Maya Angelou's Wisdom Applied To Creativity

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou

For the past few days that quote by Maya Angelou keeps popping up everywhere. In blog posts, TED talks, marketing books, student design work, branding podcasts, everywhere, because it reveals a simple truth, it is all about how you made them feel.  

Sandy Pentland: Social Physics, How Good Ideas Spread, The Lessons From A New Science

From one of the world's leading data scientists, a landmark tour of the new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence.

If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT's Alex "Sandy" Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he has distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. Humans have more in common with bees than we like to admit: We're social creatures first and foremost. Our most important habits of action—and most basic notions of common sense—are wired into us through our coordination in social groups. Social physics is about idea flow, the way human social networks spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors.

To learn more about Social Physics you should check out Pentland's book. 

Joi Ito & Tim Brown on The Future of Making

The idea of making isn't just reserved for handmade bikes, artisan pickles, and Arduino helicopters. The future of making is a product of our human needs and the possibilities we create through technology. This is about a larger shift towards making and the unexpected movements that might occur. It's about how everyone from you to your grandma might design, make and consume products or experiences in the next 10 to 15 years. In this SxSW Interactive session Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, and Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, will host a conversation that considers how we might fashion new tools for the future and then how those tools might influence our lives.

Instead of futurists, let’s be now-ists: Joi Ito at TED2014

Director of the MIT Media Lab Joi Ito speaking at TED 2014:

In the B.I. [before the internet] world, starting a business had a clear timeline: says Ito, you hired MBAs to write a business plan, you raised money, and then you built the thing you wanted to build. But in the AI world, the cost of innovation has come down so much that you start with the building—and then figure the money and business plan. “It’s pushed innovation to the edges, to the dorms rooms and startups, and away from stodgy organizations that had the money, the power and the influence.”

During Nicholas Negroponte’s era at the MIT Media Lab, the motto he proposed was: “Demo or die.” He said that the demo only had to work once. But Ito, who points out that he’s a “three-time college dropout,” wants to change the motto to: “Deploy or die.” He explains, “You have to get it into the real world to have it actually count.”

Ito takes us to Shenzhen, China, where young inventors are taking this idea to the next level. In the same way that “kids in Palo Alto make websites,” these kids make cell phones. They bring their designs to the markets, look at what’s selling and what others are doing, iterate and do it over again. “What we thought you could only do in software, kids in Shenzhen are doing in hardware,” he says.

...

Ito urges us to follow a compass rather than a map. Instead of planning out every exact points before you start, allow yourself to make the decisions you need as you go in the general direction of where you need to be.

“I don’t like the word ‘futurist,’” he says. “I think we should be now-ists. Focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware and super present.”

Looking forward to seeing this talk when the video becomes available. 

Parsing Is Such Sweet Sorrow: Shakespeare through the lens of statistics

Nate Silver re-launches a vastly expanded FiveThirtyEight and amongst the new content we find a gloriously nerdy essay by Emma Pierson that begins with: 

More than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote it, we can now say that “Romeo and Juliet” has the wrong name. Perhaps the play should be called “Juliet and Her Nurse,” which isn’t nearly as sexy, or “Romeo and Benvolio,” which has a whole different connotation.

I discovered this by writing a computer program to count how many lines each pair of characters in “Romeo and Juliet” spoke to each other, with the expectation that the lovers in the greatest love story of all time would speak more than any other pair. I wanted Romeo and Juliet to end up together — if they couldn’t in the play, at least they could in my analysis — but the math paid no heed to my desires. Juliet speaks more to her nurse than she does to Romeo; Romeo speaks more to Benvolio than he does to Juliet. Romeo gets a larger share of attention from his friends (Benvolio and Mercutio) and even his enemies (Tybalt) than he does from Juliet; Juliet gets a larger share of attention from her nurse and her mother than she does from Romeo. The two appear together in only five scenes out of 25. We all knew that this wasn’t a play predicated on deep interactions between the two protagonists, but still.

From there she goes on to explore all of Shakespeare's lovers and how much, or how little they talked to each other, making an interactive visualisation that brings new perspective to the plays (for example, see how in the comedies there are separate relationships that draw our attention whereas the tragedies have the lovers front and center.)