How Magicians Control Your Mind (Boston.com via AOC)

The always interesting Architectures Of Control blog points to an online Boston globe article on how magicians and cognitive psychologists "are getting at similar questions, but while neuroscientists have been looking at this for a few decades, magicians have been looking at this for centuries, millennia probably." Definitely worth reading. For a little bit of magic (just as an example) check out the video below from The Unpleasant World Of Penn And Teller.



Related Posts:
Jump Ropes And Magic

Swinging In Public (YouTube via Alexia Golez)

Don't worry. SAM has not gone NSFW. I just thought this video, found first by Alexia Golez, was good Sunday fare (particularly in light of my recent experience at the Serious Play conference).

Final Thoughts: A Challenge To Designers (Serious Play)

I knew it would take me a few days to both recover from jet-lag and to synthesize all the ideas that both came to me (and were thrust upon me) at the Serious Play Conference last week. It was a fascinating examination of seriousness, play and design (in all its forms) and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in seeing what the world looks like (or might look like) outside their usual box.

As much as I enjoyed being in the midst of the intellectual fireworks, I couldn't help but think that the kind of design solutions the intelligence community needs were not in the mix. Most of the designs I saw actively drew attention to the product, they helped sell it in some way or helped the product or film or project make its point from a particular point of view. I suppose the designers would tell me that such a reaction is inevitable, that good design draws one in and bad design repulses and that there is no neutral ground.

Still, intelligence products, in my estimation, need something different than what I saw. I was reminded (really!) of Lao Tse's comment on good leadership: The best kind of leader is one who, when the job is done, the people say, "We did it ourselves!" Likewise, the best kind of design for intelligence products is, in my estimation, the kind of design that, when the product is viewed by a decisionmaker, the decisionmaker does not notice that it is there yet it helps analysts communicate their findings.

Form matters. Anyone who has tried to decipher a single spaced block of 8 point text knows that some elements of design are essential no matter what the product. At the other end of the spectrum, form doesn't trump content. While this is probably true of all things, it is certainly true in intelligence work.

Herein, then, lies the challenge to designers: How should the intelligence profession design its products? What kinds of design solutions best meet the needs of the modern intelligence professional? How would intelligence change if the kind of creative firepower I saw at the conference were brought to bear upon it? Would we be able to communicate the results of our analysis better or would it just be "different"? I don't know the answer to these questions but I think it would fascinating to find out.

(Note: This was a different kind of conference for me and I suspect for most of the regular readers of this blog. If you are interested in my other observations (and have not seen them already), I have listed them below in chronological order)

Related Posts:
Liveblogging The Serious Play Conference
Cosmology, Psychology And The Mathematics Of Crease Patterns ... And That Was Just Day One
Jump Ropes And Magic
Surreal Saturday: Brilliant Crows
Sunday Funnies: John Oliver

Sunday Funnies: John Oliver (Serious Play .. Sort of)

I was not able to stay for the last session of the Serious Play Conference. I had a flight to catch and, as a result, I missed John Oliver's speech. Many people are familiar with Oliver's work on The Daily Show but I am more impressed with some of his earlier radio work with the BBC. For a sample listen to this episode of The Department (a top secret think tank within her Majesty's government designed to solve Britain's most intractable problems in less than 24 hours) on terrorism. If you like British humor (or humour, as it were...) you will like this. (Note: The Department is overtly political and the language can be a bit rude).

Surreal Saturday: Brilliant Crows (Serious Play)

Josh Klein, the Principal Technologist for Frog Design, spoke at the Serious Play Conference on Friday about his work with crows. Crows are apparently quite bright and live wherever humans live. Klein showed the video below as part of his presentation. He prefaced the video by saying that the crow had been taught to use a piece of wire to spear a grub in the bottom of the glass tube in the video. He said the researcher then put the grub out of reach of the crow (either by shortening the wire or by lengthening the tube; Klein did not say which). Watch what happens next:



Apparently the crows will then teach this trick to their young. Klein also indicated that crows have enormously long memories. He told the story of a bunch of crows who were fooled by some experimenters on a campus one day. The next days the crows recognized the experimenters and set up a ruckus when they saw them coming. The crows kept this up for four full years until all of the researchers had graduated. Now, experimenters wear masks so that they won't get taunted by crows.

For more crow weirdness/goodness you'll have to go here. For me, I am off to put in my IARPA grant paperwork...

Jump Ropes And Magic (Serious Play)

I got tired last night and couldn't write about the other two things that really impressed me yesterday at the Serious Play conference. The first was the talk given by Helen Hood Scheer. She has recently finished a documentary movie, called Jump, about the growing competitive (!) sport of jumping rope. She also brought with her the best jump rope team in the country to perform. Beyond the sheer athleticism required (see the trailer for her movie below), I was enormously impressed with the way she talked about cooperation and collaboration in the sport. Apparently, the athletes want to take the sport to the Olympics (don't laugh, you can compete in 40 countries at the national level in jump rope...) and are willing to cooperate in ways that might actually hurt their own individual chances. It gives one hope for the Intelligence Community...



