The occasional light expression

On Jan 5, I attended Easy 7, the 7th ACM SIGCHI South India’s conference on ‘Advanced User Interface Practices’ at the Leela. With a spiffier yet more top down approach, the organizers made this year’s conference one of the most interesting in the last few years (and i say this despite having been a speaker in the last 3 conferences :))

Jeremy Ashley, VP of Oracle’s Applications User Experience (my boss’s boss) gave a hard nosed talk basically on how ideas are cheap and plenty but design execution is the key to design success, I thoroughly enjoyed Bill Scott and Surya Vanka’s talks as well. Bill spoke about AJAX driven interactions and how to design for AJAX. Surya have a talk on Design driven innovation and how to design teams that are able to drive innovation as a process.

It was also great to catch up with all the speakers at the evening party organized by David and Nishant from DesignforUse. (Thanks David and Nishant!). It was also good to bump into Param, Muthu, and meet Suresh, Sunandini, Madhvi, and other folks and chat about design, travels, life and such at the lovely open space at the Royal Orchid Hotel in Manipal Center (also the hotel that owns the much-hyped-great-view-average-food- Conde-Nast-#82-restaurant Paparazzi).

Last week, I had the fortune/sheer pleasure/gratuitous grace of attending my first live ‘Ruhaniyat’ concert of Sufi/Mystic music in Bangalore at the Bowring Institute off MG Road. One of the decent blog posts that lists each of the performances is at http://hariaddi.blogspot.com/2007/01/ruhaniyat.html
The word Ruhaniyat literally meaning soulfulness was aptly suited for this brilliantly conceived and well organized evening. The music ranged from baritone Tibetan monks (whose powerful and deep chanting much reminded me of Phillip Glass), to the qawwali of the Chisti brothers from Uttar Pradesh, to the Sufi songs of Patvathi Baul, Begum Hafiza from Assam, Fakirs from Hyderabad, and the Manganiyars from Rajasthan.

If you can get your hands on them, the Ruhaniyat concert archives are a goldmine. I have the CDs from the 2005 (thanks Aparna) and 2006 concerts so give me a holler and i’d be glad to share these with you.

The December edition of the Economist has a neat article on how economists have traditionally measured ‘happiness’ and how that measurement has evolved over the years. Invoking references from Thomas Carlyle to Mihali Csikszentmihalyi, the article argues that all is indeed well and good in the free market world, and that having a good experience, a discerning audience that is ready to pay for that experience, and a clear mechanism to both get paid and be able to spend that money works better than any other alternative system. It also states interestingly how people’s common perceptions of what causes happiness (or pain) is remarkably subjective and skewed.

If you havent’ yet read it, Mihali’s book ‘Flow - the Psychology of Optimal Experience‘ is a delightful and statistically grounded account of what causes ‘flow’ or ‘peak experience’ in people. Turns out that activities such as driving, spending time in your garden, and enjoying hobbies give a much greater sense of flow or of being in the moment as compared to watching TV or eating out!