[Reading Journal] A Whole New Mind
We are in the conceptual age, where the six essential aptitudes are: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.
design
The age of focusing on functionality is gone. Visually appealing and well-designed products are the new trends.
Notes: Great news for all kinds of designers!
story
Stories have the felicitous capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave. out. Logic tries to generalize, to strip the decision making from the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture the emotions… Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion.
— Don Norman, “Things That Make Us Smart”
Notes: Best campaigns try to sell a story, not a product.
symphony
Symphony is the ability to put together the pieces. It’s the capacity to synthesize rather than to analyze; to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields; to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; and to invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair.
“creativity generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains.”
— Mihalyi Csiksgentmihalyi
Metaphor — that is, understanding one thing in terms of something else — is another important element of Symphony.
empathy
The ability to feel and understand what the others are thinking and experiencing. Don’t put oneself in the center of focus.
Note: Isn’t that the empathy required to be a great UX designer?
play
Laughter could help a lot. Too much seriousness might not be needed.
There is no question that a playfully light attitude is characteristic of creative individuals. — Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
Learning isn’t about memorizing isolated facts. It’s about connecting and manipulating them. -James Paul Gee, University of Wisconsin professor
Note: It reminds me of the EMP Museum in Seattle, where music, passion, and the internal flow of happiness are experienced during play.
meaning
Spiritual fulfillment can help reduce the stresses.
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I have also published several other reading journals:
