heathervescent

Non-Visual Designer

Today was the Association of Professional Futurists (APF) montly #futrchat. I'm currently a student member (but soon to go full Pro) and I love being a part of this community of professional futurists. Earlier this year, Cindy F (@urbanverse) and Jennifer Jarratt (@jenjarratt) started hosting the #futrchats, an hour on twitter where anyone who wants, can join in on the conversation. There is topic for discussion, like the Future of Money, or Disasters or today's: The Future of Design. 

I don't focus too much on (visual) design, because there are already so many people doing it and although I'm a visual person, I don't create visual things. So I never really considered myself a designer - but this #futrchat changed all that.

I very quickly became aware of a very big assumption: that by design, I was meaning visual design. I don't do that. I don't do graphic design or make pretty pictures. But I do design experiences. I design my life. I shape and re-shape. So the moment I released my pre-conceived definitions of design a whole new definition of design just flowed out: the non-visual designer. Maree Conway asked me to define this further, so I did: (from my tweetstream)

"As a non-visual designer, I design experiences to shift mental mindsets, the way people see the world.

Sometimes the non-visual design is expressed in a user-interface that includes visual design, sometimes it is theatre. "

When I think back to the events I've co-created (barcamp, geek dinners, cacophony events, mash-up performances, zombies without borders) they have all been to shift the mental mindset of not only the participants/performers, but especially the "audience." For a while I even described what I did as "unforgettable ephemeral experiences." I know, a bit flowery, eh?

So much of what I do, who I am, the life I live has been consciously designed, created with specific experiences in mind.

How did I do this? 

I took my professional experience as an Internet/Software product manager and applied the methods/processes I used to define, build, manage, launch and market internet products to myself as a product. Heathervescent, the product of me. My life, the product of me. Heathervescent, the brand of me. I wasn't content to let my life happen to me. Life's too short and I want to do too much. It's not about expressing/developing ONE potential - but to explore, express the many possibilities of potential. The Expression of Possibilities.

Uthur Doul's possibility sword deeply changed the way I thought about the world - and myself. After seeing him master the possibilities (in my mind's eye) I was no longer content living a limited linear life. I became aware of my possible lives - some predestined, some experienced, parallel lives, echoes from the past, foreshadowing future lives. Here, in this one, this reality, I try as much as I can, to leave the possibilities behind and with utmost intention, create, express, a life that never existed before, that can not be copied. A life that diverges from the expressed possibilities, because this one weaves pieces from those worlds (talvez donos de barcos no Caribe, meu amigos do passado no Fortaleza), creating, sometimes patiently, sometimes explosively a life impossible. A life that could only be created with conscious (self) design.

Swiss Chard Connection

Once a day I pop over to the community garden to water my plants. It's been open for only two months, so we're all just starting our gardens. I'm planting things I haven't had success in with in containers. Slowly, I've been transplanting struggling container plants into the garden. 

Take a look at this Swiss Chard! It lived in a tiny pot for almost a year, barely struggling. The first thing I did after breaking new ground, was to put these babies in the earth. It took them a week to get situated in their new surroundings (and richer earth) before they went gangbusters with growth. Two weeks later I harvested my first leaves and sauteed them up for dinner.

As I harvested, cleaned, prepared and ate the chard a realization unfolded. I didn't want to cut back so much of the leaves that the plant died, I took only what the plant could give and thrive. I wrapped the chard in a soft towel - not a plastic bag - as I brought it home and placed it in the refrigerator. I was more conscious about the preparation and cooking. When I finally ate it, (such a small amount) I realized that that small amount was all I needed.

I had a stronger connection to this living thing I cultivated, consumed. When I took care of it and it thrived, I had more produce. The better I took care of it, the better I would be fed. I wasn't disconnected, thinking, it would only cost $2 + tax at the grocery store and if I didn't get around to cooking it, oh well, it was just $2. Because I was connected to this swiss chard, took care of it, I didn't want to waste it - even if the market system said it was only valued at $2.

It's been a long time since I've had such a direct connection to my food. Farm-girl Heather identity was discarded at the California border 15 years ago. But the connection to the land never left. Here are a few more pictures of my Urban Farming. 

 

Here are my peppers and tomato plants. My friend Mimi brought back two peppers from Esalen on the Big Sur coast a few months ago, and I finally got them in the ground. I was a little worried about them since they were so small, but they've really taken off now! Can't wait to harvest Mimi's Esalen peppers! 

