How you react to adversities defines you character. You have to confront yourself first with your reaction to the environment and that is where your real self shows up.
Demonstrating the capability but also the will to adapt makes you resilient. Becoming angry and refusing to find trade-offs generates unsatisfactory feelings and put you down.
It’s not just to always look at the bright side but it definitely helps
It doesn’t matter where you are now and what you are doing. The people surrounding you or the next important task. If you committed to write, daily, you have to steal time and refuse to give the needed attention because you need your private writing time.
Maybe you don’t have your comfortable keyboard and that last meal you had didn’t leave you quite well. Still, this is that moment of the day when you have to do it.
And there it is. That’s my selfish moment, today.
Today I am hosting a guest post by Leo.
This article will be based on having more patience because if you have more patience you can calm your mind and do things easier. But if you are impatient you can also get nervous and get tired of doing that thing. Let me give you an example: if I want to read, for example, a book, I have to be concentrated and in any case relaxed at the same time. If I am impatient to finish the book and I don’t want to, I get nervous. So in this case you have to avoid doing something pleasant when you are angry.
Another example: if you want to make a nice drawing, you have to be patient because if you are impatient, you still can’t do that thing. So in my opinion the human being should have more patience in order to be able to do things and in any case respect the rules of both the person or even in this case of Covid, in fact many people are not respectful of the rules or maybe they are impatient, they get bored and therefore they remove the mask risking for the whole population.
And it was good
What’s the difference between showing the end product of your work versus showing all of the stages of your design process?
In the first case, you might want to have an impact, to present it and to impress. Maybe you cannot talk it thru, you cannot present it as product so it must be polished and perfect. There should be storytelling elements, showing the strengths of your solution.
The problem with that : you are not able to tell the difficulties, the discoveries, the problems you have faced. So is less personal is more constructed. You can try to control the instantaneous impression, but it’s more difficult to convey your creativity, your thinking process and your design personality.
On the other hand when you show the backstage of how you evolved the solution of how you researched possible ideas and how you faced the problems, the obstacles, and the constraints that you met during the ideation process, it shows more your personality as a designer or as a developer, as somebody who is been thinking about the problem and researching it and finding different ways: branching prototypes, iterating versions.
And this is also a way to show the value of your work. So if you want to give depth to your work and be appreciated for your efforts as a designer, showing the evolution of your designs is the best way of doing that, compared to giving flat screens, beautiful rendered without a background history.
It shows when I keep on writing at night when my willpower is close to zero. I really don’t want to focus in the morning. That’s another Sunday spent with the sense of guilt of not having written, and ended up in a short and rushed post.
On the other hand I am recovering forces and releasing the pressure.
There’s only this little problem of time: August is almost over and societal norms would want me fresh and regenerated back to my place.
There are some things which make us happy. When we feel sad we should remember what those things are and plan to get them. When experiences are responsible for our mood then we need to plan for them to emerge. Remembering what made us happy means being self-aware. Writing down our mood in different contexts would represent the base research for us to understand better what we should aim to. Writing, daily journaling, reporting on experiences that had contributed to that self-awareness. Here is another scope where PKM can have a positive contribution to our mood and to make us happy. Keep track of places, people, tastes, happenings, events that left a positive mark on your memories and store them safely as the most precious ingredients for happiness recipes.
I should not worry too much about what I want to write or what I need to write. I just need to do it. In addition to that, I need to organize my thoughts, my questions. My research into clusters aggregates. When I review the connection between the different pieces, I am able to find longer and more elaborate threads.
I am doing it wrong by thinking that each time that I am on a blank page, I have to write my daily journal, or my daily article, that I need to be exhaustive about a grand topic. I should write about the smallest topic I can think of. A small idea to reflect upon. And I should use it as a magnet to attract somebody else’s ideas or notes I wrote about, things I’ve read in the past from other books.
The real creativity is in composing those ideas into a bigger one. Not in having brilliant, big and exhaustive treatments of ideas, impromptu, of the day . I have been saying these things forever. I really don’t want to learn it. I am relearning it every time. I’m doing it. I just need to keep it present. So the daily effort of creating something that will remain is not to write something memorable. But it’s to create a small contribution, even insignificant, that put together with all the others you have been writing for hundreds of days. So that together, connected, revised, and even rewritten, they will become something really worthwhile.
Einstein had to admit he was wrong about the Universe being static when a lot of studies emerged about stars running away from each other. Regardless of our geniality we need continuous confrontation with others about our ideas. And we would be wise considering them hypotheses until disproved.
When even the brightest minds recognize the limits of their capabilities we can only feel more humble in our convictions.
How do you change your mind today?
I want to talk about the process of ideating solutions by speculating on possibilities and exploring the realm of what could be done without checking too much what can be done. When you create beautiful presentations of imagined artifacts and objects, you have the power of persuasion. You can persuade interested people to buy it, to be convinced that is a good solution because it is beautiful. And through the simulation of how it works, you can even have a high fidelity simulation of how to interact with it.
So you can show what would happen if that solution would be implemented in the field of your problem.
It is exciting, encouraging, and it can be used to sell the further development and creation of it. When you finally convince the investor or the client to buy it, then you have to do it. And when you pass from the visionary, the presenter, the salesman, and the designer who conceived such a wonderful and aesthetically pleasing solution, then it’s time to do it. You’re going to the business, the resources, accounting, the financing and the development. So you need to talk with the the builders.
That is the time when you have to be really humble as a designer, you need to establish fair and honest and straightforward relationship with the builders. Because if you have had the chance of talking very little with them about the solutions you have been selling, you need to be respectful of the constraints that my might emerge when building it. There’s actually another iteration of designing. That’s real co-design that finally you can do because that’s the proof of the building. So what about all of the features imagined, the workflows and the stories you’ve been telling about the interactions of this product?
Can they be done for real and with what limitations?
Are they actually working as intended? Have you covered all the possible ramifications and implications when thinking about the beautiful presentation told in a nice conference room in 30 minutes?
This is a very delicate part of the project in which you have to carefully reconsider the initial design choices because there was no time for growing bottom-up the solutions together with the client. This is reality. And so sometimes, if not most of the time, it’s not possible to do proper user research, create user stories, ideating, creating prototypes, and iterating them.
This is the first real prototype you are building. That is not a mock-up but a functional prototype where the real features. You’ve been creating, an inventory of specs and requirements you’ve been compiling are finally coming into reality.
You need to be very patient as a design leader, as a manager, when you are sharing finally what was a demo presentation and now became a spec for developers. In that case, developers have the right and the chance of becoming designers because they have the right of critiquing and reviewing the initial user interface decisions made to adapt to the real development of algorithms and interface widgets, and library components. So that’s the more grounded and down to earth collaborative design that’s happening during the execution of the project, the development.
The project now changes shape according to this more present forces that are not just business, accounting, leadership, management, and design, there’s now also development. That’s the reason why developers should be always present during requirements gathering but even during the synthesis of user interviews and user stories and epics because they need to have a say before architectural and decisions are made.
So you have a chance of integrating and enriching and adapting to this new context by adding more frequent and deeper interactions between designers, developers, and the end users. By doing that, you have a higher chance of creating a successful product for all the stakeholders.