Three Reflections on Stickiness

For the stickiness deliverable, I’ve written three short reflections tangential to the aforementioned concept. The first, “Covered in Stickiness: A True Story of Tree Sap, Honey, and iPods,” has nothing to do with the sub-title. The second, “Me in Media,” wonders about the role of multimedia in perception of self. The third, “I Am What I Collect,” meanders through thoughts on sets as a description of a person. “But self! How can these be related to stickiness?” you might ask yourself in surprise. To me, stickiness is very strongly correlated to self-perception. The reason I keep something with me has a lot to do with the way I look at myself.

These contain obnoxious amounts of self-reference and opinion. They’re thoughts, not research papers, and are to start discussions, not end them, so it would be great to see a comment or two at the end! :)

Covered in Stickiness

A True Story of Tree Sap, Honey and iPods

Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick and undoubtedly society’s choice experts on the idea of stickiness, say that a sticky idea is something that stays with you really well. You remember it, and it influences the way you act, what you buy, etc. However, stickiness can also be viewed from a product sense, to which entrepreneur Steve Gold’s stickiness lecture for Vital Ideation was more akin. I’m going to investigate the case of the latter (or, more specifically, things that would relate to the latter more).

Sticky products are things that you want to buy, and why you buy them is anyone’s guess. My personal guess is that sticky products define who you want to be. My guess is also very much like a philosopher’s personal theory that is quite accurate in some cases, but overall can describe nowhere near the entire story. So in that sense, I’m annoyed with it. I will continue anyways.

I immediately sat down to define myself by my possessions—to see what I’ve bought that defines me. Trying to describe myself with my possessions was a slightly unnerving exercise, as it probably should be. But I started writing labels and making bubbles and arrows and dotted lines and boxes, and when I thought I had generated enough fluff, I took a close look and noticed some trends. Here’s what I found…

Me in Media

Defining the Digital Identity

Perhaps it’s a function of the fact I am a student of engineering growing up in the digital age, but I found that electronics and electronic media (which is the sole use of the term I will be using in this paper) strongly define who I am.

The largest theme on the paper that I was ideating on was a large cloud shooting off of “laptop” called “MEDIA” (yes, in engineering all-caps). Now this is a bit tangential to a product already, but I found that these things matter most to me. So I went with it. In MEDIA, I have my pictures, my music (and podcasts), my videos, my writing, and a few things I lumped in as “digital creativity”—my code, multimedia projects, music compositions, etc.

Again, these are not things I bought to define me. Instead, they are largely things I’ve created. The computer is a great way to store created things. Not all types of created things, of course. Paintings and classical music are orders of magnitude more satisfying live. But I don’t paint, do I? And yeah, I compose, but software transcribes the music. It gets played elsewhere.

But if I were to lose all that, it would mean a good deal more to me than losing my credit card, guitar, and (limited college) furniture. But the point remains. Most creation of any sort has some decent way of being stored in a digital format, and this collection of digital media defines me because what I create defines who I am.

I Am What I Collect

The Role of Collections in Self-Definition

On my page of self-defining fluff, I noticed another trend. This particular trend begins with an “l” and ends with “ists”. Congrats! It’s “lists”! My page was practically covered in lists! And the cool part about these lists is not the practical nature they served.

What I mean by that is that these lists of things were not grocery lists, task lists, homework lists, etc. They didn’t correspond to things that needed to get done. Instead, they were lists of things slowly accumulated, all belonging to a specific genre, and all describing me. These were lists that integrated over time to add up to this every-changing function of self.

What does that mean? It means that instead of checking all the items off, I added new ones with the expressed purpose of further defining myself with that collection. For instance, consider books. I have a bookshelf in my room, and I am dang proud of it. Whenever I go into a new room or house and see a bookshelf, I often ask permission to look at it. Why? Because I learn about you through your books (to those of you reading aloud at home, that last sentence can sound pretty creepy with the right inflection). My set of books define me—entrepreneurship, Catholic, history, outdoors, math and science, programming and reference books—with of course more than a few random ones here and there.