Here are my tomato plants, flanked by marigolds. I gave up on the tomatoes in containers because of one very bad aphid infestation. Since we run an organic garden, I've overdosed on the complimentary marigolds as a preemptive aphid attack. You might see a few furrows between the marigolds and tomatoes. Those are my first attempts at carrots from seed! We'll see how they turn out.

I also have two rows of corn (you can see them in the back). This weekend I'll add their two sisters: beans and squash. On the other side I have planted flowers from seed and of course Sunflowers. This weekend I'm moving my sage collection and a few basil plants out of their containers. Go urban gardening go!

Level 5 to Infinity

"The battle is not here with your fellow men; but out there, in infinity" - Don Juan

"The only person worth competing with is myself." - moi

Competition. *Sigh.* I know it's suppose to motivate you to do your best, but when it comes to me, I just wanna walk away. I don't care about winning,  I don't want to be the best, when it means that someone is the loser. We don't have the same skill set, levels or perceptions, perspectives, worldview.  I'm interested in yours. Especially if you disagree with me or have a different perspective from mine. I'm already the best Heathervescent.

Competition can make one stretch. Competition can be the fuel for the midnight fires. Competition strips away the fat. Competition is full of pain (to get to 1st place or if you don't). Competition is divided. Collaboration is united. (If you have a very different perspective of competition, pls share with me.)

My favorite collaboration example is the work of Kaliya Hamlin and her work with user-centric identity. I've used many of her methods with the Geek Dinner and LA Barcamps with great success. If you've had a chance to participate in an event Kaliya has influenced, you'll see that it is just slightly different in the activities, but worlds apart in the intent and energy around the event.

At the WFS this past weekend I was disappointed with the use of competition in a couple sessions. Tom Frey announced his DaVinci Institute's Prize Competitions. Usually I love radical audacious ideas, but these rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't see anything in them about fixing the economy - or making the world better for people in the 8 prize competitions. I left the session distressed, confused at the non-practicality.

The next day, the morning session of the WFS Dev Seminar opened with a competition between groups with point scores and a "winner" to create the best scenario with specific data, variables, etc. Yuck! I know the people putting the session together weren't looking for that kind of reaction. They probably picked the competition metaphor to engage and excite people. I sat in the room, with sickness forming in my stomach, wondering if I had made a huge mistake pivoting my career and going into futures work. 

I watched the groups form and work beginning. I sat watching, thinking, this is not that different from what Kaliya does. But why do I want to leave this room, whereas with her sessions I'm signing up to lead and participate? The difference is very slight framing and intent behind the structure.

In Kaliya's sessions, people are working together for a bigger goal, which includes competing businesses, products, architectures, philosophies. Much of this competition falls away when they come together for conversation. It's a group of people with the same long term goals: a vibrant ecosystem that supports many companies, technologies, products. The space is not about competing with each other, it's about working together to create the ecosystem so all can participate. There is no one winner at IIW, if you show up, you win.

Maybe that sounds all pollyanna, let's get along, we're all winners, yay! But consider that maybe some people don't care about winning at the expense of others. 

But the zero-sum competition peppered the experience in the room at the WFS ProDev. I used the law of two feet and eventually left the seminar to check out the Surrealist Art Exhibit at the nearby Vancouver Art museum, which was phenomenal and mind-blowing. I got what I needed out of the session after all.

We're not gonna save the world competing with each other for million dollar prizes. But we could save it by working together.

Tag Cloud du Vescent

I actually like the tags this tag cloud application created based on my twitter.

How Bankers can make Shitloads of Money & Save the World

I found the missing piece of the new paradigm this past weekend in the basement conference ballroom of the World Future Summit. Ramez Naam was giving a talk on the slides below. 

The Infinite Resource - Growing Prosperity While Reducing Impact on the Earth

View more presentations from ramezn

His data was so good, I had tears in my eyes, my brain full of positive visions of the future and then his world collided with mine. 

Jump to slide 122: The Bug in the Software: Our Market System can't effectively deal with Externalities. Our market system is very good, but it's limited to the things than can express itself in the current language of the market system. The big problems we need to solve don't fit into our existing market system. The language of the market system is money, currency, transactions. We need a way to turn our shifting values into an input to our market system. That input is a currency, something than can be transacted, tracked, traded, bought and sold. 

And this is why banks and the financial industry needs to embrace, encourage, build and extend into the realm of alternate currencies. Here's where we'll jump to my presentation on the Future of Alternate Currencies and Transactions, slide 9, where I talk about Bitcoin and Ven.

