I first heard these words when I was 13, but the message has become increasingly more valuable as I’ve grown up: focus on process, not just the product.

One of the biggest problems I’ve seen in my own schooling, as well as in the American education system, is that the emphasis is reversed. Too often students are focused on (and encouraged to focus on) having the right answer, regardless of how they get there. In reality, life has few “right answers” and many unsolved problems.

I can’t fix the American education system with a simple idea, a set of lessons, or a whole new set of curriculum, and I’m not trying to. But I do believe that students, schools, and, ultimately, society would benefit from teaching and practicing the design process as a way of thinking as it encourages intentionality, dialogue, and reflection. In fact, for most schools, this wouldn’t even be a massive shift, as many schools already teach the writing process, which is the design process as practiced within a specific domain.

Although the “design process” differs depending on who you talk to, there are a few key elements:

• Ideation
• Creation
• Iteration
• Reflection
• Production 

The writing process, as it is commonly taught, involves similar elements:

• Brainstorming
• Prewriting 
• Drafting 
• Editing 
• Publishing

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Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that neither of these processes are linear. They are both messy, cyclical, and have feedback as well as iteration based on that reflection as a key part of the process’ success. Furthermore, this is not a suggestion to teach the design process instead of the writing process, it is a suggestion to teach the design process before the writing process, and continue to help students integrate it into their way of thinking.
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In both of these processes, the first step often involves identifying the constraints of the object to be produced (e.g. “Who is my audience?” “What type of object am I creating?” “What resources do I have to work with?”). From there, a basic artifact is produced that roughly addresses the goals, though perhaps not in the best way. Then, the object and its producers (and hopefully peers) undergo an iterative process of evaluating the designed object, identifying elements that are successful about the object (in hopes of keeping them in subsequent iterations), and identifying elements that are less successful (in hopes of improving upon them). This part off the process is perhaps the most important, as the ability for an individual to step aside from their work and embrace other perspectives (whether self-imposed or brought on by others) is crucial to the development of the work. This cycle of evaluation and evolution is often repeated until either the timeline for the project ends or a object is declared “finished” by the creators, and thus is produced.

While there are many benefits that the design process has over the writing process, some of the most important are that the design process can be applied to any situation, because it asks for the individual to make intentional decisions about a desired outcome based on a set of constraints (e.g. “What do I cook for dinner?”, “What do I wear today?”, “How do I talk to one of my colleagues about an obstacle that we’ve come across on this project?”). Although the writing process does much of this, it does it only in one context, and rarely, if ever, do schools have a conversation about how this process can be abstracted and applied to more broadly.

Everything in the world we experience is designed in some way. Some things are well-designed. Some things are under-designed. Some things are poorly-designed. But at some point, individuals made decisions that resulted in the products and experiences that all of us have. By teaching the design process and the practice of reflection and iteration, we are encouraging individuals to identify in what situations, and how, they have agency or control over an outcome, and to exercise that agency in an intentional way.

Good design is not necessarily about making “beautiful” things. Good design is about creating value within a set of constraints.

As a final note, I do want to acknowledge that I see the design process as a foundational way of thinking, because design is neither a spice you can add in at the end of a project, nor is it a “ cookbook to guarantee a given outcome at a certain date.”

Earlier today, Umair Haque tweeted that he wanted life advice. Haque is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter for his honesty and his perspective. He is a critical thinker and writer, regularly contributing to Harvard Business Review, where he shares thoughts on topics ranging from economics to how to create a meaningful life.

As I sat, looking at Haque’s tweet and reading some of the initial responses, I remembered this morning’s Zen Habits piece, encouraging us all to write (or create, in my mind) daily, and began to share my own thoughts with Haque. The following 10 things are what came out, in five tweets (linked below).

1. Know everyone has something to teach you.
2. Live with intention and conviction.
3. Remember no two people have the same experience.
4. Reflect on your successes just as much as your failures. Even successes involve missteps.
5. Relationships are about giving, not taking, and not giving so you can take.
6. When you love someone, tell them.
7. Smile everyday.
8. Your heart, mind, and body should be exercised every day.
9. Nothing is certain, so embrace the life you’re living, today.
10. What and how you consume (food, ideas, energy, etc.) has a dramatic impact on what and how you produce.

