The life of a moment

Fractals

The ghosts are back.

All the same obsessions domino their way back to occupy my mind again: Dreams, memories, humor, patterns and death. About a week ago my world was shaken. My cousin sister got into a terrible accident and is still unconscious. And while she lies there dreaming, carefully treading away from death, the rest of us hold on tight to memories, hope and humor.

Today I was going through old emails and found a mail my cousin sent me two years ago. She was excited because she had just found her diary from when she was in Holland. She was very very young – seven or eight. In her mail to me she transcribed one of the diary entries that caught her eye. The mail said:

Shonu monu! i was cleaning out some of the shelves at home today and I found this diary type of thing our teachers made us keep in class 3 when I was in Holland. Look what I wrote!

"On Sunday I remembered when we were in India on that night when we were going to Maastricht. I was very very scared because I didn't wanted to go to Maastricht, but I wanted to stay with Shonu. Afterwards I opened my colouring book and why do you think I cried, because I saw Shonu's colouring and, I did forget about Shonu, but then I remembered who Shonu was, and, I cried and cried, and then I lay in bed crying louder and louder. Afterwards I sent a letter to her on a piece of paper which had a cat on it because she loves cats she also has one her name is Shadow. Her name is Shadow because our shadow's always stay with us and Shonu wants her cat always to stay with her."
(oh and the funny thing is that the title of this so called story is- 'a happy happy weekend' hahaha)

What is strange is that on reading this I realized that I too had forgotten T and this mail brought back a flood of memories. Then I remembered who T was, and I cried and cried, and then I lay in bed crying louder and louder.

Funny how these things work. The first time I had read T’s mail two years ago, I had laughed at how cutely silly it was that she had ‘forgotten’ me so quickly as a kid.
But memories have a way of working in strange ways where often people, places and time get exchanged – and we get moments like this which is a memory within a memory within a memory.

the hour-glass of day-dreaming

I have come to LOVE bus rides. Looking back I realize they are my ONLY uninterrupted time in the whole day. No phone calls - too noisy for that, no internet, I feel a strange sense of privacy in that noisy overcrowded vehicle! Its become my reading time, my daydream time, my crazy ideas time, everything.

Coincidentally I had a time management training at work in which the we discussed 'interruptions' for a long time. We discussed multi-tasking, collaborating, and all the buzz words of the new healthy flexy work culture. Our trainer was convinced that multi tasking was a myth, and that people can only do one thing at a time. It was just that some people might be good at masking the transition time as they switch from task to task - but it was still ONE task at a time. And that multitasking was actually reducing their efficiency at every individual task. While this could be debated endlessly... it got me thinking.

Working with no interruption (the black box) being on one end of the scale, and embracing interruptions as a means to step out of the black box being on the other end of the scale, is difference between my bachelor's degree in design and my masters degree in design. Let me explain this. I began studying design in the year 2000 in India. The style of working was intensive and immersive. Only ONE course was taught over two weeks/four weeks, the assignments were individual, and towards the end of the course all students would be thinking and dreaming and spending every second on only ONE problem/solution. There was no major use of the internet, and very few students had cell phones. The periods of time spent working were clear cut capsules of uninterrupted flow. The final results/design solutions were often fantastic and equally often just plain old ridiculous.

When i came to the US to study design research for my masters, things had changed. The model of design education was completely different. It seemed to be based on interruption(in a good way). We were taught four or five courses at a time and these courses stretched over a quarter, everything was team work. So now at any given time, I had five things to think about and the opinions of 20 people to consider. And I immediately saw the difference: it was SAFER. No result was ever too ridiculous. The law of averages was mitigating the one thing that scared businesses away from designers: craziness. But at the same time, The number of spikes in absolute brilliance/freshness also reduced. It didn't vanish, don't get me wrong, - we sometimes saw projects that were clear examples of multidisciplinary thinking gone right :) where the answers far exceeded the capacity of one individual.

The stark difference between the two approaches makes me wonder. We now are so busy trying to make design appear risk-free and methodical and almost predictable so that we get green signals that at times i can't help but think - are we loosing that black-box, missing that 'bus' where we meet our own ideas?

Time will tell...

The disease of forgetting...

I realized this week that its just too easy to forget how to write: how to ramble endlessly to a faceless square window, its also possible to forget how to draw, and well, who knows, I've not swam in a long time and its possible that swimming too can be added to this crazy list!

