"I talk a lot about soul..."

Soulfulness is about deep intimacy and beauty. Its something that evokes feelings of warmth,affection and belonging. Its aesthetic. Its meaningful. It evokes memories and stimulates conversations.

A relationship, a musical composition, a film, a place, a picture ,a person can all be soulful.

I needed more words to describe just exactly what I meant by 'soulless'. Here's the link that inspired me :
http://tinyurl.com/yq9tm6

Fumble with Stumble(Upon)

This one's for the record.

I get a StumbleUpon invitation to join/register all that jazz. I go for it because I trust the person who sent me the request. This thing then lures me into telling who else from my contacts are on this thing (not unlike Facebook). So, I sign in with my google account and it shows me the people who have already stumbled in life :P

And there's a big bad button saying continue or next step or whatever which I gladly push after having selected the people I wanted in my network. What I don't realize because it is so deliberately hidden from me is that below the already registered users is a list of all other emails/contacts from my gmail account whom I "wished" to invite, with the default as "Select All".

Lo and behold 750 of contacts get a StumbleUpon request from me. This is negligent design and amounts to cheating at some level. Its so super embarrassing that I don't even know where to begin my apologies.

Here's where design ethics comes in. Why should the "Select all" be checked by default? And pray,tell me why should this invite list be hidden from me? Also take note, Facebook (but as a saving grace at the sneaky checkbox is clearly visible).

Fumble, stumble, jumble,grumble....

Oh I also had issues complaining on their site. Here's the transcript:

Even submitting a complaint on this site is problematic. Why can't you tell me that my complaint has been submitted or not instead of smacking the FAQ page right into my face after I click this "Send Message" button? And I have to scroll down so far down the page to realize that my message hasn't gone through yet?

I take this as deception and its in very poor taste.

This topic will remain hot, watch this space.

What's the height of Narcissism in the digital age?

Having your own website as your homepage :D.

This is an original joke, so what do you think?

Oh btw, I realized that one of the most embarrassing things is when people don't laugh at your joke. This medium shields one from those kind of awkward moments. A whole new social effect of social media,anyone? :P

A new inspiration....

Bollywood! Yes, how I had forgotten about this form of media whose inanity perplexes me to such an extent that it makes me think hard.

So here are my thoughts - mashed-up, truly new media, eh? ;) (Bollywood movie Om Shanti Om and a anthopological essay by Edward Bruner)

Om Shanti Om has flummoxed me and left me in all sorts of mental discomforts! For what I consider, a long time now. At one point, I branded it "new media"!

This surely wasn't a film. I didn't feel like I had watched a movie. The whole experience of the 'film' was unique, something that wasn't necessarily special or repulsive. There's definitely a frustration associated with my inability to express my feelings toward Farah Khan's self-deprecating, sometimes smug, sometimes preposterous (read hilarious),but most definitely grandiose movie. Its megalomania and pompous show-off at one level, yet it has deep cultural significance at another. The debate in my mind is the intention of the film maker. I doubt cultural commentary as the purpose and I suspect celebrating her sense of belonging toward the movie/glamor community as the underlying motivation. Whether the former thought even came to the film makers mind while making it is moot. Inadvertently or not, Farah Khan has created, what I consider, a very important cultural expression with Om Shanti Om.

Alright, so what am I exactly talking about? Bollywood is a culture. We all agree, right? Its not an isolated culture , it determines us and we determine it (That's how all media matures/grows - by reflecting upon and by being reflected ). But, culture is not static, its dynamic , its alive and it grows each moment. How, you ask? We contribute to its growth - by reenacting, retelling, redoing, reenacting,reliving,reconstructing and in general repeating things that we inherently understand due to our being part of the culture in the first place. The reflexivity is confounding yet it exists and its real. Farah Khan's film is reflexive with a capital R. Reflexive. There! And its this reflexivity that had me confused.

Let me elaborate on this reflexivity bit. Her use of cliches, (I don't even want to start a list here...), standard dialogs ("Yeh ek maa ka dil kehtaa hai" etc.) , twists , songs, hackneyed concepts like re-birth- all that what we've come to know as the quintessential "Bollywood Masala" is essentially retelling, repeating a kind of reinforcing of the culture that we are all too familiar with AND the film itself progresses with this reuse, expanding on/building on what already is. Due its reflexive nature, the film is hard to critique as a story. And that, in my mind makes it more of a cultural expression than a film per se. And to top it off, its Ms Khan's expression of her experience in Bollywood. Even if an Om Puri were asked to make a film on his experience in Bollywood, it would perhaps have similar elements - because Bollywood culture is so universal. Heck, if a person on the street in India is asked to make a film on his/her Bollywood experience, he'll most definitely have a similar tone of expression ( ignoring production qualities etc.)

