Wanderlust and Words

I had a very useful lesson in problem solving this week. When I came home from Regina, there was a beeping noise in my apartment. I immediately suspected that it was the smoke detector. The building manager agreed with my analysis and dropped by the next day to replace it. Well, that didn’t solve the problem. I continued to have 5-minute episodes of beeping on and off, mostly at night. Over the next two days, the building manager replaced the smoke detector three times. With no success. At that point, he got frustrated. He said the smoke detectors were not faulty and, as I was the only tenant who had this problem, and because I was the only tenant with birds, the answer was obvious: my budgies had learned to imitate the sound of the smoke detector beeping, and it was them that I was hearing. Well, then I got mad because I knew it wasn’t my birds. Fortunately, at this stage I called on my brother for assistance, and he helped me to review the situation objectively. I conducted a men...

I spent last weekend in Regina and thought some of you might appreciate some hotel/restaurant recommendations: Holiday Inn Express is two blocks from the Cornwall Centre and 1 block from the bus depot. I had a large, quiet room for $88/night. I’ll stay there again. My best meal was at the Crave Kitchen and Wine Bar at 1925 Victoria Avenue. It’s an old building (formerly the Assiniboine Club) that has been renovated and reopened. The food was good, and there were a couple of vegetarian options. Staff were friendly, and it’s an attractive space and not overly crowded. I had dinner at the Beer Brothers’ Bakery and Cuisine . I had a good organic ale from Ontario, and the surroundings were pleasant, plus it’s right downtown (next to the Globe Theatre), which is convenient. However, there is only one vegetarian main course, and it hadn’t been available for a couple of weeks. A good place for lunch or a snack rather than dinner. I also tried The Crushed Grape Food and Wine Bar at 1...

Simplicity is a key element of writing and graphic design. But it also solves traffic jams and eliminates bureaucratic hierarchies. Amazing! In Pursuit of Elegance by Matthew E. May looks at why some of the best ideas have something missing. Rather than trying to solve problems by doing things, May recommends seeing what you can do without. Eliminate Traffic Lights When an intersection is dangerous, traffic engineers normally add traffic lights or stop signs or cameras. But there is an alternate approach – do away with all the signs; remove the traffic lights. Experience shows that when there is a power outage and the traffic lights aren’t functioning, traffic actually flows more smoothly. As one driver reported, “you would expect chaos, but instead the traffic flowed beautifully. There were no backups, people were careful and polite and I saw no accidents. Traffic from the side streets flowed into the main street on opportunity. Drivers would slow down and motion them out. . ....

Why am I spending so much time thinking about design? I’m a writer, after all. I deal with words, not graphics. First of all, how you place the words on the page makes a tremendous difference. Layout and design highlight the important messages and make it easy to understand the message. Well-designed documents get read – poorly-designed ones don’t. But design moves beyond physical layout and formatting. In Presentation Zen Design , Garr Reynolds outlines 10 Japanese aesthetic principles that I aspire to instil in my work. Kanso – simplicity or elimination of clutter. Clarity rather than decoration. Fukinsei – asymmetry or irregularity. Balanced asymmetry is both dynamic and beautiful. Shibui/Shibumi – understated. Elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. Shizen – natural, without pretence or artificiality. It may appear to be accidental, but it is actually planned and intentional. Yugen – suggestion rather than revelation. A Japanese garden, for example, is a collectio...

Innovative architecture intrigues me – a revolving tower in Dubai, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. But, as I read Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space  by Jan Gehl, I realized that these buildings might be interesting, but they weren’t people friendly. Jan Gehl urges architects and urban planners to consider not only the buildings, but the space between buildings. For this is where social interaction takes place – a market, a juggler, a sidewalk café, a playground. “Living cities, therefore, ones in which people can interact with one another, are always stimulating because they are rich in experiences, in contrast to lifeless cities, which can scarcely avoid being poor in experiences and thus dull, no matter how many colors and variations of shape in buildings are introduced.” Downtown Downtown Saskatoon offers very few spaces for human interaction. There are no benches or squares to stop and break your journey. The new credit union is shiny and imposing, but it pres...

