alan wells

I have a philosophical opposition to the concept of New Years resolutions. Steadiness and consistency are important values to me, and making a bold or not so bold goal just because it happens to be January again doesn’t sit well with these values.

However, I recognize that seasonal change and the start of a new year provides an opportunity to consider one’s life and perhaps make some different choices to get back on a more desirable track. For myself, I decided that this year, I wanted to enjoy and experience the world around me more than I had in the past few years.

The context behind this desire is that 2010 was a crazy year in a professional sense. So was 2009, 2008 and 2007. Since finishing my undergrad program at UC Davis, I’ve worked at 2 startups and started one company. I’ve mostly enjoyed these experiences and don’t regret spending the time working, but it has left me wanting for a better balance. When 2011 started, I wanted make time for the things I have put on the back burner of the past few years. Writing online more wasn’t exactly on the short list, which explains why I’m writing this post on July 17th instead of January 1st.

I would like to record some of the things I’ve been doing this year, mostly so I can look back at this year and remind myself that every year should be like this. I’ve tried to do one major new thing every month this year, and so far that’s been working well. I have photos from most of these things and plan to document each one in a post. So far, the year of adventure has brought:

• January: Snowshoeing in Tulomne, 8K trail run at Angel Island, re-starting triathlon training for Wildflower
• February: Trip to Vail, Colorado. I got back out onto the slopes for the first time since my ACL replacement and spent 3 days re-learning to snowboard. Trip to Roatan, Honduras for a week of scuba diving and beach time.
• March: Wildflower triathlon training camp
• April: Marin County Half Marathon, Wildflower Half Ironman Triathlon
• May 2011: Alcatraz Challenge open water swim
• June/July 2011: Bike frame building class at CCA

There’s a great post over at Core77 on the language of form that exists in product design:

Form has meaning; it can touch us at such a primal level that our mind is left scrambling to rationalize our emotional reactions. Consider the visceral impression conveyed by a natural setting: The deep serenity felt, for example, while walking through a majestic grove of redwoods. The delicate lace of fern fronds wave as you drag your hand through them as you walk, and your heart jumps into your throat when startled by a deer caught wondering across the trail. These natural forms hold an innate meaning that not only transcends the human experience, but even predates our verbal expression, definition, and measurement. In other words, we did not create this meaning; it comes from the forms themselves, and existed long before we did.“

The idea that form is a language that predates verbal expression is fascinating to me. It feels like there’s a convergence between this idea and a notion mentioned by Eames Demetrios at Compostmodern a few weeks ago that he described as “way it should be-ness”. The post also eloquently describes a dilemma I’ve been running into lately – my job as a producer at Zynga is extremely data-intensive, but the problems I’m most interested in solving are in the areas of experience and form. In a business driven by statistics like clicks, installs and daily active users, I’m finding it difficult to justify time spent focusing on the less easily quantifable aspects of designing intuitive and visceraly attractive products. Not only that, but when we do put the time into refining these aspects of the design, as I feel we did with Scramble Live, it’s challenging to measure the impact of that attention to detail.

isolation

Originally uploaded by alanwells

One of my favorite photos from college.

Buy Smart – A Strategic Consumption Campaign: A graphic campaign designed to be applied to the built environment to drive awareness of the impact that consumers can have with their choices

California Lighting Technology Center: Working with my partner Ashley Brown, we redesigned the CLTC exhibit space and designed a modular case system to support their needs for flexibility in the space. I used Illustrator, Photoshop, and SketchUp to bring the designs together.

Green Design Wiki: a resource for exhibit designers interested in sustainability. I still maintain this site, and it gets about 1,000 hits a month.

My newest project – still in testing phase but coming along nicely.
project:regenerate

Seth Godin recently wrote about why people blog:

“What do most people get out of blogging? After all, most blogs are virtually unread by outsiders…

The act of writing a blog changes people, especially business people. The first thing it does is change posture. Once you realize that no HAS to read your blog, that you can’t MAKE them read your blog, you approach writing with humility and view readers with gratitude. The second thing it does is force you to be clear. If you write something that’s confusing or in shorthand, you fail.

Respectful and clear. That’s a lot to get out of something that doesn’t take much time.”

Since my blog definitely falls into the “virtually unread by outsiders” category, why do I bother? For me, its more of a replacement of a journal. Of course its public and I suppose that limits what I can write about, but I’m a pretty open person so I don’t find that to be a huge limitation. For me its about having a written record of my thoughts and musings, as well as the books I’ve been reading, the music I’ve been listening to, and some of the other things that are a big part of my life. Being a child of the internet, I like that writing a blog (instead of a journal) makes this written record searchable, linkable, and easily shared. Also, it allows me to include digital things that are hard to get into a hardcopy journal – and although the converse is also true – there are things that exist in the physical world that are hard to get into a blog, I find that the balance sways in the direction of the digital. But I do keep a paper sketchbook/journal/notepad/collection of interesting things to fill in the gaps. In fact, if I had a scanner, I’d probably scan some of those pages and post them here, because I think they’re interesting in a raw, unpolished sort of way. I did this in my digital portfolio and I like the depth that adds to an otherwise all-digital website.

Here’s another video, courtesy of TED, of the multi-touch display system that I posted about a few weeks ago:

TEDTalk – Jeff Han / Multi-Touch Display

TED sounds like an amazing conference to attend, I’ve watched almost all of the published TEDTalks and have found them to be very interesting and inspirational. They’ve just announced their registration for TED 2008, and I think I’m gonna submit an application, I don’t quite have the achievements yet to back it up.

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.