Cricket, holidays and memories

I was watching the movie adaptation of Chetan Bhagat's popular novel ' 3 Mistakes of my life' - kai Po Che the other night. I haven't read the book, because I think the author sort of lost the plot after 'Five Point Someone' and seems to try and do more of the same thing every time he comes up with a new release. Frankly, it's not great writing, but it seems to be perfect for the simplistic formulaic plots of Bollywood movies.

Kai Po Che was a good watch, nothing extraordinary or new, but entertaining nevertheless.Other than the plot though, which circled around the lives of 3 friends, the biggest draw of the movie for the Indian audience was its cricket-centric setting. It made me think of the times when I used to watch the sport, as religiously and with the same fervor that my brother and father did.

I remember sitting in my old house in Lucknow, glued to the TV screen and following every minute of so many One Day matches.Loo breaks had to coincide with the finish of the 6-ball over and radios were kept on standby just in case the electricity-supply decided to play spoilsport. All sorts of superstitions were followed, from the mildly absurd to the ridiculously bizarre and movement was judiciously limited when Sachin Tendulkar came to the crease. Celebrations after a win had a very specific dance ritual which involved a group huddle and jumping /skipping in a retarded fashion till the post match ceremony came back on air.

Cricket was fun then. As with most things in life, the sport and its arena has become too commercial over time. Trying to woo new viewers and glamorize the game has resulted in a cricket match becoming more like a Karan Johar magnum opus, a potboiler replete with dancing girls et all. The 20/20 format, and more specifically the IPL have made the game a shadow of what it was before; and it seems to have lost its soul somewhere along the way.

Ramblings for a Sunday morning

Much has been written, re-written and spoken about the ‘design process’ and the interpretations, discussions and opinions about it are as diverse as they are long-winded and non-conclusive. I think we as designers love that intellectual grey-area, the space between two opposing poles that holds so much possibility and choice. It is the reason why nothing in our profession is well-defined or written in stone. This induces everybody to be a part of the discourse around the subject and feel significant in their own little ways, like me, when I'm writing this piece.

From the time I stepped into the design world as a student, a good 7 years ago, I have been led to believe that everything that we do should have  streamlined process, each step leading into the other, seamlessly integrating into a final solution which is supported on an unyielding foundation of research, logic and precedent studies.

My conditioning has been such that if something comes easily to me, just popping into my head after I read a brief, I disregard it for I know it’s lacking in any sort of rational reasoning thought or study. But increasingly I have felt that some of the better things I have done, happened by accident, or when I just decided to go with the flow. It’s the age old conflict between intuition and rationale, between the left and right brain, or whatever other polar opposites one can think of.

So is it a case of me being overtly critical of anything I do, or design just isn't meant to be learnt at all? Considering that there is no “right” way to do things, a system in place which one can fall back on, how can experience ever be helpful? Every single time one is involved in a project, it might take a course so radically dissimilar than the previous one, that you have to learn and deliver on the go. Make mistakes each time, and not be afraid of them. Be a student of the subject forever, open to thoughts, processes and opinions that change and shift form like an amorphous multi-faceted being, living and evolving continuously.

Ironical as it may sound., it is this shift in perspectives, this constant questioning and analysis of what I do and why I do it that makes me believe in the validity of my choice.

Interfaces : New and old

With the introduction and success of the new Windows metro UI, a lot of debate has been spurred on between the different approaches to designing digital Interfaces. Apple's designs are skeumorphic, they try to imitate and reflect the apparent 3Dness of the real world with textures, shadows and such devices.
Windows has come up with a design based on pure typography, information design and ease of use, inspired from the stark functionality of airport signage. It's almost Bauhaus-esque. Personally, I think it's a winner.
What is the need of imitating real life in the interface, when it's clearly digital? That time is long gone when we were unfamiliar with digital tools and needed a sort of bridge to get us to feel more comfortable with a device and its UI. However, as with everything in design, context is of utmost importance. Skeumorphism maybe be getting old now, but it still has its pros.