Companies nowadays focus a lot of attention on social media, but it is typically directed at external audiences. We use websites and blogs and twitter to connect with customers, but we fail to look internally and to investigate ways in which we can use the electronic media to enhance internal administration and communications. This frustrates me as there are some excellent online tools that could be of great value to organizations of all shapes and sizes. As a result, I was delighted to read Does Your Company Need a Digital Readiness Checklist by Jeffrey Rayport. Rayport poses the question, “What impact has digital had on what you offer your customers or clients, how you interact with them, and, perhaps most critically, how you lead and manage yourselves?” He goes on to provide a checklist of points to start you thinking about how you could use electronic media tools to function more effectively. For example: • Do day-to-day communications rely on extended voice-mail and leng...

I love to read – to learn, to understand and to enjoy. I read voraciously, and a day is not complete if I have not made time to read. And yet, I’m in the minority. An Ipsos Reid survey showed that 31% of Canadians did not read a single book for pleasure in 2007. Reading Canadians read an average of 22 books a year – from a high of 33 books per year in British Columbia to 15 in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. My book reading habit will skew the averages. I read 148 books in 2009, 63 of which were non-fiction. P.S. My brother read 140 books.

“For the designer (or artist), focus, calm, gentleness, and vision are more important qualities than raw enthusiasm. Slow down your busy mind.” Ikebana, Japanese flower arrangement, “sees space not as something to fill in or use, but rather as an element to be created, preserved, and respected.” It is “the void or pause that gives shape to the whole. . . . An ikebana artist learns to leave room between the branches to allow a figurative breeze to pass through and rustle the branches, just as would occur in the natural world.” In Presentation Zen Design , Garr Reynolds outlines a number of different ways to avoid visual clutter and to use empty space to shape our presentations: • Asymmetry provides movement and balance; • Full-screen images and images or text on an angle are dynamic; • Create implied space by bleeding images off the edge of the slide (our imagination will fill in what is happening just off stage); and • Add depth through layering and shadows. Reynolds a...

“Experience-based thinking isn’t the absence of analysis. It’s the application of all that we have encountered and learned.” “In complex and ambiguous situations, there is no substitute for experience. We put too much emphasis on reducing errors and not enough on building expertise.” Quotes are from: Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Gary Klein With thanks to Stephen Few’s blog, Visual Business Intelligence

I will be posting flavourful, bite-sized pieces of information about communications on Twitter. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/PennyMcKinlay . Photo courtesy of www.madrid-guide-spain.com .

“Do only what is necessary to convey what is essential.” In Presentation Zen Design (see also Type Zen ), Garr Reynolds continues to apply Zen aesthetic principles to business presentations. One chapter focuses on preparing effective charts and graphs. Reynolds urges readers to avoid clutter and overly-complicated charts and graphs that will distract viewers from the relevant data. He outlines three key principles: restraint, reduce, emphasize. • Restrain yourself from including unnecessary information (logos, decorative items, overly-detailed data). • Reduce the non-essential elements by being very clear about the purpose of the graph and what it is intended to illustrate. • Then emphasize the most important information: colour to highlight the most important bar in the graph, a heading to direct attention to the data’s significance. It is so easy to want to draw a pretty picture – to include lots of colour and graphics – or to drown your viewers in information to show how kno...

I am fascinated by design thinking at the moment, perhaps because it provides pointers for being both more creative and more successful. The Design of Business by Roger Martin* focuses on helping businesses to use design thinking, but his ideas apply to individuals and institutions as well. Balancing Predictability and New Knowledge Martin recognizes that companies need structure and established routines in order to exploit their past successes. As a result, they analyse the figures to determine what works and what doesn’t work. They value reliability and demand proof before trying something new. But the results don’t live up to expectations. Martin explains, “What organizations fail to realize is that while they reduce the risk of small variations in their business, they increase the risk of cataclysmic events that occur when the future no longer resembles the past and the algorithm is no longer relevant or useful.” Martin says that “Few large companies have managed – or even ...