Paula Scher's Productivity Trick

In Fast Company Scher discusses her worst jobs, her biggest challenge as a designer, and her productivity secret:

I have a productivity trick that I didn’t know I had until I heard about it on a radio program. NPR did this interview with experts about boredom. iPhones and other forms of digital media were disrupting boredom, because people can occupy themselves all the time. You don’t have any more downtime—you go on your iPhone, look at email, or you’re playing video games. The fact of the matter is, that eats up really good creative time. I realize that when I’m sitting in a taxicab in traffic, or on my way to the airport, or waiting to get on a plane, or trapped in some other boring situation, that’s when I get the best ideas, because I’ve got nothing else interfering with it. I didn’t realized until I listened to that broadcast how important boredom is to me. I have to stop reading emails or being anywhere near the internet to be able to create.

The Most Intimate Relationship in Your Life: Your Smartphone

Tom Chatfield for 99u:

Above all, it seems to me, we face two entwined questions every time we reach towards a screen. What does the computer want us to do—and what do we ourselves want? If we’re not careful, we will only ever answer the first. Ours is a world in which we are nudged, cajoled, bribed, and enticed ceaselessly; in which we are locked in an embrace with tirelessly fascinating tools. More than ever, we must be prepared to admit how messily personal this relationship is; how toxic habit and excessive ease can be; and that, as in all relationships, the easiest and the best option are rarely the same thing.

As the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman once put it, “when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” If we’re not careful, our days will become a sequence of answers to questions that aren’t worth asking: what do you like, dislike, think in 140 characters; how can a friend most efficiently be acknowledged or dismissed; what distraction might help you forget the life you forgot to lead?

The Shadow Ballet: Dancers & Drones

Wired: 

DRONES WILL CHANGE how we ship goods! They’ll revolutionize search and rescue! We hear about these futures all the time. It’s less often that we’re asked to consider how autonomous flying machines might be used for more poetic ends. But, as with any technology, drones can be just as invigorating for art as they are for commerce. “Shadow” is the just the latest example.

Timothy Young: Books Matter

Timothy Young writing in Design Observer, gives ten good reasons the book is important:  

7. A book is an object fixed in time. 
A book can tell us about its status in history. If we look through first editions of Moby Dick or Leaves of Grass, we find that they give away information not only about when they were created, but also about the worlds in which they were created, by way of advertisements, bindings, the quality of their paper, and watermarks on that paper. Such components are often not captured by scanning or are flattened out to make them of negligible use. In Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold—his saga about how libraries microfilmed runs of newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s and then discarded them—one of his chief complaints was that the filmers skipped advertising supplements and cartoons: things that had been deemed unimportant. 
 

Why Think When You Can Google Instead?

Melissa Dahl writing for The Science of Us:

And so the question a team of psychologists at the University of Waterloo recently asked will likely be of interest: What does it say about our thinking skills when we habitually outsource problem-solving to our phones? 

Their results, published online this week in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggest that people who admit to relying more heavily on their smartphones for information — for instance, Googling something they could’ve figured out by with a few minutes of thinking about it — are also less likely to be analytical thinkers, judging from their answers to problems designed to assess cognitive style and ability. The smartphone-dependent were likelier to be intuitive thinkers, which means that they relied on their gut instincts rather than careful analysis.