Category Archives: Inspirational

Data Visualization

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Watch this wonderful TED Talk by David McCandless if you want to know a little bit more about data visualization and infographics.

I took notes (you know me):

  • “Data is the new soil.”
  • sight + mind = visual + conceptual = Combining two languages, enhancing one another.
  • Nominal vs. Real numbers – Relativity gives a better perspective.
  • “Let the data set change your mindset.”
  • Data visualization = knowledge compression
  • Design : Solving problems, providing elegant solutions :: Info design : Solving info problems, providing elegant info solutions
  • Information problems: overload, saturation, untrustworthiness, skepticism

Innovation? Yes.

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Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes: iWeek. I left off concluding my experience at Paustian’s Purple People Eater presentation. To recap – it’s tough to innovate because peeps gon’ crush your inspiration, and you need to practice being creative (defined as “making connections”) all day, everyday. I assume my future animation and/or web design career will involve a comfortable level of creative challenges, so I’ve got to keep those muscles in shape.

By the way, I burnt my tongue today (due to impatience and hunger), and there’s one tastebud that’s quite erect and really bothering me.

Asides aside, another speaker at iWeek was Ben McDougal. I attended all two of his sessions because he has an interesting and relevant career path. Ben intended to get into the game development world and ended up in web design. Sound familiar? Quite. My friend and classmate John Flyr – a near-future animator – couldn’t make it to the session entitled “Spawning New Life in the Video Game Industry,” but did make it to the following session about Ben’s job that “pays the bills” – working for a web design firm as sales manager.

I was excited to see that his own company’s website is a WordPress and brought that up in the gaming discussion, to which he answered, “The content management system you should be using is SiteViz, which we’ll talk about tomorrow.” I discovered that SiteViz is sadly proprietary, only has a few handfuls of modules, and is freakishly expensive. WordPress is quite the dynamic foe to those people with basic HTML knowledge, but I can see how non-tech-savvy business people could be shmoozed into buying a bajillion dollar CMS. It would be hard to be a salesperson for something I don’t believe in. And being the poor college student I am, I hearts me my open-source.

Spawning New Life in the Video Game Industry

Qapla

But back to Ben – I like his story. He went to school with big starry eyes and controller in hand, expecting to get into game design with his fancy computer science degree, but after working bottom-wrung at a gaming-giant, he realized he didn’t want to climb that ladder and jumped off, back to Iowa. He found a web-development job during the day, and plotted his trajectory toward the video game industry at night. He formed Jet Set Studio, which offers online advertising and video game event management – not a lot of competition ’round these parts, so an excellent vehicle on his less-traveled path.

Ben convinced me that Des Moines is an excellent place to get something going. It’s not too crowded and not too small, so there’s enough room for innovation. So maybe…just maybe…you’ll see a new independent animation (or whatever else I decide to do) company spring up in central Iowa. For now, I’m enjoying the learning process and working for SEO Des Moines. Web design and SEO are expanding my skill set – expanding my box, so to speak (Hi, Dr. Paustian).

And here we go – winner of the most entertaining presentation is Justin Brady. His point was unique, and the way he made it was even more so. “Ditch the PowerPoint” is another way of saying, “Communicate Better, Please,” “Prepare for Your Presentation for Once,” or, “Let’s Stop Using This Terrible Software as a Crutch.” I wish that more teachers could have been there for this one. I think they may have needed it most. But Justin Brady, the creator of Test of Time Design, did more than tell the superfluous slides to scram. The message I took from his presentation … OK, I will say one of the messages I took from his presentation was we learn best through discussion and conversation, and that a lecture with slides is nearly pointless. Because I wasn’t scrambling to write down screen notes while attempting to follow along with his voice, I feel like I remembered a lot more from his presentation than I learn from most of my classes. I had forgotten that the point of a class session was to learn and try to internalize information. Going back and forth between voice and screen was demonstrated by Justin and an audience member (hey, that was John!) speaking at the same time. The message is garbled – my poor brain can’t sort that out while the air vibrations are pushing my ear drums, let alone remember anything. I’ll put more confidence in my ability to remember what instructors say (especially when I know they put the slides online anyway).