All my ideas seem to swarm around only in long bus rides and vanish into thin air when I finally can write them down. So here's the last strain of an idea before it too sinks into the quicksand of my routine.

Its been 8 months now that I'm working in a Public Health organisation. Public Health is way more interesting that you would think... It feels to me like a system designer's DREAM problem space. Public health has all the ingredients that designers love to get their hands dirty with:

1. Its system level. Nothing caters to a person - its always about a community/state/country

2. The approach is often preventive which means understanding the source of the problem

3. It is deeply embedded in understanding and influencing human behavior

The combination of these three things makes it a fertile ground for design thinking and design methods. Its not surprising that Design for Social Impact is gaining so much momentum. However, when i sit to think about how do I as a designer try to train a team of public health professionals about design methods i realize its a challenging task. Even with the vast amounts of vigor and method embedded in design research and strategy techniques, they still seem a bit fuzzy and flaky to people never exposed to design. This is not to say that these professionals do not like the RESULTS of design techniques - they usually love it.

This led me to think that as a design community two things are needed:

1. How should we start presenting design projects at non-design conferences. I usually get bored stiff in design conferences where each speaker earnestly explains how useful and indispensable design is... I feel bad that we keep preaching to the converted

2. Alternately we must make a conscious effort to discuss failures in design conferences. Recently I was amazed to find out that there is a FailCon conference every year for failed/early entrepreneurs to discuss their stories since 95 % of entrepreneurs fail. Whats our failure rate? Surely our business of innovation is not nearly as watertight as we project it to be... where do we go wrong? how could we do it better...

But to not deviate completely from Public health, the reason i brought up these two ideas was that i think it is unacceptable for us to venture into spaces like Design for Social Change without fully understanding the risk, and responsibility, and ethics of designing in this sphere. We need to start conversations with public health organisations, gauge where we can really add value, interface with other disciplines not only in tiny teams but by organizing events and debates that are truly multidisciplinary.

Or we run into the risk of forgetting that we aren't the only ones solving problems. And forgetting, as i mentioned in the very beginning is a bit too easy.

Stars, black holes and white dwarfs...

On waiting...

...coming up soon...

...wait almost over...

And the week of waiting is now over.

Waiting is a fuel for creativity. Really. Never does my imagination go as wild as when I am impatiently waiting for something I really really want. The longer I wait, the more reasons I conjure up to explain the delay.

Excitement... anticipation... irritation... annoyance... anger... fury... concern... anxiety... worry... ImaginationRunsWild... tired... boredom... hope... optimism... ... ... exhaustion.

So much research has actually gone into this strange thing called waiting:

1.The study of lines ( i mean queues) http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/11/20/queuing.psychology/index.html

2. count-downs on traffic intersections http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/taiwans-solution-to-traffic-jams/

3. mirrors in elevators http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1244-defining-the-problem-of-elevator-waiting-times

I could go on, with this list but i will then be deviating from my point( if there is one!). Like everything else, waiting has a strange balance to it. In an interesting lecture on Emotional Products, the speaker talked about the enjoyment in the roller coaster of emotions that the film industry has mastered. We love stories that build an interesting plot, and we WAIT till the end to see the resolution...

The problem really is unanticipated BLANK time. Unaccounted time that we see as a clog in the hourglass.

Learning by teaching

I was trying to think of the next model for design education.

The only model that I know of is 'learning by doing'. This model is 'friendly' to understanding materials, working on problems and seeming what really works and what doesn't. The only problem with this is that it survives on the a very strong feedback channel. What i mean is that the teacher waits for questions and moments of confusion and ideally points you back in a moreoless 'right' direction. So what happens when you want to expand numbers in design schools? Will the old model of learning by doing still work? and if not, do we not expand numbers/ rely on technology as the solution... or....

Think about 'learning by teaching'.

Strangely, I had only partially written this post when Thalia commented on it, and it built my argument in a new and interesting way ... Lets see where this goes.

Interesting lives

Every now and then one encounters a person who's had an interesting life and more often than not, that translates to a difficult life. Yesterday I met such a person.

Lets call this lady Sethe. She was a woman in her late sixties, a large African American woman. She grew up in the south, in cotton fields. Finished high school and came to Illinois for college. She got married and had 7 children. The kids grew up, got married. Hard times hit late.

