The concept, called SmartLab, looks to be a fun way to reapply and improve on some work I have done previously in interface design, multitouch tables, and creative workflow research.

The project will involve prototyping a physical workbench (with integrated projection, multitouch screen, and image capture facilities), writing some system software, and developing a user interaction that will stretch my imagination in strange and useful ways.

Tomorrow I’ll be working with them at Dev House Boston (a self-imposed cram session of people completing interesting things over the course of a few hours) to design and possibly prototype some of the user interaction for this device.

I have an interest in people’s workspaces. I have reams of notes and photographs documenting how people set up their studios, kitchens, or even just their computer desktop. I adore artist studio tours because you can often get a sense of flow from the best producers just by their arrangement of tools or choice of decor. I believe that prolifically creative people set up their environments so that there are few barriers to successful accomplishment.   

The idea of introducing technology into an environment in an unobtrusive way to facilitate creation strikes me as a big problem worthy of exploration.

For example, one of the more interesting ideas that surfaced today was the idea of an “improved lab notebook.” Researchers must take copious notes about their experiments as they are learning and trying new ideas and techniques. These logs serve as both evidence of work progress and as fodder for the papers that are the mark of accomplishment for scientists.

While there are many attempts to digitize or automate these notes, it seems that most researchers revert to paper and pencil as their note-taking default; Mac relayed a story of a researcher printing out results and literally cutting and pasting the spreadsheet into a paper notebook.

Lifecasting as Means for Project Documentation

There are live video streams of offices and studios and workshops out there that I find fascinating. Sometimes I’ll just turn them on one of my monitors and just have them running in the background. Since I work alone from my home office, this sometimes makes me feel connected to other humans also pursuing some results.

A little while ago, I registered a ustream.tv account for an idea called “Tinkercam.”

lifecasting as means for project documentation.

There is a known psychological effect that when you are observed in a work setting (i.e. you think somebody is watching you), you will work more effectively and are more likely to stay on task. The surprising thing is that this will even work if you place a photograph of eyeballs somewhere in your peripheral vision.

I set up my tinkercam in hopes that it may be a way to mindhack my way into increased focus. On my test run, I just found that I was spending all my time fiddling with the webcam and that only one person was watching (who thought I was a tech support person and started asking questions about setting up their ustream account). Granted, I could have gone onto twitter and announced the “launch” of tinkercam, but I felt that it’s not at a launch stage yet. (The cam is live sometimes, nonetheless.)

I then started brainstorming on what else a tinkercam would be and how it needs to change to be useful or even fun.

First, because it’s video, it needs to point at interesting things. A guy, banging on his keyboard all day is actually not interesting. More interesting would be a stream of my computer screen overlaid on top of my face so you could see what I was working on, what I was paying attention to, and how my workflow progresses.

If I was working on my robotics projects (like the robot puppet), then I could get away with just pointing my camera at my soldering iron and that would be more visually interesting by the nature of the work.

Second, it needs to be unobtrusive. I shouldn’t have to think about turning it on or switching between camera views. Something like motion detection or application awareness could act as a virtual “director” for the tinkercam.

The more exciting potential is that by recording the stream or taking critical snapshots, you can document the progress of a project automatically for sharing. Documentation and process sharing has become increasingly important for creative producers in the hacker/DIY community. (see instructables.com) Software artists pay attention to the blogs of other software artists as they write about their projects.

We also discussed the value of “replaying.” Mac often captures a desktop stream as he is iterating over design (ex. photoshop). This way, he can replay his tinkering and watch the creative evolution of an idea. Often he will discover decision points where alternate choices might be useful in different contexts.

The Creative Framework and the Digital Notebook

I’ve also been working on a digital sketchbook and ideaflow tool which allows me to rapidly iterate through ideas and follow threads. I am able to fork off ideas and replay/retrace iterations to discover their lineage.

This, in essence, is my lab notebook. It’s custom software that in itself is a creative work, but it allows me to open lots of streams of thought and follow them as I see fit (or as the software urges me to go).