I recognize that every person lives a unique life and our experiences differ greatly, but for me, the above 10 “guidelines” make sense. They are a result of reflections on the conversations and experiences I have had throughout my life, and I hope they may be valuable things for you to think about as well.

LINKS: Tweet 1 // Tweet 2 // Tweet 3 // Tweet 4 // Tweet 5

“Unwanted treatment is American medicine’s dark continent. No one knows its extent, and few people want to talk about it. The U.S. medical system was built to treat anything that might be treatable, at any stage of life—even near the end, when there is no hope of a cure, and when the patient, if fully informed, might prefer quality time and relative normalcy to all-out intervention.”

There is so much to say about this article, and I will definitely return to this post and add more thoughts, but in my mind, unwanted treatment is perhaps the single most disgusting example of capitalism there is, where ridiculous costs and treatments are heaped upon dying individuals and their families even when trained professionals know that these treatments will have so little of an effect they are useless.

I would wish that we may all die surrounded by our loved ones, floating away in the warmth of their presence, rather than the cold, dry air of a hospital, though I am not so naive.

The notion that there is a formula for how to make a perfect tweet epitomizes the thinking that defined the age of push-marketing, where messages were sent to customers regardless of who they were. While today’s marketing departments can geo-target messages, there still is no objectively perfect tweet for your audience, because your audience is not homogenous. The “perfect” tweet will connect you and your audience, and in fact, the best tweet often comes from your audience TO you.

Marketing Chap’s post was commenting on PR Daily, who released a graphic earlier in an article titled “A blueprint for the perfect tweet”. They claimed that the perfect tweet should include:

1. Message:
- Call to action: Tell readers what you want them to do.
- Hashtags: Include one or two to increase your reach among people who don’t follow you.
- Tone: Use your own voice, but in a professional way.
- Format: Use a mix of headlines, questions and statistics to drive clicks and retweets.
2. Link:
- Shortened URLs: Bit.ly links earn the most retweets.
3. Blank space:
- Leave room for at least 20 characters at the end of your tweet so retweeters can add comments.

As Marketing Chap eloquently points out: “This is a style of tweet for pushing a message, pure and simple, and I am firmly in the camp that says that social media is not at its best when it is merely foisting content on followers.” He goes on to explore the Twitter account of the author and finds that this individual (Gerry Moran) indeed follows his own guidelines, but that does not make any of the tweets “perfect”. Marketing Chap’s comment mid-way through the piece identifies perhaps the most direct issue with the type of tweeting Moran prescribes:

“To my mind, the key word in the term ‘social media’ is ‘social,’ and the sort of tweets Mr. Moran advocates are decidedly asocial. What I mean to say is, there is no social interaction whatsoever. The @SAPNorthAmerica account is really just a cleverly packaged RSS feed hosted on a social media platform.”

He instead suggests the following guidelines, acknowledging that he doesn’t enjoy being prescriptive in general:

• Be generous. Besides being a splendid way to learn, being generous with other chaps’ content is an unbeatable way to cement a connection.
• Be unpredictable. If one tweets about the same thing again and again then why should a chap bother to stay tuned?
• Be interesting. Tweets that are humorous, clever or memorable will get chaps to pay attention to the next tweet and the tweet after that.

When we look at some recently well-received tweets, many of them include few of the above elements, but much more closely follow Marketing Chaps’ guidelines. Example 1: Audi’s tweet during the Superbowl:

Example 2: Rowan Singh asking “what to do if your child is being eaten by a camel?”

Both of these examples received a number of responses and spread far beyond the original poster, which may or may not have been their goal.

Which brings me to the conclusion: The perfect tweet is one that achieves your goal. As with most things in life, making intentional decisions most often leads to your desired outcome. So, when wondering “what should I tweet?”, ask yourself “Who am I communicating with?” and “What do I want them to get from this tweet?” I bet it will yield much more success than arbitrary links and hashtags.

