River Park, Winchester
River Park, Winchester
River Park, Winchester
Skate Park, River Park, Winchester
Park Avenue, Winchester
Park Avenue, Winchester
River itchen, Durngate, Winchester
Water Lane, Winchester
River Itchen, Water Lane, Winchester
River Itchen, Water Lane, Winchester
River Itchen, Mill, Winchester
An unanswered Paul Hayes brace beat Mansfield to keep Scunthorpe on top of League Two
Scunthorpe top of League Two
Summary from Eric Barker:
Being a great storyteller has immense value across five key areas of your life. Here’s the research behind how the art of storytelling can benefit you — and how you can get better at it.
What does John Gottman think is the best diagnostic tool for checking how good a relationship is? Ask them to tell their story.
I’ve found 94 percent of the time that couples who put a positive spin on their marriage’s history are likely to have a happy future as well. When happy memories are distorted, it’s a sign that the marriage needs help. Either they emphasize their good times and make light of the rough spots, or they accentuate their failures and not their successes. Likewise, they either underscore their partner’s positive traits in favor of their more annoying characteristics (cherishing), or they do the opposite (trashing). Here’s more on the importance of your relationship story.
In the Harvard Business Review, Herminia Ibarra and Kent Lineback give advice on crafting a good resume.
Bullet points of achievements are lovely, yes, but the key part of a resume that has impact is the story you make it tell. The process of putting together a resume is as valuable as the product because it entails drafting your story. Everything in the resume must point to one goal — which, of course, is the climax of the story you’re telling.
Here’s more on storytelling in your career.
Think of your recent conversations. The primary way we communicate is through stories.
Sure, facts and statistics are great. But when people hear presentations what do they remember? The stories. When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic.
Here’s more on communicating memorably.
Who is most likely to say “Tell me a story”? Children. Research shows that telling stories kids can relate to may dramatically increase their desire to learn. Students told a story about a high math achiever who shared their birthday persevered 65% longer on hard problems during a math test.
Whether it’s formal religion or just your own idea of life, meaning comes from the stories you tell yourself about what happens every day. Those stories make up a big part of whether or not you are happy.
According to the psychologist Michele Crossley, depression frequently stems from an “incoherent story,” an “inadequate narrative account of oneself,” or “a life story gone awry.” Psychotherapy helps unhappy people set their life stories straight; it literally gives them a story they can live with. And it works. For better or worse, you become the stories you tell yourself — so choose wisely the narratives that shape your life.
Half the attendees at the GOV.UK Product Direction away day on 16 May 2013. © 2013 @psd, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
There’s something happening here
But what it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it’s time we stop
Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look – what’s going down?
There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking’ their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
It’s time we stop
Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look – what’s going down?
What a field day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly saying, “hooray for our side”
It’s time we stop
Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look – what’s going down?
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line, the men come and take you away
We better stop
Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look – what’s going down?
We better stop
Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look – what’s going down?
We better stop
Now, what’s that sound?
Everybody look – what’s going down?
We better stop
Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look – what’s going down?
Alexander Baxevanis started his talk at January’s London IA with a confession – “I’m addicted to side projects.”
Now, I’ve got some sympathy with Alex’s problem here. What with the job, this blog, London IA, EuroIA, my writing role at FUMSI, editing ebooks for the Guardian, keeping my programming going, writing guest spots for places like TheMediaBriefing, making music, frequent conference appearances and running training days, I’ve got quite a lot of things that could be considered side projects myself. His involved lots of Arduinos and bikes and Arduinos in bikes, and Alex boasted that of all his projects, he’d even actually finished two of them 😉
Alex set out five rules for running a side project:
- Find something you want to learn
- Find a partner
- Shout about it
- Keep track of where you are
- Don’t get disappointed easily
Alex valued the idea of collaboration in a side project. Find someone with the opposing skills to you, he suggested, and you’ll end up with a better outcome, and both learn from each other. Sometimes people worry about sharing the credit for a project they are passionate about, but Alex suggested that sharing credit was better than getting no credit at all because nothing ever got finished. Having a partner spurs you on to meet deadlines and finish tasks you’ve promised. He also thought a physical space was useful for a project – whether that is the proverbial shed, or a collaborative environment like Hackspace.
