i like to take pictures of signs

I like to take pictures of signs.

The Hinman Research Building at Georgia Tech. Love the typeface, and the brick, and the lighting...

One of the things that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks is some artwork for a product that we are readying for launch. The product itself will be printed with this design and associated words, and although I have no formal training as a graphic designer, my team is taking a chance on me for my own professional benefit.

I’ve said before that part of my process of professional self-discovery was learning that I am lyrically creative. I am moved by words. I have to watch myself - it’s tempting to fill this 1-in x 1.5-in space with words. But nurses don’t like words. Patients don’t need words. And so, I have to find a better way to communicate what needs to be communicated for patients to have the best possible outcome.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am insecure in my abilities. As an engineer, I want to be good at mechanical design. Engineers aren’t typically known for their diction or writing skills. They’re known for their ability to take things apart and put things back together. As a young engineer, it’s been hard for me to accept that I do not have to be good at everything, or that being good at one thing does not precludes me from being good at another.

Engineering is a fancy term for problem solving, and problems aren’t always solved by fixing broken components. It takes more than just a knack for tinkering to be able to solve problems. It takes vision. It takes an ability to look at a system... and also its components. It takes empathy, and an understanding of who it is we’re designing for, and what it is they actually need.

Part of the way we design our lives is aspirational. I carry around a camera and Play-doh not because I take amazing pictures or build intricate clay models on a regular basis. I carry them around because those are things that, when I make the conscious effort to use them, make me a better designer. To me, if photographs capture the stimuli in the world as it is, and sketching and prototype provide the response, then writing about our experiences in our world fills the gap between.

Back to sign-loving. I’m currently in New Orleans, which is proving to be sign haven. It’s given me some new insights on how to communicate with people the way that people need to be communicated with.

The capital of Luisiana.

Had to do it.

A personal favorite from sign-spotting today.

it's amazing what you hear when you take the time to listen

I used to think, when I was young, that to be a good doctor, you have to be a good listener (from the time I was five, I wanted to be a doctor). Then, when I got my first job, I learned that to be a good gymnastics coach, you have to be a good listener. When I came to college, I learned that to be a good public servant, you have to be a good listener. And now, when I design products, I absolutely know that to be a good designer you have to be a really good listener.

The moral life, the life that transforms lives, begins in the ear, in the act of listening.
                                - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal A Fractured World

If you want to design the kinds of things that remove shackles, that empower people, that transform people's lives, you have to start in the ear - with the act of listening.

We pay lip service to listening. We all know how important it is, but we don't always do it. We get too busy; we want to make our points; we want to win our arguments. Listening solves problems. It creates white space. It fosters creativity.

Here's a video I took in Decatur Square last weekend (in 75-degree March weather). It's amazing what you'll hear when you just take the time - no iPod, no text messages, no notepads, no agenda - to listen.

creativity & silence

There is a composition by John Cage called 4' 33" (listen here) in which he instructs the entire orchestra to not play a thing during each of the three movements. He came up with the idea when he visited an anechoic chamber, and instead of hearing silence, he heard two sounds: "when I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation."

He expected silence, but his brain and body filled the space.

The idea here is there is no such thing as the absence of art. Where art is silent, our science finds a way to fill in the blanks and create sounds to plug the silences. Silence gives us room to breathe, to think.

White space is liberating. It creates a gap in which we can think before we respond to the stimulus. It gives us a chance to be creative.

If you want to foster your own creativity, give yourself white space, and see what your mind does with the silence. While it's true that creativity loves constraints, it also needs room to breathe.

The storefront at Victory Sandwich in Inman Park. Love the use of white space in an otherwise "noisy" neighborhood.

Also, a little bragging - major, major kudos to the Vascular Interventions team at Bard Medical - we had our first annual Franchise Awards gig Wednesday, and out of five individual awards and five franchise awards, we took HALF of the total. That's a lot of hardware, and a big deal for a new team. Props!

to become a better writer, write

self-expression is a learned skill.

