“We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.”

…says Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

And to challenge this common sensation, he uses Umberto Eco’s 30000-book library, which apparently (and understandably) includes many more unread books than read ones. For Eco, unread books present an opportunity for learning, and his ever-expanding library becomes an inexhaustible “research tool.”

“…a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. …

Every teacher and professor had their share of strain brought by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Through listening, adaptation, and planning, we made it to the finish line with quite a bit of energy with my students this semester.

There was one key decision that helped me have a very smooth remote teaching experience: preparing a front-loaded syllabus.

I made that choice consciously, but of course without a prediction about the implications of the then developing pandemic. …

On a Saturday morning, I am moving my gaze over the things on my desk. I am looking at the notes I took on a small notebook.

The notebook is made of pages. The mug has a handle.

Then there is a pen. It has too many parts including a spring inside. Somebody decided that that would be the best way to make a pen, and so the spring remained there.

The laptop? Looks simpler on the outside, even with so many keys. Inside? Too early to think about the circuits on a motherboard. …

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said.”¹

If so, how are we supposed to come up with “a new idea, creative thoughts, new imaginations in form of device or method”.²

Where do we find that spark that can lead us to the next innovative idea? How can we even talk about something entirely new?

Andre Gide stabs the innovator’s heart with this well-known statement, yet if you keep reading, you can find the courage to move on:

“But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”³

Bringing knowledge from distant disciplines

We can only make incremental additions to the existing…

I have been spending around 14 hours a day in front of my computer for the last six weeks. With my work, hobbies and writing all happening on the computer, my effort to cut my screen time down is not working so far.

I enjoy working with computers, and I am aware of novel modes of making that would not be possible without computing. I digitally craft forms and visualize them through programming, typing, clicking, and digital prototyping.

On the flip side, as someone who started painting early in childhood, and got back to it later in life, I agree…

Design innovation requires us to constantly identify and explore untouched bits of concepts we already know. Designing and making require a basic amount of knowledge to start with. Yet if our starting knowledge becomes too deterministic in the process, we fall into the trap of repeating while aiming for innovating. Repeating is great for style development, but not so much for innovation.

For design innovation, our habitual ways of thinking¹ and making should be malleable enough, so that, knowing becomes a tool rather than an obstacle.

Knowing more and better helps us build our expertise, yet it also makes us…

I am looking outside through the narrow slit between the top line of my monitor and the window shade. It is May 9th, 2020, and a wintry mix is flurrying its bits around. Colds are not unusual at this time of the year in Boston but snow is.

I am not at the beginning of anything, not at the end.

I am transitioning between designing, writing, and thinking on a daily basis. I am not asking how long this will go for, I know it will be long: I am calm. I would like to slow down, that part is…

Every decade brings forth its hot topics and buzz words and sets courses towards opportunities, or (mostly) failures that we even don’t hear about. Sitting at the core of our daily practices, data has been the molten-red topic over the last two decades.

I have been working with different sorts of data across various disciplines of design: be it architecture, product design, or visualization.

What is data? Let’s get this out of the way first.

Below, see a portion of a set that consists of 126000 data points. It represents the underfoot pressure values of a runner — numbers don’t…