Another list I had was my media, but I already covered that in decent detail. The thing I did not mention is the fact that I wrote down “collection” a bunch—the right term to think of may be “synergy” (apologies, buzzword, I know… I don’t like them any more than you do). Synergy is the word correlated with the phrase “the whole is more than the sum of its parts,” and in this specific case, refers definitely to the fact that my music collection, for instance, is more than just a bunch of songs/albums. As a set, it defines me. If anyone had the same music collection as I did, well for one I would be surprised (considering the size of it), but second, I would probably freak out and start asking them a ton of questions. After all, anyone who has all my music has all my personality, right? Right??

Ask yourself if that’s a reasonable thought, because I’m not that it is. But I would naturally want to see if coincidences extend, and some part of me would love to see that they did. But I will take the safe road and assume they don’t, as the number and size of each of my collections is enough to statistically distinguish me from any other person on the map. Perhaps that’s why I say they define me…

eNotes in the 21st Century

The method for which people have taken notes have not substantially changed in the past few centuries. The concept of paper and pen and any combination of the two have been the foundations of ideas, thoughts, worries, and creation for everyone in the past, and most people in the present. I realize the advantages and freedoms that something so simple can provide, but what sparks my interests is how technology has been able to solve many of the shortfalls of this ancient system and provide a new and useable solution to this everlasting activity.

Why eNotes are BAD:

Let me premise by saying that electronic solutions to note-taking are NOT perfect and NOT practical for all applications. I feel obliged to tear apart electronic media before I raise it on a glorified pedestal. Electronic solutions are currently more expensive than paper. The PDA that I will be using as my special case cost me about $500. It would take a lot of notebooks and pencils before you reach $500 worth of supplies.

Electronic solutions suck for drawing neat, fluid, and creative sketches. In the applications that I will talk about, you can’t sketch a landscape as well as you can on paper. You can’t draw the subtleties of a human face, and shade areas beneath the nose with portable electronics. (Assuming you don’t have a camera, which is integrated in many devices now anyways).

You also can’t add physical artifacts to your notes; there is no such thing as scotch-taping a leaf or bug or knick-knack into your electronic notebook. It takes an average of 2.8 seconds longer on e-paper to get to the point where you start writing down ideas than a regular notebook. (This is an average of 3 trials that I tried myself). Another practical distinction is that any non-textual characters (such as higher-level math or arrows between boxes), are more difficult to draw, require you to switch modes, and will be slightly less neat than on paper.

Finally, electronic media is slightly more complicated than paper. It takes exactly 4 button pushes on my PDA to start writing while paper takes a couple of page flips before you found the place you last left off.

Why eNotes are Good and Why I Use Them Frequently:

For the discussion that I am about to raise, I am using my Fujitsu-Siemens Loox N-560 PDA as an example of an electronic solution to Paper. I must point out that the electronic device you are using does make a significant impact on the performance. I personally spared no expense to make sure I got one of the better PDAs on the market, so this is definitely a good-case scenario.

The best scenarios to use PDAs and electronic note-taking media is whenever you need to record a though, idea, or expression that you or anyone else says that is in plain English. Luckily for me, this is a relatively large percentage of anything that goes through my ears, eyes or brain. Note that this excludes higher-level math and abstract picture things. Since the interface to my PDA is regular manuscript handwriting, I can record information just as fast as I can on paper. Furthermore, if I bust out my external keyboard, my recording speed increases by a factor of 4.

The media in which I record is a simple text application that can be enhanced as much as the application can. This means that it is trivial for me to add an infinite number of colors to my page, and change the font styles, sizes, lists, etc. On paper, I would need a lot of pens to make a lot of colors.

One of the most appealing feature to me is the fidelity of the information that is preserved with my eNotes. Every night, when my PDA synchs with my computer, it creates a backup on my computer. Then every night, my computer backs up its entire hard drive to a managed online storage solution. I would consider the integrity of this data to be far greater than a sheet of paper in a tiny notebook. There are many pieces of information that I want to jot down and remember forever. With my electronic format, I can far more easily guarantee the safety and security of my data. I realize, however, that there are hackers, and computers crash, and files corrupt. Because of these concerns, the protection of data goes far beyond my PDA and I personally go through great lengths to ensure backups.

