Massimo Curatella

Category: Posts

  • How to receive brutally honest feedback

    Call anybody you can reach to, even a family member is fine. Prepare on the screen the prototype, the mock-up, the demo of the visual artifact you’ve just created and you want to have feedback on.

    Do not make any introduction, do not give any explanation: call the chosen tester and ask a direct and straightforward question: “What do you see?”.

    As the first thing you want to have the first reaction, you want to listen to their thinking process. When they start to describe what they see, do not make any reaction, do not judge, do not answer. Keep on asking “and then?” or “why?” or “what does it make you think of?”. Ask only open questions to elaborate on what they are seeing and feeling.

    Only when you are satisfied and their patience hold, if you feel like, ask them more specific questions like: “Do you like it?”, “What do you like?”, “What don’t you like?”.

    And only at the end try to give context, application, and audience: “How do you see this ‘thing’ in the context of conveying this ‘message’ to these ‘people with the objective of achieving this ‘communication goal’”?

    Congratulations, you had the chance of receiving brutally honest feedback.

  • Write about what interests people you know

    Instead of thinking about what I should write I should think about something else.

    Vision

    Where do I imagine myself to be in the future?

    What is the future I imagine for me, my loved ones, the Universe?

    Mission

    By virtue of this vision that I strongly feel, then, I will have a mission to accomplish.

    How will I make my vision come true?

    Goals

    In order for my mission to be fulfilled, then, I will need to identify objectives that will make it true.

    Personas as a role model for my audience

    Rather than imagining a generic and indistinct audience, it is better for me to identify real people. When I work and communicate, I should refer to each of those existing people I know who allow me to have a direct, dedicated dialogue aimed at understanding and acting on that specific person. This can help me focus my work as if I were actually having a conversation with them. Talking with a specific person involves certain communicative, emotional, psychological contexts, etc. and therefore activates the important principle of reducing abstraction  from a hypothetical shapeless mass of people to a specific face that I know and with whom I interact spontaneously.

    Know your Personas are real persons

    It becomes essential to have a collection of real people corresponding to the conversations I like to have and would like to develop.

  • Fighting the blank page with networked notes

    It’s in moments like these, when I don’t want to write that I must find value in my notes. I don’t want to choose what I should write because I chose already when I annotated something. If I was diligent I’d also organize my notes according to emergent topics. What’s the most popular theme in my notes? What grabbed my attention yesterday or yesteryear? That is the approach. The next obstacle is in having a note archive organized to offer such creative opportunities. Do I have idea buckets? Draft idea lists? Semi-finished articles written when I did have the inspiration? Because, otherwise, my note archive has no creative value. It would be only an amass of junk hoarded with the illusion of making something out of it, one day. And that day will never come.

    So, exercise, before starting to write, if it is not a free-flowing writing session, I shall curate my notes by identifying threads, discussions, connections and potential drafts. Or, better, the work done in the note archive should be exactly that: the writing. The final manuscript should naturally evolve in the notes and when it will spontaneously emerge I would only need to extract it into a draft, candidate for publishing.

    My next step is to move my writing context from the blank page of a new document to the already existing network of notes and ideas. So that writing becomes gardening, curating, connecting, nurturing ideas that have been already found.

    It all sounds good. Let’s see what practicing it will look like.

    354/365.

  • The Metaverse is a jungle

    Technological systems are becoming more and more like living entities. It becomes increasingly difficult to set the boundaries of a piece of technology. Your computer is not yours anymore, it’s a node of a massive network of other interactive objects. It doesn’t matter how many efforts you make to clean, maintain, set up, fine-tune your dear personal computer, constant updates of software and hardware are creating a continuous change in their running setting. That’s why it makes sense to double-check settings and configuration, to assess the new features before doing an update or an upgrade. Unfortunately, intentionally or not, many software applications are now resetting their configuration selectively or totally at each update or, even worse, they are adding new parameters affecting their execution.

    It’s a constant flux of changes and interaction, it’s a fluid universe, somebody may call it a metaverse, and we should face it as we live in the real world, by trusting the next piece of software only as much as it allows us to do what we need to do and to carefully look around us for hazards and threads like we would do in a jungle.

    It’s a fantastic always-changing fluid technological world and we need to be responsible and careful in living it.

    353/365. Thanks to Alberto Gelpi for the inspiration.

