Now hosting roundtables.
Cliques bore us.
What we like is mixing it up. Viewpoints. Ages. People. Styles. We love conversations that spark new thinking. This is dialogue.
OranSwing's roundtables are flat. No hierarchy. No agenda. A theme left open provokes thought ahead of each talk. Some favorites: Make, Scale, Gather, Expat... New ones posted monthly.
Join us?
OrangutanSwing- Twitter
- Orangutan Swing
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Wall
- http://www.orangutanswing.com Mini update from AETHER DC trip.
- Artists! Checkit!
- @WallDone: "It isn’t important how you see what you see, but rather if you notice it at all."
- Who's coming to our next Drink & Draw, aka Korner? http://orangutanswing.com/blog/drink-and-draw-with-us-korner/
- According to researchers and neuroscience author Jonah Lehrer, unstructured play turns out to be one of the best ways for preschoolers to learn, says Peter Sims in "Bring Back the Lost Art of Tinkering."
- "If we don't have content, we cannot have design."
- "57% of people spend more time talking with friends online than in real life."
- You have to put in the time to think about the story you want to tell and show some actual insight
- When I see this, I see love. --Dipika
- Awesome convos in NYC, Boston and DC. Last stop on out East Coast Aether tour? Home sweet Durham, NC. Recaps, Durham details coming soon.
- Aether DC last night was so laid back, I busted out my Irish accent.
- Tonight! Who's going to be there?
- This popped up in our Aether talk NYC. Just stumbled on the link, watched the vid... Nice:)
- Facebook exclusive! Sneak peek of a series of 3 to come on our blog at OrangutanSwing.com.
- Packing. Will be in DC next week for this! :) http://www.facebook.com/events/290456034375206/
- Secret to #marriage? Take pics with topless #Italians. A wedding toast vid.
- Have something fun to say? To an audience? Check out PKN Raleigh's open call!
- “They do not provide answers, they ask questions."
- Tom Stokes: "In this media environment, any ideas, values or principles that come out of left-wing ideology are routinely rubbished and ridiculed, usually with an air of authority and often with a sneer."
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Tweets
- RT @akiramorita: A sneak peak of our #orangutanswing #dialogue #design manifesto. #drawingonglass http://t.co/9dQVt5xJ
- A #roundtable! RT @akiramorita: A big turn out tonight at #tld meetup! @ Straw Valley Cafe http://t.co/Ps9niFwU
- New Post! Gulliver's Travels - http://t.co/T9258Py9 #fb
- Listening to Ash's "Candy," haven't played this since we were in Ireland! Fun to clean the office and unearth things.
- Design Kompany's rebranding a nightclub!
- New Post! @WallDone: "It isn’t important how you see what you see, but rather if you notice it at all." - http://t.co/WWtLbqtO #fb
- @BullCityCowork Wow. What's prompted the move? Are you going to have any open-houses for people curious about this?
- @Processed_id Thanks for the mention!
- New Post! 'I didn't think of that' - http://t.co/nQ1rFCyY #fb
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Posts
- May 23, 12
Starting a new blog is hard! EIGHT visits this month.
Easier time over at Design Kompany, but not everyone wants to hear our rambles about design. Hence, Orangutan! Leave a comment if you’re our 9th visitor this month, lol. –DK
- May 22, 12
Last night I was pushing my son home in his stroller, and bargained a story in exchange for my glasses case, which he was snapping open and shut in ways that were dangerously close to destroying it. Given my aversion to accumulating “stuff,” I did not want to go and get a new case just because the one I had was broken in a fit of play. So when he handed it over, I tried really hard to think of a good story. Not finding anything original coming to mind immediately, Gulliver popped into my brain.
“Then the Lilliputians tied him up! His hair, his hands, his feet, with their tiny tools, and they put so many things around him, that when he woke up, he couldn’t move!!!”
“Why!?”
“Because he was tied down!”
“Oh.”
And later, he would go to a place where he was the little person! Imagine that! Going from one end to the other, extreme to extreme, and finding that all along the way the only thing that’s different was his….
Perspective!
And finding that Orangutan Swing dialogues are about giving people space and time to think about and consider new angles, whether bird’s eye, or worm’s eye, or simply scalar, I hit upon an insight.
We are going to go out and reread Gulliver’s travels.
Put that on the library queue, I told Akira when we got home.
It’s time to revisit some stuff, because metaphor is important! Because metaphor helps people understand what this whole dialogue design thing is about! Because without dialogue, the little Lilliputians might have been stamped and stuff, but with conversation and understanding, they weren’t! Imagine! What if…
And there is more to say here, but I don’t want to spill before I get a chance to revisit the book, and process some thoughts, so you guys get the “best of” notes instead of my rambles (like this one.) Still, I’m curious — what do you think about the idea of Gulliver and his travels and perspective, and dialogue, and thinking about how to set up the problem so you get some great results instead of just mediocre ones like we do in so many projects in our day-to-day jobs at work because no one is thinking or saying, “Hey, this could be soooo much better!”