This, unfortunately, is how the “truly liberated” woman of the 21st century is increasingly being construed. What is particularly troubling about this feminist moment – especially since both women espouse liberal ideals – is exactly how little emphasis either Slaughter or Sandberg ultimately places on equal rights, justice or emancipation as the end goals for feminism.

I’ve always been interested in the way that society’s progress has influenced the planet we live on, and I am well-versed in the discussions that surround climate change. But I did not get involved with Chasing Ice because I want to talk to people about the way we are changing nature. I got involved because I fundamentally believe that many people, especially Americans, live in a perpetual state of reckless overconsumption, unaware of what they are doing to themselves and their environment. In short, I want to help people live better, and to do that, I need to start by helping them understand how they are living right now.

For those of you that know me, you’re familiar with my belief that people should live more intentionally and mindfully, and that the biggest thing schools fail to teach people is how to reflect. Schools teach us to become passive consumers of information and society teaches us to show off our wealth through things. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and in fact, if it continues that way, we won’t be here much longer.

It has been a privilege and a blessing to be a part of the Chasing Ice team, because the people that I work with daily – Jeff Orlowski, James Balog, Paula DuPre Pesmen, Lindsay Friedman, Larissa Rhodes, Ali Fujino, Jerry Aronson (and many others) – are people who I truly believe are putting in energy to help shape the course of society by educating others on what it is we are doing to the planet and how we can see it in the ice. Many people have tried to reduce this film to pseudo science or claim that we are fear-mongering, but that’s not true. What Chasing Ice does is present irrefutable visual evidence of these changes as they are happening all around us. It is a wake up call for society to realize that “we cannot live the way we have lived and we cannot consume the way we have consumed,” as Lewis Pugh says.

At the end of the movie, Balog mentions that in twenty years from now, when his daughters ask him what he was doing to stop these changes, he wants to be able to say that he was doing all he could with the skills that he had. I hope that I can be so lucky.

Although it was not intentional, I believe that the release of Chasing Ice in the weeks before Thanksgiving is worth reflecting on, as Thanksgiving is often seen as a holiday of consumption. I hope that as we sit down with our families and friends in the coming days, we reflect on what we have, what we have given each other, and what we have given to the world. Every one of us has different talents, and it is up to us to use those talents to build a better future – a more sustainable future – for us, our children, and our children’s children.

You can learn more about Chasing Ice and find a showing near you at chasingice.com

*Note: The opinions expressed above solely reflect the views of the author and are not written on behalf of Chasing Ice or any other members of the team. 

Right now, we are in infatuated with the social web.

In the early days, with email, forums, and instant message clients, we were just getting our toes wet in how the Internet would allow us to connect, communicate, and share with others. Then came sites like Myspace and Facebook, encouraging people to put all sorts of information about them in one place; what movies they like, what books they read, who their friends are, what plants they grow on Farmville, who they are playing on Words with Friends, etc. etc. Users ate it up. We could now post about anything we wanted in any form. We were sharing images, video clips, restaurant recommendations, checking each other in to places, and posting every meal we consumed. This new freedom to share anything at anytime was intoxicating, and it has been for the past few years. But slowly, some people are coming around, and the honeymoon stage of “everything, all the time” is coming to a close.

Recently, danah boyd shared a Huffington Post article that quoted her saying that Facebook is “the teenage version of email” – a label that would make anyone cringe. This article highlighted how teens had lost passion with using the site and were turning to places that specialized in the types of sharing practices they wanted, sites like Tumblr and Twitter. This resonates with the immersion-infatuation-intention cycle as people are slowly realizing that there are places that do many of the same things Facebook does, in a better way and without an inflated set of unnecessary or undesirable features. Instagram is a great example of that, as it capitalized on how people wanted to share images of what they were doing right in that moment from their mobile devices.

I sincerely hope that this shift away from Facebook is the beginning of a larger trend, indicating that we, as a society, are moving away from infatuation with social technologies and beginning to be more purposeful about our use. Only when we are intentional about what we are doing will we be able to build a smarter, better Internet.

