digital curry

Today I learnt about this beautiful Japanese concept of "Mono No Aware". My understanding of it is derived just from English interpretation of it but it's such a beautiful concept that regardless of words or their essence to capture it I think I know quite well the feeling those words are trying to capture. Literally, it can be translated as "the 'ahh-ness' of things", life, and love. The feeling it tries to convey is the feeling of wistfulness, the deep joy touched by that hint of sadness at the awareness of impermanence of things. The awareness that the joy and beauty in the current moment is transient - and in a way that makes that moment even more special, but also knowing that the moment is going to pass and the best you can do is live that moment and cherish it to the most. There are moments where you come across something - a term, an explanation, a description - and your first reaction is "Yes, that's happened to me before!" And t...

Do posts that start or end with smart quotes feel smarter? I'll leave you to answer that but start with a quote from Einstein anyway: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity." One of the fun parts of working as a Design Researcher is thinking deeply about how people perceive things. Time is one of those things. With interactivity and flow being such an integral part of today's applications this becomes even more important. So this week I'm spending some time trying to understand perceptions of time and what an experiment design to measure some of the questions I am interested in might be. One interesting thing I learnt about were the two classic theories of time perception: 1. The Internal Clock Model 2. The Attentional Gate Model The internal Clock model roughly underlines the fact that humans/animals are capable of learning the temporal structure ...

While researching something about blogs I came across this bit of research on why people blog. 1. Blogs as documents to “journal my life” 2. Blogs as commentary: A point of view, not just chatter 3. Blogs as Catharsis: “Me working out my own issues” 4. Blog as muse – Thinking by writing 5. Blogs to build community: “Getting in conversation with each other electronically" I guess my primary motivation (if you can call such sporadic posts motivation ;) ) would lie around 1 and 2. Yours?