I’ve written about my theory of creative infrastructure before, but to reiterate:

The creative process has steps:

1. Live and Observe
2. Wonder and Research
3. Tinker and Experiment
4. Build and Bookend
5. Repeat

You complete this cycle forever and at every stage, you have opportunities to share your output copiously so that you can create better work.

I think working with Jason and Mac on the SmartLab table and lab notebook will inform my continuous tinkering with the creativity framework. I think there are tools that may emerge that will become useful cognitive aids for knowledge workers.

I took for granted that Austin was a relatively smaller town and that I could go to just about any tech-related meetup and find at least one person that I knew.

So the question, “what do you do?” has had me stumped for a while now. When most people ask that, they really want to know “how much money do you make” or “can you even relate to my self-important world?”

I’ve been doing web and software development of some sort or another for the past decade with an occasional foray into non-profit organizational work and things like dorkbot and robotic puppets. There are also many things I aspire to and am working towards. I looked at web stuff as bread and butter.

I no longer introduce myself as a web developer or Rails guy. Ballast. All of my current gigs involve art or robots or innovative software. It’s a good place. When I consciously made the decision not to pursue web stuff as a source of income the universe rewarded me by presenting just enough non-web opportunity to keep my income pipeline fuller than it’s ever been while keeping the stress level way down.

I’m happier when I’m doing work that’s more creatively fulfilling.

I’m also realizing that if I keep all of my creative work closed up in a box out of fear or relentless tinkering, then it’s as good as “never done.” Nothing is more unflattering than trying to convince someone of the value of a perpetual “closed beta.”

As a side effect, I find that the people I’m wanting to meet deal in the currency of provable accomplishments and not vaporware ideas. Nobody cares about the network of people I know (since nowadays, it’s super easy to reach anybody via social media tools). Spinning multiple plates badly is not attractive. They aren’t even interested in what I can do.

The only thing that matters is, “What have you done lately that’s remarkable?”

Cal Newport defines Grand Projects as

any project that when explained to someone for the first time is likely to elicit a response of “wow!’”

There is a huge difference in multitasking because you are disorganized and consciously multitasking so that you accomplish interesting grand projects.

Interesting people are often involved in multiple grand projects, but they really only can get one completed at a time.

So the better question is “What project are you working on right now that fires you up the most?”

I’d like to live a life of prolific creativity. I’d like to introduce myself with infectious enthusiasm over some project I can literally put into somebody’s hands.

I’m working on a meta-grand project, then. I’m fired up about figuring out what creativity framework I need so that I and lots of other people can have a relentlessly creative output of accomplishment.

I won’t spend all of my time ruminating over the creative process rather than actually creating things. That’d just be procrastination. I am spending quality time doing research and building infrastructure that facilitates creative output. These ideas are to be field tested by me and eventually others.

I’ll probably blog about that research on occasion, but only when I have something provable to say or an artifact to share.

Most of the time, now, I want to talk about the projects that result from my creativity experiments.

I may, at some point in my life, call myself a technology artist or creativity expert. For now, I’m a guy making things.

This post is a response to the Holidailies writing prompt “Introduce Yourself.”

I urged people to spend 20 minutes today working on whatever creative endeavor they have brewing in the back burner. Move that project into the center of the radar for just 20 minutes.

20 minutes is a very small chunk of time. In any given project, however, there are any number of minor pieces which can be built in that time. The encouragement today was to spend 20 minutes just building. This needs to be focused working time without deviation from activity. This is inspired by Merlin Mann’s dash concept – a good way to beat procrastination is to just begin on a small chunk… Just commit to cranking activity out for a small amount of time. When the dash is over, you’ve easily beaten the first and only hurdle of procrastination: starting.

Running constantly on my OSX desktop is a small timer program called Minuteur. This has worked wonders for me.

I just set it at 20 minutes and hit go. I focus on a single piece of a project until the timer runs out. Minuteur pops up a “TIME’S UP!” window and I can choose to add 5, 10 or 15 more minutes. I often do that simply because I’m on a roll. I’ll also sometimes drop in 10 minutes between working periods for guilt-free play time. That’s usually when I do my RSS reading or grab coffee.