What really grabs my eye when I roam the internet these days is the rising interest in the analog interfaces of  yore. I remember my mom mentioning that she wanted a DSLR like mine because she loves the sound that the shutter makes when a photo is clicked. It seemed more authentic, old school and has a certain  characteristic to it. The tiny click of a digital camera is simply not that much fun.
On one hand I see that newer laptops are striving to make their interactions more silent and unobtrusive, and on the other I see an app designed just for the purpose of making your laptop keys sound like a typewriter's.
http://fffff.at/noisy-typer-a-typewriter-for-your-laptop/


The feeling of getting a hand written letter from someone you care, can never be replaced by the structured emails of today. It is perhaps this emotion that drives us to look into the past, reminiscing about our old devices and trying to integrate those interactions in the objects we own now..

All these highs and lows,

And you're never really sure

What you do it for

Well do you even want to know?

You put on quite a show...

~ Smoke and mirrors, Gotye

Amorphous and organic,
Like a giant evolving cloud of cotton
So wonderfully grey, 
So painfully close,
Tainting the things it touches,
Making them whole.
It's something to revel in,
Something to celebrate.
Wait, watch, try, suspend
It will always catch the bait.

Design and the Internet

I'm an internet junkie, I admit it. Sometimes, I don't realize where the day has gone, just because I have been too busy reading blogs,news,tweets,RSS feeds or watching videos.I should have a tool to regulate my time spent on the www. There has to be a point where it gets counter-productive.

It's the sheer glossiness and design of media content, all packed up in pretty little boxes that makes me sit in some kind of a stupor, ogling at the screen for hours on end. I become a sponge, soaking in everything the curators/bloggers out there want me to,sometimes making them writhe in pleasure if I happen to like,share or tweet a link a  my social media network.( It shows up on the stats, you see). 

Reflecting on it, it makes me wonder if most content on the internet today is like that well made 3 minute ad video; amazingly edited and presented, slick and communicating so much in the blink of an eye. These product/service/idea explanation videos are in a league of their own, meant to dazzle and mesmerize.But consider this,  do youtube views and facebook likes truly reflect the quality and importance of a project? I do believe that design is meant for the people, so their opinion should matter.What annoys me sometimes is the ridiculously low percentage of actual intelligent critical debate and discourse on a topic in comparison to the flash news sort of approach.

The internet and social media are great, I love them.When it starts to dictate terms about what is good and what is not, is when I feel slightly uneasy. It's like trusting an organic, unknown collective consciousness and not my own.

Digital Hoarders

Clutter. There’s a lot that has been said and discussed about how having too many things and  too much stuff can negatively affect your life. It crams up your abode, leaving no scope for ‘white space’. It also gives valuable insights about the person and their way of life. Why do we like collecting stuff,  sometimes even the things that we don’t need or want? Maybe it is that our possessions give us a chance to exist outside of ourselves, or maybe a chance to attach myriad meanings to things that make sense only to us.

Considering that our identities are constantly being shifted from the ‘real’ to the digital realm; observing  a person’s computer, their various external HD’s and other storage devices can give us an idea of their hoarding habits. If I take my own example, I realise that I have tons of movies on my computer that I haven’t seen, books that aren’t read and music that hasn’t been on my player even once. Still, this doesn’t stop me from downloading even more of these digital artefacts, to lovingly store till the day comes when I would be motivated enough to go through them.

Somehow, having them seems more important than experiencing them. I do watch a movie once in a while or click through an e-book at express speed on a few occasions , but the ratio of the time spent in doing that is much less in comparison to the time I spend in looking for even more stuff to download and keep.

What does this say about me and countless others? Has our practice of acquiring things seeped into our digital habits too?

Just a few thoughts that mulled around in my head when I heard a few friends talking about 1 TB hard disks running out of space and my own laptop HD graph lurking in the overfull red region.