Size is another issue that really sets PDAs apart from many other types of note taking on any media. Unlike a laptop, I can have all of the benefits of electronic media without a large barrier between me and a potential subject that I am taking notes on. Furthermore, a PDA can fit in my pocket and has 4” of useable screen resolution. One specific design consideration for my Loox N-560, was that the screen has a full 640 x 480 resolution. At that resolution, the pixel density of the screen approaches my visual perception. With this amount of detail, I abate the common issues of very little usable screen real estate. With this model, I have as much physical space as a pocket-sized notebook.

The fact that the PDA and all the information it contains fits in my pocket, is one of its most powerful features. Think about how many notebooks it would take to match the 4GB of memory that my PDA holds. Assume you have a pocket-sized notebook that’s 3” x 5” and you’re using a 0.5mm lead pencil to fill up the 15 square inches of usable space. Assuming you can fit about 100 words (600 characters) on one side of a page, you would need about 3,579,139 pages to match the 4GB that my PDA can hold. That many pages has the same surface area as 17 acres of land.

Finally, my PDA is far more than just a place to take notes. It is a notebook, and audio recorder, a video player, an mp3 player, a GPS navigation system, a calendar, a task manager, a photo album, a storage device, a calculator, a library of books, and can take the form of any application you can load onto it. That much versatility in a single device can’t be matched by any paper notebook that I know of.

When a PDA solution is executed properly, I believe that it can be an extraordinarily valuable asset that can far exceed the functionality of traditional paper under most circumstances. It is an investment that I do not regret and still use habitually today.

Sticky Notebooks: Part 2

I think I left off last time describing my two design notebooks:

So I had a couple thoughts about the notebooks, though I haven't made any decisions about them yet: I need to resolve this “two notebook conflict” somehow. The problem is that different categories of things have already been separated into different notebooks. The notebook doesn’t feel like mine right now either. It feels like a tool-something useful, but not something that’s part of me. Things are dated, but they’re sloppy, and not something I feel I’d go back to. But am I even supposed to go back to this? Is this notebook something to be used to help me in the present, to be discarded immediately? The sole purpose for me would be to get things out of my head and onto a piece of paper-something I might have otherwise scribbled on the back of my homework for someone to see, that probably won’t be important ever again.

A lot of other people taking this class have notebooks they’re more attached to. One person is using an electronic device, while others are using old notebooks from past classes. Some people bought notebooks just for this class. Our notebooks are already ours, just because they look different, they’re different sizes and shapes.

Notebooks are sticky ideas

Something isn't sticky of it's own accord-it's sticky because /we/ make it stick. People around us make it stick. The classic example is the ipod. Everyone has one (except me..) at least, that's how it feels. Why? Because it's a sticky object-and it's not just an object, it's an idea. Our notebooks have everything that makes something sticky. We put time and thought into our notebooks. We put part of ourselves into them-our notebooks are something more customizable than almost anything we have.

So...what now?

I'm still not sure what to do with my two notebooks, but I don't think most people could possibly just use their notebooks for idea generation and design. Maybe if I stop worrying about what my notebook is supposed to be, it'll become what it should be.

Stickiness Charting

What really is stickiness?

The primary focus of Steve Gold's presentation for us, and our original discussion was more along the lines of sticky products and ways of making products stick through proximity (propinquity!) and customization. However, my initial thoughts on stickiness were much more along the lines of the book, which deals with how people remember different things, and how to make people remember. The criteria for success were exactly that:

Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credibility, Emotions, and Story.

So my thought was: what type of medium gets these things across the mostly clearly?

What's easy to remember?

I've been actively thinking about what I'm remembering, from a variety of forms of learning, including:

1) UOCD Readings (with diagrams)- Text and Figures
2) A play I saw this weekend- (August Osage County)- Dialogue
3) The food I ate this weekend- Text from the Menu, Taste/Smell
4) A musical I am stage managing (Into the Woods)- Lyrics and Music

Interestingly, I'm usually pretty good at remembering words. I think it's a lot easier than trying to replicate an image or a figure, and I'm completely tone deaf. Thus I figured I'd remember the things with verbal components more.

However, I've actually found that that really isn't the case. I'm going to work with the things that I remembered best from these things, and attempt to combine them into a "rememberability matrix."