Keeping a record and telling people about your projects were also important. By talking about them, you get the dread nagging reminder of people asking how you are getting along with such-and-such, but you also get the serendipity of people recalling you are interested in a topic and suggesting ideas, resources and events to you. I keep track of my projects with a whiteboard in the kitchen – which also means it is a very visible record of whether I am working on the things that pay me or make money, or whether my focus is elsewhere and I am getting behind with things I need to do.
I laughed a lot at one part of Alex’s talk. He said one of the best things about side projects is that they are a great way to learn. If you want to learn HTML & CSS, he said, don’t get yourself something like a Sams Learn HTML in 21 days book, get started by trying to build something you want to build. That way you’ll focus your learning on what you need to know.
I laughed, because when I first started to learn how to make the interwebs work in the 1860s, I didn’t have a computer at home, and a Sams Learn HTML4 in 21 days was exactly what I used to get myself started – writing out example code on paper and then typing it into the work PC in my lunch hour to see if I’d got it right.
But I didn’t really get started until I had a project – to rebuild the Reckless website. Certainly today my efforts to scratch along with Python are based on learning what I need to get my prototypes working, not some great plan to become a Python expert.
One of the questions Alex was asked at the end was whether his side projects actually helped with his work. He explained that as much as he loved his job, it was never going to be “100% of what I want to do” – an advantage that side projects have. And during the talk he’d given some examples of “side projects done good” – the World Wide Web you are reading this on evolved out of a Tim Berners-Lee side project called ENQUIRE which was exploring hypertext, and the 6502 chip which transformed home computing was the result of engineers tinkering around the edges when they thought they could do better than the specifications and ambitions of the company they were working for.
Alex has published his slides and text on Speaker Deck, and Richard Wand has also blogged about the talk.
Next…
The final talk at January’s London IA was my amazing colleague Mary Hamilton, with her tale of “Verbs. Zombies. UX.” I’ll be publishing my notes from that next.
“London IA: Notes from the talks”
Martin Belam, foreword by Ann McMeekin Carrier
London IA is a network of designers, information architects and thinkers. Since 2009 the group has been holding regular meetings featuring talks about UX, or of interest to UXers. This ebook is a compilation of my notes from those evenings, featuring talks by Andy Budd, Giles Colborne, Cennydd Bowles, Claire Rowland, Jason Mesut, Ben Bashford, Chris Heathcote, Dan Lockton, Relly Annett-Baker, Michael Blastland, Margaret Hanley and Richard Rutter amongst others. Topics covered range from ubicomp to psychology, from learning how to sketchnote to how to write a UX book, and how to improve digital design through diverse routes like copy-writing, designing for doubt, learning from music technology or taking care of typography.
“London IA: Notes from the talks” is available for Kindle for £2.47.
Posted 29 November 2012 13:18pm by Heather Taylor with 30 comments
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With all the recent changes to our favorite (or not so favorite) social networks with Facebook covers, Twitter header images and YouTube branded channels, businesses have had to redesign their images and rethink of how they represent themselves visually online.
This gave way to a lot of new creative campaigns on Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest but is has led to a lot of social media managers scrambling to get the images just right.
Earlier this month LunaMetrics released an updated version of their widely popular Social Media Sizing cheat sheet with image and video sizes for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Though I bookmarked it, I thought it was actually too valuable a resource to keep to myself.
So before you post your next picture or change up your profile image, take a look at this handy cheat sheet and bookmark it for yourself.
”Discounting advance tickets is a way of managing passengers to suit the needs of the railway. I think we should be managing the railway to suit the needs of the passengers.”
Peter Jordan 