Thinking for
a Living™

Obama Hug

Illustration by Mark Owens at Life of the Mind.

Thoughts on Context Switching

Designers like being productive. Context switching is a productivity killer.

Context switching is not multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is eating a burrito while walking down the street and thinking big all at the same time. This is possible only because walking and eating are relatively mindless tasks. It’s the mindful tasks that we have trouble with.

For designers (and knowledge workers in general) the job is all focus — focusing on one thing, then another. Let’s call this task switching.

Task switching isn’t a bad thing. How could it be? But context switching? Yes.

Context switching is changing focus between unique problem sets, each involving different circumstances and details. For the designer this means switching projects.

Computers can do this sort of switching very quickly; Command+Tab whips between worlds of complexity. Context switching for humans? Very expensive. Significant time is required to focus on a subject, recall all of the assorted details, and hold the sum in your brain.

However, once “in the zone,” work happens, hours fly by. The designer is happy.

It’s getting to this highly productive state that remains an inescapable challenge. Being inescapable, the only solution is to say: Today I’ll do this… and that’s it.

Illustration: Matt Owens

Bad Babysitter

Mikael Alacoque’s ‘Bad Babysitter’ is part of a series of sculptures that are concerned with a playfully sinister bastardization of familiar objects. The pieces have an initial feeling of innocence and irreverence but on closer inspection seem more bizarre and unsettling.

Much Broke

A succinct thought by Depression Press spotted at my daily haunt, the Reference Library.

Radio Silence

Radio Silence documents the ignored space between the Ramones and Nirvana through the words and images of the pre-Internet era where this community built on do-it-yourself ethics thrived. Authors Nathan Nedorostek and Anthony Pappalardo have cataloged private collections of unseen images, personal letters, original artwork, and various ephemera from the hardcore scene circa 1978-1993. Unseen photos lay next to hand-made t-shirts and original artwork brought to life by the words of their creators and fans. Radio Silence includes over 500 images of unseen photographs, illustrations, rare records, t-shirts, and fanzines presented in a manner that abandons the aesthetic clichés normally employed to depict the genre and lets the subject matter speak for itself.

There is an opening tonight at the Riviera Gallery in Brooklyn, New York of a show featuring original black-and-white prints from the forthcoming book, published by MTV Press. The show runs from October 4th-31st, 2008.

Making Cents

In September 2008 Sagmeister Inc. participated in Droog Event 2: Urban Play. The public art installation consisted of 250.000 eurocents placed on the floor, covering more than 300sqm on a square in Amsterdam. The coins spelled out the sentence “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better”. The piece is part of the series Things I have learned in my life so far by Stefan Sagmeister.

Did You Ever Imagine...

Ed Rondthaler on Spelling

At 103 years of age, living legend Ed Rondthaler, the founder of Photo-Lettering, Inc., former president of the American Literacy Council and author of The Dictionary of Simplified American Spelling, has a few things to say about spelling in this short clip presented by House Industries.

Security Patterns

Sometimes called safety envelopes, tinted safety envelopes or security envelopes, the interiors of these envelopes are designed to protect the information within from prying eyes. Falling victim to paperless ATM banking, internet banking, automatic withdrawals, wire transfers, Pay-Pal and email, these envelopes are disappearing from our daily mail and therefore from our visual vocabulary.

Excerpt from the Tinted Safety Envelope Research Project.