Lala land

Lala land fills me with the magic of dreams. I loved seeing two dreamers in defiance of their normal lives.

The force of their dreaming coloured the early scenes, transforming something as boring as a shoebox bedroom into a vehicle for the magical.

Dreams need believers to live. That's what Sebastian and Mia do for each other - their mutual love and encouragement breathed life and colour into each others dreams.

It's sad when they parted to continue living their dreams. At a certain point, as their dreams took life, they stopped the magic of dreaming and each settled into the comfort of life.

It leaves me thinking that the magic of dreams is in the pursuit of it. And when the dreams of today, are filled with life tomorrow, to give rise to more dreams. And on and on I'd float, bouyed by the magic of dreams, always light and free from the boredom of comfort.

The Transformer of Autonomous Farmbots Can Do 100 Jobs on Its Own

The first fully autonomous ground vehicles hitting the market aren’t cars or delivery trucks—they’re ­robo­-farmhands.

Dot isn’t just a tractor that can drive without a human for backup. It’s the Transformer of ag-bots, capable of performing 100-plus jobs, from hay baler and seeder to rock picker and manure spreader, via an ­arsenal of tool modules. And though the hulking machine can carry 40,000 pounds, it navigates fields with balletic precision.

Uber Makes Peace With Cities by Spilling Its Secrets

Today, the curb represents the most contested space in the urban world. Cyclists pedal through bike lanes, cars battle for parking spots. Taxis, Ubers, and Lyfts pick up and drop off riders. Delivery trucks unload Amazon Prime boxes and buses pull in and out of stops. People on foot scuttle through it all, trying not to get hit.

All of these debates that people are having, you have to have some kind of shared truth

Uber's New Direction: Move Slow and Test Things

In February his deputies appeared at an all-hands meeting to sell the company’s 18,000 employees on the importance of one metric: the ratio of driver or rider complaints to rides booked. That ratio needs to be reduced—a lot—in 2018, he told them. (He won’t specify the company’s 2018 target, but he said, completely deadpan, “Zero is zero.” Note: Even the Pershing didn’t have zero defects.) He believes the ratio is a good metric to use because it can be improved only if operations, technology, and customer service work together. “It’s a unifier,” he said. At Expedia, he worked on reducing a similar complaint metric, and the experience cemented his belief: As the measure improved, so did sales.

Khosrowshahi’s vision for Uber, as he relayed it, was to ask people to do their jobs correctly every single day. “It’s a game of inches,” he said.

Growth, not quality, had been its guiding principle for too long,

Zero Defects. The idea was, basically, to instill in workers the will to prevent problems during design and manufacture rather than go back and fix them later.

Instapaper - leading with porous design

What Design Chiefs At Uber, IBM, And Microsoft Care About In 2018–And Why

Inclusive design for Allen doesn’t mean creating one thing for all people; rather it is creating many different ways for many different kinds of people to participate in an experience. In an ideal world, the result is technology that fits each person and creates a sense of belonging regardless of physical ability, cognitive ability, and social context.

designing systems that don't alienate. open porous systems Vs gated ones

Joanna Peña-Bickley, head of design for Amazon AWS Internet of Things, puts it: “If you have design in the C-suite you are more likely to be the disruptor, not the disrupted.”

design is not just what it looks like and feels like. It is not even how it works. Design today is how it leads.

Microsoft: Inclusion and Diversity as a Business Goal

deeply design has integrated into the landscape of corporate America

Microsoft's human-centered AI philosophy [instapaper]

The Real Story Behind Microsoft’s Quietly Brilliant AI Design

that this idea of trust was thorny, and important: Unless the human felt some kind of connection to the machine, they’d never give it a chance to work well after it made even one mistake

how we build trust with machines

company’s governing principles for AI design: that humans be the hero of any story.

Microsoft goals for AI design

there are screens that evolve over time, as the relationship with the user grows.

