elliott writes

someone once told me that MIT is a school full of highly functional autistics. everyday you could see people walking down the hallways, face in a book, finger following the wall, to not wander. i’ll admit, i was one of them, or actually, i was the guy walking outside to avoid the hallways all together. there was definitely a large group of people who just didn’t get social interaction.

today at a new coffee shop, the barista remembered me from giant eagle. what made it interesting is that i have seen him before, but today, for the first time, he saw my bike which made him remember me. i don’t know about the rest of the population, but with bike people, this happens a lot. there are plenty of people who have better bike recognition than person recognition. and that reminded me of a story of a guy who was autistic who remembered people by their jeans. and that led me to think of MIT as being a huge group of autistics.

its just a little strange and discomforting that many of my interested and activities, MIT, bikes, coffee, photography, existentialism, all have one thing in common, and that one thing is a neurological disorder.

my blog is INTP. no surprise there:

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications. 

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

so i am finally trying to get through art as experience by john dewey. the opulence of his writing style and essentialist views sometime get to me, but i preserver. right now, in chapter 2 he talks about authenticity of self, or living an authentic lifestyle as living true to oneself. this made me question my own personal development. i have also been interested in design (a process) and buddhism (a skill set) and have been slowly moving forward in both of those disciplines, but now i am starting to realize that to be true, to make decisions that are inline with my perspective, i have to more fully understand my perspective, and i think that is going to require some introspection as well as a bit of seeding from people who have similar perspectives as i do. so in addition to learning more about design and buddhism, i have started revisiting the movie maker antonioni, and nietzsche, and post modernism and other things existential. fortunately, it seems like i naturally gravitate to these sorts of topics anyway, so it shouldn’t be too hard of a push.

now after watching joseph pine on tedtalks (2004), i am starting to realize that there is an intersection between service design and authenticity. joseph pine talks about the move in economy from commodity to good to service to experience. he even uses the example of starbucks that us shelley evenson fans so affectionately remember from class: the cost of a cup of coffee based on the commodity, the bean is about 2 cents, the cost of the goods, 10 cents, the cost of the service of someone actually making the cup for you, 50 cents, and the cost of the starbucks experience wrapped around that cup, 4 dollars. now everyone in the service industry probably already knows this, at least intrinsically, but what was new to me is what he said mattered in creating experiences. and this is where shakespeare comes in.

  This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

so in addition to being true to yourself, you have to be true to others. and so joseph pine talks about price being the primary factor for goods, quality being the primary factor for service, and authenticity being the primary factor for experience. so as a company or a person, marketing isn’t necessary, what’s needed is a space to show your true self.

unfortunately, when thinking about buying a lot of products, i immediately think of the product i will buy to inevitably replace that product. i guess it has come from the feeling of being in a state of transition right now. i rent. just the very nature of renting an apartment is one of transience. this couch isn’t going to be my couch. i don’t want to buy any art, because the art will definitely not make it to the next apartment. i have thoughts like these all the time.

this becomes most complex when applied to stereo systems. during undergrad i had a 2k stereo system. shortly after, i decided to reduce a lot of what i had, and ended up with a tiny tivoli pal. now that i am over living out of a bag, i have started to think about speakers again. i want something that will make it to the next apartment (read: not some monster towers that weigh 200 pounds each), but i don’t want to spend a grand on speakers that will be sold in a year either. so i started thinking about what i call my lifestyle development, and how products fit into that. i could buy a pair of bookshelf speakers, and a receiver, then when i buy a home, i could buy a pair of towers and use the bookshelf speakers as rears. or i could buy a pair of bookshelf speakers, and when i buy a home, use those for my bedroom and have a completely seperate rig for my living room. these may seem like trivial issues, but there are a lot of factors at play. great bookshelf speakers right now, are not going to be great rears. great rears, are not going to be good stand alone speakers now. the upgrade cycle of speakers, if thought out, has valleys and peaks of performance, and you could spend months optimizing. do i want great speakers now or great speakers later? when will i actually upgrade? what about the unpredictability of the future and the layout of my house if i ever even buy one? these issues are most felt in audio equipment because of several factors: the lack of improvement over the years, the lack of depreciation after the initial new - used dip in cost, the modularity of speaker system, the fact that speakers systems need to be designed with a room and its characteristics in mind.

so what i think is the greatest thing in home audio since sliced bread is aperion audio’s “full value trade up program”. basically within a year, you can send them in your old speakers and use the full value to go towards more expensive speakers. i could buy a pair of their bookshelf speakers for 500usd, in a year, upgrade to their mini towers, and that 500usd would completely to go the purchase of the new speakers. so now there is basically a zero loss of value, and a direct upgrade plan with a small initial cost, and incremental upgrades. also, this obviously creates brand dependency, because you can only get your full value by sending them back to aperion audio, so there is almost no point selling the speakers to someone else, no point putting them on ebay, and almost no point not upgrading if you have a couple hundred bucks laying around every year.

in short: have i slipped into living a life where the difference between right and wrong is directly related to the probability of being caught? where lies of omission are the same as silence? if no one gets caught in the digital age, where is the protest of unjust laws?

a month back i switched motorcycle insurance companies. because of a fault of my own or of my new insurance company, one document was never received, and for a while, i thought i was driving with insurance when i had no insurance. a few days ago i get a letter from the state saying that i had a lapse of insurance and i need to state that i did not drive it during that time, or have my license suspended for 3 months. the woman on the phone instructed me that all i needed to was fill out a form saying i didn’t drive, and that would be it. for some reason i was a little upset. upset that this woman nudged me to lie, upset that i am forced with an ethical decision where by siding on my principles, i go 3 months without riding my motorcycle. upset that there isn’t a better system than this one. i mean i’m a service designer these days, and i am yearning for some help so that i don’t make this mistake.

