I’m back in DC! Today was a beautiful day outside - but besides a short trip to Trader’s Joe (a supermarket! It’s awesome!) and the nearby “park” (disappointing) to orientate myself in the surroundings of my new AirBnB here in Foggy Bottom, I stayed at home. And was quite productive again! I’d say I had an ideal balance between Input and Output:
I started with a lot of reading around exemplification in journalism and storytelling and its consequences for our belief systems. I watched TED talks for a shallow entry point and worked myself upwards to academic papers.
Then I had a medium-great day-project: Great, because I was so much better at scraping websites with the Python library BeautifulSoup and then analyzing the data with R then I thought I was. And only medium-great, because the data turned out to not be super interesting. But yeah, NOT running into major and not-solvable-for-hours problems with Python surprised me very positively. Also, I commented my code really well (I hope) and put it on GitHub. I should do that more. Putting my code on GitHub.
Input? 7
Output? 8
Learnings?
Storytelling is the right balance between anticipation and surprise. You want to know what will happen next, but you also want to get surprised.
Kahnemann’s System 1 and System 2 system is actually a good model for the conflicting goals in journalism.
If you’re not watching one or two specific series on Netflix, then its selection is actually not that good.
Questions?
Is it just me being not in the field anymore or are trends in graphic design a) not so quickly changing as when I was studying and/or b) not tried out by every single designer out there? I thought about that yesterday, while doing basic graphic design for the first time again after two years…and the trendlist.org analysis didn’t bring so any clarification for that question.
Is it better to have a very open discussion at SRCCON or a very narrowed one?