One of her daughters developed an ailment that slowly killed her. Her daughter's son had tried really hard to take care of his mother, and had convinced himself that if he did a sincere job of looking after her, she would get better. He'd sleep at the foot of her bed , and if at any time the mother felt pain or needed something, the boy would run and get it for her. When she finally did die, the boy went into shock, and never came out of it. Its been five years. Counseling and the passage of time have not seemed to have done their trick. After the mothers' death, Sethe took custody of all her grandchildren - seven children. The following year her husband died, and the year following that, she was diagnosed with cancer.

She said that she was sitting in the doctors office when she was told she had cancer. She said she was scared, very scared. More scared because she knew she had to be strong, there was too much depending on her LIVING. She said she walked out of the doctor's office feeling weak... and decided to sit for some time. as soon as she sat down she saw a very young boy around four years old, coming out of an open heart surgery... and she saw his mother crying, and she thought - this kid is so young and he is already seeing a darker shade of life, I'm sixty how could i possibly feel sorry for myself. She said she felt no fear after that. Slowly but sure she recovered.

So Sethe is a survivor in many ways. By survivor I don't mean just someone who came through alive. I mean a person who's spirit has survived. Sethe was one of the most energetic, funny and loving people I have met in a long time.

I began by talking about interesting lives. No, I don't believe that interesting lives have to be tinted with tragedy, some interesting lives are full of surprising and unpredictable upswings. The interesting-ness lies in the spontaneity and surprise in the trajectory... and the voice of the storyteller.

On Lingering

So while i begin most posts after a long time on a declaration of ending a 'chapter', this won't be one of them. This chapter doesn't seem to want to get over so easy.  I feel like the author of a book in which the characters have become so strong that i can't keep to the story i had planned... the fictional characters themselves are suddenly planning the trajectory of the plot... and that i myself will be surprised when i write that last chapter.

So right now is about lingering. Its about a lot of looking back, a lot if reflecting.  I'm in a place i didn't expect to be in after my 'time was done'. I also  such a have foggy picture of whats ahead that the only way to navigate is by looking behind me.  The good thing is that there IS so much behind, so much that i can pick up the loose ends of and start a whole new tapestry.  

The last few months were fun. And here i mean fun in the best meaning of the word.  It was SO much play with thoughts and fights with time.  Mock fights - the fun kind.  So i DID manage to take my work on understanding humor to a new level.  something so far from my comfort zone.  I read my paper again today after 2 weeks of not thinking about it, and was thrilled to see that it still seemed to have the possibility of a touch of magic... and strangely and most importantly it was so not complete. So much still to come. Just like the format of humor.  Humor is fun cause its format is in its incompleteness. Ones mind has to work to complete the riddle.  Different minds tie the ends in different ways, some don't and don't laugh... but the important piece is that interestingly jokes like abstract art hold no meaning if you don't make sense of it in your own context.

Here's to the next few months being the 'set up' for something that will truly make me smile at the point of resolution. 

Like humor.

Snails...

Its time that i took my own idea of "Snails at Heart" seriously.

This has been an exceptionally slow semester so far. A lot of idle time, a lot of sleeping, a lot of 'yak-shaving', movie watching, wiki-surfing. I feel sinful, but I'm hopeful that this will BE the goofing off quota for the year and I'll get a crazy job that know the tricks of keeping me on my toes.

Writing is difficult business. I chose to write a paper this semester and even though a few good ideas have struck me, its all still in note form.  Some people find it hard to write things in a concise manner... i find it hard to elaborate... i keep wondering if I'm entering into the realm of redundancy.  Ideas seem wonderful in my head, but when i write them down, it feels exactly the same as when one wakes up thinking one had an AMAZING dream, and the more you try to remember it, the more you forget it, or worse - CAN remember, but can't figure out how it made me SO happy...

OK, coming back to snails at heart - my original idea with this was to create a space where it was OK to 'slow down'.

and not feel sinful.

 

health

I am wondering if I’m turning into a cry baby.

One of my courses has me studying and reading an online blog - a new method of user research in which participants maintain an online daily journal and share their life, their views. This particular study was on understanding notions surrounding health and food choice.

While this may sound very dry, and I must confess I felt pretty weighed down after being handed 500 pages of research data to read, but this stuff has me crying every few pages.