Microsoft is now trying to build a different model of how AI adapts. The idea isn’t so much to wow anyone up front with what a machine knows–but to quietly gain a user’s faith by offering options that they can choose among, and then, when the time is right, to offering something smarter than you might have expected.

, giving people all these amazing capabilities at once that would still have a 30% probably of being wrong,” says Friedman. “Those models don’t have pacing that builds to high-confidence recommendations, then making a trust leap. We’re trying to pace things and work into a relationship, because you have to mirror how human relationships are built.”

lesson for working with clients - to defer to them with options and mild suggestions to build trust and insight. to offer leaps of authority only occasionally and later

Time and again, it turned out that assistants succeeded not by being smarter than their clients, but rather by deferring to them. This applied directly to how a machine assistant might beha

You garner trust by being open about your limitations, letting the client’s expertise lead the way. But the real secret to gaining trust? Quietly learning more and more about someone until you can surprise them with a level of thoughtfulness that they’d never expected

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Filter bubbles that divide. False news that misleads. Opinion polls that misapprehend. Information cocoons that isolate. Local voices and issues that are ignored.

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How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete http://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/03/how-babies-learn-and-why-robots-cant-compete "I asked her about language learning. We knew words mattered, but I’d not heard much talk at playtime. “If we’re not addressing personal, social, emotional development first, you’re not ready to learn,” said Prodger. She explained that before children could acquire the tools of speech and language, you had to ensure they felt a sense of “being and belonging”. Too frequently, she thought, our approaches to early learning skipped these steps. It sounded to me like a nice-to-have, not an essential, but research showed otherwise." "They take the kids out to the forest a few days a week, light fires, let them experiment with scissors and ride BMX bikes. If they want to be outside, they go outside. If they fancy returning to the snug, where the youngest infants roll around, that’s where they would go. The environment dictates the learning. The adults aim only to connect and share attention with the children. Reading and writing could wait. Nurseries ought to be as social as possible, and follow kids’ lead in their play. Before kids can get on with learning, we have to ensure they belong" " “What the machine can’t do is be a partner,” Hirsh-Pasek told me. “It isn’t social. It’s interactive without being adaptive.”" "He had discovered that human learning was communal and interactive. For a robot, the acquisition of language was abstract and formulaic. For us, it was embodied, emotive, subjective, quivering with life. The future of intelligence wouldn’t be found in our machines, but in the development of our own minds." " In 2003, the psychologist Patricia Kuhl experimented with teaching American infants Mandarin. Split into three groups (video, audio and flesh-and-blood teacher) only those with a human tutor learned anything at all. In 2010 a study of the wildly popular Baby Einstein vocabulary-building DVDs (Time called them “Crack for Babies”) revealed that infants who watched them “showed no greater understanding of words from the program than kids who never saw it”. Nor did babies learn words by eavesdropping on parental conversations or listening to In Our Time on Radio 4, however soothing the mellifluous tones of Melvyn Bragg. More than words, it took a human being for a baby to learn language. They could not learn from screens." "Erika Christakis, early-childhood expert and author of The Importance of Being Little, charts the slow descent in preschool learning from a multidimensional, ideas-based approach to a two-dimensional naming-and-labelling curriculum. Daphna Bassok at the University of Virginia asks if kindergarten is really the new first grade. The expectation that kindergarteners – aged five or six – can read is now commonplace. Yet this is counter to all the evidence. A Cambridge study comparing groups of children who started formal literacy lessons at five and seven found that starting two years earlier made no difference at all to a child’s reading ability aged 11, “but the children who started at five developed less-positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those who started later”." "These findings are clear: if you start on the decoding before you have an underlying understanding of story, experience, sensation and emotion, then you become a worse reader. And you like it less. Treat kids like robots during early learning and you put them off for life." "In her book, she suggested six Cs for modern learning: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence. Truisms, I had thought, but unlike much education policy, drawn from scientific evidence. If I was to take away one thing, she said, it should be that “from the earliest ages, we learn from people”." "He had given up building robots that would compete with humans and instead turned his attention to the augmentation of human learning. What had changed his mind was the process of actually raising a child"