so for a while i thought i should fight this, but why? wasn’t i in the wrong? why does it hurt so bad to lie on a form about driving, when it doesn’t hurt to download amazing quality rips of any artist i want from the internet? the only difference is that no one is asking about the music. to write down on a form that i did not drive my motorcycle for a week is a blatant lie, but to go on downloading illegally and to do all the other things that i do illegally–these are just lies of omission. all of our illegal doings are merely slipping through the cracks, but that doesn’t make it right. if we feel like laws are unjust, then by all means we should not follow them, we should suffer the consequences of not following them, and we should strive to change them, but what happens if there are no consequences?

the reason people are no longer fighting against unjust laws of the time, is because if you break those laws you won’t get caught, so what’s the point?

where is the civil disobedience of the digital age? a brief google search popped up some place that sells t-shirts stating “i steal music off the internet” but it seems more about looking like a rebel and less about an actual protest.

i used to be a consumer of about 250 blogs. on average, i would say that i would read about 350 post titles a day. one of those blogs was 43 folders, a blog by merlin mann on productivity and all things gtd. i eventually fell off the blog. once you reach the other side, you don’t carry the boat with you. but recently he has been very critical of the blog medium in general. he asks when did we stop making and start merely critiquing? does our ill conceived 3 paragraph treatise on what someone else said actually make this world a better place?

so i have been applying this to my own writing here, and i have been wrecking my brain on how to actually make a contribution to something… anything, as apposed to just being more kruft in the ether. anyway, i think that means more depth and less breadth. i have a couple “big thoughts” and i need to start moving forward with them. i think there will be more series of posts, posts that are additive instead of posts that are just strings of non sequiturs. most likely this means seeing me struggle. seeing me work with stuff that is half baked. seeing things that are half baked, ill conceived, or just plain wrong.

anyway…

it’s not about big ‘D’ or little ‘d’. it’s about good design and bad design. any project can be as big or as small as you make it.

i am on the bandwagon of getting things done by david allen. I am not a member of any forum about productivity, nor do i want to be, so i have been grappling with issues of organizing my life complete with goals, projects, tasks, and calendar events in the dark… just me, the gtd book, and the occasional post from 43 folders. one large part of this organizational framework is the vertical map. a place where you write down your vision for the perfect life, your fundamental principles such as religious based rules of living, and then your goals for various distances into the future. when you have this, your goals should lead towards your vision, and your projects you are working on right now should lead to your goals, and your tasks should lead to your projects. got it? so at the end of the day, almost everything you do, every little thing, is moving you closer to your vision. this all seemed neat and tidy when i first started. i wanted a dog, and i wanted a house in the woods, and i wanted to be financially independent. there are two problems with this framework, and now that i have a teeny tiny bit of the design bug in my, i my desire to fix these problems has taken over my “weekly review.”

the first problem is that this framework is fundamentally future centered. i wanted to do industrial design two years ago. this was a goal. right now i am doing service design, which is making me amazingly happy, so what do i do, i change my goal. this is only one example, but brings up a topic of values and vision. in a class called design management and organizational change at cmu, this topic came up for driving forces of organizations. are they vision driven or value driven? i am not saying that i am value driven necessarily, because of this example or any other number of similar instances, but i can say that i prefer being value driven. in bushido the warrior is said to have no plans, and to make decisions in 7 breaths. i at first saw this as foolish and a product of the times and the simpler lives associated with those times, but looking closer, i realized that i was wrong. the reason no plans are needed, is because of a deep understanding of the self. if you know yourself, you know what you are going to do. if you are value driven, you don’t need a plan for the future, you need to know what you value, and you need to make decisions based on that. first problem.

second problem was that i was unsure that my vision was taking everything into account. my first vision had no health issues in it. should i exercise? did i have a vision of how i wanted to be in the future? could i create goals based on that vision? maybe 10 push ups by next month, 100 by next year? it just didn’t add up. i had financial goals, and physical health goals, and social goals, but was i really covering everything? the framework never told me what my vision should be. 

so lately i started thinking about positive psychology (i will stop linking to wikipedia, anyone can do it on their own). i definitely believe in this stuff because the positive psychologists are right, curing ills does not equal happiness. anyway, there is a growing body of theory and evidence that points to parts of our lives which lead to happiness– pleasurable experiences, the flow state, and contribution to something larger than self. i started thinking that maybe my vertical map should be broken down into three parts to reflect the three aspects of this theory.

then i started to think about buddhist practice. i decided that development/wisdom and awareness/radical acceptance should be the split for my vertical map.

then despite my distaste for maslow, i decided his triangle might make a good basis.

then it hit me! all these are lenses. all of these are perspectives of what makes a good happy healthy life. and i realized that just the division of values or vision into parts described by these people would be biased and not very close to the truth. so what did i do… i put it all on the cross of pain. yes, dick buchanan’s class is getting into the deepest darkest regions of my life. even after almost a year has passed since i took his class, his lessons continue to help me learn about myself. help me not get caught in one perspective, but to see the bigger picture by accepting what everyone says about a situation. dialectics.

anyway, maslow goes on the bottom, positive psychology goes on the left, buddhism with awareness and radical abandon up top (my bias?). so who goes on the right?

so the biggest news in my life right now is in the left bar… pink. a project, an independent study in school, a dream, all wrapped up into one page. pink is the service design firm that i have started with a few goods friends from cmu. it’s going to be putting a roof over my head, and food in my mouth for as long as it can, and so far it’s doing better than any job i have ever had.

i cannot express the pros and cons of starting and owning a business in words, but i will say that it is not for the faint of heart, but at the same time, everyone should do it at least once.