Go Play

They say parents these days are awfully protective, awfully afraid to take risks. Maybe we can relax a little.

Design: Generating Creative Ideos

David Kelley thinks everyone is creative, at least until the creativity is driven out. He teaches a course in creativity at Stanford University in the heart of the most famously creative city in the most creative industry in the most creative country. Peter Robinson interviews him on Uncommon Knowledge.

Kelley's 5 steps in the creative process (The video gives more detail at 12 minutes.)

1. Empathize – bias for action: immerse yourself in the situation to be studied and see it from the typical user's perspective.
2. Define – Explicitly define the problem to be solved, then iteratively re-define at as your project progresses.
3. Ideate – with fluency and flexibility. Fluency says the way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas and flexibility says make them different from one another. Find your ideas from talking to users and experts, looking at other ideas and at the state-of-the-art.
4. Prototype – make something physical that lets people experience your idea.
5. Test – Put your prototype in front of your ultimate judges and see what they think. Take their suggestions and make it better.

More details in his book, his free 80-minute course or his YouTube videos.

Both Awesome and Manly

Awesome Daily posts twenty illustrated skills from The Art of Manliness*

*

Why You Need to Understand Statistics

While this is "honest" in the sense of not being fraud, it is not honest in the sense of giving you the truth. If your skill in logic and statistics is weak, you will certainly walk away believing a falsehood. I'm not sure that is accidental.
More likely, it's a battle: an epic struggle between universities and student. You, to get their education and degree. They to get your money. Their side seems more sophisticated.

 Once upon a time, we marketed law schools with a printed brochure or two. That changed with the advent of the new century and the internet. Now marketing is pervasive: web pages, emails, blog posts, and forums.

With increased marketing, some educators began to worry about how we presented ourselves to students. As a sometime social scientist, I was particularly concerned about the way in which some law schools reported median salaries without disclosing the number of graduates supplying that information. A school could report that it had employment information from 99% of its graduates, that 60% were in private practice, and that the median salary for those private practitioners was $120,000. Nowhere did the reader learn that only 45% of the graduates reported salary information.