People can be so candid and honest in faceless environments... perhaps in the past year I’ve had so few "real conversations" (as in I don't remember the last time I had a lump in my throat after a conversation with a friend). Suddenly this influx of truth and unadulterated emotion and confession has me choked!

People were so forthright and honest with all the details of their life - the crazy little problems that bugged them everyday, dilemmas surrounding BIG challenges in their lives, very sad moments, moments to remember... stories about having to care for their little child who is suddenly very ill, caring a family member with a mental disability, the death of a close friend, cancer, pregnancy, eating when upset, eating to celebrate... etc.

The lives of these people seemed 'closer to the ground'.  And I definitely do not mean this in a bad way. I mean I realized that since I have not had to deeply care for another person/creature and take care of anybody on a daily basis, my daily/life goals are mostly oblique.  Nothing seems too scary or too urgent. Time is always on my side, and I rarely feel that I actually have something to loose. Motives and reasons for my daily actions are luke-warm.

And so I cried.

Not out of sadness but a strange relief.

We really aren’t as selfish as we are taught to believe we are... we actually perhaps function much better when we need to take care of someone (anyone, even a pet)

And then I cried again, because I missed Shadow.

Which brings me back to the beginning...

washing the mud off my stripes

When I was 12 I sat in front of the mirror and slowly painted my whole face brown. I wanted to see what I would have looked like if I wasn't a 'zebra' as my mother called us. After finishing, my heart sank cause everything looked wrong. My eyes, my lips, my hair… nothing went with the brown.

And many times I just lied brown. I told people that my mother was an INDIAN from Trinidad, and that I was in fact completely Indian. I learnt the rules – that I could never correct people's English, but everybody could correct my hindi. I learnt that people who 'hated' fair skin, were good people, and people who hated dark skin were bad.

But its been some time now …

I now introduce myself as part Trinidadian. I talk about my grandmother who was from Canada. My accents not changed a notch… and I want to go back to India, after seeing a bit more of this side of the world.

Cause i do owe 'this side of the world'. This one year here HAS changed something very deeply. this was the first time when i introduced myself as Indian, i didn't have to explain my color, or make excuses for it, i WAS what i said i was. It even struck me that if i said i was American, if ANYBODY said they were American, it would be accepted without a blink of an eyelid, without the need for any explanation of color of skin. there might be undercurrents that i don't see, but there is a difference, - prejudice is not a subject of pride. and once i didn't have to fight to be seen as an indian, another door opened in my mind... my real roots. I didn't feel the need to lie anymore. No more excuses, no more fudged history.

Caste: CAR

The Caste System of India has been replaced by the Car System in New Delhi.

Stay with me, this makes sense.

At the top are the Cars:

This is a powerful class, and believe that all resources are meant for them or should be given to them as Dakshina.

2^nd tier are the Motorized Two Wheelers:

This is the warrior class. They charge bold and brave past most obstacles. They take chances, and often are prey to it. However, as they aspire to the Car class, they too tend to believe that resources are MEANT for cars.

3^rd tier are the buses

This is the trader class, the vast majority of people. They suffer many hardships but are resigned to their fate. They believe that the only way they can escape from the cycle of daily acrobatics of jumping off moving buses, transversing through moving traffic after being dropped in the middle of the road; is by moving up the chain… they aspire to buy a bike some day.

4^th are the bicyclists:

This is the service class. They have no power, no right to space. They occupy the leftover space on the road. Each turn/change of lane is a life threatening event, and in the actual event of death, it is presumed that it WAS in fact the bicyclists fault, for BEING on the road that is meant for cars to begin with!

Recently a new system was introduced in Delhi’s roads: the Rapid Bus Transit.

A system introduced because everybody undoubtedly ASPIRES to rise to the Car Class, and our roads can not hold that many cars, if we build more and more roads so that all cars could be in the various levels of road, the air would not be worth breathing.

The reaction of the car owners to the BRT was very similar if not IDENTICAL to the upper caste reaction to the ‘reservation system' introduced also not very long ago. While it IS the rise in the number of CARS, not buses causing the increased traffic congestion, car owners find it impossible to accept that they need to sit in a traffic jam consisting of cars, while buses move relatively freely. This reaction is almost amusing seeing that even if the BRT was NEVER introduced, these cars would be sitting in a traffic jam of similar duration in a matter on years ANYWAY owing to the rise of car ownership. So if the BRT has pre-empted the traffic conditions 2 years hence while still providing a way to get from place to place, one would expect a welcoming reaction…. But car owners would rather NOBODY get to their destination if they can’t.

