Kip Voytek

SVP at IconNicholson

handle = kipbot

Random bits of information:

  • Plays chess
  • Skydive
  • Interaction Design
  • Doesn't blog anymore
  • Slightly crazy but fun

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Posts (of mine) worth looking at

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I’m getting some traffic from a few places where I’ll be speaking/visiting/workshopping next week and the most recent posts don’t make me look particularly good. So here are links to some posts which put a better face on me and might be interesting to read. And yes, of course, this screams of the need to re-design, get some WP modules, and making the thing decent again . . . meanwhile:

A revelation I had about the difference between design and creative (at least in interactive and marketing)

A curmudgeonly screed complaining about how simplistic our notions of design thinking have become.

More churlinshness about innovation and what a weasel word it is.

If your read only one (and why should you even bother with that?):

A happy post about innovation and craft and a jubilant post about that awesome young man who built the windmill in Malawi. You’re probably better off going to his site. I just wanted to counterbalance the crank with something positive.

Some thoughts on simplicity in web design, by way of tests I used to give IxD candidates interviewing for a job.

An overview of my obsession/fascination with emergent design

Several posts about craft and the XO people (additional obsessions)

Why study music?: Craft lesson from a piano teacher

1257773358|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover - http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/11/09/why-study-music-craft-lesson-from-a-piano-teacher/

I’m starting to look for a piano teacher (my previous teacher has, alas, moved to the west coast. A moment’s homage to her: she was awesome, played my piano beautifully when she walked me through Mozart sonatas and had a fun mix of stern teacher (reflexively pushing my elbows up and straightening my back) and music lover (listening to any vague musical connection I made between a theory assignment and something I was listening to.

So, a teacher I’m looking at has all sorts of things to love, chief among them his professional/academic work around Mahler. But he has a section on his site called Why study music? which highlights some of the benefits of taking a craft seriously and going deep into something. His key reasons, paraphrased below:

Dealing with pressure — the site refers to children learning to deal with pressure, but there’s something impressive for adults to, on a weekly basis, confront a piece of music that doesn’t come easily to them. Knowing that a lesson is coming up is just enough pressure to force you to take a longer view, break the piece down and work on it. It’s also long enough to be rewarding when, by the end of the week, you being to master it.

Responding to Criticism — I’m surprised how many design focused places don’t ‘workshop’ things and how many times we hold back from really working over a piece of work. One of the key, but most frequently overlooked, tenets of design thinking should be/is iteration and revision. While anyone’s first rev should be excellent, it should be understood that further revs will only improve the final product. Even if you come back to the original design, you’ll have a stronger, more confident understanding of it.

Persistence — in my world of marketing and interactive, there’s a borderline obsessive interest in the next thing, newness, novelty and never seen before. Sitting with someone for a while, working on something for longer than a quarter, doing a truly better v2.0 that is continuous with the previous version is not only hard to do, but often scorned. That said, however, there are a lot of creative types in the field who know when to dig in and fight the good fight or keep on pushing to validate an idea.

Multi-leveled focus - inset Steve Jobs quote about zooming in and zooming out and the design trope of ‘rinse and repeat’.

Project management - taking a long view of mastering a craft or something within the craft requires some PM like thinking. For a piano piece, my instructors regularly tell me how to break it down: “start with the left hand until it feels smooth and you find some melody in it, then focus on the melody right hand only, and work on the middle section until it feels clean, then you can add the intro, do dynamics last.”

The bolded names of the benefit are his, the interpretation mine. His page about why we should study music is pretty nice read, highlighting brain age as well as craft/life lesson benefits . . . and, oh yeah, the joy of playing music you love!