Edit: After posting this, Nathan Jurgenson and I had a short back of forth to clarify an aspect of this that I have not covered – balancing users’ desires with corporate desires (or limitations/constructions of the technologies themselves). I’ve posted the tweets below, but do want to acknowledge that technology use (especially social technologies) are often technologically-determined (that is, limited or framed in terms of what a technology allows one to do) and socially-constructed (that is, people often do with a technology what others do with that technology and develop norms and practices as a group). A great example of this is how students post their course schedules on Instagram. Perhaps not what the founders expected, but it is a great way to communicate a certain type of information with a specific audience. As always, thanks Nathan for keeping me sharp.

It feels like every time I’m at a gathering of social researchers, within 15 minutes of being there I’ll hear the words “digital world” and “real world” being used to discuss interactions that take place in a technologically-mediated context versus actions that take place in non-technologically-mediated context.

The sound of this always makes me cringe, because assuming that somehow the “digital world” is separated from the real world makes it seem as though every time anyone uses Google Maps they are quite lucky the fake Google world that exists in the digital realm somehow maps quite impressively onto the “real” one that the person is moving through. If the speaker seems receptive enough, I will often ask them, quite playfully, “what isn’t real about the digital world?” This often gets them to clarify their language, and I assume that little harm is done. Often people don’t mean to separate mediated interactions from “real” ones, they just shortchange their audience by using limited language. But it is often that limiting of language that is problematic, as it shifts the discussion to reductionist terms that may not fully address the concept or experiences at hand. It is also the reason that I hope more people can come to terms with the notion of “augmented reality.”

I’m not going to re-define the term “augmented reality”, as you can read an excellent post by Nathan Jurgenson that encapsulates the discussion here, but I want to share a story from a recent gathering of social researchers that helps illustrate why “augmented reality” is a better explanation for the way many people are interacting with and through technology.

*I do want to acknowledge that there are a wide variety of experiences that people have with technology, and in some cases their experience in mediated environments, such as forums, chat rooms, MMORPGS, etc can be completely detached from the lived experience they are perceived to have by members of physical space around them. However, I want to use the following example to explain augmented reality in practice, and how it often can account for the link between mediated (by technology) and unmediated interactions.*

I was at a recent gathering of social researchers discussing what the future could hold for social technologies in a number of situations, such as education, health, political uprisings, and so on. We were discussing education and young individuals using technology, when one member of the group mentioned that s/he had read a recent and compelling study that social network use was making individuals less social and even lonely. While s/he couldn’t remember the particulars of the study, s/he found the evidence quite compelling and wondered what we thought about these side effects. There was a pause in the group, and so I offered her the following explanation (roughly paraphrased):

“Perhaps it is not the technology that is making them less social, but the technology is making them more aware of the actions of others. Let’s say, as an example, I go out to the park with my friends for a picnic. While there, I take photos of the picnic with and post these to Instagram, which then posts them to Facebook. Another friend takes pictures with her DSLR and posts those photos to Facebook as well. Our other friends there do not take pictures, but they post status updates and tag me in them. So while I may be out doing one activity in the physical world, I (and those around me) have created a large set of digital artifacts of this experience, which you observe through Facebook. In this scenario, instead of just hearing about my picnic from me, you see multiple sets of images and Facebook statuses about this experience. So while you know that I only did one thing, it feels like I was doing many things because the mediated interactions (comments, likes, and so on) on the digital artifacts extend and amplify my physical experience into an augmented one.”

The individual who had proposed the “less social” idea slowly nodded at this, responding, “so instead of you going to the park and telling me about it, you go to the park, and everyone I know tells me about it, right? Which means although only one thing ‘happened,’ there were a large number of interactions, both mediated and not, that resulted.”

Fortunately, the discussion that followed as a result of this example led the group to have a productive conversation about areas that more research should be done to understand the variety of experiences that social technologies facilitate. While that conversation will be saved for another time, I was glad to see the group embrace the idea that mediated interactions often not only support, but frequently amplify, physical interactions to create an augmented reality that persists the interaction to a greater extent that was previously possible.

If we, as a research community, want to continue to make progress in understanding the role that technology can play in our lives, it is imperative that we recognize and explore the various ways in which technology facilitates our interactions. Some things do happen in physical spaces, and some things are contained to digital spaces, but many experiences have both a physical and digital component, and have relevance only in that intersection.