On August 1st, I stumbled across a website called 750words.com. I've always heard that to become a better writer, you need to write. And that by becoming a better writer, you become a better reader (of more, and more relevant, content). I thought, I'll give this a shot. 750 words = 3 pages, as it's explained:

Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in "long hand", typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It's about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day.

For 48 days, I wrote religiously, almost exclusively in the morning, often before going for a run at 6 AM. Eventually, I got into a rhythm, writing first my personal mission statement verbatim, then letting myself run wild on my thoughts and reactions to where I was. Then I always concluded with a thought for the day, a goal, an inspiration. For 48 days, despite my travel schedule, availability of internet connection (or laptop!), meetings, appointments, and all the other craziness that the past few months have brought, I wrote no matter what, sometimes finishing the day's thoughts on my iPhone. I wanted to make sure I hit every date, could continue my "streak", meet my challenge. Some days were harder than others; some days more open, some with more thoughts to share. I expected to feel a surge of creativity, an undiscovered side of myself that would point me in a new direction. And above all, I wanted to check my box and say that I had done my time and completed the day's words.

And then yesterday, I woke up at 4 AM to a sick puppy. Sawra had vomited in her crate, and both her fur and her den needed cleaning. It wasn't a task I particularly felt like doing, especially on my day to sleep in after weeks of 5-AM-wakeups. So an hour later, as I pulled my laptop into the bed and opened up the site, my mind was as blank as the white space in front of me. I just didn't want to write.

my overall mindset in all my time at 750words.

Creativity can't be forced. Creativity isn't about checking the box, about scoring points when you write just to write. There is a lot of value in pushing yourself through things that most people won't (link is a .pdf), even when you don't want to. But there is more value in realizing when you need to do that... and when you don't. I've learned a lot by waking up every morning and writing 3 pages. One of the things that I've learned, is that sometimes you have to let yourself deviate from the schedule you've set. That your idea of what should happen in your life, and when it should happen, isn't always the way that it will happen. And you have to be ok with that.

I've learned that you don't always learn what you think you're going to. I've learned that I write very quickly, that my thoughts center on religion and success. I learned that I am consistently and privately introverted (and, although many of you won't believe me, that my extrovertedness is a learned skill). I learned that I am unfailingly positive, more certain of myself than most of the world, and toeing the line between thinking and feeling. I am learning that I filter my words unconsciously, that I'm not often completely open with the thoughts in my head, and that to be self-expressive is difficult for me (which makes blogging scary, at times). I've learned that despite my background in design and engineering, my creativity has always been primarily in words, and that I have an uncanny ability to describe every situation in life through song lyrics (and am I reminded now of the Anna Nalick song "Breathe"):

two am and i'm still awake writing a song
if i get it all down on paper it's no longer inside of me,
threatening the life it belongs to
and i feel like i'm naked in front of the crowd
cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud
and i know that you'll use them however you want to.

I learned (well, confirmed) that I like metrics and complete datasets. I learned that I view my life in the third person more often than I'd like, and that maybe there have to be changes in the way that I think in order to create the changes that I want. I learned that I am capable of thinking big thoughts and taking big chances.

I broke my streak at 48 yesterday. I have already lost the September Challenge. I have to start my quest to 100 days from the first step again. But I'm finally ok with that. This morning, I came back from my run and started my words.

the best place to start when you're struggling is anywhere at all

Today was a good day.

I've been working on a big design project for just under one full year. It's a two-part project with a lot of visibility in the company, and involves a change from our current paradigm that falls outside of our "core competence." For the past year, we've gone back and forth on designs and iterations, on concepts and user needs, on market segmentation. The topics are always interesting, and the insight is always good, but month after month, the song remained the same. It was starting to remind me of the Einstein quote about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

We were struggling.

just get the ball rolling. (photo courtesy of... )

But two weeks ago, something important happened. We brought in a new industrial designer, one with a totally different paradigm on medical devices than anyone we had on our staff. Almost immediately, he started on one piece of our design problem, and had a working concept in four days.

