alan wells

Doesn’t quite have a catchy ring to it, but I gave it a shot anyway. Most of my friends know I’m interested in sustainability, and I’m also not the biggest holiday person. The environmentalist in me finds it hard to square with the rediculous consumption and waste that seems to define this time of year. I love spending time with family and enjoying the good cheer, but all the presents, wasted food, and other things are always bothering me.

So I tried to do things a little differently this year. For my extended family, I donated to www.carbonfund.org to offset 50,000 pounds of CO2 production for my family (really only 1/10 of what one person produces in a year, but I think it covers the impact of just our family christmas on the planet). So I guess you could say that for the first time ever, I took away something for christmas instead of giving. But I still felt wierd about that, so I bought a copy of An Inconvenient Truth book for every household in that attended my family xmas celebration – which turned out to be a great choice because the books producers have chosen to make it a carbon-neutral production by devoting some of the proceeds to carbon-offsetting.

It took a little explanation to the family to get them into it, but they all seemed to like the idea, and I feel better about my small stand against the waste of this time of year. And it started a family discussion on electric vehicles, the sort of topic we don’t often talk about on Christmas. What every family in the US started doing this? I think it would be a great step in the right direction.

More info, if you’re interested:
http://www.climatecrisis.net/
http://www.carbonfund.org

Happy Holidays all, lets shoot for a carbon-neutral Christmas in 2007!

Today I was reminded of what life is like when school work isn’t consuming my every waking moment, and some of my non waking moments (having a nightmare about a web design/CSS problem is a rather unsettling way to wake up). I spent a good portion of today engaged in good conversation with good friends, it it felt very refreshing. Over a late breakfast with two of my friends we touched on cool classes, business ideas, and religion. One of the ideas that came out of our conversation had to do with a recent article in business week about young entrepreneurs. Chuck Branding (25) is working on a business that helps people buy cars by doing all the legwork with finding a dealership and negotiating the price. The most interesting thing to me about his business was that 15% of his customers are "single women who are intimidated by car dealers".

I brought up this fact with my two breakfast companions, both female, and was surprised to hear them say that they would never buy a car without a male there too. I consider both of my friends to be independent, strong women, so I was a little surprised that this was the case, but I think this speaks to a real problem with the car buying process and a place where there’s room for a lot of improvement. And it also reminded me of the importance of seeing the world through other people’s eyes whose perspectives differ from my own – whether that be because of gender, race, nationality, whatever.

The other conversation I had today was with my roommate, and we spoke mostly of relationships with other people – what affects the quality of those relationships and the kind of people we most like to cultivate interactions with. Early in the conversation, I said that I felt there was a sort of x-factor in people that I couldn’t put my finger on, but that it was some rare trait/combination of traits that make someone really interesting to me. My roommate pressed me to try to define this x factor, and over the course of our conversation we came to the following conclusion:

The people that we cultivate relationships with, the people we find most interesting and most pleasurable to be around are those people that allow us to feel comfortable enough with them to share our true selves. These are the people who we share our most personal thoughts with because we know that they are worthy of the trust entailed in sharing those thoughts.

There were many other musings from my day of conversation, but I’ll save those for another post.

Reason #537 that I love my Powerbook: backlit keys are awesome for blogging in the dark.

Now that I’m breathing easier after my final critiques, I’m working on a list of things that I’ve been thinking about over the past few months and have wanted to write about now that I have the time, so here’s what I’ve got so far:

- The idea of trying to connect the dots forward in one’s future in the way that Steve Jobs says is not possible in his Stanford commencement speech.

- I’m wondering what it is about California that makes it such a hotbed for really good ideas and new businesses. It seems like a disproportionate amount of the cutting edge things I hear about are happening right here in my own back yard in sunny California. Is it the weather, the water? I’ve got some ideas that stem from ecology and biodiversity that I think might be related in a theoretical sense

- I’ve got some notes and thoughts from a lecture that Eric Heiman of Volume Design gave at UCD this fall. He’s one of the best design speakers I’ve heard in my short career, and said some things that really resonated with me.

-I’ve been reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, for the last few weeks. Its been an absolutely fascinating read so far and its interesting to see some of the things that I’ve thought about myself as a creative person be validated by a psychological study of other creative people

-As mentioned before, I spent thanksgiving in Copenhagen, and I had the opportunity to appreciate the refinement of danish design while there. I’ve been thinking about why their design has been pushed in the direction that it is, and I want to explore a few ideas about that

-I read a book called West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origin of Belief by Steven Kotler… I hadn’t read a non-design book in a while and I really enjoyed the read. Kotler talks about some interesting topics including syncronicity and the genetic basis for spirituality. There’s something about the way he writes that appeals to part of me that’s interested in the intersection of science and spirituality.

-I read John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicty early on this fall quarter, and found it to be a great set of general guidelines for many things, and I’d like to share some of the things that have been most useful to me.

I’m sure (I hope) this list will keep growing but I think this is a good starting point for the first couple posts.

I spent all day wrangling with Flash and CSS, but finally my new portfolio is up. For now its hosted on the UC Davis design server at:
Alan Wells @ UC Davis Design
and its also hosted on my domain www.functionformdesign.com

I’ve got a few things I’ll be addding to the portfolio over the next few weeks, but the major stuff is all done.

So it’s about 3:15AM and I’m just about to stop work on my portfolio for the night. I think its coming together quite well, but it definitely needs some more time and effort. The beta version is up at:
Digital Portfolio Beta

So I spent Thanksgiving break away from UCD (has to be done sometimes) and went to Copenhagen to visit my Mom. It was great to get out of town for a while, and for someone interested in design, Copenhagen is a great place to spend some time. I’ve got some thoughts to share about Danish design and things of that nature, but they’ll have to wait until after my final project for my web design class is turned in on Thursday. Until then, here’s one of my favorite pictures from the trip.

So I’ve finally done it, I’ve set up a blog. I hope to record my own thoughts and musing here mostly for my own records, but perhaps someone else might find something interesting here to read as well.