Compare this dialog from the film "aur agar sab theek nahi hai toh...picture abhi baaki hai mere dost..." to this line from an anthropological essay on cultural expressions of experience- "Stories may have endings, but stories are never over". Om Shanti Om (the expression) will end but Bollywood (the experience) will continue on and that's where the unintended (for most part) brilliance of Om Shanti Om comes to the fore. It reflexively uses this dialog to drag the film until "sab kuch is theek", finally. And its not just this dialog, its many other countless instances which makes you think - this is silly, but most of Bollywood is silly. OSO doesn't re-mediate (like other Bollywood films) , it simply re-enacts and it re-tells what it is to have a Bollywood experience.

To complete this expression, self-deprecation is a tool, hackneyed dialogs are a tool, every little thing in the film whether Ms Khan intends or not is a tool toward completing her expression. And this is a landmark expression, hilarious and all. Because this will surely compel the Bollywood community to add to this culture thereby rendering new ideas and new thoughts and new kinds of films. I won't credit Farah Khan for making an amazingly entertaining film (because 'Mai Hoo Na' was far superior) but by making Om Shanti Om she has done a great service, which will hopefully make people more reflective on the Bollywood experience and contribute toward its maturity.

"What is this an example of?"

That's the question Erik Stolterman asks in his Capstone class. That's what I have been told- I have never actually attended that class. But, its the best question to ask when designing, undoubtedly. Because it makes you draw parallels and forces you to see/ recognize patterns.

Check out Luke W's notes on UI12 - especially the part of ideas come from other ideas. That's what this question is all about and it is hard to answer immediately, trust me. I applied it recently (again), and after hours of pondering, I got a very useful answer.

Thanks Erik!

S-St-Stuck

The title of this post was also my facebook status a few weeks ago. As it turns out, I cannot "emphatically" blog and twitter about this workshop. Besides the point, I am not s-st-stuck because of that.

This is about the problem scoping session. Very hard to conduct and for me to participate in as a designer. As ramblings about raw data, object views, transient objects, wikis and widgets hijack the agenda, there's little or no window for design thinking.

A beautifully fuzzy problem space gets dragged into discussions of functions, forms and features. Break time....

Information Workplace!

Attending the user experience workshop at SAP, they dwell on a particular project with the problem on designing 'gap' applications. I will be blogging about it on twitter and deeper reflections will be posted here.

Not being an enterprise software doesn't help. Empathy is harder to come.Software is meant to be sold - hence its about customers and not users.

These problems although abstract are very technical in nature consisting of repetitive tasks , using alternate technologies [ leading to my fav topic of uninteded usage], redundant usage, application incapabilities and a lack of cross-system intergration. The nature of the information worker and information workplace needs a deeper people centered understanding.

This workshop will be twittered and blogged about emphatically.

Redundancy of Communication

Ironically, I am writing about this!

Communication happens all the time, everywhere you go, every step you take. There are things out there screaming out loud at you. Some screams are slick, some are subtle, some are undesirable and some are, just...well screams.

There are times when even screaming is not enough to communicate though. Silence doesn't work either. Its a limbo, a stalemate, a staus quo. Have you ever felt it? Neither does your silence, nor do your words get through. Somehow, communication seems redundant then.

It happened to me just recently. There are some visceral feelings that you feel the need to communicate. Have to get creative to do that. But without empathy from the other end,it is nearly impossible. Even more frustrating is when the best efforts at empathizing fail. Just trust the other person then, no way out.

There's nothing travelly about this entry :P, just some redundant thoughts I needed to get out of me.

What's the scoop?

There were mounds of ice-cream in the gelato shops in Italy (pictures coming soon). Very pretty mounds too with all the fruit flavors adding to the color. That was the beautiful part.

The inspiration part was the scoop. I want to one day be able to scoop my blog or my mailbox or my facebook or you know just scoop something digital. Why? You tell me. I can list quite a few times when I have felt the need to scoop out stuff from these interfaces and put them in a cone or a cup :P.

Do you feel the need to scoop?

On a separate note, I was amused that the pineapple flavor was called "Annanass", because that's what we call pineapple in Marathi (my mother tongue). Then, someone told me that it was the Spanish who bought the pineapple to India....figures I guess.

First Post, Yay!

Blog agnostic me finally succumbs! Probably lots of free time has caused this submission :D. There's a real , core reason though, which in due course of my writings might get revealed....

Welcome to Wandering Inspirations, where I post-document the things that inspire me while traveling.Inspiration for this blog - my recent trips to Europe and India (home!!).

This is only just a start point though, travel here is a very broad term which includes all kinds of trips ;)

There will be a pattern to my inspirations , you'll find out soon. But, within those you should find some interesting stories. Feel free to join in and share your stories too. Inspire me!!