🪃✨The Nexialist #0015
Boomerang, Rita Lee, Emotional Plurality, Resilience in CX, Deletion Death, 12", Architecture ft. Music, Social Infrastructure, Memory Palace, Imagination as Necessity and more...
Welcome back to the Nexialist, where I do brain-strip-tease
In this week’s Nexialist I decided to play a little game which I’m gonna call Boomerang. The rule is simple: I’ll start this episode by picking up the last week’s last reference (because this is my newsletter and I do what I want.) If you didn’t see it, you may or may not want to check it out.
I must say it feels nice to make the “rules” of The Nexialist as I go, so thank you for being on the other side putting up with this live-experiment-unintended-therapy-project-thing. Also, are you as excited as I am with the boomerang emoji?🪃✨
🎸Meet Rita Lee
I finished the last Nexialist with a video from Rita Lee, a.k.a the Brazilian Queen of Rock. The day after sending it, this remix album with big names like Tropkillaz, Gui Boratto, DJ Marky, and Mary Olivetti came out and it’s totally worth a listen. I love that it’s called Vol 1 because I’m hoping for a Vol 2 that has more women and queer DJs doing the remixes 😉
I remember during university being fed up with only listening to the same (non-Brazilian) music and at one point feeling ashamed I didn’t know a lot about music from my country. For some reason, Rita Lee’s was the first full discography of a Brazilian artist that I downloaded and heard from beginning to end. Completely worth it!
🤡Emotional Plurarity in 2023
Another synchronicity that I have to mention: last Friday as I opened WGSN’s Future Drivers 2023 website, I came across this:
The overwhelming sentiment driving 2023 will be the concept of emotional plurality.
Fear. Hope. Anger. Pity. Optimism. Rinse. Repeat.
This is the very nature of emotional plurality – occupying multiple emotional states simultaneously due to an ever-changing and increasingly complicated world.
Emotional acceleration has characterised 2020, when feelings have been heightened and diminished based on different inputs. Between the 24-hour news cycle, social media feeds, global social justice movements and the climate crisis, people have struggled to process emotions at the speed of change.By 2023, we will see a shift towards acceptance and the ability to manage multiple emotional states. While the inputs may differ, the outputs will result in reforming traditional institutions, renewed appreciation of community and a resurgence of optimism.
I feel like I have a hard time figuring out one feeling, can you imagine noticing and managing multiple feelings at once? Sounds like a power you would see on X-men. Jokes aside, it’s a reminder that we do feel many things at once.
🤖Resilience in CX
John Maeda has been doing his Computation Experience Reports since 2015, always sharing relevant trends in the intersection of design, technology, and business, for free access. The 2021 edition also seems to be aligned with the last Nexialist issue, with a few recurring topics: Distributed and Remote Work, Emotions, and even Unknown Unknowns. You can watch his 36 mins live here.
I chose a couple of slides where he talks about Resilience. The first board shows how “experiencing change is similar to how we manage and process grief.” I don’t think I had ever seen the process of grief in a graph, so that’s quite neat to visually understand it. Below, nine possibilities to do self-analysis when failing at something. A bit harsh, but can help us ask questions to face and self-assess these moments. (Original post from HBR is here).
Another slide that caught my attention was this meme because it’s so true. I also think a lot of people also had a digital transformation in their personal and professional lives, and the impact of that is still ahead of us.
💀Deletion Death
Talking about grief, Matt Klein brings a relatable personal story. His Youtube playlist with his favorite videos since the beginning of Youtube was randomly deleted by the platform. Some people might find it silly, but it’s like a box of files and photos being burned. He talks about the trauma of this deletion, which we’re never prepared for, and some thoughts and learnings that came from this experience. It’s worth the read.
My loss feels traumatic for multiple reasons. The sudden and unexpectedness of the deletion didn’t allow for any preparation. The deletion hurt, but it felt more barbaric at the hands of a friend, a platform I revered and devoted hours to for over a decade. My loyalty and goodwill wasn’t considered. Despite my smiling avatar, I was a faceless violator. This facelessness also went the other way. Because YouTube is a faceless hundred-billion dollar corporation, there is no one person to blame. For this reason, it’s easy to understand why Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO is so often a target — she’s the only one that could be named and held accountable no matter the dilemma. Further, there’s no ritual to memorialize this type of loss. It’s difficult to wake up to an automated email and just carry on. And lastly, I have no closure. I crave just one employee responsible for this design or decision to personally voice understanding. Mourning without empathy or recognition is achingly isolating.