  • Annotating Podcasts and Connecting Contextually

    I find stimulating to take voice notes while listening to podcasts. Not only do I highlight, paraphrase and summarize the most relevant parts but I connect immediately with whatever comes to my mind by association or contrast. I am walking, I cannot (or I find uneasy to) check my notes, so the connections are coming from my memory. But the kind of interpretation and connection that I do is particularly satisfying.

    I take notes directly in my real-time voice transcriber. Problem: I am outdoor so the transcription is only 90% good and, in the end, the notes are longer than the podcast duration. I will never find the time to listen back to what I captured, moreover, I should listen carefully to fix all the mistranscribed words.

    I would call that a partial success. I am looking to improve this knowledge capturing workflow because I like how it started, I don’t like how it ends.

    352/365

  • Write for your future, past, and present self

    You are, at the very least, three persons: yourself in the present, yourself in the past, and yourself in the future.

    Leverage on this multiplicity by identifying your three selves as real persons whom you can talk to.

    Yourself in the past

    What can you tell about your past behaviors? What were you thinking when something important happened to you? What can you learn from your past actions? And, what was your past self sending to your future self? That is you, now. What’s the message for you, today? How can you change your behaviors based on what your past self did in the past?

    Yourself in the future

    Your future self will look at you and ask you questions: “what should I do?”, “What are my options?”, “What happened when I did that?”.
    This is your chance, now to provide your thoughts in the hope of helping your future self. What are the things that could be useful in the future? What are the trends you see that could develop for yourself, tomorrow, in one year, in ten years? Write a letter, now, and address it to your future being.

    Yourself in the present

    That’s the person you have available to interact with. What do you need now? Who are you now? Use the present time to reflect, track your feelings, your fears, your desires, your happy moments. Spend some time to express your gratitude for what you have and who you are. Acknowledge your weaknesses, you’ll feel better. Recognize your strength, you’ll be more confident.
    This is the only real-time you can live. The right here and right now moment. There are no other times to live. It’s just imagination. Useful, yes, but only a projection of your mind.

    Multiple identities

    You are never the same, even your multiple past identities are different, you are definitely changing each moment you are alive, in the present, and, therefore, you cannot be but an infinite variability of selves in the future.

    351/365

  • Learning Expands Our Senses

    How can we keep the curiosity active? Playing a musical instrument for the first time can be an exhilarating experience. Discovering the capability of producing the notes of those songs that we love is an unforgettable memory. The nature of those songs change ad well. It’s not anymore just a tune to hum indistinguishably but a precise sequence of dots and lines flying at set heights and with defined depth. It’s an entire new world of senses an sensations. You listen to music with new ears a new sensibility. It’s like being born again.

    Something similar happens when you make an effort to write, draw, paint or build something.

    Learning a new art or craft give us extra dimensions to our lives and makes us deeper, broader and richer.

    Of we could go through the joy of learning while having fun there could be no limit to our happiness.

  • Reflecting on voids and missed opportunities (draft)

    Filling voids.

    Catching up with missed opportunities.

    Superficial impression of order.

    Going to the root causes: why did voids create?

    It’s in the behavior: a sequence of actions leading to order or disorder according to different points of view.

    Side note: using WordPress editor as an outliner. Paragraphs can be easily reorganized by drag-and-drop.

  • Approaching the horizon

    I am trying to imagine myself, about two weeks from now, when I won’t have the daily commitment to write posts like this. I will reflect on how much I struggled to write and publish every day and how I slowly go from super excitement to dull, flat and boring chore. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted a clear and solid trend of growth. More content, more quality, more interactions, more ideas and more willingness to write. The exact opposite happens. That is the underlining message I am trying to decode. If I had to speak with the language of facts, I can only say one thing: I wrote every single day. What about the rest? What did I learn? What did I build? These are the kind of questions it will interesting to ask myself.

    348/365

  • How to decide if to rebuild or adapt a new system

    Before considering rebuilding a solution because old, it’s wise to evaluate the differences between the existing system and the new version to be designed. Even if there are many components with several interdependencies it might be convenient to evaluate a piece-by-piece update rather than scratching everything and starting back from zero.

    How shall we decide if we should redo it from scratch or adapt the existing one?

    Plan to invest a limited amount of time to map the most connected and relevant part of the system to the one to be and see if it is relatively straightforward to translate between the old and the new or if there are too many differences or new pieces or a lot of old pieces to be completely removed.

    If you discover that there is a high ratio of unchanged parts or slightly adapted components versus the novelties you might consider updating and upgrading the old rather than starting from scratch.

    In very complicated systems, if you discover that the update is more convenient than the rebuild you might save a lot of time and resources.

    This is my daily post no. 347.