I Know Kung-Fu: Another Curmudgeonly Grump about Craft

1257772066|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover - http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/11/09/i-know-kung-fu-another-curmudgeonly-grump-about-craft/

Perhaps is because I’m getting old. Perhaps it’s because, having gone through 2.5 career changes and paid my dues/been schooled 2.5 times. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I found this Zen Habits article about
how to become amazingly great at something refreshing. I’ve been to so many places where people are going to “get digital” in 3 months, or pick up a new competency through a couple hires, or “spend a weekend” with something to plumb its depth and master its rhythms. I loved the setup to this article:

Very often you’ll see blog posts or books teaching you to “master” a skill in only 10 days, or 3 days … in fact, it used to be 30 days but the time frame to master something seems to be shrinking rapidly.

I’ve even seen tutorials claiming to teach a skill in just a few hours. Pretty soon we’ll be demanding to know how to do something in seconds.

Instant mastery of skills and knowledge! Hey presto!

Unfortunately, the reality is something a little less magical. Or maybe that’s a fortunate thing.

The War Room Mantra

1257691180|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover - http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/11/08/the-war-room-mantra/

Briefing a team on interactive is a balance between reductive over-simplification and excessive detailing of requirements. Everyone knows this. It was part of what made planning an art, it’s why agencies struggle with things like channel-neutral briefs. One of the best examples of a project brief comes from the 1993 documentary The War Room. I’ve used it 100 times. Sometimes, it supports the need to go beyond the three word brief (which is important for complex, rich interactive experiences). Sometimes, it supports the idea that anything, no matter how complex, can be simplified.

Back to The War Room. The documentary is about the 1992 Clinton Presidential Campaign. The filmmakers joined up early in the campaign when Clinton was more than a longshot, so they kind of lucked out in that they wound up being on the winning and unconvential team. The War Room of the title is the campaign office in Little Rock where soon-to-be-legends George Stephanopoulus and James Carville were calling key strategic thoughts in the campaign. At the end of the film, Clinton can be heard giving his victory speech on the steps of the Governor’s Mansion. The camera crew is inside the now-empty War Room and lands on a whiteboard (!) at the front of the office:
picture-3.png
This was the mantra, or the brief, of the campaign: Change vs more of the same, Health Care for Everyone, It’s the economy, stupid. (It had several versions and I went with the one that was more memorable for me. Interesting to note is that the press simplified this even further to include only “It’s the economy, stupid.”)

The mantra defined what was going to win for them, their true north, the campaign’s compass, the priorities, the decision-making criteria in strategy. Of course, the campaign was going to take on other issues, but these were the themes to which they would return again and again, this was the source of their voice, their media presence, and their style. God help me for the marketer-speak, but these were the things which, if they owned, would put them over the top.

A great use of this mantra is for any team that complains that they can’t possibly formulate a strategy or brief that’s less than 2 pages. Surely, if a presidential campaign can be distilled to this, something as simple as a website, or a game, or an MP3 player can be tamed as well? The alternate use is to combat the notion that anything beyond three words is superfluous, confusing, too hard to work with.

Early November giddiness

1257420185|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover - http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/11/05/early-november-giddiness/

A year ago, I tweeted the following about the election:

Nov 4 AM: “Smiling like an idiot at every polling place I pass.”
Nov 4 Noon: “Scratch that. I’m smiling like an idiot at everything.”
Nov 5 AM: “my face hurts . . . I think I kept smiling in my sleep”

Rmembering, I’m smiling again. (The World Series doesn’t hurt, either.)

Weird tweet on mortality idea

1257078811|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover - http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/11/01/weird-tweet-on-mortality-idea/

Following the reading of The Power of Full Engagement, I picked up How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci which was frequently cited in the first. It’s a little embarassing to read (one of the times when having a Kindle obscure your reading material comes in handy), but whatever, it has some use.

I’ve noticed that, in addition to mentally processing things I might use for work, or quote for other purposes, I semi-consciously evaluate text or look for things that are tweetable. It bothers me, but I do it. So when I was reading the end of the biography material in the da Vinci book, I had a weird thought about da Vinci’s line on mortality: “As a day well spent brings blessed sleep, so a life well lived brings a blessed death.”

Not even a hundred characters! It seems like social media will eventually become a place for that kind of musing.

