“That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.”
Albert Einstein to his son, via Brain Pickings
Category: Play
Ethnographic Fieldguide
I’ve gushed before over Just Enough Research before, Erika Hall’s outstanding primer on UX research and thinking about research in a broader commercial sense, but this morning I came across a hidden gem.
In re-reading Chapter 5, I came across a link that I had missed before, to the Helsinki Design Lab – specifically their Ethnographic Fieldguide, a concise, delightfully Finnish document that outlines a manner of thinking and approaching research from an ethnographic perspective. What does that mean?
Ethnography aims to get under the skin of human behavior, to better understand the world and the specifics of the cultures we live in. The focus of the research can be anything from current cultural tendencies, to changing values, attitudes and norms, or concrete human behavior and its motivations within different situations and contexts.
You can find the Ethnographic Fieldguide, and learn more about the HDL, here.
November Reading Roundup
Another month, another missed Reading Goal – here’s the rundown:
– I finished Drive, thanks entirely to the rare foresight I executed in buying the audiobook. November was a pretty crazy month for travel (we drove almost 1000 miles in November), so being able to listen to Drive in the car really saved me. I’m still counting it toward my reading goal!
– I only finished about a third of Antifragile, but I have discussed it with more people than any other book I’ve read in 2014. I’m excited to finish it – it’s the kind of book that I think about a lot, even when I haven’t picked it up in a while.
– These are both great recommendations, and my hat’s off to Jeremey and Ian – thank you both for such outstanding reads.
– Another factor in missing my reading goals is that I received the first four collected volumes of Hellblazer for my birthday, and like any lifelong comic wonk, I couldn’t simply let them sit there. I finished the first two, representing 604 pages of non-reading-goals reading.
– In all, in November I read 456 (.42 Infinite Jests) reading goal pages and 604 (.55 Infinite Jests) outside pages. That’s almost an Infinite Jest, so even though I missed my specific goals, I’m happy with the overall page count.
More Speaking Resources!
In my ongoing quest to find and share resources to make myself and others better speakers, I sometimes find things that are useful, helpful, or just interesting. Here are two things I’ve recently come upon that have moved the needle on my presentation game: specifically how I build slide decks and what I put in them.
10 Tips on How to Make Slides from the folks at TED – if anyone knows anything about great slides, it’s TED.
In pursuit of their sixth tip, Use photos that enhance meaning, I’d like to introduce you to a resource I borrowed from Dave – a collection of collections, a meta-collection if you will: Stock Photos That Don’t Suck.
The featured image on this Post is from that list, specifically from New Old Stock.
Rick Steves’ Travel Philosophy
“Be fanatically positive and militantly optimistic. If something’s not to your liking, change your liking. Travel is addicting. It can make you a happier American, as well as a citizen of the world. Our Earth is home to nearly 6 billion equally important people. It’s humbling to travel and find that people don’t envy Americans.”
Simon Ouderkirk 