Week 38 & 39
Becoming more patient, end-of-life dreams, my 36 days of type, love as mere exposure effect and conducting my first creative coding workshop.
It is 1 am as I sit down to write this post. The past two weeks have, yet again, been a whirlwind. Opportunities flooded into my life and, as always, I said yes to more things than I could handle.
However, with that sacrifice of time & energy, I managed to experience quite a bit in a short period of time. I wonder whether this is the right way to live; to be in this mad chase perpetually.
Anyway, these are some of my top learnings from the past two weeks:
[Realisations] [Conversations] Have I become more patient?
Three weeks ago, I was mentoring a group of students at AND Academy for a design sprint. A sprint usually runs for 5 days and aims to solve a problem from start to end; ideally from research to testing a desirable solution.
Due to the fast-paced nature of the sprint process, it is natural for mentors to prompt students directly with the answers to their questions so that they can move on to the next step faster. In one of my calls with the students, I promptly understood that the answer they were seeking was fundamental to their education as designers and it would be wrong to simply provide the answer to them. This one, they needed to arrive at themselves.
As I facilitated this, prompting them with multiple questions until they saw the solution themselves, a friend sitting beside me was mildly impressed. She later mentioned how she would have given the answer directly because of the frustration I’d feel when they didn’t get it right the first time. She went on to say that she really liked how patient I was with them and that she could never do that, even though both of us take workshops on similar topics at work.
I was pleasantly surprised at her comment. I have never viewed myself as a ‘patient’ individual. On the contrary, I can easily view myself as an impatient one. All my life, I have wanted to get there as fast as possible; whether it was in work, goals, relationships, conversations or life.
Her comment had me thinking. I realised that I had grown more patient with time. I could feel it; as a listener, at work, in my relationships and with my aspirations. I believe that a huge part of this change in myself can be traced back to my role as a teacher & mentor in different places.
When you teach a group of students or mentor an individual, you already know what they are going to know in the future. However, you cannot tell them everything at once. They have to walk that road, towards an end that you can see very clearly but can’t bring closer for your mentee/student. You wait, patiently, for them to have a realisation that you saw 6 classes ago. Act with haste and they won’t absorb it, leave them all alone and they won’t take a step forward.
I am proud of who I have become in this tiny aspect of my personality. With time, I wish to be a more patient human being.
[Articles] End-of-life dreams
This past week, I read this wonderful article by Paul Lauritzen titled: End-of-Life Dreams – A hospice doctor makes sense of our final visions. The article talks about how people during the last stages of their life experience extremely vivid dreams; after which they know that their time is up. The article reads:
In his studies, Kerr found that close to 90 percent of patients report having at least one dream or vision that could be classified as an end-of-life experience. These dreams are distinguished from regular dreams by being especially vivid. When asked to rate the degree of realism of such dreams, most rate them ten out of ten—the highest degree of realism. Patients often report that they are “more real than real.” They occur both during periods of sleep and periods of wakefulness, and they are easily distinguished from hallucinations or bouts of delirium.
Apart from the theory and the research, what I especially liked about this article was how his enquiry was the result of great personal pain. He begins his article with the line, "In April 2018, my wife of thirty-eight years died from complications of ovarian cancer" and ends it with, "I also can’t help wondering whether, when the time comes, I will find myself in Lisa’s presence again”.
I hope that Paul, wherever he is, is well and happy; even with the tremendous amount of grief that he carries.
[Work] My 36 Days of Type Idea
A while back, I had come across an article on inclusive technology which had a very interesting visual language. It featured a mouse pointer in all the graphics.
What I liked about it was that they used an object that is frequently seen by all of us and treated it as a shape to generate compositions. The graphics rely on simple concepts of creating a composition (figure & ground, scale, emphasis, etc.) with a frequently seen object. With 36 days of type looming around the corner, I wanted to do just that; but with letterforms.
The world is 14 days into the challenge (currently at the letter N) and so am I. In all compositions, the letter of the day is typed out in Helvetica Normal with a black background and white text colour. Then, I try and view the letterform as a shape and create compositions with them. Here are some of them:
You can keep up with them on Instagram.
[Thoughts] Do some people love simply because of the mere exposure effect?
At work, I came across the mere exposure effect which says:
The mere exposure effect describes our tendency to develop preferences for things simply because we are familiar with them.
– The Decision Lab.
I couldn’t help but wonder whether some human relationships of ‘love’ are simply an outcome of this tendency. Maybe people express undue liking for someone simply because they’ve been with them for a long period of time. This article elaborates on the science of it a little more.
Interesting, robotic thought.
[Experiences] Conducting my first-ever creative coding workshop
This past Saturday, I was invited by SEEKH to conduct my first-ever creative coding workshop for a hundred MIT-ADT students. It was called Set Rules, Make Art: An Introduction to Algorithms As A New Creative Medium.
It went so well.
I didn’t expect it to go half as well as it eventually did. The participants were interactive, energetic, excited and remained so till the end of the 6-hour workshop. What has stayed with me was the feeling I had on the bus ride back home.
As I saw the city of Pune pass by, I felt a tear drop on my jeans. For the last 3 years, I had been messing around with computation, design & art on my laptop while seeking acceptance for a medium that the world around me originally rejected. Even though I stuck to it, I could not figure out if my ideas made sense to the world. I kept on making them, earlier as an act of rebellion and then as an obsession, which was enough to let my teachers allow me to do whatever the heck I was doing.
From a space like that, I went to a space where isolation had somehow turned into uniqueness. Everyone now wanted to do similar things, grab a bite of this cake that no one wanted to touch earlier. In all honesty, I have conducted this workshop plenty of times in my head, speaking my lines aloud even before I was at a stage where someone would invite me to actually conduct one. This idea of merging computation with design & art in the way that I do, has been my baby for 3 years now and, finally, I have started to find my tiny space in the world for it.
I wish to conduct more of these in the future.
It's so exciting to see you grow Arjun 🌱