I remember the food I ate extremely well, probably the best of any of these things. From this I've decided to create a matrix of memorability. Look for an update on how that came out soon!
nfro
For the record...
from UOCD I remember graphs showing how valuable things were, why personas are valuable, and Venn Diagrams.
I remember every detail of my meals.
I remember some of the play, particularly some interesting lines, and the general plot.
and I remember lots of Into the Woods, but possibly because I've seen it so much. It's more difficult to remember parts of the songs that are the same melody with different lyrics.

after awhile here's something i came up with:

i combined the concept of UOCD using a three-way grid to determine something and made a sticky grid based on: how you perceive it, what it is, adjectives that describe the information.

Carrying a Notebook is a Fad.

Well, isn't it? Maybe not a fad, but it is at least an idea that has caught on for one reason or another. For what it's worth, 'tis a "sticky" idea at the least. What is the value of a design notebook? Part of me feels that individuals walking around with a notebook feel better about the fact that they carry one than about how much usefulness they get out of carrying it. I mean, it can be a hassle. Get changed, get stuff for class, oh yeah! grab my design notebook :). What makes someone do that in the first place? Well, carrying a design notebook is a sticky idea. Hopefully by the end of this post I will have made a bit of sense out of why this is the case.

So, I decided last week that I would hold out on writing about design notebooks until I thought of something interesting to write about. The topic of the second Vital Ideation lecture was "Stickiness," and part of me feels that the act of carrying a design notebook is something that falls in line with many of the principles we discussed when talking about a product's stickiness.

The first things that come to mind...
First off. I think that the act of carrying a notebook around is the sticky part of this whole idea. The "design" modifier is really only a specific case of this phenomenon. The carrying of some sort of notebook, whether for ideas, doodling, sketching, tasks, or some combination thereof is what can be considered "sticky." The first things that come to mind when I think of a design notebook are the following:

1. Moleskine --

   "the legendary notebook used for the past two centuries by great artists and thinkers, including Van Gogh, Picasso, Hemingway and Chatwin. With an elastic closure and an expandable inner pocket made of cardboard and cloth, which contains the history, they are ideal for students"

   It is actually kind of ridiculous how many different types of notebooks they have on their website. There is something special about this personal notebook idea. Something that makes people pay lots more than they should for bound paper for your pocket. Notice the sketch-book of Vincent Van Gogh himself to the right. How it shimmers with knowledge, uniqueness, genius and who knows what else. Is this what makes personal notebooks so sticky? Here is one of Olin's very own on personalizing their Moleskine.

   "I just retired a Moleskine and got a new one that I have to set up - I figured I'd take you guys along for the ride. "

   So begins the blog post, which describes the act of setting up the notebook as a "ride" itself. From tables of contents to specialized lists and such, the customization that goes into this moleskine rivals that of a personal computer. Crazy huh? It's only a notebook you might say, but it seems to be more than just this.
2. Lifehacker. Oh lifehacker and other such "tech trick tips for getting things done" websites. If I actually listed all the posts on maintaining, purchasing, improving, creating, modifying, and streamlining personal notebooks, I would be spending hours compiling all the posts and linking to them all in this lowly blog post of mine. If you pass the lifehacker test* of being described in more than 3 or so blog articles, I think you qualify to internet and/or nerd sensation (see also: fad & obsession.) Well, maybe not. (*note this term has never been used before and will never be used again in any formal writing)
   
3. PDAs, the Internet, and all other Electronics. Funny that this is one of the first things that comes to mind when I think of (personal) notebooks, but it is true. One of the intrinsic values of the personal notepad, whether for design or otherwise, is that it isn't a technical gadget, but it can be as personal and individualized as a computer, cell phone, misc. Apple product.

So, I started carrying a notebook myself. sort of.
I started carrying my own notebook mostly because I thought it was nice to be able to keep track of tasks, add tasks and then rip them out when I was done. It was also a convenient source of doodle space and paper during French class. But the real reason was that I had finally convinced myself that carrying a personal notebook wasn't completely a "hey they do it, I should do it too!" thing. Additionally, I found that carrying a notebook could be particularly useful personally as a way of keeping track of tasks from random things I am involved in which I sometimes forget to do/not put into outlook or any other-sort-of-reminder format.

The idea of carrying around a notebook to write down random thoughts on was one that I'veheard suggested for about a year now. ...Moleskine this, ideas notebook that... Maybe being at Olin has something to do with this....ok fine. It has a lot to do with this. I know my friends from back home would scoff at the idea of carrying a notepad around. "What the hell for?" they would surely tell me. Often times in this past year I have thought--"Wow that would be a really cool thing to keep track of, maybe in an ideas notebook!" Finally I have one, but I don't use it for ideas.

