Another interesting talk by Sir Ken including something on the declining value of a degree and the aesthetics of math and how we should look to a more organic model of human development and away from the industrial model that we currently have. Providing the conditions, rather than the components will allow great people to grow.
I’ve posted before on WILB and how the use of small distractions might actually be beneficial for people who are working on the computer. But what about those people who are not on the computer? All they have access to is their imagination, and specifically, their day dreams. Could those help do the same thing? Well it seems that they can. Kalina Christoff, Alan M. Gordon, Jonathan Smallwood, Rachelle Smith, and Jonathan W. Schooler. (Experience sampling during fMRI reveals default network and executive system contributions to mind wandering. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0900234106) have a paper that is just over a year old talking about this and how it can be important. So why is this post worthy today? Well I was in a meeting and I noticed myself getting unfocused and then my mind started to wander and I thought about the WILB materials I had dug up a while ago because there is a debate raging in my inbox about the value of monitoring web use (Facebook, Olympics et al) and it occurred to me that I was WILBing without the computer. Getting back to the office, and I found that there was indeed research that suggests that daydreaming is an important part of a creative, healthy mind.
This is something that I remember from my days in grad school taking a look at UI design – what goes into designing an icon. It struck me that even in this new age of increased definition, we are still trying to simplify the interface. This is a challenge that will continue and it seems to be at the root of many of the issues surrounding IT. Once people understand the basic vocabulary of the computer, they are able to understand what the little house looking icon might mean, and what the camera icon might mean. But for those who are coming from a different background that doesn’t share the same primary concepts that get distilled into icons, this simplification just goes to make computing more difficult. Even for the people who live and breathe in a computerized environment, a slightly different icon, even if it is the same theme can be problematic. I found this with my new phone. The picture icon isn’t a camera, it’s aperture blades. I don’t know about you, but even me being a computer and photo geek, it took me a couple times to “get” the new icon. I knew what it did, but I still had to do a mental double take, understanding the icon only by knowing what the other icons were and through elimination understanding the “take picture” button.
This simplification is certainly a double edged sword and it will be interesting to see how it changes now that we’ve got a new generation coming of age that has grown up with the icons of two generations past, it will be interesting to see what we will see in GUIs of the future. Especially when you consider that the majority of these designers will no longer have a North Atlantic background.
I wonder what Sir Ken (Robinson) would say about this?
It seems to me that this sort of thing happens far more often than we might think. So many kids think different, or on scales that are not obvious to adults that there are likely at least one of these in every grade level in every school. In defense of the teachers, who are pushed by standardization and deadlines, they don’t have time to think beyond “is student doing X”. If we all had a little more time, we might be able to see some of these creative geniuses for what they are rather than trying to “understand the problem”.
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