vanderwal.net

Once in A Lifetime with Sleeping Beauties

A few months back I received an email that was not the usual sort.

The email asked for clarification on how to pronounce my name. Hmm… So, I read a little further. It was from the producer for an audio book recording of an unreleased book by David Byrne called Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up. The email continued that the author was recording the audiobook and wanted to the pronunciation to be correct.

My first thought was, this couldn’t be David Byrne of the Talking Heads and the so many more wonderful contributions that entertained me and kicked off insightful considerations of the world and art that have been sprinkled through my life. I searched for the unreleased book and found it. It has an October 6th release date and it is from the only David Byrne I know of.

Say Your Name

My first thought was, “How do I share the pronunciation?” I looked up pronunciation guides and how to use them, which turned into a hot mess quickly. I reached out to a few friends to ask how to create a pronunciation guide of one’s own name. The responses pointed to the same and similar variety of non-aligned options. I turned to the best option I knew, just record myself saying my name. I did that quickly and made a quick edit of the file. I replied to the email request with a small audio file attached and asking if that would work, and it did perfectly.

This is a Road to Where?

Now the big question sat for months. Why was David Byrne using my name in his book? For months I’ve been deeply curious. I pre-ordered the hardback book, even though I’m really also interested in hearing David Byrne say my name, in whatever context it was used.

In the last week or so I looked at the Sleeping Beauties’ table of contents that were online and couldn’t sort out where my name would surface. Nor could I sort out the context for its use.

Sparking Innovative Understandings

Today I picked up my copy of the book and opened the box. I flipped to the book’s index (that is a habit I had for a good stretch of years, but now passed) to find my name. I found my name and it is listed on two contiguous pages. It was in the “Conclusion: Liberating the Imagination” section and is the focus of the subsection, “What You Call It Helps You Find It”, which was folksonomy (folksonomy marked posts) related. David Byrne’s write-up explained it incredibly well, and he called out my explanations. His wrap-up for the this sub-section had me insanely pleased as he really understands it:

Interestingly, although folksonomy tagging is nonhierarchical, a common shared set of terms and language has emerged despite the personal and subjective origin of the tags. Surprisingly, it’s not chaotic; there is an emergent self-organizing structure, though at the same time, as Vander Wal claims, it encourages exploration and serendipity – perfect for finding sleeping beauties!

Just prior to this conveyed understanding of not only the term folksonomy, but the deep river of understanding and possibilities it brings. David Byrne in the section goes through his own use of personal understandings and terms for what he calls things and calls when he shares with others. But, the breadth of his understanding is not only shown, but he has lived it, as he conveyed.

Now I’m deeply looking forward to reading the rest of the Sleeping Beauties book.

What to do with My Phrases and Snippets

Going back to just after I graduated grad school, when I started writing poetry (as I had time to think a little more freely), I started keeping phases and snippets. Some were in notebooks and some in text notes on my computer. Often these were things that would pop to mind and wouldn’t clear my head until I captured them. Some turned into poems (a sliver of what I wrote is on my Poetry :: vanderwal.net page). Some turned into short stories that picked up a few of the phrases and snippets, some of these were rather micro-short stories or scenes (I enjoy the output of the scenes and dialog).

Over the years I tried to pull the snippets that I hadn’t used into digital notes. Up until around 2010 I had many different note apps and each had a snippets note. In the last two to five years I’ve been pulling them into a handful of notes. But, I have taken a note I stared around 2008 with phrases and snippets and that is my live phrases and snippets note. When something pops into my head I tuck it in there. In Obsidian I keep that note open in a panel so it is easy to slide to and read through or jot something down.

When I read through them I often chuckle or laugh, and some get me thinking more deeply. Some have turned into scenes again and short pieces, which I also haven’t shared.

The phrases and snippets are brain prompts and idea fodder for creativity. Some are turns of phrase, some playful word play, others are snarky, some play with time and reality shifts, and others are just prompts for “tell a story about this”. I have over 200 of these and for a long time I’ve thought of wanting to keep them to myself for my use. But, lately I’m really curious what someone would do with the snippet as most can be taken in many different directions.

I’ve thought about a challenge or carnival a month for a phrase or snippet to see what comes back. Also thought about a postcard subscription service with a phrase or snippet a month (more than a few of the items on a postcard could get a knock at my door), but also thinking of these routing openly through the mail service for anybody to read and get their mind going in a different fun direction.

I have also considered just making them public on a page, or a page each.

What Would You Do?

If given the following snippets, what would you do with them?

“I am going to need to go to an AA meeting, as I need to understand how to develop a drinking problem, as I think that is the only way to get through this.”