Most people don't use notebooks for idea generation.
That's odd. I don't actually use my notebook for idea generation. And I don't think many people do either. I supposed I am very biased in this, but I generally don't sit around by myself and come up with ideas. If I'm sitting around thinking about something that is interesting enough to warrant being copied down in a notebook of ideas, then I'll find people who I know would be interested and talk to them, who will not only potentially polish the idea if it isn't a horrible one, but the discussion that the idea will kick off will likely be of the variety that keeps me up for hours longer than I should instead of doing "coursework." Silly academics.

I suppose the only time that I have used my notebook to jot down random stuff has been during lectures from cool speakers, or while I was supposed to be doing other things, like during French class, when I sort of do other work I find more engaging in my notebook while i sort of interact with the rest of the class. I guess my notebook has been useful to me. And I guess in the end that's the point right?

A low-tech! personal ___(insert word of your choice)___ notebook is a sticky idea. For me, it allows me to _______ and also _______ wherever I am, sort of like a PDA or something. The best part is that when ____ happens, I can _____ using my notebook. How sweet is that?

My notebook represents who I am as a designer, engineer, over-committed student. Tis my PN. "Personal Notebook" :D :D :D


-Marco

Sticky Notebooks: Part 1

We've had two talks thus far-Matt Jadud on Notebooks, and Steve Gold on Sticky Ideas. It's actually kind of a good thing that I'm late on my first post, because the topic of sticky ideas ties in well with the ideation notebooks we're all carrying around for this course.

Most of what Matt talked about was his /own/ notebook-or notebooks, and what he's used them for, how he's felt about them. He highlighted how a lot of the information in them was just scribbles-the notebook wasn't some pristine space that he had to keep neat and clean. This made me think about my own notebook-

Right now it's lined..that's the first thing that comes to mind. And having lines makes me want to stay inside them. It structures my notes and ideas, and tends to limit them. Occasionally I'll realize the lines are there, and purposefully write against them.

That wasn't what I intended to talk about though: The story of my notebook starts last semester-before I knew about this class. I decided that I needed some kind of notebook to carry around with me, just for those little things that come up that I don't want to forget (like when a song I don't have in my itunes comes on the radio, or someone mentions a website or book that I might find interesting). I also decided that I'd write my thoughts in it. I didn't know yet what I'd do with them after writing them down, but I just had this feeling that putting them on paper would make them go somewhere. So I bought a nice little book at CVS for a dollar. It's spiral bound (the sprials are annoying already), and has a green plastic cover.

I lied, actually. I bought two. One's more pocket sized than the other, so it's easier to carry around. The conflict here? I have two notebooks. What am I going to do with them? I started writing tasks in the smaller one-I rip them out when I'm done (I usually can't seem to finish the tasks I wrote down though, so more often than not they stay in the book for a while). Even when I don't finish them all though, I find it helps to have everything written somewhere-like the planners we used to get for free in high school. I stopped carrying a planner once I came to Olin, but my planner was something I couldn't live without a few years ago.

In the larger one, I started taking notes. About anything. I've got notes about both Vital Ideation talks, notes and comments to the person sitting next to me on a robotics lecture I attended, and notes I took about Cafeteria workers for a design course. I’ve never had a notebook that served quite this purpose before-usually things get written on the last page of an existing notebook (who ever uses every page in their notebooks, right..? )

This is starting to get a bit long, so this post'll be continued in a few days :).

No-longer-tortured confessions of a notebook bum

I've waited far too long to post and all the good topics (colored pens, note organization...) are taken, and I wasn't there for Matt Jadud's talk, having been... well, working in Manhattan at the time. (For those of you who don't know me, I'm not actually an Olin student - just used to be. Class of '07. My name is Mel.)

And what this means is that I get to improvise around what information I can glean from the wiki on the weekly theme. Basically, I make stuff up in the absence of actual content. Or to make that sound somewhat better, it's my hope that these weekly reflections will (1) make me look up from my coding and knock me into the world of ideas on a regular basis, and (2) provide a breather of perspective from outside the bubble, where I'm colliding with things that aren't midterms and credit-hours (more like taxis and bug reports). (I mean "colliding" in the poetic and not the physical sense. At least for the taxis.)

