Week 75
Reflection, wondering why I lose to strong personalities, random beziers for a 2024 aphorism, Estuary, god as a justification machine, apartment complexes as inspiration and Disney creative strategy.
I didn’t particularly feel like writing this one but it was the only unchecked item on my weekend to-do-list.
This week felt like a week from my past, with some amount of balance between different things – I worked, I made, I read, I cooked, I taught, I worked out and I spent time with other people. It feels good to not have one thing consume your days.
Monday was also Christmas – a night I spent under candlelight, eating red mushroom pasta and watching a Hugh Grant movie.
[Experience, Reading & Thoughts] On reflection
This past week was an interesting week for me with regards to the topic of ‘reflection’. In a work meeting, I tried to pitch facilitated-reflection as a means to provide closure for a workshop that we were designing. The idea was met with strong disagreement, primarily on the grounds that reflection is ‘boring’.
What was interesting to me was that I was surrounded by strong, but tacitly reflective personalities in the room who have grown to believe that thinking about a learning experience and deriving usable concepts from it is simply too obvious. I started to explore this premise myself as well – if it’s so obvious, why do I try to push facilitated-reflection so much?
The first piece of reading that I did was on the Zone of Proximal Development which largely states that there are things that a learner can achieve, but only with support & encouragement from someone well trained in it. This is the same for reflection as well – of course one can do it by themselves, but there are certain zones that you can only reach with a trained facilitator.
That provided enough academic justification for why we should try and include facilitated-reflection in a learning experience. The next question was how. I wanted to look at an array of methods and stumbled upon The University of Edinburgh’s Reflector’s Toolkit.
While they discuss a bunch of tools to use in different settings, I especially liked the one where they discuss reflecting with others. I found the following to be a powerful change that I can make while giving feedback to someone’s work –
It is important to note that there are many types of conversations with other people that are productive, valuable, and important, but not necessarily reflective. For example, being given feedback is both productive, valuable, and important but if it is not paired with asking yourself how you can use the feedback, what it means for your practice, and how and why you do things, it is not a reflective conversation.
(Source)
I do believe that in a short learning experience, it might be difficult to make everyone see the value of a reflective exercise. However, it can work well if some people in the larger group (particularly those who are extremely concerned about their learning) arrive at an interesting takeaway, either about their own or group’s work. A spark is enough to light a fire.
[Experiences & Thoughts] Losing to strong personalities in professional disagreements
This week, I had three passionate disagreements with people at work. All three of them were extremely strong personalities with passionate views.
I’ve realised that, often, I tend to avoid conflict. If there is someone older than me who tries to push their own viewpoints while disagreeing with mine, I’ve started to simply succumb to them. I think there are three reasons for this – one being that I lack conviction & experience to present my own points, two that I am afraid of public & personal defeat and three that I give up way too easily for things that I morally can afford to.
I’ve noticed people around me use interesting tactics to push their personal agendas in a room full of disagreement. One is to say you do your way, I’ll do mine and we’ll see what works better but this often requires you to have some kind of leverage; either of time, experience or bandwidth. The other is to use an “and” approach – let’s do your way and my way, leading both parties to believe that they have equal say. I’m sure there are other ways as well, instead of using the “I’m older & more experienced” hammer. I’m on a quest to find these. Maybe this should be a separate blog – how to get your points accepted as a young professional.
Or maybe my points are just wrong? No they mostly aren’t, I follow everything up with objective reasoning. That’s my only saviour to oppose the “age” argument.
[Experiments] Random beziers
Had this thought in my head for a while now – what if we drew computer controlled bezier curves from one unique point of a letterform to another unique point of a letterform?
Made a poster using the same idea to display a possible aphorism for 2024.
[Experiments] Making music with Estuary
I’ve also become pretty interested in livecoding – how can algorithms make music & visuals for a live performance?
To explore this, I’ve been messing around with Estuary, a platform to experiment with sound, music and visuals on a web browser.
Taksh said that the piece reminded him of me as a drummer back in eight-grade. Was terrible at music then, am terrible at music now.
[Art] Apartment complexes
Was thinking about the confusing & uniform nature of apartment complexes and made two pieces. The first piece is apartments and the second piece is security gates.
[Thought] God as a justification machine
I’ve reached the point in When Breath Becomes Air where Paul Kalanithi starts to discuss religion.
The problem, however eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning – to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in.
While reading his entire paragraph on his experience with religion and the battle with scientific thought, I thought about how God is a perfectly good justification machine for all the chaos in the world. Something bad happens – it is god’s way of leading you to better paths.
I wonder if the idea of God was created to help people justify what was happening in the world, because there was no science at the time that could explain it and the same stands true even today.
[Reading] Disney Creative Strategy
I also read up on an interesting brainstorming technique – the Disney Creative Strategy.
The premise is rather simple. Teams operate in one of three zones – dreamer, realist and critic. Members start out by dreaming about a problem and try to think of many ideas without any worry. Then, they put on the realistic hat and wonder about the feasibility of the ideas. Here, some shortlisting of ideas is done. Then, teams put on the hat of a critic and evaluate + refine their ideas to make solid, concrete ideas.
This cycle is repeated until teams have good ideas to move ahead with. I might try this in my next workshop. Seems like a good way to get people to think in isolated ways.