So I carry around a little green notebook that serves (on again, off again) as my idea book and journal. I’m coming back to it after a long hiatus partially because I need something to take notes in at SD West when the speaker doesn’t give out a slide deck, and partially because I’ve been having more ideas lately after a bit of a break.
It’s got the usual range of writing from embarassing self-conciousness:
“People’s complexity tells the clearest tale” (what does that even mean?)
to embarassing crudeness:
“If split pea soup looks like vomit, what does vomitted split pea soup look like?”
to genuine gems that I’m glad I preserved:
“The fog was graveyard thick”
Of course I’ve got much longer ones, but I don’t feel like typing them.
Much of it is from my college years and contains random ideas for research projects. I’d have thought many of them would sound lame after 8 years of real-world experience, but I’m surprised by how many of them still sound like good ideas today. It’s kind of validating.
Here’s a good one that has real application in building design:
“2 doors, one farther away but open, one nearer but closed and unlocked. Which one will people go into? How far apart do they have to be to make a difference?”
There’s an annoying example of this at Yank Sing Express. There’s a set of double doors to the place, the left door is typically the line of people waiting to order and is propped open by that line of people. The right door is typically closed and is the one that makes the most sense to use to exit. But for some reason when people exit they insist on using the left door, which has a line of people in it and requires people to move out of the way. Almost without fail, exiting customers would rather ask people to move out of the way than just open the stupid right door even though the right door is right in their path. It simply blows me away. Imagine this effect maginfied in a fire or some other panic situation when large volumes of people are trying to exit a building.
Much of my green book has to do with a very pivotal time in my life, when I abandoned wanting to be a firefighter and applied to real colleges, eventually going to UC Davis. It’s been good for me to read myself transforming from someone who hid his talents and intelligence to someone who (I like to think) doesn’t. One thing that isn’t in that journal is a point a year or so later when I realized some of the upper bounds on those talents and that intelligence by meeting truly brilliant people at Harvard (though Lindsey). Paradoxically enough, that was just as liberating.
I wish I’d been updating the green book around the next pivotal time in my life, when Miles was born. But I guess that “point” isn’t over yet anyway.
