Conversation as Brain Candy

When the news is dom­i­nated by sto­ries of vol­canic erup­tions, cor­po­rate bank­rupt­cies and lay­offs, or yet another exam­ple of Wall Street malfea­sance, it’s easy to get depressed. Espe­cially in this grey Seat­tle spring weather…

So it was a won­der­ful con­trast to enjoy some stim­u­lat­ing con­ver­sa­tions over the past 24 hours with two vibrant and accom­plished women: one, a con­sumer mar­keter par excel­lence, and the other a top-notch inter­ac­tion designer.

It felt like we’re mem­bers of the same tribe, even though we’d never met each other before.

In our “Candy Jar”

In no par­tic­u­lar order, here are a few of the things we touched on dur­ing our brief time together:

• Mem­o­ries of intro­duc­ing experience/interaction design to the New Zealand busi­ness com­mu­nity
• Mem­o­ries of intro­duc­ing cap­i­tal­ism to Hun­gar­ian bot­tlers right after the Berlin Wall was taken down
• Hyper­Card — remem­ber when?
• Seat­tle ver­sus Sil­i­con Val­ley — pros and cons 
• The plea­sures to be found in fine white bur­gundy wine, espe­cially when you can find it at a rea­son­able price
• The many joys of Seat­tle for “food­ies” — or for hik­ers, bik­ers, yoga or pilates enthu­si­asts
• The fun of design­ing the ini­tial user inter­faces for first-gen­er­a­tion dig­i­tal cam­eras
• Mar­ket­ing those early Macs…
• What it feels like to talk to new­com­ers in the work­place who can’t remem­ber what life was like back when cam­eras required film
• The excit­ing new options for lis­ten­ing to the mar­ket­place and see­ing the chang­ing per­cep­tion pat­terns as they unfold across tra­di­tional and new media, such as social media
• What can hap­pen to a staid busi­ness (like an insur­ance com­pany) when you intro­duce expe­ri­ence design into the mix, and then men­tor and train a core cadre of peo­ple who dif­fuse this dis­ci­pline more broadly through­out the com­pany
• Trav­els to Europe, wine tast­ing in France
• The dif­fer­ence between design, when approached as a strate­gic prob­lem solv­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions dis­ci­pline, ver­sus its more com­mon func­tion as busi­ness “cake dec­o­rat­ing”
• Microsoft and UX/experience design — pro forma, or the real thing?
• Mar­ket­ing as art or as busi­ness archi­tec­ture
• Daniel Pink and his notions about the grow­ing import of “right brain” qual­i­ties and think­ing styles for busi­ness and soci­ety
• The impact of serendip­ity or luck in our early career oppor­tu­ni­ties
• And a whole bunch of things I can no longer remem­ber

Yes, we enjoyed free-wheel­ing con­ver­sa­tions, mov­ing flu­idly back and forth between busi­ness and plea­sure, with­out being all that con­scious of the tran­si­tions.

Brain candy for right-brain thinkers…