An experiment in light expression

About 10 days back, I had a minor crunch on my front Swift fender from a speeding TVS fellow near Rammurthy Nagar. And a major loss of gravity and heartburn when I saw the frame sticking out near the left headlight.

I gave the car to the good repair folks at Mandovi, who told me they would pretty much replace the left front panel and repaint the car. I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for the past week waiting for her to arrive, waiting, waiting, waiting….

When I stood in front of my gate waiting for the car to arrive, I had a palpable sense of anxiety, excitement, fear, and that giddy feeling that one gets when there are pheromones in the air. And it was then that I felt - perhaps men do ‘feel’ something about their cars : )

As I drove to the neighborhood supermarket and slowly found my brain and hands and feet connect those many neurons required to drive safely in India, I felt this very simple joy. It was the simple joy one gets out of washing hands and brushing in the morning, or standing in a balcony and feeling the night breeze - that sense that all is right in God’s green earth. I felt peaceful, reflective, and generally content.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of my favorite psychologists and the author of some wonderful books on Flow and Creativity and Happiness has a nice note on how car driving creates a strong sense of flow and control in one of his articles…
“During flow, we typically experience a sense of control — or, more precisely, a lack of anxiety about losing control that is typical of many situations in normal life. This sense of control is also reported in activities that involve serious risks such as hang gliding, rock climbing, and race-car driving, activities that to an outsider would seem to be much more potentially dangerous than the affairs of everyday life. Yet these activities are structured to provide the participant with the means to reduce the margin of error to as close to zero as possible. Rock climbers, for example, insist that their hair-raising exploits are safer than crossing a busy street in Chicago, because on the rock face they can foresee every eventuality, whereas when crossing the street they are at the mercy of fate. The sense of control respondents describe thus reflects the possibility, rather than the actuality, of control.”

At Bangalore Barcamp 2, I had the pleasure of interacting with one of India’s leading bloggers, technology commentators, and host of several entrepreneurship-innovation style events, Kiruba Shankar. Kiruba and I did an interview for his Podtech posdcasting station.

In this podcast interview, I spoke about the state of User Experience in Bangalore, the local UX and innovation community, and some of the graduate schools and consultancies in India, that are part of the soft infrastructure of putting the Indian User Experience scene on the forefront.

I am looking for good references on writing book reviews. For a lark, I did a book review on Amazon about 5 years back and then nothing. In looking at the many genres I have covered since - Science, culture, consciousness, quantum physics, Sci/Fi, Fantasy, psychedelic shamanism, Sufism, Career development, puzzles, comics and whatever else - I feel I owe it to myself to write more reviews. Except, I need to figure out how to make these reviews good within 200 words…..

I have a hard time explaining to people how ‘design management’ is different from project/program/people management, and yet inclusive of all of them. I think design management and design leadership cannot be considered separately - if design managers are not empowered to construct and execute design ideas with great thought leadership, they can easily become execution machines.

Erin Malone’s post on ‘So you think you want to be a manager’ is a good reminder of all the trade-offs of being a design  manager, including the heart burns and the sacrifices and the moments of joy. I recommend you read it along with an earlier post of hers ‘Modeling  the Creative Organization’.  And if you’re still with me here, I strongly recommend The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley, one of the IDEO brothers (David is the venerable professor at Stanford).
In my two and half years doing design and user experience and project and people management first at PeopleSoft and then at Oracle, I find my job to constantly juggle between people issues (designers are a sensitive, creative, fun, demanding, idiosyncratic lot!), project issues (balancing the formal choking of project management practices with the million opportunities for improvisation), design issues (should we do a user interview or talk to Strategy/Pre Sales hacks?), and all sorts of shit that hits the ceiling when you have 8 interesting, fun, young designers working directly with you. Did I mention the notion of ‘managing your managers and your managers’s super bosses’. That one’s reserved for another post : )

Doors of Perception is back!

