Happiness

Recently I was having a conversation with my good friend Kevin about life, the universe, and everything. On the topic of happiness, he offered up a simple and unappologetic perspective on how to be happy. His theory on happiness boils down to two things. Find love and have a lot of money. With those two things you can be happy.

Other theories discussed were that you needed 4 things to be happy.
1. love
2. enough sex
3. working out
4. enough sleep
And when you really think about it... if I had all 4 of those, I think I might be happy.

Ultimately we reached a Darwin based theory on happiness. Evolution has made it such that our happiness is driven by wanting something more. Complacency leads to extinction... so you have to be improving or evolving. We're genetically tied to thinking the grass is always greener somewhere else. Thus the happiness theory is that you can't achieve happiness because it can't exist. Only the anticipation of happiness can exist. Once you achieve a milestone, you can't perpetuate that feeling of happiness because the achievement isn't the sustaining part, it was the anticipation of that achievement.

I Want One!!!

File this under 'things I want.'
I'll credit Towleroad with turning me on to this one too.
For the record, it's a 3'x8' multi-touch computer interface.
Here's the inventor's research site.


The thing that whets my appetite is what this could do for the creative process.

Architecture (with a capital "A") used to be about creativity and art, but along with technology's increase in productivity has come a decrease in creativity.

Today, we get bogged down in the details because the computer lets us see everything down to the 1/256th of an inch.

Details are important; I'm not saying ignore the details, but in first year studio, you are taught to start exploring a design using fat markers and pencils on paper.

Color outside the lines, and let your sketches be messy! You're judged by the scribbles in your sketchbook as much as you are by the precision of your final presentation.

Sketching is the creative process and the creative process doesn't begin at the 1/256th of an inch level.

While computers and CAD were great for efficiently creating drafted plans, it sucked for creating concepts. Blueprints aren't Architecture. Blueprints are an instruction book for creating a concept or thought that originated in someone's mind or was fleshed out in someones sketchbook. Think of it as a word processor, not as a pen. Recently some tools have started showing up that help the creative process using a computer, but the interface has always been the bottleneck.

My hand and a pencil will always be faster than a keyboard and a mouse.

Speed and flexibility is important because the design process is about iterations--it's about following tangents and exploring 'what if'. This video makes me drool because it has the potential to let me communicate things as fast as they evolve in my mind.

Creativity unfettered...!

(Plus it would be really cool to pretend I'm Tom Cruise in Minority Report.)

Discover Music

... I discovered Musicovery on Towleroad a week ago. It's a flash based internet radio that has a great user-interface. It makes for a great way to discover random playlists based on a matrix of tempo and mood.