Week 76
2024, neuroplasticity, a collection of advertising annuals & brand guides, an ideation technique for rigid people, knitted patterns and a structure for reflection.
This was the first week of 2024. I went into the new year with a bunch of questions, hypotheses, experiments and a mess of words that I couldn’t synthesise.
As the week progressed, I finally arrived at what I want 2024 to revolve around – learning. By the end of January, I shall know the outcome of my pursuit of a graduate education at the MIT Media Lab. However, shall it not happen (most likely scenario), I will have to pivot my life towards self-directed learning.
Most of this week has been spent in this thought – how do I best structure my life around intentional learning? I don’t yet have an answer, and maybe that’s saved for a later week.
Don’t let your education be limited to schooling.
- A powerful line I heard in a talk, while doing research at work.
[Topics] Neuroplasticity & tricks to learn faster
In an attempt to find out how humans learn, I stumbled upon the concept of neuroplasticity. Essentially a simple concept – neural pathways adapt to context, strengthening certain pathways that are more often used than others, moving towards that action turning into muscle memory.
I also saw a TEDx talk that discussed ‘secrets’ to learning faster – attention, alertness, sleep, repetition, breaks and mistakes. Nothing groundbreaking here yet except for the feeble thought that focused practice may be a way for me to learn faster.
[Resources] Advertising annuals
Found this publicly shared Google Drive on LinkedIn, where the author has uploaded scans of old & new advertising annuals.
[Experiments] Bringing ideas out from rigid people
This week, I was also conducting design thinking workshops at IIM Indore for ~160 MBA students for work.
Over the past year, I’ve found MBA students to be a well-suited testing group for ideation methods, with the central question behind my experiments being – how can I allow rigid students to atleast put down their wacky ideas on paper, in a 40 minute time-frame? After a year, I’ve finally made some headway.
This time I tried a method that I coined the “Train of Thought”.
The method is simple. In a demonstration, I write a generic problem statement in the center of a whiteboard and allow the class to shout out ideas. Each new idea becomes a node and each development on a node (by asking how) becomes a branch. In the demo, I keep going until there is laughter in the classroom. This means that people have said wacky ideas.
After this explanation, I use my leverage as the authority in the classroom and tell each team to come up with atleast 12 nodes with 3 branches each (meaning 36 ideas) in 7 minutes. Most teams end up with 20-35 new ideas.
However, this idea will only work if I can leverage my position as an evaluator who is going to grade the work of the group. I still need to find out what I can do in corporate settings, where there is no grade to induce fear.
[Resources] Brand guides
Found an online archive of brand guides from around the world.
[Experiments] Knitted patterns
Wondered about a sine-wave passing through a grid of ellipses (an idea I had in Visakhapatnam during Week 73 & 74) and ended up making a pattern generator that would produce nice outputs for knitted garments.
[Frameworks] A Little Less Of, A Little More Of
Read this article by The Brand Identity on five designers sharing their goals for work and life in 2024.
Found the framework to be powerful for facilitating consistent reflection in academic settings – what can I can do more / less of?
I wondered whether I could use it for myself in 2024 but couldn’t get myself to. I think I also enjoy the fact that some of my learning is tacit, even though I’ve managed to structure a huge chunk of it.
The advantage of unstructured learning is that it can take you to unexpected places, which I’ve found to be very beneficial in my work. I think my goal for 2024 is to find a balance between structured & unstructured learning (primarily through doing).
I’ll find something – 2024 excites me :)
I find that learning outside of institutional spaces is fullfilling but also difficult to balance with full-time work. I wonder how it'll evolve as our full-time spaces demand more of us in the next few years. I also feel like this time before we take on more responsibilities is precious, we might never be able to do as much we are doing right now in just two or three years.