Week 40
How much of life is really unique, accepting design, AI interns, an Arabic design archive, tiny sci-fi stories, portfolio progress and a poem.
A rather normal week. I am glad that things have fallen back into place and a routine has set in. Sometimes, I find peace in mundanity. I wonder whether this is the death of spontaneity or my attempt to balance the two.
Either way, I have also managed to stick to the 36 Days of Type challenge. Today, I completed Day 21 / 36 and I’m quite proud of being able to do that (after two years of unsuccessful attempts).
Anyway, here are my learnings from this week:
[Thoughts] [Conversations] Am I A Victim of the False Uniqueness Bias?
I was first faced with this idea as a 19-year-old while returning from a climbing trip in someone else’s car. The two of us had been talking about just how much of a difference lies in human experience among different individuals. At the time, I strongly believed that individuals were vastly different and, therefore, no two human experiences could even be compared to be similar. The other person, however, was about 13 years older than me and believed that everyone was practically the same and went through the exact same experiences.
As I grow up to observe the world around me, I find myself confused. If I look at all of my extremely intense experiences, someone else has also worded an experience of similar intensity. For example, you may be with someone and think that your love for them is one of a kind, completely unique. But then, you look at, say, Sylvia Plath’s poetry for Ted Hughes or Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise trilogy and suddenly you realise that other people have felt similarly too.
How much of the human experience is truly unique to us? Due to the wide array of variables that add up to a human being, we believe that things happening to us are special; unique in some way.
But are they, truly? It feels like everything has been felt before, somewhere by someone else. Someone has been through the same situation, somewhere, somehow. Someone has thought the exact same thought as you, somewhere, somehow.
Snyder and Shneckel (in 1975) coined the term: “illusion of uniqueness”, which later found its way into social psychology as a cognitive bias called the “false-uniqueness effect”; something that I came across at work the other day. It basically states that people tend to view their qualities, traits, and personal attributes as unique when in reality they are not. Maybe it expands to everything, even experiences & feelings. Nothing is really unique.
I don’t know whether knowing that all of my life has been felt or experienced before my existence should bore me or comfort me.
[Articles] Accepting Design – by Caio Braga, Fabricio Teixeira for DOC
This was a rather interesting read this week. It presented someone else’s answers to questions that I myself had been pondering about. Here are some excerpts from the article that I liked/found interesting:
“Aim to meaningfully change one person’s life versus creating a suboptimal product that tries to serve every human on Earth.”
“Impact is impact – at any scale.”
“Finding joy in our craft.”
“Think about that feeling when the perfect color or font combination just feels right ... Discovering a new trick that will make our workflow more efficient. Collaborating with other designers, feeling inspired by their creativity. Finding inspiration from other places and industries and incorporating those references into our work.”
“Are we able to enjoy our process as much as the outcome of our work?”
“At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days. We attract a different type of person — a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe.”
I think it’s a rather bravely written article. My personal views on all of it are still undercooked and I’m going to hold off writing about them, for now.
[Articles] The World’s First AI Interns
This was another interesting article that I came across this week.
Codeword, a content & PR agency that works with tech brands, had decided to welcome two AI interns at the beginning of January this year. Interestingly, they gave both interns different personalities and culled out distinct roles for both of them at the agency.
As they mentioned in the article, Aiko (the first AI intern) will work with the design team, doing “typical visual design intern tasks” whereas Aiden will work with content.
What I enjoyed about this project was how they were looking at the inclusion of technology, not as a distinctly different relationship but as a symbiotic one. They’ve explained this well in their article:
What’s common to all of these visions is something we call the “sandwich” workflow. This is a three-step process. First, a human has a creative impulse, and gives the AI a prompt. The AI then generates a menu of options. The human then chooses an option, edits it, and adds any touches they like.
The sandwich workflow is very different from how people are used to working.
They have a bunch of answers to expected questions in their article, even on whether the AI “interns” are going to be paid or not. They’ve published a few updates since January but I’m still to get around to them. Sounds like a rather interesting experiment and I can’t wait to see what they have reported back with.
[Cool Projects] Arab Design Archive
Found this cool online archive that aims to document Arabic graphic design.
[Cool Projects] Tiny Sci-Fi Stories and Everyday Projects
Found a cool everyday project by someone called smllwrlds on Twitter. I don’t quite know the background for the project but it seems like a short sci-fi story presented on a poster.
I feel like it’s a bot, automatically generating this content every day, but I could be wrong. Either way, looks pretty cool. I’m getting very interested in this idea of an everyday project, although I don’t know if I’m at the point in my life to be able to stick to a particular theme for an entire year.
[Work] Portfolio Progress
In the past few weeks, I have been able to make steady progress with the development of my portfolio.
What I have understood slowly is that I must give this project time every single day. I can’t wait around for days when I will have a bucketload of time, as my current life doesn’t allow that possibility. Every day is about getting a little bit ahead, even if that means making a button on the website.
Something is better than nothing, I guess.
[Poems] Places With Terrible WiFi
Read this poem in Jyotsna’s newsletter last week. Found the simplicity rather appealing. The words are carefully written and placed as well.
very excited to see this portfolio!! <3