Week 10
The end of September, changing personalities to adapt to situations, Dylan's 2013 Figma pitch, functional fixedness, latin alphabet relationships and Ali leaving.
[Learnings] [Self Realisations] Context-Driven Personality Shifts
This past Friday, the TinkerLabs team had a workshop with Karishma Chhabria. Although I have strong opposing opinions about some of the things that she advocated for, it was undoubtedly an interesting and reflective experience.
One of the things she talked about (a facet of the Transactional Analysis Theory) was the concept of ego states, based on the Transactional Analysis theory by Eric Berne. Simply put, the theory says that when we indulge in social interaction (transaction as it involves giving and taking), we operate out of one of three ego states: Parent (controlling/nurturing), Adult (rational and assertive) and Child-Like (fun-loving, rebel and obedient).
If I take my own life, for example, I know that I tend to act like a nurturing parent amongst juniors or peers who look up to me. Even in my relationships. Around adults, I tend to act like a child (all three sub-types, depending on the context). Very rarely does the adult ego-state kick in and, often, it happens only when serious situations kick in.
As the juniormost person in my organisation, I realised that I came off as a child-like personality far too often and this seeps into the professional realm. People forget that you can and do shift personalities once work begins. Oftentimes, I’ve also resorted to a rebellious child-like mindset when my points aren’t taken seriously (although that is a rare scenario).
During the workshop, I realised that we must have a strong recognition of time & space. Certain situations require you to operate out of a certain ego state and, in difficult situations, it’s hard to maintain this rationality.
Maybe this is what it means to operate out of an adult ego state: to shift, to flow in-between personalities; to adapt, as the situation demands.
[Cool Stuff on the Internet] Dylan Field’s Figma Pitch Zoom Call from 2013
I think this is one of the coolest things I’ve seen on the internet in recent times.
The design industry is torn between the strong opinions for & against the Figma acquisition by Adobe. Little do people know that Dylan was 20 years old when he started Figma, received the Thiel Fellowship to drop out of Brown University and that Figma was a photo manipulation software over WebGL back in the day.
The pitch above is a 21-year-old Dylan pitching, essentially, creative coding experiments to manipulate images over WebGL to an American investor: Daniel Gross. I was thoroughly amazed.
This is very close to what I’ve been doing as well. Experimenting with building things, type generators, and graphic generators to produce outputs, that would otherwise be hard to spit out by a human. Although I may not have the entrepreneurial bug that Dylan did, or the solid direction he had, or even his technical expertise, I was just amazed to see how Daniel was amazed at these experiments and the no-bullshit-real-time working presentation that Dylan made.
Someday, hopefully, I can do this with my work as well.
[Discussion] The Candle Problem, Functional Fixedness and Becoming Tool Agnostic.
Imagine that you’re presented with a task: take the objects in the image below and attempt to fix & light the candle on the wall (or cork board) so that the candle wax doesn’t drip below.
This is known as the Candle Problem by Karl Duncker (a Gestalt psychologist). This simple test was given to various kinds of people, including MBA students. It was observed that people explored creative but less efficient methods such as tacking the candle to the wall or melting the candle wax to use it as an adhesive.
The most optimal solution, however, was to empty the box of thumbtacks, use the thumbtacks to nail the box to the wall, put the candle inside the box and then light it with the match; making the box a wax-holder.
This cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used, i.e regarding the box of tacks as the box only for tacks, is called Functional Fixedness. Researchers also found that this bias develops and strengthens as people age.
Recently, at work, I used a tool for a particular task. The tool isn’t necessarily meant for that task but I understood how it would be of value due to certain aspects of the task at hand. One of my co-workers was amazed. She exclaimed, “Wow, you’re using this for this?”.
It is then that I realised how comfortable we’ve gotten to using tools the way their usage is advertised. Where has the flexibility to evaluate features and choose the best tool for the job gone?
[Resources] UX Lex - A Glossary of UX Research Terms
This is a cool resource sent to me by Michele Ronsen. It contains a glossary of all the acronyms that the UX industry uses, in case you want to spruce up your vocabulary before that all important project pitch.
[Learnings] Latin Alphabet Relationships
I’ve recently started reading up on the relationships between letters of the alphabet to further my n=4 experiment.
Found a fantastic article on the same published by the Open Educational Resources for Typography. Here are my notes on the same:
[Reflections] The Intensity of September
September has been an incredibly intense, fruitful and somewhat chaotic month. I learnt so much this month and a lot of things started to connect to one another, as shown in my Obsidian map below.
Days have started to look packed, with me scurrying around to try and achieve a balance between work, personal projects, learning and life. I’ve started to account for everything by including it in my task list as ‘tickets’. These include mundane tasks such as replying to someone on WhatsApp as well. If I don’t account time for it, it rarely gets done.
[Personal] Ali Leaving.
Ali’s internship ended and she left Mumbai today.
It’s been such a wonderful time living with her. I didn’t know that I was capable of living with someone, without springing into a fight half the time. I’d become so used to living alone, eating alone, cooking alone, managing the house alone.
When Alina decided to move in, I was skeptical and scared of things going south. However, I have to admit that it was quite a lovely time to be able to live with her. I’ve grown and learnt how to be more accomodative and live with other people, what it means to nurture a relationship and how work may not be the single most important thing in one’s life.
So long, kid. See you on the other side.