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# [How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete](http://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/03/how-babies-learn-and-why-robots-cant-compete) > I asked her about language learning. We knew words mattered, but I’d not heard much talk at playtime. “If we’re not addressing personal, social, emotional development first, you’re not ready to learn,” said Prodger. She explained that before children could acquire the tools of speech and language, you had to ensure they felt a sense of “being and belonging”. Too frequently, she thought, our approaches to early learning skipped these steps. It sounded to me like a nice-to-have, not an essential, but research showed otherwise. > They take the kids out to the forest a few days a week, light fires, let them experiment with scissors and ride BMX bikes. If they want to be outside, they go outside. If they fancy returning to the snug, where the youngest infants roll around, that’s where they would go. The environment dictates the learning. The adults aim only to connect and share attention with the children. Reading and writing could wait. Nurseries ought to be as social as possible, and follow kids’ lead in their play. Before kids can get on with learning, we have to ensure they belong > “What the machine can’t do is be a partner,” Hirsh-Pasek told me. “It isn’t social. It’s interactive without being adaptive.” > He had discovered that human learning was communal and interactive. For a robot, the acquisition of language was abstract and formulaic. For us, it was embodied, emotive, subjective, quivering with life. The future of intelligence wouldn’t be found in our machines, but in the development of our own minds. > In 2003, the psychologist Patricia Kuhl experimented with teaching American infants Mandarin. Split into three groups (video, audio and flesh-and-blood teacher) only those with a human tutor learned anything at all. In 2010 a study of the wildly popular Baby Einstein vocabulary-building DVDs (Time called them “Crack for Babies”) revealed that infants who watched them “showed no greater understanding of words from the program than kids who never saw it”. Nor did babies learn words by eavesdropping on parental conversations or listening to In Our Time on Radio 4, however soothing the mellifluous tones of Melvyn Bragg. More than words, it took a human being for a baby to learn language. They could not learn from screens. > Erika Christakis, early-childhood expert and author of The Importance of Being Little, charts the slow descent in preschool learning from a multidimensional, ideas-based approach to a two-dimensional naming-and-labelling curriculum. Daphna Bassok at the University of Virginia asks if kindergarten is really the new first grade. The expectation that kindergarteners – aged five or six – can read is now commonplace. Yet this is counter to all the evidence. A Cambridge study comparing groups of children who started formal literacy lessons at five and seven found that starting two years earlier made no difference at all to a child’s reading ability aged 11, “but the children who started at five developed less-positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those who started later”. > These findings are clear: if you start on the decoding before you have an underlying understanding of story, experience, sensation and emotion, then you become a worse reader. And you like it less. Treat kids like robots during early learning and you put them off for life. > In her book, she suggested six Cs for modern learning: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence. Truisms, I had thought, but unlike much education policy, drawn from scientific evidence. If I was to take away one thing, she said, it should be that “from the earliest ages, we learn from people”. > He had given up building robots that would compete with humans and instead turned his attention to the augmentation of human learning. What had changed his mind was the process of actually raising a child

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How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete

I asked her about language learning. We knew words mattered, but I’d not heard much talk at playtime. “If we’re not addressing personal, social, emotional development first, you’re not ready to learn,” said Prodger. She explained that before children could acquire the tools of speech and language, you had to ensure they felt a sense of “being and belonging”. Too frequently, she thought, our approaches to early learning skipped these steps. It sounded to me like a nice-to-have, not an essential, but research showed otherwise.