Just saying, is all.

Simple, simple solutions

1256036241|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover - http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/10/20/simple-simple-solutions/

Way, way back in in 1989 (the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the other subway series, Tiannanmen, release of Mandela), I worked at a foundation that funded environmental, community development, and some cultural groups. While there, I heard a great story about a simple solution. It involved Lester Brown, head of Worldwatch.

Brown was presenting at an event sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (a foundation created by later, more progressive Rockefeller cousins) and someone asked the question: “if you could get people to do one thing, what would it be?” Brown is said to have thought a very long time about this question, uncomfortably long for some, when he finally answered: “get people to ride bikes.”

This was a simple solution to many, many, many problems: by using bikes instead of cars or public transit, carbon emissions would be reduced, by getting people to ride they would have fewer heart problems, live healthier. Bikes require less infrastructure and generally pose fewer delays in people’s live so they reduce stress. David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries makes the charming argument that biking around cities makes him “feel more connected” and provides insights into “the mind of my fellow man.” And bikes are just nifty.

Seems like another simple solution is emerging twenty years later: cook for yourself. For a variety of reasons, I’ve resumed cooking and a friend recommended The Flavor Bible. The introduction has a nice little closing:

Ultimately, cooking offers the opportunity to be immersed in one’s senses and in the moment like no other activity, uniting the inner and outer selves. At these times, cooking transcends drudgery and becomes a means of meditation and even healing. . . . It is little surprise to us, then, that when US Poet Laureate Charles simic was asked by New York Times’s Deborah Soloman earlier this year “What advice would you give people who are looking to be happy?” his response was “For starters, learn how to cook.”

Now, The Nation has an article titled “We Don’t Need a Food Revolution, We Just Need to Learn How to Cook”. It begins with the line:

We need radical thinking, but we don’t need a revolution. We don’t need an overthrow of capitalism. Nor do we need to become vegetarians. We need not become spartans. We’re just going to have to learn how to cook.

Sadly, the rest of the article is mostly about Americans: 1) needing less protein than we think; 2) eating only choice cuts while leaving other interesting bits (kidney, tripe, liver, brisket) to our pets and the rest of the world; and 3) the protein paradox of feeding out protein sources (livestock) more food than we need to feed 4 billion people. It’s less about how a lifestyle change would work or connect to Simic’s line.

Still, my apophenic brain circuitry has latched onto this. I’m getting too many signals in a short period of time to ignore it: David Byrne’s bicycle book, the resurfacing of the Lester Brown story, the Simic quote, my own interest in cooking (and not spending obscene amounts of money for a salad at Pret a Manger), the Nation headline (if not the article in Google Reader).

Two city things today

1256035610|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover - http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/10/20/two-city-things-today/

cover_photo_100x160px.jpg

Just started reading David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries this morning. The book, which has all the charm of David Byrne, has a great story to it. Byrne started riding his bike as a way to stop dealing with cabs, get a little exercise, and as a superior way of going to clubs to hear music.

Eventually, after discovering the folding bike, he began travelling and touring with a bike and riding around the cities that he visited. (He blogs about his biking now.) He found that, while on his bike, he was:

more connected to the life on the streets than I would have inside a car or in some form of public transport: I could stop whenever I wanted to, it was often (very often) faster than a car . . . and I didn’t have to follow any set route.

This point of view — faster than a walk, slower than a train, often slightly higher than a person — became my panoramic window on much of the world over the last thirty years — and it still is. It’s a big window and it looks out on a mainly urban landscape. … Through this window I catch glimpses of the mind of my fellow man, as expressed in the cities he lives in. Cities, it occurred to, are physical manifestations of our deepest beliefs and our often unconscious thoughts

The other urban thing is a nifty sticker campaign, by graphic designer Mike Joyce. The sticker reads “More Jane Jacobs, Less Marc Jacobs”.

jane-marc.jpg

Sad little footnote. Lots of people started defending Marc Jacobs to him. Worse still, lots of people asked who Jane Jacobs is. We don’t have a contemporary urban critic who celebrates city life . . . Steven Johnson is doing some of that, but I think we lose that voice to his technology and science history writing.