TEDxYouth@Seattle was an event that has taken me on one of the greatest emotional roller coasters of my life, but on Saturday, all of that was forgotten and I was on cloud nine. Over the past eight months, I have been in the trenches with a number of other young and passionate individuals, people I believe truly want to make the world a better place, working hard to make this event happen. I owe them – Jessica Hendrawidjaja, Kimmi Newsum, Michael Kim, Chris Mathews, Alex Diaz, and Cindy Wu – my deepest gratitude for making this experience what it was. Although I was “Creative Chair” and emcee for the event, anyone who has been apart of a seven-person team knows that titles are poor descriptions for what each person contributes. Everyone on our team was helping out in every aspect of this event, and it really showed on Saturday.

While being an emcee for the event was a huge honor and pleasure, the greatest joy came from simply being at the event. I was witness to an awe-inspiring lineup of young talent from the west coast who conveyed messages of love, agency, change, and ultimately passion about our role and responsibility to make the world we live in better. It may be through empowering ourselves, empowering others, starting a business, building a product, or simply dancing, but there is room for all of us to step forward, shed our disbelief, and try to change the world. As Houston Kraft reminded us, sometimes someone just needs to say “I think you’d be good at it.” For the attendees at TEDxYouth@Seattle on Saturday, there were ten speakers who told them just that, through a variety of stories, experiences, and emotions, and you could feel the energy changing in the room.

While there are a number of things I would change if we did this over again, I would do it again in a heartbeat. Being a part of a room of hundreds of people who are interested and engaged in changing the world is invigorating in so many ways. The smiles, conversations, and energy I felt during the breaks between the sessions were empowering, and I was thankful for every single person in that room. I can confidently say that everyone at the event was moved in some way, all I can hope is that every one of them realized that they have the capacity and the responsibility to be an agent of change in this world.

As a final note, I need to thank all of our speakers, sponsors, volunteers and audience one more time. YOU were what made this event happen.

Last night I was a member of a panel put on by a number of students at the University of Washington surrounding the “Kony 2012″ video put out by advocacy organization. The panelists included Assistant Professors Joseph Babigumira and Amy Hagopian from the School of Public Health, Fredrick Lorenz from the Jackson School of International Studies, Kristy Bolsinger from Ant’s Eye Media and myself.

Professor Babigumira presented a great overview of Uganda and the historical nature of the conflict, discussing the tribes in Africa and how power has shifted in the region in the past century. Lorenz followed with a discussion of the ICC and what an American “intervention” in the Kony conflict could look like. Professor Hagopian discussed her work in Uganda and what other interventions, ranging from medical training to government power, look like. To conlcude, Bolsinger and I talked about the nature of the video (her) and how the message was spread throughout the country on social media (me).

I pulled heavily from the coverage that SocialFlow and Ethan Zuckerman gave to the issue, discussing how social media can help engage audiences, help empower the audiences to engage with each other, and how ultimately the video did not go “viral” but instead moved through a semi pre-constructed network, as many have pointed out.

What I wished I had said to the group at large, but was ultimately said to a few individuals after the panel in response to their question, was when we consider social media’s role in conveying complex messages, things like tweets are analogous to tastes of wine at a restaurant. If someone offers you a taste of wine and then doesn’t have the bottle to provide you with, they are doing a disservice to their customer. Similarly, social media is an incredible tool to share snippets of ideas and messages with links, but if those links don’t ultimately connect us with the larger story, the organization spreading the message is doing a disservice to their audience.

It’s clear from Zuckerman’s writing as well as others that we need to not avoid complex issues, but that we do experience obstacles in trying to share them in bite-size bits. So please do encourage people to taste the wine, but make sure you have the bottle ready.

A big thanks to Mihae Jung, Kevin Solarte, Kaeley Pruitt-Hamm and the rest of the group that organized this event. It was well-attended and quite a pleasure to be at.

As a final note, I do not mean to use the wine metaphor as a way to say you should encourage your audience to get drunk with your message, but it happened to be one of the most appropriate metaphors that I had used in the conversation.