The other speaker that was interesting was the magician, Jamy Ian Swiss. Swiss teaches people how to be professional magicians. He did a number of pretty spectacular sleight of hand tricks. While they were impressive, I was more interested in some of the hints he gave about the art of performing. First, he said you should try to act away your mistakes and not explain them away. He indicated that the natural response to a mistake is to try to talk it away and that some of that is inevitable but he also showed how, by including some movement or other action, it made the mistake have much less impact. I intend to figure out a way to incorporate this insight into my classes on presenting intelligence to decisionmakers.

Swiss also stated that a good performance was inevitable not obvious. In magic, everyone knows that the trick will work. It has to. No matter what happens, no matter how disastrous things seem to be going, it is all part of the trick -- and we know that. That's inevitability. Obvious is coming out and just doing the trick or, even worse, explaining it. Obvious trivializes, inevitable seems more profound. Inevitable also captures attention (the key to learning) much better than obvious. I think about the best classes I have attended and I realize that there was more of the inevitable about them than the obvious.



Related Posts:
Cosmology, Psychology And The Mathematics Of Crease Patterns ... And That Was Just Day One (Serious Play)
Livebogging The Serious Play Conference

Cosmology, Psychology And The Mathematics Of Crease Patterns ... And That Was Just Day One (Serious Play)

The Serious Play Conference is nothing if not intellectually stimulating (almost exhausting). It will take several weeks to synthesize everything I have seen. Here, however, are some of my notes and a few of my first impressions:

The Conference has been moderated by John Hockenberry of NPR. His opening remarks talked about our "inner zealotry" that drives us to be creative even when there is no apparent use for or purpose to it.

The morning presentations were given over to cosmology which may not, at first glance, seem to have much to do with design or serious play. The presenters were Dr's George Smoot and Charles Elachi. Smoot is a Nobel Laureate (if you think it was pretty cool to have basic cosmology explained by a Nobel Laureate, you are right) and Elachi is the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Apparently, there is a quite a strong connection between JPL and The Art Center. As the morning went on, it became obvious why -- elegant, useful design is critical to JPL's success. They have recognized this and tap into The Art Center for ideas. We got to see a full scale mock up of the Phoenix lander (scheduled to touch down on Mars on 25 May) and they showed us a cool movie about the challenges of the descent and landing (which you will have to go here to see).

One of the things I liked about the conference is the way they would take a break from the speeches (which were all pretty good anyway) and just show something interesting. The video below, an ad for a South African mobile phone service, is a good example of one of these creative interludes:





The afternoon sessions had a number of good presentations but four stood out (I will only talk about two here and save the other two for tomorrow). Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute of Play, talked about his work studying animals at play and his early work in the importance of play in humans. He made a number of interesting observations. First, he said that the opposite of play is not work; it is depression. He cited several studies where animals that were not allowed to play were much less well adapted to their environment than those who had been allowed to play. He stated that "play signals" (like a dog bending down on its front legs with its tail wagging) are, in some sense, trust cues -- something that tells the other animals that it OK to drop their guard and just play. He showed some amazing photos of a wild polar bear and a chained huskie "agreeing" to play instead of the bear just eating the huskie. My notes may not be quite right but I thought he even said that flirting in humans was essentially a play signal. I had never thought of it quite that way...

He went on to claim that there were all sorts of reasons to believe that play is very important to humans. First, he rejected the notion that play is somehow related to preparing oneself for the future. He said it was more than that. He claimed that 82% of the memories recorded by families in the obituaries about loved ones after 9/11 had some element of play about them. I was reminded all the while of Rebecca West's comment concerning the people of the Balkans in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; something to the effect that life is about more than just taking the bad things out of it. It is also about putting the good things into it.

I was also very taken with the presentation by Dr. Robert Lang, a physicist turned origami virtuoso. He has figured out the mathematics of origami such that he can, with a large enough single piece of paper (and without cutting), make anything. Really. Anything. His software is called "Treemaker" and is apparently free to download and play with. His work reminded me of Gerd Gingerenzer's book Gut Feelings and Mike Lyden's thesis research into Accelerated Analysis in that they are all looking for fast and frugal methods that explain the most amount of info with the least amount of work. While Lang has used his work in origami to help JPL figure out how to fold up its antennae and solar panels on their spacecraft, his discussion of crease patterns made me think that there might be something there, either metaphorically or mathematically, to help understand patterns of significance to intelligence analysts.

Liveblogging The Serious Play Conference

The Art Center College Of Design, in Pasedena, California, is sponsoring its biennial conference and the theme is Serious Play. I will be here capturing anything that looks interesting. I like idea factory conferences like this one (TED also springs to mind). I think design concepts, in particular, can help intelligence students and professionals think about new ways to present and facilitate intelligence analysis. I hope to come away with some new ideas about how to improve communication without seeming to sell my analysis and and how to facilitate collaboration/interaction without demanding it. I am also looking for new ways to make teaching more interactive and hands-on.

Serious Play may seem a pretty big leap outside the realm of intelligence and analysis but I believe that truly new and useful thoughts can come from looking at your current experiences through totally different lenses (See! I have only been on the west coast for a couple of hours and I am already starting to speak like a Californian!). Going to professional conferences within one's discipline does make a lot of sense but, if your goal is to push the outside of the envelope a bit, it also seems to make sense to mix it up a little.

The list of speakers is eclectic and the venue seems designed to generate new ideas. This evening I will be able to participate in a workshop with David Macauly, author of the wonderful The Way Things Work book among others. He will be talking about how to draw what you know (a workshop tailor made to meet my first objective, I think).