Week 9
Retrocausality, taking design thinking workshops and reflecting on my involvement with the process, making a shape generator with math and a repository of algorithms.
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[Cool Stuff] Retrocausality and Feeling The Future by Daryl Bem
In an extremely well-written article by Adam Mastroianni (one of my favourite writers on Substack), he introduces the research of a man called Daryl J. Bem. Daryl was a psychologist and professor at Cornell University. He published a fascinating set of experiments in his paper: Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect.
These experiments primarily test the idea of ‘retrocausality’, a concept in which the future affects the past and the present. Essentially, Daryl’s work in the area was trying to prove that knowledge from the future could effectively impact your present.
In one of the studies, participants were individually shown a computer screen with two curtains; one on the left and one on the right. Behind one of the curtains was an image.
In one set of participants, Bem showed non-erotic photographs. The chances of a participant picking the curtain with this image behind it were 50% (2 options, participant has to pick one); which is exactly what Bem found in his research: 49.8%.
However, in the other set of participants, Bem put explicitly erotic photographs behind one curtain and found that participants could pick the curtain with a photograph behind it 53% of the time; i.e, better than chance.
An even better experiment was his retroactive facilitation of the recall experiment. Here, he showed participants a set of 48 words (each from one of four categories: Food, Animals, Occupations and Clothing) and they had to visualise each word, as they saw it.
Then, the participants were subject to a surprise recall task where they had to recall as many words as they could. Then, the participants were subject to a categorisation test: they were shown 24 of the original list of 48 words that they then had to categorise according to the buckets listed above (food, animals, occupations and clothing).
His research found that the words that were going to appear for the categorisation task had a higher chance of being recalled in the surprise recall task; thereby suggesting some sort of retroactive facilitation of recall or that information of the future was somehow affecting the information of the present.
Although the methodology used in the experiments is highly debatable, I think it was rather fascinating to see how wacky people can get with hypotheses for the irrational functioning of the real world. And sometimes, even prove it with data that the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology was compelled to publish.
In case you’re interested in learning more, you can view the original paper or watch Dr Hatala’s YouTube video that breaks down the complex paper in 10 minutes.
[Experiences] Workshopping and How Ingraining the Design Process Helped Me
This past week, I co-facilitated a Design Thinking workshop for HERE technologies, a direct competitor of Google Maps.
During the workshop, there never came a moment where I’d hesitate to give an answer or provide directions for the teams to progress through their challenge. It felt as if the process was the but-natural way to go and I never had to internally deliberate.
Later, I was told by Mandeep (the person who led this workshop) that this isn’t usually the case. New facilitators are often underconfident while providing instructions and usually discuss each thought with the lead workshop facilitator, but I didn’t ever feel the need to. It came naturally and I was appreciated for the same.
As I sat down to reflect on this, I realised how ingrained the design process has become for me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean that the EDIPT design thinking process is my rote-learned process to apply to every problem but the fact that steps/qualities/things to be aware of within each step feels so natural.
Research, observation, clustering, rapid prototyping, testing, talking, feeling, understanding, attempting to understand … all of these are so natural; they feel so logical.
Last evening, I sat down with a couple of my juniors who needed some help with their UX projects. They were struggling. Their main problems were - “we can’t figure out what framework to use” or “what do we do”.
It is then that I realised that if tools are taught as duplicatable frameworks/templates, they will never be understood at the conceptual level. Students will never be able to extrapolate the concepts needed in order to adapt to a particular problem.
All that these ‘tools’ become then are restricting items of baggage that students are bound by, for the rest of their ‘creative’ lives.
Design, at its core, is simple and comes naturally to problem solvers. Go out there and solve a problem, without worrying about whether or not you’re fulfilling the requirements of an academic checklist.
[Experiments] Mapping Points In A Circle Using Polar to Cartesian Coordinate Conversion To Make A Shape Generator
This past week, I’ve been messing around with the idea of converting cartesian coordinates to polar coordinates in order to map points to the circumference of a circle.
The way to do this took me some time to figure out. Essentially, you find the x coordinate by taking the radius and multiplying it with the sin of theta [r*sin(a)] and the same for the y coordinate is r*cos(a). This results in an x and y coordinate on the polar coordinate system.
[Cool Projects] Nightdrive Javascript Simulation by James Stanley
James programmed a ‘nightdrive’ simulation on JavaScript. You can view it here. I found this project on HackerNews.
What’s cool about this is how simple it is. The entire simulation essentially involves circles moving with a certain velocity. You can find the code here.
[Resources] Play - Prototype iOS tools
A cool platform to prototype applications for iOS on an iOS device. It also helps you design with native elements such as the Apple input text field, live maps and elements from the Human Interface Design System.
[Resources] Algorithms Repository - The Next Web
Recently, I’ve started getting more and more interested in algorithms. Also been reading this book titled Algorithms To Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths.
The Next Web, a website that focuses on new technology and start-up companies in Europe, actually has a dedicated section for algorithms, which is a very cool resource for anyone wanting to geek out on some algorithms.