Oh, I don’t cook I just make leftovers

The plague of the minor maladies

They had all the traits of being a non-conformist

beige ficus genre

I lost my site’s 404 page, which seems a little more than ironic

candle lit dinners in the McDonalds parking lot

The Blue Ant Trilogy and The Near Future and Everynow

This may need another edit, but it is still a bit time-foldy, but what I’m focusing on is very time-foldy.

When I read the Blue Ant Trilogy from William Gibson (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History) as they came out in 2003, 2007, and 2010 I wondered then how they would hold up, as they were near future scifi. Each was sat in the now and /or the just about to become. If, at the time, you were paying attention to culture (particularly around a technology focused world) all of the elements in the book were familiar to nearly familiar. Most of the roles, technology, and ways of thinking were already at the edges of society, but very very niche and not yet made it into the main consciousness. How does near future look in the future?

I regularly pull Pattern Recognition off the shelf and read snippets and it takes me back to that time in 2003. I’m a big fan of that book on many levels. But, to me it still holds up, yet I’m looking at it from the living through this at the front edge of emergent culture and technology. I still wonder how someone would read this today who was less than, say, 10 years old would read and perceive this today.

In the past week or two I’ve run into a handful of YouTube videos and blog posts / articles by people who have recently read one of the books, most often Pattern Recognition. I find interesting in that some see things in the books from 15 to 20 years ago are still coming in the near future (this really intrigues me) and others things seem quite foreign and more futuristic. Yet for some of us they have happened and became normal outside of the far edges of culture, but were far from mainstream. I was expecting reviews, at least some, to talk about how these books seemed set in the past. But, yet no, not one. They focused on, what to me is, an odd perspective continuum.

This surfacing of ideas and perceptions in a society and culture hit two scenarios and situations: 1) Common, but at the edges; 2) Things from the past that still seem futuristic as they haven’t happened in someone’s (or mainstream’s) perception lens. Yes, William Gibson’s famous, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” applies readily. But, there is more to this where things happen in pockets and spread more widely, but not too widely and don’t take hold broadly, nor are they known of more widely.

This phenomena isn’t just related to scifi and technology, but global understandings around mental models, and the language structures around broad cultural mental models (that are mainstream in another culture in an other part of the globe that people in another culture don’t have curiosity about and are more settled in their parochialism and pedestrian thinking to look up and notice). The scales of this and the complex mappings around it from edge cultures, out to large global cultures are more than a lifetimes of effort. But, the key piece is a response of curiosity or defending one’s own currently limited understanding. The common responses are often, “Wait, what? Tell me more.” Or, “That is wrong.” My common phrase when people discover something new that changes how they see and understand things, and they feel like they were doing things wrong, or didn’t know of other helpful possibilities, is, “You can’t know until you know.”

But, with in those interested in exploring at the edges and particularly around the fluidity of time and understandings and seeing something from the past (20 plus years in the past) that was then just happening at the edges and moved more into some cultures mainstreams and faded, as still in that same state of temporal now or about to happen. Now is different for everybody.

In 2004 I started using the term Everynow and included it in a lot of presentations and writing and ended up writing about it explicitly in the linked post in 2013. I was focussing on technology and ideas that set in play the now. But, for some reason concept of having people read a piece that is around 20 years old about the early edges of something and it being still near future, is really surprising to me. The concept of near future from 20 plus years in the past and for many (yet still a small few in the whole of it all) today becoming again (or still) the near future is wild.

The near future idea, has a sense of anticipation in it that something is coming. But, for those who went through that near future and lived it as it was happening, and to the past transition cycle, it seems odd that a near future for something in the past doesn’t just jump straight to the now stage as they experience it. Having a near future anticipatory stage for something that happened for many in the past feels odd, but it is just another reflection of experiencing the now of others viewed throw and really wide and elastic everynow.

Design and Business Leadership Snippets

There have been quite a few pieces lately on the importance of design and design leadership. The importance of design is getting to the true understanding of what the problems are and thinking about solving out from there without preconceptions of solutions, but letting solutions evolve form the need. Different and well fitting solutions often result from this approach, which is real innovtion and not copying someone else’s solutions for your use as innovation approach.

Matt Milan’s “It’s never been more important for design firms to think differently” is the cornerstone for this thinking differently approach and its deep value. I’d add to this is knowing not only the current state of where the various mediums, systems, and devices are sitting, but where they are headed in the next year or two, so to openly plan for adaption and keep the potential integrations as open possibilities.

Brian Zmijewski’s The Design Leadership Gap and Lead by Design are two really good pieces that take a look at the need for strong design leadership.

Kai Brunner’s Is DevOps Driving the Future of UX Design? is a great look at how to mix and have success with design and DevOps. The two prodominant models don’t really work well and how to work to get to a more optimal model.