If a company wants to up-level their design, marketing or research teams, you must hire people who understand people.
“Interest is a cognitive openness to engaging with a topic or experience. Curiosity is an emotional state…Curiosity means recognizing a gap in our knowledge about something that interests us and becoming emotionally and cognitively invested in closing that gap through exploration and learning. Curiosity starts with interest and grows into passionate investigation. Interest is a cognitive function. With curiosity, our heart and head are both invested in closing that gap.”
Considering the number of layoffs in the tech world in the last few months, those who are left behind are soon going to be met with a sad reminder of the many colleagues they just lost.
Published by Brighton in Personal
September 27, 2024 — No Comments
Same fight, different field: Reorienting to a holistic, embodied form of artificial intelligence
Despite the leaps made in Narrow (weak) AI, if we look closely at the research and not just at the tech company rhetoric, the possibilities inherent within various forms of Artificial Intelligence ask us to reorient our understanding of the complexity of the human mind and realize there is much that we do not know about ourselves and especially about ‘embodied’ forms of intelligence.
September 27, 2024 — No Comments
Your identity is in an ‘unsupported format’: the loss of digital, cultural archives
Digital music’s renaissance — iPod, illegal downloading, and digital recording software like ProTools — coincided with and created the popularity of Myspace, establishing a massive community of music-lovers, music-makers, and music-stealers. Bands and individuals uploaded millions of MP3s — some of their own music, some they’d downloaded on LimeWire. The sound of youth in 2006 was a tinny din of 128kb/s, but it was beautiful.
September 27, 2024 — No Comments
Getting comfortable with ambiguity: how to be a postmodern investigative realist
If truth during an interview must be pursued, as Morris and Macdonald argue, then, I would say it’s the skill of emotional intelligence that allows for that pursuit. The art of interviewing uses emotional intelligence to infer what is being left out and to attempt to probe deeper and attempt to find a deeper meaning. This probably isn’t a controversial statement for documentary filmmakers to accept, but is difficult for qualitative researchers to concede.
INTRO
It’s near intoxicating to work for one of the most powerful corporations in the world. It’s so exciting to know things that other people don’t know and to get to use products before anyone else. You feel like you’re part of a really cool and exclusive club. It’s powerful to watch news reports get written about products and features that you helped build. There’s no feeling like it. It’s an incredibly strange and exciting feeling.
There’s also nothing like realizing that you have unwittingly become a small and unimportant enemy of said corporation. A liability. A problem. A troublemaker. Immediately, nothing is real and everything is confusing.
I don’t enjoy delivering bad news, but... I kind of do? When I discover an issue with a product that could end up being a big deal, I do get excited because that means I’m doing valuable work. It does mean I will have to build a presentation where I argue that a feature isn’t ready for release or that people did not find the product useful at all, or that a design has massive privacy flaws or the potential for bad press…but that’s a day well-spent. It’s a challenge in service of the greater good and a greater product experience. After all, that should really be the goal for everyone involved.
June 17, 2020 — Comments are off for this post.
Creativity and community in music and design
When I lived in Seattle, I played bass in a band. On my old portfolio site, I had an entire section devoted to this band. I did this because, well I didn't have a lot of industry experience to show, but also because a lot of the skills needed to play in a band are the same skills that make for a great designer. You have to organise a group of people towards a goal. You have to collaborate and create an output together that everyone is aligned on. You have to think through branding and monetisation strategies. But you also want to all have fun and create cool things together. God I miss that.
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