They take the kids out to the forest a few days a week, light fires, let them experiment with scissors and ride BMX bikes. If they want to be outside, they go outside. If they fancy returning to the snug, where the youngest infants roll around, that’s where they would go. The environment dictates the learning. The adults aim only to connect and share attention with the children. Reading and writing could wait. Nurseries ought to be as social as possible, and follow kids’ lead in their play. Before kids can get on with learning, we have to ensure they belong

“What the machine can’t do is be a partner,” Hirsh-Pasek told me. “It isn’t social. It’s interactive without being adaptive.”

He had discovered that human learning was communal and interactive. For a robot, the acquisition of language was abstract and formulaic. For us, it was embodied, emotive, subjective, quivering with life. The future of intelligence wouldn’t be found in our machines, but in the development of our own minds.

In 2003, the psychologist Patricia Kuhl experimented with teaching American infants Mandarin. Split into three groups (video, audio and flesh-and-blood teacher) only those with a human tutor learned anything at all. In 2010 a study of the wildly popular Baby Einstein vocabulary-building DVDs (Time called them “Crack for Babies”) revealed that infants who watched them “showed no greater understanding of words from the program than kids who never saw it”. Nor did babies learn words by eavesdropping on parental conversations or listening to In Our Time on Radio 4, however soothing the mellifluous tones of Melvyn Bragg. More than words, it took a human being for a baby to learn language. They could not learn from screens.

Erika Christakis, early-childhood expert and author of The Importance of Being Little, charts the slow descent in preschool learning from a multidimensional, ideas-based approach to a two-dimensional naming-and-labelling curriculum. Daphna Bassok at the University of Virginia asks if kindergarten is really the new first grade. The expectation that kindergarteners – aged five or six – can read is now commonplace. Yet this is counter to all the evidence. A Cambridge study comparing groups of children who started formal literacy lessons at five and seven found that starting two years earlier made no difference at all to a child’s reading ability aged 11, “but the children who started at five developed less-positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those who started later”.

These findings are clear: if you start on the decoding before you have an underlying understanding of story, experience, sensation and emotion, then you become a worse reader. And you like it less. Treat kids like robots during early learning and you put them off for life.

In her book, she suggested six Cs for modern learning: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence. Truisms, I had thought, but unlike much education policy, drawn from scientific evidence. If I was to take away one thing, she said, it should be that “from the earliest ages, we learn from people”.

He had given up building robots that would compete with humans and instead turned his attention to the augmentation of human learning. What had changed his mind was the process of actually raising a child

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Hope is a beggar...

Faith takes control

Desert island playlist

1 The XX - xx
2 The Libertines - the likely lads
3 Paul Kalkbrenner - train
4 Nosaj thing - kexp live mix
5 smashing pumpkins - adore
6 ash - nuclear sounds
7 chemical brothers - another world
8 jay z - grey album
9 Debussy - Clair de lune
10 opening theme to Planet Earth
11 Ratatat
12 gattaca soundtrack
13 yeah yeah yeah s

Desert island playlist

1 The XX - xx
2 The Libertines - the likely lads
3 Paul Kalkbrenner - train
4 Nosaj thing - kexp live mix
5 smashing pumpkins - adore
6 ash - nuclear sounds
7 chemical brothers - another world
8 jay z - grey album
9 Debussy - Clair de lune
10 opening theme to Planet Earth
11 Ratatat
12 gattaca soundtrack
13 yeah yeah yeah s

Systems or content

What is the foundation of a good business?

Singapore makes me believe it's lifestyle. Jakarta convinces me it's the logistical system.

A beautiful system wrapped in great content.

Harmonica

Harmonica

adventure time

Adventures Comes / Disaster Goes....

What a wonderful adventure - I wake up this morning in wrong train in the wrong city. Bandung is 300 kilometers away from my intended destination of Jakarta. It is 630am

...and there is a meeting at 2pm...
...and the next train from Bandung to Jakarta is full...
...and I'm dressed in a polo shirt, shorts and sandals...

Oh Yes, the trails of corporate business and general travel adventure.

