Week 42
Brain overdrive, purpose in creative work, tracing back the inspiration for an experiment, loss aversion for better schooling performance, article structures as functions and website updates.
Whwbjksabiadad.
What an overdrive week.
Have you ever been occupied with thinking, as you’re sleeping? This rather new phenomenon has begun to seep into my life. I first experienced it during my undergraduate thesis, when my game broke the day before its proposed launch and I decided to give up & sleep. But I couldn’t.
I tossed and turned in bed, with thoughts racing inside my head even though I had barely slept the week before. Although the solution came to me in my half-asleep state, (more on that here), I remember the feeling of wanting to sleep but my brain saying a resounding ‘no’.
I had never experienced restless sleep before that day, at least not that intense. I’ve experienced it a couple of more times after that and now the frequency, here in Mumbai, has just been rising.
Yesterday night, for example, I decided to stop working on something at 2 am and call it a night. I woke up at 6 am the next morning. However, between 2-6, despite my tiredness, I could barely sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I had new thoughts about an idea at work and a new plan for two experiments that I want to run. I woke up because I wanted my head to stop racing. I could feel it, like a vortex that you’re speeding through, and the sides of your head begin to hurt as if it’ll explode soon. I was tired of thinking. I couldn’t sleep after that.
Such has been the theme of this week, which turned out to be a decent one productively. I just wish I could sleep more peacefully.
[Thoughts] [Conversations] [Reading] Why are we so hell-bent on purpose?
I have been reading Graphic Design Theory - Readings From The Field by Helen Armstrong. Fantastic read till now; although a tad bit heavy to cover in a short span of time.
As I read this, I was getting out of the local train at Andheri station (here in Mumbai). When you climb up the stairs and move towards the East side, you are greeted with an enormously large portrait of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam that some corporate company has graciously commissioned as part of a CSR initiative.
Before I started reading this book, I had always been rather appalled by this portrait. So much money must have gone into making this purposeless portrait, money that could have been put to good use elsewhere.
However, when I walked by this time, I paused to look at it and smiled. What is this constant functional-fetish that the creative people of today live in? Who the heck decided that creative work must arise from purposeful intention?
Even if we assume that everything meaningful must serve a purpose in the world for it to be meaningful, this portrait of Kalam is indeed meeting that criterion. Imagine a perfectly functional world, where everything works like it is supposed to. How boring, how white. What about the visual culture, the subjectivity to spark a difference in opinion and the space for people to be themselves without having to serve a purpose for everything they make?
The portrait of Kalam does serve a purpose, albeit probably not a functional one like us designers expect. For example, the style of the portrait is a commentary on the visual preferences of the people of Mumbai during this time period. It is a part of how Mumbai looks as well, a part of the identity of the Andheri station.
It may be messy, it may be plain, it may be simple … but what’s the problem in that?
When I discussed this with Sakina, I realised how averse I have become to the desire of gaining absolutes in this world. I am so happy with this; I would much rather be fluid than function in a self-righteous box.
[Experiments] [Thoughts] Inspiration and subsequent experimentation
I made this in the past week:
It is essentially leveraging a new way to obtain coordinates of a letterform that I came across during my audio-reactive letter experiment with Navya. This time, I used an array for the string of words (“I wasn’t meant to be contained”, “But you tried anyway”). The array value shifts with a mouse-press and the algorithm (to get coordinates within each letterform) runs again.
What is also interesting about the process of making this is the inspiration leading up to this idea. Here are all the thoughts that I merged into this single outcome:
Conversation with Sakina about putting people into boxes and how she hated & still hates it.
Conversation with co-workers about structure & creativity – how much structure is okay in creative work before it becomes too restricting?
Own feelings about being boxed in work.
[Reading] Loss Aversion for Better Schooling Performance
Was doing research for a project at work and stumbled upon an interesting paper, titled: The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance (Levitt. S. et.al, 2016). The paper presents the findings of experiments conducted with primary & secondary school students to see if behavioural economic principles could be leveraged to improve educational performance. One interesting finding from this paper was:
Incentives framed as losses appear to outperform those framed as gains: Students were given some monetary amount at the beginning of the test which would then be taken away had they not improved on the test. This led to a marginal increase in test scores, leveraging the popular principle of loss aversion.
[Thoughts] [Articles] Article Structures As Functions
Read an article on Functional Documentation by Heydon, which wasn’t what I thought it was. I expected it to be an article about using functions (a concept in programming) to write better. Instead, it was about documenting or writing about functions. Misleading title. Anyway, I abstracted the following thought from the article:
Each paragraph on the website can be thought of as a function. For example, establishContext() … that entire paragraph should result in establishing context. This was something that Karthik had also talked about in his writing workshop during the Xperimenters programme.
Begin the article by writing a line about each intended paragraph. Expand on that line in the paragraph.
This could be a good framework for me to write case studies on my new website. Conscientous writing.
[Website] Website Updates
I ended up writing my first case study on the WIP website. I documented a small experiment that I had done, complete with the underlying thought and an interactive sketch window.
I am happy with how things are looking right now. While writing, I realised that I massively underestimated the writing time that it will take me. Hopefully, my years of writing blog posts will help produce crisp writing in short spans of time.
Excited to reach the end of this journey.