Here are a few roundtables we are hosting in the coming weeks. I’m particularly excited about MAKE, which was incredibly popular last February.

SELECT

SELECT will be this Saturday, February 25. A roundtable on curating art exhibitions.

MAKE

MAKE will be Friday, March 9. A roundtable on the creative process. This one will be at Fishmonger’s, upstairs in a separate area. That way, we can focus on the conversation better than we could last year at West End Wine Bar.

4 speakers confirmed so far!

They span industries including music, photography, illustration, and building things by hand.

Register here.

[Update] Background and past stories about our MAKE roundtable series is here.

PARENTING

PARENTING will be on Saturday, March 3. A dialogue as well as a playdate at Trinity Park.

AND MORE AT ORANGUTAN SWING

More stuff is getting planned at our new event site for dialogues, Orangutan Swing. See overview.

Pic by Dawn Crawford

What a fun night!

Getting to be on stage for the biggest crowd of my life was… surprisingly calm! I had a great time while I was at it. That was a first for me, because usually I’ll freak out if stuff isn’t absolutely perfect.

I had a moment beforehand where I was tempted to do something bold. Leave my cheat sheet—a taped together list of top points on yellow Post-Its—backstage. In case I totally blanked.

Taking the red pill

Marketing writer Seth Godin once said somewhere that when you’re anxious you should consciously break the habit that enables the anxiety. Like, if you’re one of those people that obsesses about the lights being off every time you leave the house, maybe once just TRUST yourself that you TURNED THEM OFF and DON’T CHECK. It was hard for me to trust that I wouldn’t forget something, but then, I realized, “Hey, I’m in Raleigh. This is my home turf.” I stuffed the little notes into my sleeve. I wouldn’t be able to see them, but I’d know they were there. Somewhere between Leaving It Behind and Not Leaving It Behind. A .357 on a scale of 0 to 1. (Note to people who weren’t there: In my talk, I shared how fuzzy logic is based on the idea that we can decide stuff on scales that are not binary.)

But there’s something else.

Another reason I was less freaked out.

Mere minutes before getting to Lincoln Theater in Raleigh yesterday evening, I got to see something truly epic. […Continued…]

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I had this idea for a talk.

Fuzzy logic. Quantum physics. Pop art.

Fuzzy Quantum Pop!!

I would submit it for Ignite Raleigh, a fast series of slideshow talks. TOMORROW.

A bunch of awesome people voted for me so I could be one of the top 10, clearing the way for a sure slot. (Thanks you guys!!!) There were 24 submissions in total.

Talk highlights

On Thursday evening at Lincoln Theater in Raleigh I’ll take some 500 people through:

• How German quantum physicist Max Planck got people to see there’s more than one way for a thing to exist
• Why the math that was derived from this, “fuzzy” math, got really popular — in Japan
• How Pop artists in the US in the 1960s broke rubric, too, of what’s considered the “right” way of doing stuff

[…Continued…]

Instagram pic of Adrienne Moore, in front of the zine collage series that sparked TILU

Did you miss it?

Here’s a quick snap Akira took.

More images to follow.

And not just Instagrams.

Durham photographer Jamila Davenport documented the evening, and is preparing some lovely shots for us to share with you.

In recent months, DK is doing more commissioned drawing work.

Something about the way we boil a big idea down. Simplify. Convey with clear intent, and strong signal.

That works well for illustration.

We’ve been asked to make:

• Vector line drawings for a slideshow animation
• A tattoo
• A comic to help explain a concept for a new game

I wonder what’s next…

There’s an octopus in here. Can you see it?

My friend KE and I went to breakfast this morning and I told her about my upcoming talk for Ignite Raleigh.

D: It’s called ‘Fuzzy Quantum Pop.’
K: What’s that about?
D: Well—there was this quantum physicist, Max Planck, who said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
K: Okay.
D: The idea… you know, that physical particles actually change when your perception skews, that really psyches me up.
K: …
D: …
K: Have you seen this octopus video?

Prepping for my Ignite Raleigh talk

I’m getting my talk together on the heels of TILU, which I have to say was totally fun. Thanks to everyone who made it out last night! Pics to come shortly from the amazing local photographer Jamila Davenport of OMNI Photography, who also documented SCALE.

More about my science talk FUZZY QUANTUM POP is here.

If you’re a visual and aural person, this video will give you an idea of the crux of the talk’s idea:

DRIFT by Dipika Kohli

Come out to hear it this THURSDAY at Ignite Raleigh.

FUZZY QUANTUM POP
By Dipika Kohli
Thursday, February 16
Raleigh

Links:

• Register here.
• IgniteRaleigh.com
• #igniteraleigh

Local? Come on down to meet us on Friday!

• Event info: http://tilu.eventbrite.com
• Invite: flavors.me/tilu
• Project site: todayiloveyou.com
• Dipika’s art one-pager: flavors.me/wavular
• Twitter: #tilu

Our naming guide on Pinterest

Since 2006 we’ve been collecting lots of articles and books on branding.

