What is rough copy? A place for early ideas, ill-formed thoughts, first drafts, brain farts, word clouds, inspiration soups, aimless meandering, typos, bad ...
I remember reading something like this somewhere: The bad things I worried about never happened. The bad things things did happen I couldn’t even imagine. I have always loved this visualisation of the future from the book Speculative Everything, which just to be clear is not a book on managing existential angst, but a book about designing objects from the future that can provoke a conversation…
Excerpt from an essay by the founder of Wiggy’s Companies are very resistant to changing the way they do things, especially if it’s not their own idea. I learned this very early in my career, and I run into it again and again even today. Then, as now, success often had more to do with fashion and advertising than with function. Wiggy’s today is a company focused on function and durability, rather…
My partner calls me Pendulkar, a portmanteau of pendulum (always swinging) and Tendulkar, the famous Indian cricketer. I second guess myself a lot, or vacillate about making a decision or do a did-I-choose-wrong-whinefest after having made a choice. Jeff Bezos once said, decisions are like doors. There are two-way doors, doors you can walk through and then come back out of. Or one-way doors, once…
What a gift it is to read or watch something unabashedly truthful. I re-watched Fleabag the other day. It is such an ode to humanity. ‘People are shit, and people are all we have.’ Goes a conversation between the titular (ha-ha) character and a woman who’s just won a women in business award. And that pretty much sums up the heart of the show. I remember reading an article about how relationships…
One of the most useful classes I took in graduate school was Needfinding with Michael Barry. One framework he taught to analysis both product innovation and adoption is use, usability, meaning. Consider a chair. Think of the crazy variety that exists. Why would a person choose one chair over another? Use, pretty straightforward, they are serve the primary use of resting your butt down. Usability,…
So this happens: You made a mistake, especially with your partner. The anger and the sulk felt not just right but righteous and now a day later you realise what a shit human you’ve been to the person who loves you with all their heart. What do you do next? You feel shame, embarrassment. You want to go hide somewhere. You apologise profusely to the one you hurt. You withdraw unto yourself. Am a bad…
One of the most useful bits of advice about doing creative work that I've gotten is "Keep your pen moving." A random side project I have been working on has been to turn a friend's kid's doodles into a sticker pack. The challenging bit is that what I have is a badly taken photo of 3 sets of sketches he had done over several days, the lighting is different, the line-widths are different, the fill…
For years now, anytime I have gone “online” there have been certain destinations I go to, much like when you step into a chic neighbourhood in a city you visit, there is a bar, a club, a square you’d gravitate to. (I know we are all perpetually online now, but since I grew up when in the dial-up era, there was very much an offline state of my computing device and an online state.) These…
🌵 Friends who are pointy on the outside but squishy inside
ना करके पछताने से अच्छा है, करके भुगतना