Admittedly, my responsibilities are fewer than, say, a single mom with 2 toddlers who is trying to finish college, but I often find myself devoting 100% of my useful and usable time into other peoples’ projects. Day job work spills into after hours and suddenly I’m barely left with enough energy to get myself home, much less exercise or make a good meal, and much MUCH less build a stunningly cool and beautiful machine puppet.

Since when did I put “making somebody else lots of money sweating blood over their vision” at a higher priority than “following what my soul and mind’s eye are screaming at me?”

That needs to end.

It’s not to say that we all don’t need day jobs. We have mortgages to pay, for crying out loud. However, I think the mistake I often make is letting the day job crowd out the dreams.

In The Now Habit and there’s this concept of the “Unschedule”. Briefly, it recommends starting your calendar by planning in all of your “me” time: Block out sleeping, eating, commuting, and exercising time. More importantly, block out your play time – time in which you are simply NOT working. This is time for guilt free play; guilt free play, incidentally is where I think the best creativity is born.

I also recommend scheduling 20 minutes a day as an unbreakable appointment with yourself every day for every project which you genuinely care about completing with all your heart.

Only then do you block out work appointments: meetings, etc.

Whatever’s left is your day job working time.

If you are anything like me, you’ll be very surprised at how little time you have left over. It’s no wonder we feel overwhelmed at work sometimes – we operate as if we actually had 40+ hours a week to do the jobs we’re assigned. And as Parkinson’s law suggests, we stretch tasks to fill those phantom 40+ hours. Whoops. It’s like buying working hours on credit… we don’t have that much time to complete the tasks on that schedule and so we tend to go home over budget. Of COURSE our energy is low and all we want to do is crash.

So let’s start operating with a more realistic understanding of what time we have and how fast we should work and to what standards we should aspire. That is to say, we start learning when to stop tinkering to get to perfection and just start building… putting projects in the “done” bucket faster and with less energy.

I would never suggest that you go about your day job without the highest integrity and quality of work that you can provide. During work hours, you work, and you work hard; you deliver more value to your employers and clients than they are paying for: 110%, team-player, all that – Work with the mantra “I am here to do nothing but add value.”

I believe that a self-fulfilling prophecy / psychological trick starts to happen. When you realize your time is limited at the day job and also at the passion job, you start to move with grace and efficiency. You don’t feel the need to slack off, mostly because you are aware of how little time you have to accomplish your jobs.

However, you must remember that you have unbreakable appointments with your personal passion projects. When it comes time to work on those, you will find a way to work on them and summon all your energy to build them with the same amount of integrity.

I suggest 20 minutes a day at first. I would guess this will increase over time.

caveat: I think it’s a bit presumptuous for somebody like me, who often struggles with Getting Things Done, to write an article about how better to get things done. Take it with a grain of salt. I’m only regurgitating advice I’ve culled from many other sources.

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Technorati Tags: day job, gtd, procrastination

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The infrastructure provides help for a creative thinker to make progress. She will collect observations, ask questions about those things she notices, investigate answers, and then form a result.

So there are four categories of activities she will pursue:

• observe (generates notes)
• wonder (generates questions)
• tinker (generates experiments and more notes)
• build (generates answers)

The activities she completes in each of these phases may be very similar to each other; this makes it difficult to figure out in which phase she might be engaging. Furthermore, she may be moving up and down that list very rapidly so that her steps are not easily discernible. (I have come to believe that each of these steps is discrete, however. I must allow for the creativity framework to only be expressed as a serial operation and say that at any given moment, an artist may only be in one phase. More on this in a future post.)

But what do we care about? What will she have to show for all of her creative activity? At the end of the day, she is either rambling around or she is doing something that is contributing positively to her spheres of influence.

The ability to move a project into and through the build phase is the single difference between somebody who accomplishes and somebody who flakes. (I must confess. I believe I am in the flakey category, currently – at the very least, as it pertains to my creative pursuits). Moreover, doing this rapidly makes you prolific, and doing this across a variety of topic areas makes you a polymath.

