Week 31
Dealing with sickness, borrowing ideas, design researchers as conversationalists, love as a choice, appreciative inquiry, fulfilling adult loneliness & finding comfort in discomfort.
Thoughts.
So. Many. Thoughts.
This whole week was filled with conversations with a wide assortment of people, on a wide array of subjects. My brain has hit a processing limit today and all I wish to do is lie down on my bed & watch a crappy show on Netflix.
Here are some absolute wonders from this week:
[Thoughts] Can you view sickness as just another mountain to overcome?
I’ve been sick, on & off, for the past 7 months. It has been a wildly frustrating experience for me, especially since I have never been the kind of person who falls sick often.
I was extremely disappointed with the sickness when it came again this week. Turns out I’ve had a persistent bacterial infection but that is not what is of prime concern to me. What being sick does is that it annihilates a meticulously planned future. I remember imagining in December where I’d be by the time February ends and, two days before the end of the month, I’ve made no progress this month. This mismatching of expectations and reality had me bummed for a while until I thought of changing perspectives about it.
What if being sick could just be seen as another challenge that you have to overcome in your life? I, for sure, have overcome a bunch of practical challenges but somehow when I fall sick, I cannot get myself to do anything. Of course, remaining motivated and actually putting in the work when you’re sick is tremendously difficult. But what if it could be done?
What if I could think about persistent sickness as just another barrier that I have to deal with, time & time again?
If I can achieve this, it would ensure that I make at least some amount of progress in the direction that I want to go in without stopping momentum every 2 weeks. I don’t have a plan right now, just a nascent, difficult dream that I vie to achieve.
[Thoughts] Can you use a divergent-convergent approach to generate ideas?
I had an interesting conversation with Pratyush the other day about how abstract it is to ask someone to borrow ideas from the world. Both of us were facilitating a design-thinking workshop at IIM Indore this week and it struck us then, as we were conducting the ideation stage.
Somehow, I couldn’t let the thought go and scribbled a loose framework in my diary on the way to the airport.
The problem with saying borrow ideas, as a prompt, is that you first need to think of what to borrow before you borrow it. This means that you will first think of multiple possibilities where you’ve seen something happen, choose between good & bad experiences (you’re analysing at this point), figure out what actually worked in that good experience and then attempt to list this down on paper. This is actually a very intense process, combining multiple steps and merging two very different methods of thinking which makes it an inefficient ideation process.
I’ve been wondering whether this could be broken down into a mini divergent-convergent approach. Step 1 - List the desired behaviour(s). Step 2 - diverge to list the places where you’ve seen it happen successfully. Step 3 - Critically examine what about it works. Step 4 - Cluster / combine into a single idea or 2-3 ideas.
I think I’m going to try it at work once and see how it turns out.
[Experiences] [Thoughts] Do design researchers make for good conversationalists?
I was having a wonderful conversation with someone this week and in the middle of the conversation, I wondered what was making this conversation so wonderful. This person said something and my immediate response was, “why”. It hit me then.
As design researchers, we are constantly trying to get to the bottom of things. It’s our job. For someone who needs to do this with every conversation, I think that this instinct must also seep into their personal lives. I want to know why something is happening, or why someone is feeling a particular way when they are doing something. When I ask these whys, I am almost always getting more information out of them than someone who doesn’t probe might be able to (unless the speaker is extremely comfortable and self-aware).
Can this hypothesis be true? Are design researchers better conversationalists? Or at least have the potential to be, in certain scenarios?
[Conversations] Love is a choice
I have intrigued with the idea of arriving at a reasonable definition of ‘love’ for a while now. I even conducted an informal discussion-event to co-create meaning of the word during my time at Science Gallery Bengaluru. We collectively decided then that it was too situational and that no one definition could do justice to it.
Well, I’ve had some interesting conversations on the subject this year and finally one statement has resonated with me. Love (in the sense of being with someone) is a choice.
You can like a million people on the planet and you may even like them more over the course of time but you still choose to love someone, despite all of that. Let’s face it, we’re never going to be able to meet all the 8 billion people in the world and decide who the best fit is. If you like someone or if you are with someone, you choose to love them every single day and I think that is quite beautiful in itself.
I can’t believe I didn’t see this earlier. How immature of me.
[Learnings] Appreciative Inquiry
For a new project that I’m working on at TinkerLabs, I was introduced to a new method of inquiry: Appreciative Inquiry.
This is essentially a subset of a larger bucket of research methods which are called strength-based approaches. They look at research in a rather fresh manner.
While most design research methods focus on the left side of the spectrum, i.e what is not working, appreciative inquiry focuses on the polar opposite: what is working. The belief is quite simple, which is to identify the positive core of a system, things that are leading to positive outcomes and then amplify them.
Here’s a short talk by David Cooperrider, the guy who originally proposed the idea, in case you’d want to get into the nittie-gritties of it.
I found the method rather amusing at first but later realised the merits of it. I’m interested in seeing how the outcomes differ (when compared against a more traditional problem-identifying approach) and whether anything useful can even come out of this method.
[Meanderings] The fulfilment in the loneliness of an adult life
I had this thought while peeing at 3 am.
I have a small window in my bathroom from where I can usually see what’s going on outside. While peeing, I saw that all the lights around my house were shut off. My house was a Christmas tree at that point.
I wondered how strange it is; how strange that I am awake at this ungodly hour while someone besides me is peacefully asleep. Tomorrow morning, we will both head to the office at the same time and continue our work. There will be hundreds more, performing similar tasks to each other. Everyone working. And I will be one of them.
No one in this apartment building knows me and no one really cares. It’s a very Bombay-thing, where you can feel incredibly alone amidst one of the most densely populated cities in the world. You are so forgettable. For example, I may not show up tomorrow and nobody would care. Life would go on; unlike, say college for example, where people would ask questions or bother to drag you out of bed and speak a bunch of motivational stuff to you.
I find this invisibility so peaceful. I could be in love with the work I do for myself and do it in my own sweet time at night without worrying if anyone would ever see it; because, hey, I’m invisible. No pressure. Just love.
What a confusing feeling. I wish I can express this better someday. I’m actually laughing at myself, mildly amused at my inarticulate self.
[Reading] Can you be comfortable in discomfort?
Read Edith Sampson’s wonderful commencement speech and found these lines very meaningful:
Hang loose, but stay vibrantly alive.
Consider today's graduation no more than a pause to catch your breath before continuing the life-long job of education.
But those who make choice five are never fully comfortable.
They are nagged at by their realisation that they could be wrong.
They're prodded by their recognition that they've still so much more to learn and even more than that to understand. They're made restless by their knowledge that no matter how much they do, there's still ever so much more left to be done.
I feel point 3 every waking second of my life. It has almost been a year since I graduated and I don’t even feel like I’ve scratched the surface. She rightly said, people who make this choice are never fully comfortable. How often I’ve looked at people around me and wondered why they were so comfortable; why “not knowing” was not enough for them to remain paralysed in bed, desperate for some hours of rest before the same ordeal of curiosity the next morning. More than their lack of drive, I was agitated by their comfort. I always wondered why I couldn’t feel like that and even remember whining about it to some people.
Maybe that’s the choice that I took for myself and no one is wrong in their own way. I am, and always have been, a person who made that choice; someone destined for discomfort. And maybe, just maybe, I might be able to find some comfort in the discomfort.
A long way to go and I wish to take each step with absolute wonder.