Aug 28, 2008
Consider Yourself On Notice
Fantastic article (via kottke) about noticing things, and the way noticing can be helpful in design and innovation.
“But once I’d noticed something and photographed it, chances were good that I’d notice it again—as if that click of opening the shutter coincided with the creation of a new info-capture zone in my brain.
This process of noticing once and then noticing again is how you start finding patterns and uncovering themes…”
This is similar to what I was getting at a couple of months back when I wrote about being receptive while on a commute (especially, but elsewhere too), and finding patterns, similarities, in the seeming chaos. It’s a key skill in anthropological and ethnographic fieldwork, and one which yields rewards in other areas, too.
The article takes the form of a conversation between two men working in the field of design, customer insight and research. It’s a great interaction, and a lovely way of exploring the theme:
Soltzberg: Which really supports what we were talking about earlier, that it all begins with noticing. There’s another classic Zen concept that everything you need to know and experience is already happening and present, but you need to get your old ways of thinking out of the way so you can experience it.Doing contextual research is like using “super-noticing power” to peel back those layers of preconception, culture and habit. When you do that you get to something fundamental and then you’ve got a really solid platform for developing new concepts.
Portigal: Super-noticing power really is a strong cultural idea. The enhanced human with awesome noticing and synthesizing powers crops up regularly in science fiction (e.g., the Mentats in the Dune series or the neurachem from Richard Morgan’s books).
Soltzberg: Right, sort of like a super-charged version of William Gibson’s Cayce Pollard character in Pattern Recognition.
Noticing definitely draws on a set of skills that these kinds of characters embody and amplify, but at the heart of it you have to genuinely be interested in the world around you and in other people.
Super-noticing is something which happens a lot if you’re trained to be receptive and observant, but also if you’re thinking about a particular thing.
Years ago, in 1990, I won a scholarship to go and study for two years at an international college in western Canada. Having never been to Canada before, I became hyper-aware of the mention of anything Canadian, so all of a sudden there seemed to be holiday offers to Canada and visits by minor royals to Canada and singers from Canada releasing new albums and documentaries about wildlife in northern Canada and books set in Canada and Canada Canada Canada Canada Canada everywhere I looked.
Was there really a sudden surge in True North (strong & free)-related promotions and media in the spring and summer of 1990, or had that stuff been there all along, only now I was more attuned to it and therefore noticed it more than previously?
It’s the same with pregnancy – friends undergoing IVF recently told me that they’d never previously noticed how every other woman you see in your daily life is pregant, but that actually the city in which we reside is full of waddling, fecund mothers-to-be.
Steve Portigal goes on to explain how he turns noticing into a student assignment:
Portigal: I’ve assigned students to routinely maintain a noticing log, either a blog (words with pictures) or a Flickr account (pictures with words). The exercise helps sharpen noticing skills by giving people permission to simply observe and document. There’s never any requirement to suggest a fix; indeed what they observe may not be broken in any way. It just has to arouse their interest, and in documenting it make the details of that interest explicit. Establishing some discipline for this behavior can be very helpful.
He’s right: sometimes just getting into the habit of noticing can be enough to help the patterns to emerge. The discipline is everything.
That’s one of the reasons I love Tumblr – my digital scrapbook allows me to record some of the digital ephemera(/detritus) that I come across in my daily life online, and I can look back through it to find patterns…or not.
Sometimes there’s nothing linking the stuff I find and paste there, except the person who found and pasted it.
Flickr is great for developing a discipline around noticing, too, and Flickr groups in particular – if your eye is receptive, then every journey out into the world can be filled with potential squared circles and little fellas and malapostrophication and more.
One of the easiest ways to get started is to go out, armed with a camera (or cameraphone) and just capture everything you notice of a particular colour. You’d be surprised how it opens the mind.
Here’s my redspotting challenge collage from Valentine’s Day a few years ago:
And here’s the rest of the pool of contributions.
And this is yet another reason why people how are using ‘web 2.0′ applications are gaining benefits, and why those outside of this online world struggle to see the value.
It’s the line “I can look back … to find patterns…or not” that is key for me. Does the argument then become “how costly is it to store and review the information” versus “how often do I find a pattern?”
There’s definitely something in this. When you hear a kid’s name you haven’t heard before, you suddenly hear of other people with the same name. Or when you buy a car and you see that car everywhere. You could put that down to fashion, but there’s more to it. On holiday last week I kept seeing people with pugs, the breed of the puppy I left behind and was missing.
Maybe that’s fate’s cruel sense of humour, maybe it’s perception or a Jungian causality thing.
[...] posts: Ever notice? by Steve Portigal & Dan Soltzberg Consider yourself on notice by Meg [...]