Self Distraction

Self Distraction

Five signs your office is creative

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If you ask me, there is just one: you produce creative work creatively. Do that and you’re creative, QED. But when you’re looking at a particular office space, there are things you can tell immediately.

Such as this: if there are big, wall-sized decorations with words like “Imagination” then there will be creative people consciously ignoring them. That’s what non-creative people think these offices need and the real creatives are the ones who wouldn’t be seen dead being motivated by that.

Visual.ly believes there are more visible indicators of office creativity and, I suppose naturally, the site lists its top five visually. Have a look.

And you think you’re busy

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Assuming you’re not actually overloaded at this very moment, take an hour or so to look at people who are. These are showrunners: American TV producers who have to run their dramas like businesses.

It is truly a phenomenal job in terms of having to be productive – and productive all the time. I remember one showrunner mentioning in an interview that the shock of the job was just how many decisions you had to make in the moments walking back from the toilet to your office.

Decisions that affect the employment of at least dozens, typically hundreds. Decisions that affect the enjoyment of millions and thereby the income, sometimes counted in the billions of dollars, that your studio or network will get.

Video chatting phones – in 1970

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Bell Labs was right about so many aspects of video chatting.

They were right that it would a little bit awkward. That it’d provide “an enhanced feeling of proximity and intimacy.” That people would use it as a way to get out of tiresome business trip. That, someday, really, we’d all use it.

They were just wrong about how much anyone would be willing to pay for it.

In 2014, video chatting is one of the clearest “hey-it-really-is-the-future” features of day-to-day life. But it was first commercially available 44 years ago, when Bell Labs debuted the private “picturephone” in Pittsburgh in 1970.

The First ‘Picturephone’ for Video Chatting Was a Colossal Failure – Sarah Laskow, The Atlantic (12 September 2014)

Shrug. Might work. Music to be productive by

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I don’t know. The other day I got into a right Kate Bush mood – it happens to us all – and I did find that I was incapable of playing her music while I worked. Couldn’t let it be playing, I had to listen hard, I simply could not concentrate on anything else.

Naturally, then, I switched her off and went to my old Discoveries playlist. (Don’t click that. It goes to a confessional piece with a long list of music and I am still holding on to the hope that you respect me.)

Allegedly, apparently and reportedly, there are alternatives to music you like. There is music you don’t listen to.

There’s a joke there, but I’m not reaching for it.

Music to be productive by. You can tell I’m not sold. But see what you think: if it works for you, I’ll give it another go.

Forget Con Air, this is AirCon

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I relish the details behind things we take for granted and this story is about how air conditioning is replete with details and history:

But when air conditioning was first invented in the 1800s, hardly anyone actually wanted it. It took more than 100 years for AC to really catch on. This innovation took a long road, which Salvatore Basile explores in his new book, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything.

“I think there were many people who thought, ‘God made bad weather so you should just put up with it.’ And I think the idea of dealing with heat was to ignore it,” Basile told me in a recent phone interview.

Eventually, air conditioning did win out and ended up changing a lot — from where people live in the United States to the architecture of our buildings to even the evolution of computers. The interview with Basile is below:

How air conditioning changed America forever – Susannah Locke, Vox.com (9 September 2014)

By the way, look at the address of the full feature. It’s “www.vox.com/2014/9/9/6124321/the-history-of-air-conditioning-is-more-interesting-than-it-sounds-i”. Apart from that errant i at the end, what I like is that this was almost certainly the original headline on the story. “The History of Air Conditioning is More Interesting Than It Sounds”. No surprise that it was changed to “How air conditioning changed America forever”.

Here’s the Salvatore Basile book.

One silly paper-based Apple story…

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I’ve been leaning toward the larger phone because I’m really curious about how a bigger screen would change my relationship to my iPhone. I really like my iPad and if I had some of those features in my pocket at all times, I may really like that. I’m so curious that I’ve made a mock-up with this template from Ars Technica. I printed the page, folded it around the 6 Plus size, and taped a stack of index cards to the back to give it the approximate thickness of the actual phone. I’ve carried it so far in my fancy work pants and my jeans. It fits fine in my pocket.

6 or 6 Plus? – David Sparks, MacSparky (10 September 2014)

Here’s the Ars Technica link if you really, really want to do this daft thing. I saw that they’d done it, I just didn’t think anyone would use it.

Sparks, who I might mock for this bit otherwise think is an interesting guy, explains more in his full piece and mentions the ribbing he’s had today.

Apple’s other product: the presentation itself

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Apple does this stuff well. I’ve stolen from their playbook: I make the simplest, shortest, briefest slides I can.

Others have gone a lot further. Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi’s CEO dresses like Steve Jobs, presents products that look remarkably like Apple’s, and recently did Jobs’s famous “One more thing” in a presentation.

I would hope he got laughed at. I would hope that I get away with my short slides. But we both have reason to steal from Apple: they do this stuff so well.

Quartz (qz.com) looked at the last many years of Apple event presentations and analysed them rather a lot. So much so that it’s a bit of a shame they didn’t wait until after yesterday’s which would’ve seriously affected the findings.

Still:

One of Apple’s most successful products—which rarely gets recognized as such—is made not of aluminum and glass, but of words and pictures. The Apple keynote is the tool the company uses a few times a year to unveil its other products to millions of people. To understand their hidden structure, Quartz reviewed more than a dozen Apple keynotes, logging and analyzing key elements. Here’s what we found.

The Apple Keynotes podcast on the iTunes Store lists 27 events since Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone on Jan. 9, 2007. (A few are missing.)
They are an average 88 minutes long, with a similar look and feel—a minimalist slide presentation with live demos from Apple executives and industry leaders, punctuated by videos explaining Apple’s design and manufacturing processes. These videos—a genre in themselves—have been frequently parodied.

The Hidden Structure of the Apple Keynote – Dan Frommer, Quartz (8 September 2014)

Read the full piece for more minute by minute details, including who is the funniest Apple presenter ever. It isn’t Steve Jobs.

Taking the scorched Earth policy to your social media

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I belong to that exclusive Twitter club, not users who have been “verified” (curse their privileged names) but users who have hit the daily tweet limit, the social-media equivalent of getting cut off by the bartender. The few, the proud, the badly in need of help.

Reboot or Die Trying – David Roberts, Outside (2 September 2014)

That’s serious social media use. I had no idea that there even was a daily limit on Twitter. But after hitting it and generally just going far too far on all of these things, Roberts quit. Cold turkey, near enough, for a year.

He claims to have five things to tell you, five things that you can only know from having a year away from technology – or, presumably, reading about it.

I’d tell you some of the five but this is on Outside magazine. Outside. I barely know what the word means. Read the full feature and if it’s that crucial, let me know.