper, in the same way that a teacher uses a blackboard or an overhead projector to visually demonstrate what ze is teaching. But here is how you use PowerPoint (or Keynote, which I'm using) effectively:

1. Write your talk, longhand or in a word processor. Use complete sentences. Figure out what your main points are.
2. Plan what your slides need to show to demonstrate or illustrate each section of your talk. Usually this would be a simple graph, or maybe a movie or animation if your data is best shown that way. If you are showing a product, show the product. For God's sake, no clip art.
3. Make slides accordingly.

Essentially, pretend you are Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone. I'm serious. Go watch his iPhone intro (that's a link to Apple's site, with Quicktime video). Watch what he does with his slides and how they work with what he's saying. Watch how minimalist they are. That cube animation when he explains the iPod, the phone, and the internet device are all one thing? That cute little animation is only there because it has a purpose -- to show that these things are just three facets of the same thing. Watch how he only uses the slides to illustrate and emphasize the words that he's saying.

That is how you do it. What you do not do is open up PowerPoint and use it to write your talk. You'll end up with bizarre bullet points, false hierarchies, and confusing language.

Of course, I once got a lot of people upset at me for writing a talk properly. I wrote out the talk, then used PowerPoint as just a slide projector -- nothing but projecting graphs and plots on the screen, which I explained verbally. The trouble was, this was one of a series of class presentations, which would be on the final. The other class members knew everyone's slides would be uploaded to the class website, so half the class didn't show up, assuming they could just get the presentation off the website. When they downloaded mine and found that I hadn't written my entire talk in bullet points, there were some frustrated emails demanding that I also upload written notes explaining each slide.

I forbore to comment that if they had showed up to class and taken notes on what I'd said, they would not have this problem. I had written my talk beforehand, so I caved in and uploaded that. You can only fight so many battles.

100 Things I Want To Do In My Job

I saw this post -- Tackle Any Issue With a List of 100 -- a while back, on Lifehacker. Last week I bought the journaling book that idea comes from (Journal to the Self: 22 Paths to Personal Growth, by Kathleen Adams), and thought about doing a List of 100 again.

The biggest issue gnawing at my mind right now is career satisfaction. So I did a list of 100 Things I'd Like To Do In My Job. I'm posting it here, under the cut. You'll notice that I repeated some things; I think that just shows my patterns of thought.

I'd be really interested in the thoughts of anyone reading. Who do you know whose job is like that? What do they do? Is your job like that?

As I re-read this list, and talked to a friend about it, I realized that much of this list goes back to my old idea of going into science education. There were a few reasons why I didn't. Chiefly, it was the Physics GRE, required for entrance to nearly all physics education programs. Quite frankly that test kicked my butt. I did very poorly -- not because I didn't study, but because I simply had never learned many of the particular kinds of problems on the test. It would have taken me a tremendous amount of time and work to learn, from scratch, the knowledge on that test that I didn't learn as an undergrad. BME graduate programs didn't require that exam.

My spirit quails at the idea of trying to go back and do a second Ph.D in physics education now: more years in school with no money. Maybe there's another route to pursuing that passion. I love to think about how people learn, what is effective and ineffective in teaching/communicating science, and how best to display and arrange information so that it's clear. I've requested two Edward Tufte books from the library, for example.

I spend all my time going meta. That's why I have trouble getting things done sometimes -- I'm thinking about how to do them better, and why I'm doing them at all, and why anyone does them. I need to find a place where that's a strength and not a weakness.

1. Teach people
   
2. Make something
   
3. Save lives
   
4. Read books
   
5. Read blogs
   
6. Read about politics
   
7. Write about politics
   
8. Write about design
   
9. Write about ways of learning
   
10. Make beautiful Keynote presentations
    
11. Make beautiful pieces of technology
    
12. Make something easier to use
    
13. Make something that makes people happy
    
14. Work with positive people
    
15. Have a private office
    
16. Work in a city
    
17. Solve problems
    
18. Characterize problems
    
19. Get recognition for solving problems
    
20. Have people say “Yes, and...” instead of “No” to my ideas
    
21. Make a breakthrough
    
22. Save a life
    
23. Get someone else excited
    
24. Get excited myself
    
25. Travel
    
26. Meet new people
    
27. Work late because I want to 
    
28. Lose track of time
    
29. Design a better user interface
    
30. Remove frustrations
    
31. Bridge blue-sky to reality
    
32. Work with people who will help me bridge blue-sky to reality
    
33. Present something interesting and get listened to
    
34. Have my name known
    
35. Be taken seriously
    
36. Be respected
    
37. Build something that works
    
38. Get published
    
39. Write a book that other people read
    
40. Write a popularization
    
41. Not have to suck up
    
42. Make mistakes
    
43. Drink really good coffee
    
44. Have the money I need to pursue my ideas
    
45. Work from home
    
46. Collaborate with other groups
    
47. Cross disciplines
    
48. Work with artists
    
49. Talk about how things work
    
50. Get excited about ideas again
    
51. Get written up in the newspaper
    
52. Create a really successful website
    
53. Create a beautiful piece of software
    
54. Break boundaries
    
55. Make something easier to use
    
56. Not worry about money
    
57. Feel totally competent to deal with whatever happens
    
58. Be confident in dealing with others
    
59. Be in charge
    
60. Make an idea happen in reality and actually have it work
    
61. Have others say Yes to me
    
62. Make something happen
    
63. Amaze and astound other people
    
64. Be well-liked
    
65. Be a role model
    
66. Help others get to their dreams
    
67. Talk about how to do things
    
68. Write about how things work
    
69. Analyze how things work - people, systems, governments, body parts....
    
70. Write about how to write
    
71. Write about how to learn
    
72. Write about how to think
    
73. Make something abundantly clear that wasn’t clear before
    
74. Explain something so that someone else understands it perfectly
    
75. Work with people who are like-minded and positive
    
76. Be in charge of my own projects, not have other people assigning them to me
    
77. Not be compared to other people
    
78. Be around people who say Yes
    
79. Make something better for the planet and a better product on its own terms
    
80. Design something elegant
    
81. Overcome obstacles
    
82. Have quiet time to think and write about what I’m analyzing
    
83. Come to conclusions
    
84. Put conclusions into practice quickly 
    
85. Solve other people’s problems for them - find out things they don’t know
    
86. Work with complete integrity
    
87. Make things happen
    
88. Make changes and see what happens
    
89. Experiment, reconsider, and experiment again
    
90. Do work that has patience for the long term
    
91. Make people happy
    
92. Bring new knowledge to people
    
93. Enlighten people
    
94. Bring new power for good into the world
    
95. Fix things that are broken
    
96. Make things easy to use and powerful
    
97. Put the world right
    
98. Come up with an elegant application of theory to yield powerful results
    
99. Make something cleaner
    
100. Say Yes