Typical interaction

1255690142|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover - http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/10/16/typical-interaction/

Luvit: a starfield on your ceiling (not stickers either)

1255351668|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover - http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/10/12/luvit-a-starfield-on-your-ceiling-not-stickers-either/

I love this Instructable and wish I could do it for me. The author, responding to that clear-but-squishy-edged school of thought that various stimuli are good for infants, created a remote-controlled pattern of fiber optic lights in his soon-to-be-born baby’s ceiling. He can remotely control the overall brightness, the rate of twinkling, and the phases of the moon (waxing and waning):

Full lesson at Instructables

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Comment about Wipe yer hooves

kipbot has posted a comment:

Hmmmm . . . kind of a Reindeer meets Grauman's Theater thing maybe. Also, wasn 't it Donder and not Donner?

Wipe yer hooves

1260023369|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Comment about Wipe yer hooves

mokindo has posted a comment:

what? did they all com danc'n on one hoof?

T/

Wipe yer hooves

1260021143|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Comment about Wipe yer hooves

ttblum has posted a comment:

And don't forget Lucifer himself.

Wipe yer hooves

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Comment about photo.jpg

ttblum has posted a comment:

Better than Soma: "the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was!"

photo.jpg

1259066095|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
monday dinner

kipbot has posted a comment:

I'm a sucker for squash and greens, apparently. Any pic of the two . . . works for me.

monday dinner

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Comment about photo.jpg

redboat has posted a comment:

and it was...

photo.jpg

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Comment about Fucked up.

mokindo has posted a comment:

now I see it, it looked like a giant banner in front of a store front on the first pass.

Fucked up.

1258921743|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Comment about photo.jpg

technekai has posted a comment:

wow wow wow like a CAULDRON of autumnal joy

photo.jpg

1258895504|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Comment about Fucked up.

kipbot has posted a comment:

bumper stikcer on the inside of a cab window. excessive even for haters.

Fucked up.

1258850740|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Comment about Fucked up.

mokindo has posted a comment:

where is that?

Fucked up.

1258499554|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Comment about Excessively amused by dogs

turtlefly♥ (camera & compu broken D:) has posted a comment:

Hi, I'm an admin for a group called dogs licking their noses., and we'd love to have this added to the group!

Excessively amused by dogs

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Union Square Chess Match Quick Save / 20091002.SD850IS.3352.P1.L1 / SML

See-ming Lee 李思明 SML has posted a comment:

agent j loves agent a

Yes definitely can play in person. Blitz can do also. Have 3 clocks. I think that I was supposed to give kipbot one of mine.

Washington Square is now in construction so no go. Where in New York are you?

Union Square Chess Match Quick Save / 20091002.SD850IS.3352.P1.L1 / SML

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Union Square Chess Match Quick Save / 20091002.SD850IS.3352.P1.L1 / SML

See-ming Lee 李思明 SML has posted a comment:

kipbot

Thanks for the info. I'll check him out - thanks for posting here + email :)

Union Square Chess Match Quick Save / 20091002.SD850IS.3352.P1.L1 / SML

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Union Square Chess Match Quick Save / 20091002.SD850IS.3352.P1.L1 / SML

kipbot has posted a comment:

you might get a kick out of looking up asa hoffman.

www.jaderiver.com/chess/tchnamef.html#HOFFMAN

He's the person the austin pendleton character in Searching for Bobby Fischer is based on. (The guy who walks over during a tournament and says "I think I'm going to win a pawn. Pretty sure, I've won that pawn" and he's all crazy.) I met Asa in real life about ten years ago, and he was a total trip. What's really interesting with him is that you can send him games you've played in tournament conditions (even G30) and he'll coach you based on that.

Union Square Chess Match Quick Save / 20091002.SD850IS.3352.P1.L1 / SML

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