A question I had posed was, “What about people whose learning style is more visual?” His answer made a lot of sense – a person is very visual. Gretchen pointed out to my uncle that night that over half of language isn’t the words we speak, but body language, facial expressions, proxemics, and audio cues like inflection, and I solidified the connection between a physical speaker and a visual aid. But I’m so used to poor visual aid from speakers that I assumed it wasn’t. Justin’s iPad being thrust into an audience member’s face (hey, that was me!) is definitely visual.

When in Doubt, Go Without

PowerPoint Fails in Comparison

I suppose as a successful designer, he should know when to use visual design…and when not to use it. He said graphics are for when there isn’t a person to communicate an idea in person. With that idea in mind, I’m going to make my graphics attempt to emulate human communication better. I say this while my blog is completely devoid of graphics at the moment. Conscious choice? Not exactly.

Even as my blog is still in its infancy with a readership of zero, I still feel the need to conclude my thoughts. Dr. Paustian’s speech on creativity was inspiring, Ben’s story was quite akin to my own, and Justin’s PowerPoint-less presentation made powerful points. DMACC’s iWeek: more valuable than any job fair. And it’s free*.

*Free = included in the thankfully-affordable tuition.

Ideas in Action

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So lovely ol’ DMACC West Campus was putting on a thing called iWeek themed around “innovation.” A rerosterous amount of big wigs were there to present on many a topic. I had looked at the schedule a week ahead of time, and although most of the presentations were geared toward people headed for cube farms and lifeless corporations, there were a small handful that were relevant to my more creative goals.

Our campus’s provost (what’s a provost, anyhow?) Dr. Anthony Paustian held a really engaging presentation on creativity itself entitled Beware the Purple People Eaters. He threw out a few jokes, people laughed, and he was a really gripping speaker. He even used visual aids: a small box and a giant box. It helped illustrate his believe: Don’t think outside your box — just expand it. The more you learn, the more tools you’ll have in your box when “making connections,” his personal definition of creativity. I think this is an excellent definition and encompasses more than what people might typically connote with the word creativity. It means that applying some business technique to a previously unconnected business goal is considered creative. But back to expanding your box: I was reminded of the concept of latent learning in my intro to psychology course. We are constantly learning new things, but we can’t observe the fact that someone has learned unless some situation necessitates that bit of knowledge. Paustian declares we should create those situations that necessitate that knowledge by ourselves as a way to practice being creative. Yes, you can practice it. And by making connections constantly between things previously unrelated — like how to physically combine that clock with that desk, or even my laptop’s trackpad with my nephew’s keyboard — we set ourselves in a new, ultra creative mindset. But why did this have anything to do with Purple People Eaters? That monster comes into play during the step before creativity: inspiration. Whatever inspiration he had to use a purple crayon to color his people a violet shade, his first grade instructor gobbled it up by stipulating skin-tone use. And that happens all the time – you’ll have an idea, and someone else (or even YOU) might shoot it down.

He finally tied in the presentation to the big buzzword: Innovation. He even complained that it was becoming a buzzword. People start throwing it around like “synergy” and “dynamic” and it’s meaning gets garbled, its power diluted. Innovation is actually difficult. You obviously have to be creative to innovate, which is pretty difficult to get past the purple people eaters. But then you have to try to convince the world that this idea you’ve been working on for a while is actually useful. Take Dyson, for example. Yeah, those vacuums? 15 years and thousands of prototypes. It took him that long to innovate, to change the world of vacuums. I liked that example because it reminded me of my dad, who has been obsessed with an invention of his since the early ’90s. It gave me some hope for him.

I’ll fill you in on the other presentations at a later date, for I must rest. And I feel this post is getting too big for itself.
Dyson and his lovely vacuums: 'Take that, Purple People Eaters!'