Tiny Gigantic

A friend of mine recently introduced me to a concept she calls “smart-people traps.” It’s a loose idea, but still useful. A smart-person trap is a limiting situation that is particularly common or tempting for smart people to get themselves into. And given that you’re reading this blog, you’re probably a smart person, so I thought I’d pass these along, lest you find yourself in a pickle.

1. The Professions
Smart people go into The Professions (you know, white collar work: lawyer, doctor, banker, career-track desk jockey) for any number of reasons: they are tempted by the rewards, or they are pressured by family and culture, or they cannot leave the security of a pre-defined track, or they are unwilling to explore themselves enough to see an individual course. The problem is that The Professions are a grind, and for many there is no passion or purpose, no vision or meaning, no intuitive individual truth. And if you’ve ever been trapped doing work that has no meaning for you, you know how soul-sucking this can be.

2. Academics
Smart people are good at school, and so they are tempted to stay in school their whole lives. The problem with this is that for most academics, they get into a spiral of irrelevance and isolation from the rest of the world.

3. Politics
Smart people often want to use their gifts to help the world, and politics seems like a good path. The trap is that in order to change the world through politics, you must gain power, and the game of gaining power will fuck you up for sure.

4. Critical thinking
Smart people generally get very educated, and higher education (in the US at least) teaches only critical thinking. Smart people spend all their formative years getting rewarded for finding problems, for focusing on the negative. They leave school thinking that the way to be useful and show your smarts is to point out why things won’t work, rather than using some of those smart to find a way forward. Of course, critical thinking IS useful, but it is not a complete toolbox. (Consider, for example, how useful it is to know how to do creative thinking.) The problem is that most smart people have only one tool, but because they don’t know any better, they operate as if their toolbox is full.

The thing about traps is that once you see them, you can avoid them. So let’s hear it: what other smart people traps can you think of?

HBO’s got a new project going that I don’t quite understand, but the promotional website is super interesting. First, it’s quite beautiful. And second there seems to be a number of inter-related stories taking place, all seen from the outside. And the narrative goes on for a while so you get the good stuff without feeling like anything’s required of you. Pretty smart. Go play around with it for a while.

Whoah. The folks over at mental floss found a crazy stunning project.

Just go check it out.

Thanks to TinyGigantic reader Delford for the tip. : )

So we spent the day at the PSFK conference yesterday. And it kinda sucked. It’s not that the speakers chosen weren’t doing interesting shit. They were. And it’s not that the stuff these speakers chose to talk about wasn’t (mostly) relevant. It was. Kinda.

Part of the problem was the format. PSFK billed it as a conference. And like every conference I’ve ever attended, NO CONFERRING HAPPENED. People are either giving or quietly consuming presentations. There is no conversation. I’d rather be reading a blog. With a blog, at least you can participate in a conversation in the comment threads. And with a blog (or magazine for that matter) you can control the pacing. You can skim, and skip the boring stuff. Not so with conferences. When you’re bored, you have to wait it out.

The other problem is that while the speakers were talking about the cool and interesting shit they’d done, no one actually talked about why what they’d done mattered and, more importantly, what we could actually learn from it. That sucks because most of us came to the conference to learn stuff that will help us.

The very first speaker presented “9 themes for inspiration” (or maybe it was 11—I was already a little wobbly). Aside from most of them being super-ridiculously obvious (e.g., number 3: “look to the past”), there was no talk about how to actually do that. But there was one theme that stood out as a catalyst for inspiration: Frustration. Which is why I’m writing this post.

What seems so dumb is that we had so many cool people in the room, and we were given no way of mining all the good stuff that was in their heads. We weren’t even given a real forum to discuss the speakers’ ideas. I want someone to organize an event that is really about conversation. I want to be sitting at a round table with the attendees, and given a problem to solve or a topic to pursue. I want a creative matchmaker to filter out the idiots and make groups of people that will blow each others minds.

Anyone wanna help us put something like that together?

Our homies over at MINE just sent us another piece of their Everything is Okay project. Sweet!

From the project:

This project exemplifies the power of design to alter meaning through context, and invites people to question (not simply accept) the veracity of its message.

Now, that sounds all serious and design scholar-like, but actually this is a super fun and playful project, which seems meant to be screwed with, kicked around, added to, subtracted from, and otherwise participated in. You’ll just have to decide how.

This is the TrekStop, a prototype for a vending machine that sells bike parts for quick repairs on the go. It sells stuff for doing minor repairs: bike tire inner tubes, patch kits, etc… and it also comes with an air pump, area maps, a message board and a video kiosk that offers tutorials on how to do minor repairs. It’s hard to know if these things will get enough permission in the cycling community to become ubiquitous, but if they do, it’s a super-smart bit of branded content by Trek.

Via Bicycle Design

from Core77:

Using bone conduction, a technology developed for hearing devices, the “touched echo” installation in Dresdon transmits sounds of the cities devastating 1945 carpet bombing through the visitors arms when they rest their elbows on the balustrade and hold their ears. Several custom made sound conductors mounted to the railing send sounds of the airplanes and bombs exploding through vibrations, it’s completely silent unless you touch the rail.

More here.

Thanks Eric!

See more googly-eye street art by Filthy Luker here.

Via woostercollective.

Yasmin Sethi has designed a super sexy chess set inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

In ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll, Alice falls through a mirror and on the other side of the mirror, she becomes a piece in a game of chess. Inspired by this, the chess pieces have an opaque mirror finish, when they touch the surface of the board they magically turn transparent and reveal the identity of the piece contained inside them. When removed from the board they revert to being opaque, hiding the identity of the piece.

Read more here.

via notcot.

This is just one of the many amazing nests and cocoons and huts that Patrick Dougherty makes. Gorgeous.