So, back to my earlier comparison, the Upper caste/ Upper class seem to believe that all resources are primarily THIERS for the taking and everybody else must be grateful to receive the leftovers. Any attempt to equalize distribution goes against the very nature of the caste system ingrained as FAIR!

other Readings:

http://thecityfix.com/media-and-car-owners-take-on-brt-in-delhi/

http://www.india-seminar.com/2007/579/579_geetam_tiwari.htm

18 to 63

I heard this from an old woman as she was leaving Chicago.

Girl you gotta make things happen
or things will just keep happenin to you….

She said:
You come here young at 18, and
Blink, you’re 63
All those things you collected
You just give them out for free

I couldn’t sleep when I got here
The sirens drove me nuts
Do people really manage with
No Ifs and buts?

But then I slept so soundly
That I woke up just right now
45 years are over
And I still can’t figure how

Girl you gotta make things happen
or things will just keep happenin to you….

Well, I had just moved to Chicago,
and I wanted her rocking chair,
the sirens weren’t my problem ,
but my apartment was pretty bare…

Ma'am

There are moments in your life you know you will remember forever
There are books you put down knowing you’ve changed
There are people that you meet, people you know that MAKE you. You would not be the same you if you hadn’t met them.

Today is a sad day. My school history teacher passed away. And I am so far away from anybody who will understand how sad this is.

Its strange. There is comfort is knowing that that somebody is there SOMEWHERE in this world, even if you never meet them again. And to know they are gone is comfort removed from a strange place…
A close friend who wrote to me telling me about this is about to go to Japan for 5 years to do a PHD in Japanese, another close friend who I wrote about this to is doing her PHD in history, all my closest friends are from my school are out there somewhere still studying… I am here, so far away from the world I know and love, to study. And I KNOW that Chitra Ma’am probably changed the course of all our lives.

NO ideas, no discussion, no thoughts, no quirks, no reflections, no contemplation, no questions, no answers, no anything.

Very very blank.

turtles all the way down...

This morning i woke up early feeling very hungry. I sleepily wandered into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk, mixed in sugar and coffee, sat and stirred it until it was nice and frothy.

i was hungry but very very sleepy... so i decided to put my glass of cold coffee next to my night lamp, and lie down, intending to sip it every now and then...

Soon i fell asleep.

I my dream i was still hungry, and still in my bed, i reached over to the night lamp and was surprised to see that my glass was not there! i got up and looked all around my apartment... then the dream took over. there are spaces that i visit often in my dreams. I have never really seen them, but from dream to dream i seem to revisit them. Its almost like a Yoshifumi Kondō film. There are long sequences in my dreams of the path i take to reach the place... secret shortcuts, little hiding places, clearings, alleys...

I visited ALL those places looking for the glass of cold coffee.

Finally i gave up... in my dream i thought that maybe, i just dreamt that i made cold coffee, and actually i never made it...

i was just thinking of making another glass for myself when i woke up... and saw the cold coffee right next to the night lamp...

I had to laugh!

But thats got me pretty worried about whether i am really AWAKE this time!

(if the title does not make sense, then read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down )

confession

This thought hit me last night.

I am intrigued by my growing need for blogging every now and then… its like a form of confessional behavior that I never imagined I would subscribe to.

Why I call it confessional is cause of the way I treat this space... no big secrets being let out, - no. By confessional I mean that I treat this space as a mood and meaning tracker. Unlike a personal diary this space gives me the feeling of something ‘bigger’, and a feeling of a degree of anonymity. Probably most of the people that read this blog are people that do know me, but every once in a while there comes the unknown reader.

This got me thinking about this whole need for ‘confession’ and something ‘bigger’… it sounded too much like the way people feel about god. Its probably an outrageous parallel… I know.

But I sat and thought about this for a while. Confession is a crazy strand of communication. Its with ‘nobody’, and with no expectation for a reply. I don’t blog to create an open source solution finding attempt at my life’s problems… many of my blogs end with questions, but I don’t expect answers.

So what is it about externalizing thoughts that is an end in itself?

My cow

I actually thought i could build the whole cow out of cans... but a dozen cans down the line i realized that the 'face' made me happy enough!
Now she gives me company next to my seat.

Candid? :)