The Future of Alternate Currency and Transactions

View more presentations from heathervescent

The point I hear everyone missing when talking about new currencies are the additional VALUES encoded in the DNA of these new currencies. These concepts are being expressed in collaborative consumption, freecycling and lending/borrowing activities today. Companies are revolutionizing these activities. ProBono and Gift Economy are not tracked on any balance sheet because they can not be expressed in the current market economy language.

When Naam talks about a Carbon tax, why not make it a carbon currency? No one likes taxes, but people love currency: money! Wouldn't you love to trade, earn, sell carbon currency?

Let's put the values we care about into a metaphor the market can utilize: an Alternate Currency.

There's lots more money to be made with many currencies than with fewer. Wouldn't like you to have more opportunities to make buckets of money? If you do, consider embracing alternate currencies. Make more streams for the money to flow. 

GTDing Your Gmail Inbox, part 1.

As you may or not know, I am a big fan and active user of GTD, an organizational methodology by David Allen. I've written blog posts and created five videos on how I use GTD - and how you can use it too. 

The most important criteria for GTD is to use what works for you. If a recommendation doesn't work for you - you don't have to do it! 

I've been on the GTD train since December 5, 2005. So I've had a lot of time to internalize the system and customize it based on my own trainwreck of left and right brain organization. I even stole/modified a note-taking idea from Tim Ferris before his superstardom and use 1 notebook to take notes on ALL my projects, creating an ad-hoc Table of Contents as the notebook gets filled up with notes.

But today, I want to tell you about how I was just able to GTD my inboxes of > 500 email messages (from the weekend) in 20 minutes and be left with just 4 messages in my inbox.

There are three steps

1. Set up your system
2. Use your system
3. Care and feeding of your system

I'll just mention item 1 today. First, you've got to (start to) set up your system. 

@, in_, L:, P:, z

The first thing I did was create GTD specific folders in my gmail.

• @: The "@" / "at" folder. e.g. @ActionItem, @Email, @waiting
  Your "@" 's are where you put emails into general buckets for "actions." Like it an email needs an action items (to be responded to, to be read, to do something and then respond, any kind of action). My @ActionItem folder is like my Todo list in my email inbox. My @waiting is where I file emails I am waiting for a response from (that I want to track). I use @ActionItem and @waiting the most in this category. 
• in_ : I have many email addresses and I filter them all into my gmail account. I filter several addresses directly into their own folders. For those acconts, I preface them with in_nameofemail. I process these folders when I process my "inboxes."
• L: I am on a lot of lists, and some of them I filter directly into their own folders. I often don't go into these folders, but filter them because they automatically get tagged if they also go into my inboxes. For lists that are of similar topic, I just filter them all into the same folder. E.g. All my tech email lists get filtered into L: TechLists.
• P: or the Project "Folders" aka google labels. I was a power Outlook user before I switched to gmail, so I love folders and preface project folders with P:. This makes it easy for me to see my active projects at a glance. (I hide or archive any labels that are not active.)
• z or Archive. When I'm done with a label or folder, I will either roll those contents into another general folder (e.g. zArchivedClients) remove any organizational prefixes and replace with a "z" prefix. I started doing this before they offered the "hide" function. Sometimes now I will just hide the label instead of zArchiving it.

Check out the screenshots below.

  

OK, give this a little food for thought and think about what folders of the above might be appropriate for your own style. Next post, we'll talk about using your system.

Import Goods / Export Ideas

Yesterday, I took the afternoon to explore around Vancouver and ended up taking a seaplane ride around the coast. As we were heading back in, I saw empty container ship after container ship at anchor. I reminded me that the US imports more goods (from China) than they export. But then I realized what the US exports (or what Developed Nations export) doesn't really fit on a container ship.

Developed Nations (and I'm talking about North America, Europe and parts of Asia: Korea and Japan) don't necessarily export goods. They export ideas. And most of these ideas can be exported in a way that doesn't take months to cross the earth. These ideas are exported - shared - via the Internet.

So while the US may have more goods imported from developing nations, it exports it's (our) ideas (and influence of those ideas) far wider and faster than a container ship could hope to.

* photo by jdnx

Future of Alternate Currencies and Transactions

If you missed my presentation at the WFS this morning (and the mimosas as well) or just want to refer back to the slides, the presentation is below.

The Future of Alternate Currency and Transactions

View more presentations from heathervescent

And now with added Video!

The Purple Tornado is...