Zoom, in a taxi to the nearest Bus Station.
Walk, through a hulking bus yard finding a bus. "di mana? di mana?"
Sit, in a rickety bus with frostbite aircon

For 1 hour, nothing moves and I wait.

We wait until it moves, and when it moves it moves in staccato fashion zooming through traffic and screetching to inappropriate stops along the autobahn to pickup any villagers or mobile food sellers.

We stop and go and stop and go through rice fields and green tea plantations. Slowly the green landscape rots away to concrete, canals and smog-traffic to reveal an emerging Jakarata before spitting me out at a fruit-named station called Rambutan and off again into a blue bird taxi for another hour of blue bird taxis.

Nevermind the shower, nevermind the clothes. We change in the office toilet and brush our teeth. Truthly, our is still just me but I have with me Patti Smith on audio book and a spinning mind sketching out a video for the company. So to keep the loneliness at bay I is We.

At the end, a simple text to frame the day: "Hi Darling, great disaster adventure this morning!" *send* 😁😁

#RoleModels

James Cameron
Elon Musk
Ed Catmull
John Carmack
Thom Mayne
Frank Gehry

Trust Your Better Self

By noon, tasks have piled up to nay high and there are messagings pinging in from facebook, skype and whatsapp. Like a growing cacophony of sounds, its hard to tell what the real tune is.

Which is why I think its important to find a quieter time to layout your intended tune before the din of everyday life comes in.

Its become a ritual in the studio to do two things:

First: 1010s, where we update each other everyday at 1010. We share two things: whats my most important thing (*MIT*) for the day and if i need any of the team's time. After that, we're set and everyone is off to do their own thing.

Second: PPPs, where we share the progress, problems and plans at a project level. This happens every week on Monday morning, and from it we get 3 MITs for each project phase. This helps to guide everyone's daily 1010.

Third: We've tried for a third - quarterly reviews, annual review - but at that scale, things are less regular and the real impact of decisions in what projects you say yes or no to.

So when its past noon and there's tons of pinging messages, I trust my better self and switch them off (if its important, they'll call). Because my better self told me at the morning 1010 that there's an important tune to play for the day, so nevermind the ruckus.

Get wrong to get right

You need to get it wrong to get right. For example, instead of creating 3 design "options" in 4 days and labouring over the details, how can you make 100 design iterations in 20 minute and flush out all the bad ideas and deadends early on? Don't ask "how do I get the design right?" Instead, ask "How can I make 100 mistakes in 20 minutes and clear the way for good things to happen?? And the best way to do this is to be very clear on what kind of mistakes should happen when. Too many mistakes at the same time will make it hard to judge what the right move should be. The hypothesis is that you should be very intentional in what you're trying to get wrong. Using techniques from matte painting, here's a hypothesis for the PAL project: The first mistake to make is in organization. Make every space too small and too big and dead and wasteful so that they can eventually be right: the right proportions, the right flow, the right light. The dimensions to evaluate are 2 dimensional. The next mistake to make is in massing. How is the organization going to be shaped? Only think about form and value relationships. Don't waste time thinking about materials yet. Draw fast and let it be ugly, clunky and awkward. Diagrammatically work the plans/sections or types/assemblies with the drawing so you know that it can still work. Eventually, a big grid of doodles will emerge and you can start to sort and distill into a single image or two that work. The doodle is mixing plan and section. 3.5D of information: X/Y/Z and values. IF you get stuck, just be systematic about the permutations and combinations you can make. This is a mixture of a line and a tonal thumbnail. If you've made it this far, congrats. You are now ready to make more mistakes! Its time to get materials and details wrong. Focus on making the materials as ugly and clash as possible. Try pinks, blues, reflectives and coloured lights. Don't worry. Try textures and smears and overlays. At this point, you should be having so much fun that there should be two massing perspectives to mess up! This is a colour study. Finally, focus your efforts on getting lighting as bad as possible. After this only are you ready to develop it in 3D.