?,
DK
- May 21, 12
We did get to move to a round table for the AETHER DC roundtable. Atmosphere was relaxed and straightforward — but in a totally different way than the New York Bryant Park experience. This was more like our Boston, super-intimate conversation, though I believe that one stayed more on topic: is the medium still the message? The three stops on our tour (so far) were all completely intriguing, experimental, and fun. Sometimes you just have to go with it. Next up, Durham. Who’s on? Details to come, follow us on Facebook or Twitter if you do that stuff. –DK
- May 21, 12
Akira had gone to New York and Boston, but didn’t take any pictures of AETHER. Or write about it. And we haven’t fully had a conversation yet about what we learned, exactly, from his trip to those spots and my visit to Washington, DC, last week. But I thought I’d tell you what we did realize, independently.
Malleability is key. If you go in with too many things pinned down, you’re not going to walk in with an open attitude. Most of the people we invited to come join us were aware of this fact, if not a little confused. But they took it on good faith that we were excited enough to talk about it enough that they ought to at least drop in. Most people told us that they were very glad they did. Which reminds me, of course, of our past dialogue roundtables. People love eye contact.
Eye contact is key. One of the things that happened for me as I came down from DC on the train was deciding to be less online. I know! I am all about blogging! I have three blogs: this one, Kismuth for my memoir, and Design Kompany for our branding business. Not to mention a bunch of Twitters and posterous and tumblr, too. A lot.
But you know what?
It’s really not that important.
Because you don’t get rapport online in the same way as you do IRL.
Real life is huge.
So I started popping into people’s offices again, when I got to Durham. I started walking around on Main Street at lunch hour, just to see what was going on. Akira went to the farmer’s market on Saturday and came back with at least five updates on what people are doing, and what their kids are up to, and so on. It is fascinating, because this moving around and looking at people in the eye and talking is actually much more efficient because you get much richer information when you’re standing there, looking at someone, than when you get some generic Tweet across the aether that could be read as positive, uplifting, sarcastic, ironic, or just plain weird, depending on your offline relationship that exists already.
Online can help bolster offline interaction, but it’s a poor place to start. It’s really HARD to make friends with the Internet people. I remember my friend JK having a party, when he turned 24. It was in Seattle, and he was younger, but I went along for the craic. I was a “work friend,” but there would also be, he said, his “Internet friends.” This was 2005, and that concept blew me away. But now I’m writing here, all about dialogue and offline engagement, and hoping some people out there reading will materialize in real life at one of our future events.
To test my theories about dialogue and offline interactions, I popped into three nerdy Meetups. One was about Prezi, the software for presentations; one was about WordPress; and one was about search marketing, where I met a gentleman who now lives in Raleigh and knows some of the same people that I do. This circle of influence, spheres of common interest, and geolocal commonality is huge. I love Twitter, but I have to say, being out and about and offline for just five minutes, wandering into the world without an agenda or any kind of pre-ordained philosophy is way, WAY more intriguing.
The highlight for me was my final night, when I got to see if anyone would join me at my table for AETHER DC. It was a beautiful evening, and I had an eye on a round table just behind me. Since the place didn’t take reservations, and since I had NO IDEA how many people (if any people) would want to hear a North Carolina-based Indian-American girl with a branding studio and a “dialogue design” blog called “Orangutan Swing” come and talk about media and the message and Marshall McLuhan, well, you know, I just kind of eyed it.
Then three really great people showed up, and we began. –DK
- May 20, 12
“We don’t chit-chat about decisive moments and art, we don’t pretend to know what the author was trying to express.”
See on walldone.com - May 18, 12
First Mondays at Geer Street Garden. Join us to draw, drink, and talk about Life. –DK
- May 17, 12
As we regroup from our tour of AETHER in New York, Boston, and DC, we have a lot of things to say about it to you all out there listening. Especially because we’re planning our big finale, right here in Durham, in the coming weeks. It’s pretty awesome to travel, but it’s even more exciting to do it when you are on the way to connecting with folks you’ve never met, who have no idea they’re going to run into you, and experience the roundtable style that Orangutan loves to talk about so much.
When I asked Akira if he took pictures of his conversation tables in New York and Boston, the answer was a disappointing, “No.” But when I experienced my own roundtable in DC, I totally got why. You get wrapped up in the conversation, and you want to give it your focus, and you don’t want to be distracted trying to document everything to pieces.
I mean, what kind of offline dialogue would it be if we put every minute of it, every tape of it, every image of it, on this newborn blog?
I guess it would be like Facebook.
Hm.
I didn’t think of that.
- May 15, 12
Does America have a terrific obsession with testing?
See on blogs.kqed.org - May 14, 12
Francesco Franchi on ‘infographic thinking.’ The upshot: Be informative, be interesting, entertain, but make sure you’ve got good data to build from.
See on www.fastcodesign.com - May 13, 12
