Apr
A flow chart for changing a habit.
via shoutsandmumbles
Apr
Dissecting psychological principles to understand the motivations for social commerce.
Apr
IDEO Patterns: Gamifying the world.
Designers can harness our desire to entertain ourselves by embedding game mechanics into all sorts of products and services. Play can transform arduous or mundane tasks, such as exercising and conserving energy, into less taxing, more enjoyable activities.
Mar
Designing Great Data Products
“We are entering the era of data as drivetrain, where we use data not just to generate more data, but use data to produce actionable outcomes.” by @jeremyphoward on @radar.
Mar
The Brain on Love
A relatively new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you.
All relationships change the brain — but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.
via @curiositycounts
Mar
Mar
![Managing Criticism in Design Exploration
Design decisions should always be based on what’s appropriate for the task at hand. If you find your design is being beaten down, the best way to fight back is to counter with “Well, when would my design be appropriate?”. Conversely, before you take pleasure in destroying someone else’s hard work, first make sure that you can answer “When is this solution great?”. […]
Lastly, always remember the golden rule of critique: don’t be a dick.
Read the full post from Intercom and check out their slick new “customer relationship management and messaging tool for web app owners”.
jonathanmoore](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0xtawHXs01qzv45so1_1280.jpg)
Managing Criticism in Design Exploration
Design decisions should always be based on what’s appropriate for the task at hand. If you find your design is being beaten down, the best way to fight back is to counter with “Well, when would my design be appropriate?”. Conversely, before you take pleasure in destroying someone else’s hard work, first make sure that you can answer “When is this solution great?”. […]
Lastly, always remember the golden rule of critique: don’t be a dick.
Read the full post from Intercom and check out their slick new “customer relationship management and messaging tool for web app owners”.
Feb
Nike FuelBand.
There’s a deep psychology to the role data plays in motivation.
“When you look at setting a goal, we see a very clear trend that people who set themselves a goal and hit it are so much more likely to stick with any experience than the ones that either don’t set a goal, or set too high of a goal, miss it and get discouraged.” Finding that people don’t need “extreme granularity” and are instead mostly concerned with consistency and simplicity, Olander says what Nike is attempting to do is “make it really easy to level something—give yourself a goal, but then allow yourself to adjust that all the time to what you want to do.” - Nike’s Vice President of Digital Sport Stefan Olander
via CoolHunting
Feb
So you don’t think you’re creative? Think again.
I’ve never considered myself a creative person. I don’t crank out idea after idea in a brainstorm, theatrically waving my hands in the air and selling in novel concepts with conviction and passion. That’s just not my personality. Apparently it’s not how my brain works either.
Creative thinking is actually based on our brain’s activity and how we process information, according to Lebanonese psychologist Arne Dietrich (2004). It depends on which part of our brain we’re using and in what context we’re processing information.
Our brains have developed two different neural systems to extract information:
Emotional - attaches value and evaluates significance
Cognitive - performs detailed feature analysis and constructs sophisticated foundation for information processing
Couple that with the different environments for which thinking can take place:
Deliberate - conscious or intentional
Spontaneous - without premeditation or stimulus
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SO that brings us to four different kinds of creativity:
Deliberate & cognitive - Makes connections between bits of information stored in other parts of our brain. Requires a high degree of knowledge, enough prerequisite information to process, and ample of time to work on a problem.
Deliberate & emotional - A-ha moments related to our feelings and emotions. Mandates personal, quiet time and stimulus to process and ponder.
Spontaneous & cognitive - Unconscious mental processing that happens when we’re not thinking about the task at hand. Best when we set up a problem, walk away from it, and then it will come. This does not require any existing body of knowledge related to the problem.
Spontaneous & emotional - Spontaneous ideas and creations emerge. There is no designing for this and is the tendency of artists, musicians, and the like.
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This helps me recognize that I’m a deliberate & cognitive creative thinker, which makes perfect sense considering my knack for making connections, understanding the relationship between ideas, and the need to always ask questions to understand other facets of the problem. So I AM a creative thinker after all.
Now I can stop trying to be the off-the-wall, ideas-coming-out-of-my-nose and at-the-drop-of-a-hat creative thinker I will never be.
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Sources:
Dietrich, A. “The cognitive neuroscience of creativity.” (2004).
Weinschenk, S. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. (2011). — a must read!
