Links for Friday, April 12

Anger is sometimes a good thing.  Anger gets you fired up, gives you something in the world to change.  This article made me angry.  The gist of it is “The mystical creative monkey is a necessary evil in your business. Treat them just well enough to get a bare minimum of innovation out of them.”

By “Creative people” I’m assuming that he’s talking about designers.
Designers – Never let yourself be referred to as the “creative” especially not when that word is used as a noun.  Everyone should be creative.  Designers are not the only people who can use creativity.  Design is not magic, it is a craft that you learned how to do.* Don’t let them treat you like a monkey who knows photoshop.
Business people – Designers are not foreign.  Designers are not monkeys.  Don’t be a jerk.
They’ve changed the title since it was first published, saying that this is only about your “difficult” “creatives” but it entirely fails to note that there might be a reason why they’re difficult.  Maybe they feel underappreciated? Maybe they feel like they’re unable to reach their potential in an organization that treats them like mystical monkeys?

This article is about online textbooks that track how much a student opens the book, what parts they read, how they take notes and more. This gives professors the ability to track student engagement and study habits. Problems?  The online textbooks cost as much as a print edition, but you can’t sell them at the end of the semester – instead, you can no longer access them.  If you take notes on paper, or don’t hilight things in the book simply because of how you like to study, that can have a negative effect on the way your professor views student engagement. Do these really help professors and students?  Thoughts?

A long time ago, I used google reader, but I subscribed to a lot of tumblr blogs on it, which made it get clogged, and I gave up on it after a while.  On tumblr, it’s reasonable to post every twenty minutes, but on other blogs?  Not so much.  Anyway, I’ve just started to use a reader again on feedly and it’s pretty nice!  I think the key to using a reader effectively is similar to using twitter effectively – only follow the things that you really want to hear from all the time.  If it’s a twitter account that’s sometimes funny, or it’s a blog that’s hit or miss, unfollow them and just check on what they’re up to occasionally.

SiTE:LAB is happening tonight in Grand Rapids, as a part of Art Downtown.  All of Art Downtown is going to be amazing, and you should be sure to see it.  Especially SiTE:LAB.

*stolen from Mike Monteireo

Comments

  1. Nikkiana

    Ugh! That HBR article was revolting! And unfortunately all too telling about how management in corporate America tends to treat it's designers… There were a couple of points I could maybe get on board with, but the utter arrogance in the tone of the article was just disgraceful… and the apology at the end? Didn't diminish my disgust at all.

  2. Samantha

    Yeah, there's just this whole management attitude of "we must control the designers, or else they will go totally wild" that's wholly unwarranted. Ick.

Comments are closed.