And strategy.

And marketing thinking that revolves around coming up with a bright concept first.

Here are some links to articles, a slideshow, and a few of our own case studies on naming, specifically.

One of the things that happens when you’re inextriciably influenced by the aesthetic of Japan, love modern Scandinavian patterns, and feel a little critical about the way people overconsume is this: You draw.

Doodling helps you see what you even think about a thing. Eventually, you assemble what my friend WH called “a body of work.”

I’m going to show some of that body for the first time, in public. My first solo show for the series Today I Love You opens with what I hope will be Design Kompany’s biggest party yet.

Are you local? See you Friday, February 10.

XO,
DK

EXPAT: A roundtable

Thinking about all the conversation last night at EXPAT, a roundtable on being elsewhere, I am still spinning with the kind of buzz that you get only after meeting people IRL.

In real life, I mean.

It’s good to mix things up. See who’s around. What they think.

Isn’t that why we travel?

The people who come to the Expat roundtables (this was our second) are an intriguing self-selecting bunch. I am always amazed at what transpires when we have our breakout conversations, and the energy in the room is amplified a zillion times. I’m not one for meetings—I get itchy in the middle and want to zip off to some cafe and make a zine or something—but I can linger for a long time with people who want to talk about a topic in depth.

[…Continued…]

Shomuni. A Japanese drama

A while back I told you about Six Thinking Hats by oft-quoted creativity thinker Edward de Bono.

One of them is yellow.

I thought I’d tell you about it, since tomorrow we host EXPAT, a roundtable on what it means to be somewhere else.

(More about our roundtables is posted at our new site, OrangutanSwing.com).

Why expats wear yellow hats

Why yellow?

Why indeed.

The thing is, the yellow hat belongs to a way of approaching a situation that involves suspending your personal belief.

Amazingly hard if you’ve never left the country.

Surprisingly natural if you have. I’m not talking about just hanging out with other Americans, fanny packs and all, in loud voices all over Grafton Street in Dublin. This actually happened. I saw this and almost melted into the statue of Molly Malone.

The hats explained

What I’m talking about is going outside what you’re already used to.

You don’t have to be fluent.

You just have to be open.

Wearing your yellow hat.

Let me back up a bit about this hat stuff.

According to Edward de Bono, you need 6 different ways of thinking if you’re to have a really fantastic dialogue.

White’s about looking for information.

Red, for gut feelings.

Black for finding fault.

Green for new ideas.

Blue for steering.

And yellow.

The yellow hat is about looking for the positives of someone’s idea, even if you don’t agree.

You simply have no other choice about this if you are living in another country.

Some questions I had when I was a fresh arrival in another country:

Japan
Me: Did that guy on TV just eat a goldfish?
Yellow Hat: Yes. But you know? Game shows here are unusual. Let’s see what else is on TV. Ooooh. Is that Shomuni?!

India
Me: Why is it so hard to be by myself here?
Yellow Hat: This is a really crowded country, and people come in and out of homes a lot with groceries, bills, laundry, vegetables, and visits for chai. Maybe this is actually more healthy than our suburban lifestyles in rural North Carolina.

[…Continued…]

I had been to Ireland exactly once before I moved there, indefinitely, in the winter of 2000.

I just had this fixation in my head about the great green country that managed to tug at my heart when I first set eyes on the long hills.

I saw the coast from a little train that carried me to Bray from Dublin.

Not many years later, I would come back, to the southwest of the country, and settle in the town of Skibbereen.

I stayed more than three years.

I wouldn’t know it then, but the span of time I was in the southwest of County Cork would set the tone of my life from that point forward forever.

I would see things not as black and white, but as shades of gray. Ireland had a way of winning you over, to seeing things from lots of angles, because there were stories to be told from so many walks of life, so many ages, so much history and love, and sadness, and feeling.

It was all so emotional.

In lots of ways, Ireland was like India.

But I didn’t know how, exactly, until much, much later.

Whenever it’s time to leave for a new place, you have this thing you have to do. If you don’t, you’ll regret it. You have to say your goodbyes.

Sometimes it comes twenty years later. You find the person again, and you have this moment. When it’s OK to finally let go. Of the thing. Of the idea. Of the concept of a relationship that really, well, isn’t what you had originally dreamed up.

Know why it’s important to say goodbye?

So you have closure.

Closing a chapter lets you open a new one.

From my India travel journal in 1999: “The end is only a beginning, the onset of a new phase.”

Ever since I was 6 years old, I’ve loved swimming. I’m a Pisces.

I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer. I thought if you set your eye on a high goal, that was the best thing in the world. If you wanted to get places, you needed lofty aims.

Something happened, though.

Thirty years later, I don’t swim like I’m in an international competition. For me, the laps aren’t about going fast and feeling powerful, but slowing down. And breathing. It might be all the yoga.

Taking the time.

Slowing it down.

I don’t mind that I’m not an Olympic swimmer.