Five years ago I incorporated a company based on a vision. I named it after the picture in my mind of my two favorite shapes: a spiral and a triangle. I thought, how the hell can a triangle also be a spiral? A spiral is circular, a triangle, well, triangular. I lightly held these two conflicting shapes in my mind, asking how they could be the same. Slowly, the spiral turned sideways and stretched out in 3D space and that is when I saw the triangle. It WAS both a spiral and a triangle! The object was purple, my favorite color at the time, and so I named it The Purple Tornado.

I was so taken with the vision, I immediately knew it had to be a company. What the company was to do/be did not matter. 

With further exploration of the shape I realized it was more than just a tornado, it was also a funnel. Envision the wide top mouth. This reached all the way out into the unknown, unconscious, the potential, the place of all possibilities dreamed and undreamed. The other end of the spiral, the small, compact end, stretched down to earth. It spit ideas into the harsh reality of our world as physical objects, products launched - the idea manifested in material form.

The Purple Tornado is this metaphorical funnel bridging heaven and earth. It is the device I use to reach out into the unknown possibilities and pull them down, manifesting, creating, clarifying, applying the pressure of this reality to manifest, to create a real expression of the idea, an object. The Purple Tornado is an entity of this reality (just ask the IRS) but it is not like any traditional business. It comes and goes as it is needed, much like the blowing and calming of winds. It exists for the sole reason of channeling ideas into reality. Sometimes those ideas are technology products, other times they are experiences and they have ranged from a Debt Auction to a Zombie Cabaret.

Not everyone understands my company. But that's ok. It exists as a metaphor and paying tax entity. But it comes and goes as it's called - not by me - but by the ideas that ask to be realized. It exists to be of service to the possible. To enable these faint baby cries of ideas, of possible futures, to get a chance to exist. The Purple Tornado listens to those cries and whenever possible, helps birth them as best as the resources allow.

The Problem with Paradigm Shifts

Back in 1999, I worked for a small San Francisco start-up. They were primarily a tech group building productivity applications using a new combination of technologies: JavaScript and HTML, which we called DHTML. (Most people know this technology combination as AJAX today.) To this day, I have never worked with software engineers as good as this crew. They are hands down my favorite dev team.

But back in 1999, DHTML was new. No one was using it. 

I had the opportunity to usability test our first product and prototypes: a web-based presentation and a word processing application. Basically PowerPoint and Word for the web. I'm talking about creating, editing ppts and word docs in a browser. Netscape 4 browser. A whole new paradigm. My testers understood the concepts quickly and loved the ease of use. Many got how paradigm shifting this was and loved the idea. The company planned to build an entire suite of productivity applications using this technology.

But then, we got acquired. (Well, it wasn't so simple as that.) And next thing I knew, I was down in Mountain View presenting the technology to large internal groups. My role shifted and in the next year, I must have presented this technology (thanks to the amazing dev team) to over 30 groups inside AOL. Many groups immediately saw the user benefits - stuff that you and I take for granted today. Pop-ups, mouse-over dynamic windows, i-frames, divs. 

Inevitable, the question would be asked about metrics. Back then, all metrics were page refresh based. Ads were displayed based on each page refresh. So if there was no page refresh (because we no longer had to refresh the page each time a user did something) that decreased the number of page views, which decreased the number of ads that could be served. Sure, we'd show that people stayed for minutes on a page, instead of leaving immediately, but even this metric was too new a concept.

Our new technology could not be "successful" in the terms of the old paradigm. Sure, we'd make the application more interactive, user friendly, basically have the user stay in the property using the application a LOT longer and increase usage, but.... it didn't show an increase in metrics that defined success at the time.

And that's because, the new paradigm was not "successful" by the metrics of the old paradigm. The mental mindset had to shift. The definition of success had to shift. And it took 4+ year before that happened.

The success metrics of the current paradigm stifled the adoption of the new paradigm. 

And that's just one challenge when you're working with/creating paradigm shifts.

Best of Houston Futures at the WFS

I'm headed to Vancouver this week to speak at the World Future Society's Annual Conference. I will be on the panel, Best of Houston Futures, 9am Sunday morning, moderated by Peter Bishop, the Director of our program. I will be joined by two excellent colleagues from the program. I've had the opportunity of reviewing Emily Empel's work on the Future of the Sex Industry and it's surprising! I've heard great things about Sara Robinson's work. You won't want to miss our visions of the future. Full panel details are below.

• Peter C. Bishop, PhD, Moderator
• Sara Robinson, The Future of the Progressive Movement in the United States
• Heather Schlegel, The Future of Currency
• Emily Empel, The Future of the Sex Industry