I know I love my Youtube and Spotify playlists, my Pinterest boards. Also, my Tumblr used to be where all my content was compiled. I had automated IFTTT to send my likes and posts from other platforms into a sort of my content dashboard. I remember the day I couldn’t log in. Yes, I was also taken out with the Tumblr Purge. My personal hub had been deleted (and months after, recovered). I was so frustrated with the oppressive no-nudity policy. A couple of years later and I can say I got over it (a.k.a bargained), and now my grief process is complete as I migrated to other platforms.
🎛I Feel Love🎚
Earworm is back (tomorrow)! One of my favorite shows from Vox, where Estelle Caswell does beautiful music journalism, with great research and so much love in telling it. Just to celebrate and get you excited, I chose an episode from two years ago that I love. I dare you to press play and not watch the whole thing as she puts together how Donna Summer’s I Feel Love is constructed. Here, they explain how the 12” single launched as an innovation for disco music, changed how pop music was made.
In 1976, an accidental studio discovery by Disco pioneer Tom Moulton provided the solution: A 12-inch single. By stretching one song across 12 inches of vinyl, a format typically reserved for full-length albums, those extended dance tracks had room to breath.
By the 1980s, the 12-inch single dominated pop music. It not only changed the sound of records, it allowed for music producers to experiment with length and structure.
🎹Architecture ft. Music
Not only the format of the media influences how we make music. Before recorded music was available architecture was one of the main factors in how music evolved. From drums being played in a circle in open spaces to organs in gothic cathedrals, to concert halls. Now I see most music being made to be heard in our headsets, or potent sound systems in our homes or cars. What’s next? It seems that music will be streamed right into our brains. Not sure if I’m ok with that either.
🏰Social Infrastructure
Social infrastructure is the glue that binds communities together, and it is just as real as the infrastructure for water, power, or communications, although it’s often harder to see. But Eric Klinenberg says that when we invest in social infrastructures such as libraries, parks, or schools, we reap all kinds of benefits. We become more likely to interact with people around us, and connected to the broader public. If we neglect social infrastructure, we tend to grow more isolated, which can have serious consequences.
Architecture doesn't only influence our music, but also how we function as a society. I loved learning this term in the 99%Invisible podcast with Eric Klinenberg, the writer from Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.
I remember the story about the tragic heatwave in 1995 Chicago when around 700 people died. The poorer and segregated neighborhoods suffered more, but when Eric analyzed the data closely, he noticed some outlying neighborhoods that went against the trend. After spending time there he noticed the local social infrastructure was more robust: people would hang out in libraries and community buildings, and take care of their elderly neighbors.
After bringing this up now, I’m thinking about how our social infrastructure is also moving online. I just hope it doesn’t go fully there.
🏘Memory Palace
Thinking about palaces, I remembered this memory tool that I learned from The Mind, Explained.
A Memory Palace is an imaginary location in your mind where you can store mnemonic images. The most common type of memory palace involves making a journey through a place you know well, like a building or town. Along that journey there are specific locations that you always visit in the same order. The location are called loci, which is Latin for locations.
Yes, there’s a wiki with memory techniques. I’ve been quite forgetful these days, parking my bike and forgetting where, leaving things behind. So I started to use this trick (when I remember, so not frequently). I also do a similar exercise sometimes before sleeping, imagining myself visiting places that I have been before or from my past, like my childhood homes. It’s a great way to relax and reconnect with your brain. Where are you going tonight?
💭Imagination as Necessity
Pandemics, wars, and other social crises often create new attitudes, needs, and behaviors, which we need to anticipate. Imagination — the capacity to create, evolve and exploit mental models of things or situations that don’t yet exist — is the crucial factor in seizing and creating new opportunities, and finding new paths to growth. While imagination may seem like a frivolous luxury in a crisis, it is actually a necessity for building future success. The authors offer seven ways companies can develop their organization’s capacity for imagination:
1) Carve out time for reflection;
2) Ask active, open questions;
3) Allow yourself to be playful;
4) Set up a system for sharing ideas;
5) Seek out the anomalous and unexpected;
6) Encourage experimentation;
7) Stay hopeful.
Read: We Need Imagination Now More Than Ever - Harvard Business Review
Imagination is crucial for creating new opportunities and finding new ways to grow. And I think this is an important exercise, not only for companies but also for individuals and smaller businesses. I love the third one: allow yourself to be playful. This is what I do here (hello, boomerang!). The Nexialist is not bringing me money, but writing skills, critical thinking, discipline, and the most important part: fun. I hope you enjoyed it and I’ll see you next week!
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