I like finding the quiet within the move.

When I tell people the crux of my story is about losing a friend in childhood, I get some awkward looks.

But the thing is, through the next 20 years I got to think about it from a lot of angles.

Life just wasn’t going to be predictable.

As a young adult, I lost my grandparents. In my 30s, I lost a fetus. My first pregnancy. I made this video to remember her:

Pink is for Monica from Design Kompany

Then I lost a close friend, only a year older than me, late in 2010. The next year meant really coming to terms—with every one of the deaths. My back started hurting and I couldn’t stand straight. People told me I might have to get surgery. But I ignored them, because I’m the kind of person who does the opposite of what people tell me. I started yoga, and acupuncture, and a lot of reorganizing of the shelves of my mind. Along the way, I met a few of “my people.”

It’s taken a while to find them.

Stuff’s been in the way. Lingering echoes of youth had been troublesome. Piercing verbal assaults from teenhood from my mother, growing up, got in the way of helping me find a calm, quiet spot to reflect. I was annoyed that it took a full decade of being on the other side of the Atlantic and the other coast of the US to gain the distance needed to, well, grow distant. Now that my mother’s influence is for all practical purposes negligible (I would say less than .2%), I am able to focus on constructing my own thoughts more clearly. More fully. More provocatively.

Hence the memoir.

Death has a way of tricking you into seeing something you wouldn’t expect. That life is beautiful, actually. That there was more to enjoy about it than there was to lament. If, that is, you were willing to look at things that way.

My memoir is in its fourth draft. I took that step of sending it to a publisher, and got it back, intact, and a note saying, “not for us.” Still, the act of sending it made me feel like some invisible wall’s been crossed. Now I am going to blog in the meanwhile, as I finish the next (and possibly next next) versions and upload after that to Amazon.

What’s it about?

Oh!

Why, death, of course.

There’s this thing that happens sometimes.

You get all caught up in the moment.

Like, you’ve never been there. And then, one day, you are.

The sun rose over the dunes of Jaisalmer one morning in 1998. And I was there to catch the long, loose rays of pink and gold that sharpened and tattered the edges of my consciousness.

Reality broke. And a new light, too.

Pop artists. Fuzzy logic. Quantum mechanics. What do they have in common? Pop artists challenged the rubric of art, fuzzy logicians found ways to make machines think more like humans (if x, then z) than robots (it’s gonna be 0 or 1.) The great Max Planck, whose equation is where I found inspiration for my art name Wavular, started the whole QM creation when he happened to misapply a probability principle to solve what was called the “blackbody” problem. In 1900, he published the paper that introduced the world to what’s now called Planck’s constant, and which would change the way people thought about what was “true” and “untrue” about how particles behave. –DK

And yet Michael Faraday’s experimental style set things up for James Maxwell’s famous differential equations. Which was important. Because it gave mathematical relationship to the way electric charges and magnetic fields work. Stuff you couldn’t even see. But the effects of which you could observe.

Why am I writing about this? I have a talk on Thursday called Fuzzy Quantum Pop. I’ll talk about the way we look at things, and how it’s really our perceptions that make up our “reality.” I think people get so caught up in “right” and “wrong,” and “truth” or “nontruth.” They forget that things change around when we just observe differently. Something to think about.

Only after making and installing some 50 new pieces of Sharpie work did I have a real “a-ha.” It was at the art show opening on Friday for Today I Love You.

I didn’t realize this, but the kinds of people I like to talk with are a slim segment of the population that likes fantastic conversation and intelligent thought. So even though there weren’t a TON of people there, the ones who were came ENGAGED.

Building Design Kompany from scratch over seven years led my partner and me to the same conclusion: our clients are a) really smart, b) really open to new ideas, and c) just fun to talk to. People at the intersection of these three circles? They’re my people. I’m so lucky to finally know this.

People overconsume. Keeping my drawings simple is one way I can say: “Hey, you don’t need to have a lot to be a lot.” My favorite material is paper. I like collaging paper onto paper. Don’t get me wrong: I adore color. Rothko. Chagall. O’Keeffe. Dali. But I’m in pursuit of a modern aesthetic of “beauty.” I look for what emerges in the distillation. In the clutter reduction. And the attentuation of noise. New layers of my artistic idealogue might be expansive — from Wordsworth to Ladytron — but a strong, singular concept in an art work is what makes me feel so close to it, I can weep.

Know what the best time is? When you notice.

The far spaces.

The not-here spaces.

Like, extremely far away.

Andromeda to here. That kind of thing.

Many times when I’m in the flow with writing or drawing, I get this strange sense of it. An intuitive sensation that there’s a lot out there. A lot of open, vast, nothingness.

In Japanese, there’s even a character for it.

無。

You know what it means?

Nothingness.

You go to a temple, and you find that character on top of the whole shrine part, and you just notice all at once that it’s written there for you.

The quiet space.

The nothingness.

The not-here, not-near, vast.