It seems like this week's theme is "vital ideation," aka "the whole class," and... design notebooks! I've been a chronic doodler ever since the days of boredom back in elementary, and used to draw Sierpinski gaskets, Hilbert curves, and more in the margins of my math notes, but that wasn't "design." Later, Fritz the Homework Penguin showed up on all my problem sets. And then quick song parodies, and sketches of the people sitting ahead of me, or drawings of the tip of my left thumb. Not really design.

Or is it? I used to feel all guilty about not keeping my notebooks "intellectual" or "inventor-ish." Ben Linder filled his pages with gorgeous 3D cutaway sketches of apparati; other classmates bristled with neat formulae, pencilled-in circuit diagrams (with lots of eraser marks to show where resistor values had been tweaked), or even colored sketches of costumes for a play. I... drew my thumbnail. And cartoon versions of math symbols that talked in Shakespearean verse.

But that's the way my brain works, and the stuff it occasionally needs to spew out (along with experiments on how lightly I can draw a pencil line, or the train stop to get off at). Design doesn't just mean "class notes," nor does it mean "design of things," as if every page of the notebook had to be funneled towards some known end goal. It's a place to braindump and structure and re-dump things back into my brain. It's like plugging in extra mental RAM.

So what does that design? The way I think. What I think of, what I write down, what I give myself permission to say, and to whom. I need to move things from my mind into the real world, and writing them down is the first step in mentally shifting me towards making that happen; somehow, a project proposal is different when you're holding it than when you're tossing the exact same words* around in your head. Then you can scan it, share it, shred it - but you're dealing with your thoughts-made-word, and that makes it easier to make the jump to word-made-flesh (why yes, I was raised Catholic). And it makes it much more definite and visceral when you rip out an idea and attack it with scissors than when you go, in your brain, "meh, I won't think about that any more."

*note my bias towards the verbal! Our language is a powerful shaper of how we think. I'm still only fluent in American English, but would love dearly to be able to keep my notebooks in Chinese, Italian (with backwards handwriting), and... many others. I've tried keeping notebooks where I avoid the verbal by only drawing, or vice versa with only words, or words and abstract shapes (no real-world objects allowed), but I find anything less than my full range of output options leaves me feeling stymied rather than challenged. (Exception: I hate clipping external objects into my notebooks. They're strictly two-dimensional marks by me on paper. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps the bulk.)

Sure, Fritz the Homework Penguin won't be waddling across my kitchen floor anytime soon. But the math symbol cartoons turned into Rhomeo and Julihat and a roughly dozen-person production at one spring Expo. And the fractal doodling turned into my first foray into teaching at a math summer camp at my high school. So you never know. And yeah, sometimes my notebook turns up things like alternative train door closing mechanisms in between the drawing of the plastic bag my groceries came in and a couple of half-finished sci-fi novel plots. And sometimes there's actual work in there; some computations for part tolerances, some pseudocode and a chart of data flow.

But I pity the clerk who'll have to go through my scribbles for "prior art," if I ever make something important enough for someone else to get into a legal tiff over some day. "What relation does this French-speaking rabbit have to your processor design?" they'll ask**. "Well, both were on my mind at the time." "Is this a... necessary part, the rabbit, for your invention to work?" "Necessary for me to think of it in the first place," I'll answer (if I'm being completely honest). My brain is a space where many strange things collide, and from this mess occasionally emerges an intentional design.

Design notebook? Yes, if I use the term loosely. Designed notebook? I choose my paper and my writing implement and my own restrictions on usage based on the direction I'd like my brain to go in (or not). But it's my notebook, in any case, and useful to my life, and it's good enough to make me happy.

**Yes, I know that patent proceedings don't actually go this way, and I'll redraw any very important diagrams before submission, and label them nicely with ID numbers and stuff. It's called "artistic license."

Mel Chua is a lazy bum who staunchly refuses her parents' orders to get a job. During her "year off" (right now) she overcooks spaghetti and attempts to save the world. Her current notebook is a somewhat world-ravaged green Google minitome from Leslie Hawthorne that she keeps forgetting is in her pocket. This weekend she will get a larger one.