For anyone that works in design or manufacturing, four days is not a long time. Four days in the entire development lifecycle is a blink of an eye. It takes months, and sometimes years, to take a new product from idea to shelves. For medical devices, time to market is typically even further exaggerated, with regulatory requirements, clinical trials, and extensive documentation standing in the way. It's not uncommon for an implant or heart valve to take more than eight years of development time before seeing commercial use. For a kinesthetic person, it takes an enormous amount of discipline to work on something for that long without seeing the physical output.

The best part, though, was not that we had a design in front of us that met our design criteria, or that changed the way users interacted with IV lines. We had a design that gave us momentum. We got moving on part one of that two part design. And today, that spilled over into part two. I had been searching for a new material since February. I had drowned myself in the research, looked at material properties, made tables of peel / shear / tack values. I had tested for moisture vapor transmission rate and looked at every vendor this side of the Mississippi. But late last week, after seeing Howard's excitement and new designs, I got excited. I picked one. Today, the material arrived, and it works wonderfully. The excitement is contagious. Howard's designs get better with my excitement, and my designs get better with his input.

Momentum is a funny thing. When you get stuck in the inertia of the day-to-day, it's hard to visualize the end of the road (especially when the end of the road is 18 months down the line for a medical device to launch). But as a new friend of mine told me a few weeks ago, the important thing when you're dreaming up something new is not to come up with one really good idea; it's to come up with lots of ideas, period. Ideas lead to more ideas, and more ideas lead to action. And that's all you need to get the ball rolling.

live the questions now

"I beg you, to have patience, with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even realizing it, live your way into the answer."  - Rainer Maria Rilke

Twelve stressful (but fun!) weeks later, life has demanded that today I ask the right questions and try and live my way into the right answer. It's the hardest design challenge I've been faced with yet.

mindfulness comes from exploring your white space

I am terrible at yoga. Not so much the poses - I’m bad at coordinated breathing. I’m bad at sitting still. And most of all, I’m bad at not thinking about how bad I am at coordinated breathing and sitting still (maybe I'm not white enough?).

(personal image, please do not reproduce without permission)

I’ve always been a restless person (unless there was food involved… see childhood photo, in which my parents bribed me with food to stand still and look at the camera). My DISC profile shows that I’m a strong I and a moderate C, making me an anal-retentive people person who has trouble sitting still. Every week in class, I struggle with my inability to be mindful in downward dog.

Ironically, I find that peace and clarity in busy places. I love busy coffee shops and nice days at the park. I’m at my most creative and aware when I’m around other people, when I’m engaged in conversation, when I’m replying to blog comments and having four gchat conversations. To me, yoga class is full of mental chatter, but real conversations bring clarity. Real conversations inspire me to create, to fill the white space within myself. And the most interesting places are the empty spaces – they are what changes. But real conversations are hard work - you have to be willing to open up and explore your own thoughts, and listen to those of someone else. You have to think about contributing meaningful content, about asking good questions, and sometimes, about admitting you're wrong.

I’d rather drag myself to yoga week in and week out, hoping that one day I’ll find the self-awareness and mindfulness that my instructors talk about. And every week, I find myself thinking too hard about timing the rhythm of my breath with my ustrasana, or find myself trying to mentally correct the instructor’s Sanskrit pronunciation. What I really need to be doing to recharge is to spend my Sunday morning at Octane, reading a book and writing an article and having a conversation on the nuances of apologizing for drunken behavior in ancient Chinese culture (tip: Allen). And I know it. I’m just not at peace with that yet. Because it's easier to go to yoga and listen to someone else tell me how to find my inner being.

We all do that - we know, on some level, who we are. People have always been fascinated with finding out more about themselves, be it through art, meditation, or personality profiles. But the more important thing for us to explore is not quite who we are - it's finding and shaping who we can become. It's our white space. And by pursuing endeavors that bring out that white space, we become more mindful. And finding that white space is hard work.