The importance of the Prototype

An often misunderstood process prototyping is at time hard to sell to your clients but invaluable to your final deliverable. Some fantastic info here:
http://uxmag.com/articles/how-to-prototype-and-influence-people

For those who do not want to sit through the 30-minutes romp and my rapid prototyping, here are the principals of prototyping that I explain fully in talk:

1. Your first try will be wrong. Budget and design for it.
2. Aim to finish a usable artifact in a day. This helps you focus and scope.
3. You are making a touchable sketch. Do not fill in all the lines.
4. You are iterating your solution as well as your understanding of the problem.
5. Treat your code as throw-away, but be ready to refactor.
6. Borrow liberally
7. Tell a story with your prototype. It isn’t just a set of features.

Getting in the Zone or getting in the FLOW state

As a creative person or as a person who creates stuff and needs focused bursts of time to create those things, I found this article fascinating. With a lot of this material its stuff we intuitively know and recognize once we've had a flow state experience but articulating those experiences is always a challenge. Here's a quote from the article with a link to the full text below it.

Jobs that require a lot of brainpower—software programming for instance—also demand deep concentration. You know that feeling when you’re “in the zone,” cranking on something. That is flow, a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Unfortunately, most of us are constantly interrupted during the day with meetings, emails, texts, or colleagues who want to talk about stuff. These interruptions that move us out of “flow state” increase R&D cycle times and costs dramatically. Studies have shown that each time flow state is disrupted it takes fifteen minutes to get back into flow, if you can get back at all. And programmers who work in the top quartile of proper (ie uninterrupted) work environments are several times more productive than those who don’t.

Ideally programmers and other knowledge workers can spend 30% – 50% of their day in uninterrupted concentration. Most office environments don’t even come close. To get started, ask your engineers to track for a few days their personal flow state percentages: how many hours each day are they in flow, divided by the number of total hours they’re at the office. And then brainstorm ways that the team can move this number up. For example, perhaps there’s a little paper sign at each person’s desk that says “Go Away, I’m Cranking.” Or maybe you have a day where no meetings are allowed. Tom Demarco has written insightfully on the topic of flow.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/12/13/five-new-management-metrics-you-need-to-know/

Exerpt from Daniel Pinks - FLIP "Give up on trying to find your passion."

When we find ourselves in the midst of a career change or feel a dull sense that what we're doing now isn't
what we should be doing forever, our friends and families—along with every mentor, advisor, and consultant—will smile knowingly, lean in tenderly, and pose this question: Tell me, what's your passion?

The idea is that if we simply acknowledge what fires our soul, if we just pull out our metaphysical arthroscope
and examine our hearts, the path will reveal itself.
So—with a voice that quavers in expectation and an inflection that italicizes the final word—they ask us again,
"What's your passion?"

Ladies and gentlemen, I detest that question.



Again here's the whole thing

Creative Agility

A very well written article outlining how the Agile project development process can be applied to a creative department. One issue in particular that resonated with me was how to create a process that can produce repeatable results yet allow for some autonomy and creativity.

Process is Evil

"A major barrier to improving the process of creating assets is the aversion to process that many artists feel. Artists often view the creative process as an organic thing that cannot be analyzed, dissected, or reduced to a set of defined practices without killing it. As a result, they see methodologies as cold instruments from a mechanistic world that is at odds with an artist's goal to capture and express beauty. Experiences with managers who don't understand this mindset have further validated this feeling.

Overcoming this aversion to process requires an understanding of the role of process itself. 

For the whole article click here.

Autonomy is the pathway to accountability

"Rules and policies and regulations and stipulations are innovation killers. People do their best work when they're unencumbered. If you're spending a lot of time accounting for the time you're spending, that's time you're not innovating." 

 Steve Swasey, Netflix's vice-president

I found this on  Daniel Pink's website within the "FLIP" pdf