Doors of Perception 9 (http://juice.doorsofperception.com/) takes place in New Delhi at India Habitat Centre on Saturday, March 3, 2007.

The theme of the conference is “Juice: Food, Energy, Design”. It is followed in the evening by a social technologies bazaar. Doors 9 is preceded by an evening Mediawalla Festival produced by Pixelache. On Sunday 4 April all participants are invited a Holi party.

If you are new to the design and innovation conference scene in India, the main Doors website as well as Doors’ India conferences - Doors East 2003, Bangalore and Doors 8, Delhi are great references. For both of these conferences I had the pleasure of working with my good friend Aditya Dev Sood and John Thackara, the founder of the Doors movement to spread the word, design workshops, and cobble together funds from large technology and service organizations to sponsor Doors in 2003 and 2005.

Alas, I have had too much fish to fry lately to try and raise funds for 2007, but I do hope to be able to make it to Delhi for Doors.

On Jan 5, I attended Easy 7, the 7th ACM SIGCHI South India’s conference on ‘Advanced User Interface Practices’ at the Leela. With a spiffier yet more top down approach, the organizers made this year’s conference one of the most interesting in the last few years (and i say this despite having been a speaker in the last 3 conferences :))

Jeremy Ashley, VP of Oracle’s Applications User Experience (my boss’s boss) gave a hard nosed talk basically on how ideas are cheap and plenty but design execution is the key to design success, I thoroughly enjoyed Bill Scott and Surya Vanka’s talks as well. Bill spoke about AJAX driven interactions and how to design for AJAX. Surya have a talk on Design driven innovation and how to design teams that are able to drive innovation as a process.

It was also great to catch up with all the speakers at the evening party organized by David and Nishant from DesignforUse. (Thanks David and Nishant!). It was also good to bump into Param, Muthu, and meet Suresh, Sunandini, Madhvi, and other folks and chat about design, travels, life and such at the lovely open space at the Royal Orchid Hotel in Manipal Center (also the hotel that owns the much-hyped-great-view-average-food- Conde-Nast-#82-restaurant Paparazzi).

Last week, I had the fortune/sheer pleasure/gratuitous grace of attending my first live ‘Ruhaniyat’ concert of Sufi/Mystic music in Bangalore at the Bowring Institute off MG Road. One of the decent blog posts that lists each of the performances is at http://hariaddi.blogspot.com/2007/01/ruhaniyat.html
The word Ruhaniyat literally meaning soulfulness was aptly suited for this brilliantly conceived and well organized evening. The music ranged from baritone Tibetan monks (whose powerful and deep chanting much reminded me of Phillip Glass), to the qawwali of the Chisti brothers from Uttar Pradesh, to the Sufi songs of Patvathi Baul, Begum Hafiza from Assam, Fakirs from Hyderabad, and the Manganiyars from Rajasthan.

If you can get your hands on them, the Ruhaniyat concert archives are a goldmine. I have the CDs from the 2005 (thanks Aparna) and 2006 concerts so give me a holler and i’d be glad to share these with you.

The December edition of the Economist has a neat article on how economists have traditionally measured ‘happiness’ and how that measurement has evolved over the years. Invoking references from Thomas Carlyle to Mihali Csikszentmihalyi, the article argues that all is indeed well and good in the free market world, and that having a good experience, a discerning audience that is ready to pay for that experience, and a clear mechanism to both get paid and be able to spend that money works better than any other alternative system. It also states interestingly how people’s common perceptions of what causes happiness (or pain) is remarkably subjective and skewed.

If you havent’ yet read it, Mihali’s book ‘Flow - the Psychology of Optimal Experience‘ is a delightful and statistically grounded account of what causes ‘flow’ or ‘peak experience’ in people. Turns out that activities such as driving, spending time in your garden, and enjoying hobbies give a much greater sense of flow or of being in the moment as compared to watching TV or eating out!