Being conscious of this overarching goal – to build… to iterate… to answer questions about my world through whatever creative output that might embody, is the objective of having a creativity framework.

Example: Backing up my computer

• Observe: I noticed that my hard drive exploded on my earlier this year and my backup system wasn’t up to par. The data recovery was very expensive
• Wonder: How do I setup a backup system for my computers?
• Tinker: Surf the web looking for articles about backup. Tag these in del.icio.us
• Tinker: Make sketches in my notebook of various hard drives and their connectivity, backup schedule, etc.
• Build: Download, install, and configure backup management tools and run my system for a while
• Observe: I forget to swap out my external drives often. My system requires it too much.
• Wonder: How do I tweak my backup system so that I don’t have to rely on myself to swap out external drives often
• Tinker: Surf the web looking for ways to minimize manually drive swapping out of backup solution
• Tinker: Think about problem as I’m riding my bike.
• Wonder: Eureka moment! Will using rsync solve this problem?
• Tinker: research how to run rsync
• Wonder: What do I do when machines lose connectivity?
• Wonder: Could I just pay a host to backup for me? They are always connected!
• Tinker: research hosted backup solutions
• Build: Hosted Backup is too expensive for me
• Tinker: sketch diagram in notebook that describes a system which uses rsync as an answer, but does not have a high impact should the connectivity of a device cause a missed cycle
• Build: add rsync tweaks to backup system

This example shows that a prolific creative person will iterate over builds (i.e. get something out there as a version and then make changes if it’s not working). As part of tinkering, she will throw away ideas that aren’t working, also.

Another (ongoing) example:

• Wonder: Is this post appropriately marked in the Tinker category?”
• Tinker: Perhaps this post is marked “Tinker” because it’s a draft of my creativity framework thoughts.
• Tinker: However, it might also fit into “Wonder” because it’s just a hypothesis and I have not run enough experiments on the idea to see if it works.
• Tinker: It could also go into into “build” because the post itself is definitely an iteration of my thoughts about the creativity framework
• Tinker: I don’t think it’s in “Observe” because that’s more passive. Observation just happens, but tinkering is more active.

I’ve come to better understand what I find interesting in other blogs and what I find dreadfully boring.

I think a lot of what I have put in my blog in the past falls into the terribly yawnspirational.

You can categorize blog posts along an axis of “interestingness” or “value” or “quality.” I would roughly scale the types of blog posts like this (with the understanding that most blog articles will not fall cleanly under just one of these categories):

• Quick Posts, links, observations – these are blog posts that might simply point to research found elsewhere (ex. links to an interesting post on another blog) with some commentary. It might also be a picture I took on the way to work. These are usually fast, come often, and very likely do not have much meaningful content content.

• Posts that propose ideas or questions and posts that that show attempts at solving those questions

• “Final” articles that are fully baked – they tend to be longer, come along very rarely and have been edited and publicized, often over multiple versions. My SxSW article is a good example.

There is an element of mental doodling that happens on blogs, but I recognize that most people don’t care about the draft versions of most of the author’s thoughts.

So my intent is to reengineer the blogging and blog reading experience here to account for readers who may only want to read fully built articles.

Here are some assumptions:

• EVERY nugget of content (links, articles, photos, personal journal entries, questions) can potentially spawn other bits of content (or at least have a directed graph relationship with other bits).

• Certain content pieces can be tagged as “questions” or points of “wonder.” These might look like blog posts posing a single thesis.

• Certain other content pieces can be tagged as “research” or “experiments” to answer those questions.

• Certain bits of content can be tagged as “built” or “versions” of an answer to a specific “wonder.”

This requires that I, as an author, can “riff” off of anything I put in my blog. I should build into the authoring software simple buttons that say “riff” which spawn child nodes.

Alternatively, I may be able to build custom tags into the software which allow me to divide articles into specific areas.

As a reader, you should have the option to see what research, questions, and tinkering led to whatever you are currently reading. Furthermore, you should be able to filter away everything but the final “built” articles.

Questions: Can a node have multiple parents? Can a parent have multiple children?