Archive for Me, me, me!
Filed under Good Experiences, Information Architecture, Management, Me, me, me!
February 11, 2008 at 11:30 am
Today I have the great pleasure to announce I’m concluding an extremely important phase in my life, managing the Information Architecture and Usability for Comcast Interactive Media, and starting a new one, as Principal of Information Architecture for the same Comcast Interactive Media.
Yes, you read that right: I’m not going anywhere, yet, I’m going forward!
Coming to Comcast was a great opportunity for me - I wanted to work for a large organization and experience the trials and tribulations that my clients expressed when I worked as a consultant. I also wanted to manage a larger team and experience the challenges of long-term people management. Comcast welcomed me with an opportunity to do all that and more. Not only to manage people, but to start and build a team from scratch; not to just be in a large corporate environment, but establishing a new competency (information architecture and usability) across a very large organization.
This was a very enriching experience and I’m extremely satisfied with the outcome. What a learning experience! Fortunately for me, realizing that I reached this point didn’t mean I’d come across a dead-end at Comcast. Comcast Interactive Media is continuing to grow and so we came up with the Principal position, allowing me to keep growing and focus on new strategic challenges.
As Principal of Information Architecture I’ll be responsible for evolving the vision and establishing UX best practices across Comcast Interactive Media properties. Those include Comcast.net, Fancast, Ziddio.com, GameInvasion, Chill and all Comcast Cable, High-Speed Internet and Voice services.
I couldn’t possibly do that without passing on the baton of managing team and practice to someone else. That is a hard call to make given that this is “my baby” and I want the very best. Which is why I’m THRILLED that my dear friend Dennis Schleicher stepped in to take on the Director of IA role. Dennis is one of the nicest people I know. I’m not just saying that because we share a love of cheese. He’s also very talented and inspiring to be around - nothing seems impossible or hard when you discuss it with Dennis - you know you are talking to an anthropologist when you start answering your own questions. Welcome Dennis!
I’m very excited about all this so I’ll try and blog a little more frequently to talk about what I’m up to. The last I’ll add today is really the only reason I decided to write this post, to say thanks to the absolutely fantastic team that made this possible for me. Crystal Kubitsky, Eddie James, Austin Govella, Aparna Ramchandran, Paul Kali, Cynthia Hoffa and David Fiorito. You all rock. I hope I have reminded you of that frequently enough and I hope you are as proud of this team as I am. I can’t wait to continue working with you.
Filed under Me, me, me!
October 1, 2007 at 5:47 am
I was just reading Andrew Hinton’s blog - whose thinking usually floats on a plane above the average smart person - where he quotes from an article discussing the ideas of Jonathan Haidt and talks a bit about Lakoff, and it made me think of a recent observation.
Mel and I argue all the time. It’s not negative, vicious or combative, on the contrary, it’s often energetic, positive and leads to growth and enlightenment on either side if not both. Though I’ve known we are a good match for each other for over five years, it’s been only a couple of months that we have lived together in the same house and this physical closeness has cemented that assumption. It has also created more opportunities for conflicts to happen. And by conflict I simply mean A expresses something different from B’s worldview and a negotiation needs to happen to resolve the mismatch.
99% of the times that we get into a debate, regardless of the origin or the resolution, we have meta-discussions about the way we are talking (what we are saying as well as what we are not saying). I have attributed that to a) Mel being the best-read person I know and having a wealth of knowledge and vocabulary that results in me learning a new word or meaning in every discussion, and b) my interest in the link between thinking and language, and therefore it’s impact in people’s behaviors, c) we were each raised in a different cultural setting with a different primary language (ok, ok, and d) the fact that lesbians are notorious for processing everything).
We can be in the middle of a discussion about something really important or emotional and one of us will go off on a tangent about the word usage in the sentence one said to explain why they were acting in manner X. When you’re already pissed off, that can be quite enervating, but it’s also fascinating (scientifically), so as painful as it may be (to get your very important topic interrupted by linguistic analysis), the scientific interest often wins.
Which gets me back to Haidt and Lakoff. As Andrew points in his post, Lakoff is very influential in IA and, to me personally, opened the doors to a part of science that I’m very fond off. To Lakoff everything in our thinking is grounded in metaphor (and therefore, language is how those metaphors are expressed). I feel that personally being bi-lingual and knowing how thinking about the same thing in English versus thinking about it in Portuguese affects my judgment and interactions - the metaphors are not quite the same when the language, thought translatable, is not quite the exact match.
But there is something about that fundamental assumption that language plays such a large role in our actions that bothers me. I always felt like it was accurate but insufficient. There is something else, something related to moral dimensions that affects behaviors as strongly as language, if not more strongly.
Living in the US for the past three years, having been raised in Brazil, gives me a perspective on the US society that I don’t believe a native would be able to appreciate (likewise, I lack that perspective about Brazilian society). I see incredible debates about social issues where it’s easy to spot how the specific use of language wins or loses the argument. At the same time, I see debates where the use of language is “at the same level” (if there is such a thing - roughly equivalent) and yet, one side is absolutely more successful than the other in the behaviors they affect. I see the same issues being discussed in Brazil and all things being equal, the outcome is entirely different. It would be easy to encapsulate the difference as “cultural”, but that doesn’t explain much. I believe the fundamental difference, which makes up the ‘cultural’ difference, is about moral dimensions.
I wouldn’t know who to quote to support this argument, but I firmly believe morality is personal. It’s informed and reflective of cultural and social morality, but cultural and social morality are just aggregates of the “majority”.
Mel (I think because of being Jewish - her social/cultural morality?) has very high standards for social interactions, specially how to treat people. People who are rude, people who are vicious, people who are unfair and people who try to take advantage of her upset her to a degree I find unbelievable. Any of the resulting behaviors that I would consider small and quickly dismiss, like talking louder or “making a face” or sounding dismissive, upset her to the core. I get frustrated because I don’t want to see her upset and will say something like “Why do you let something so small get to you?” or after I feel it’s been sufficient time, “Why can’t you let it go?”. Though I may agree about how other people’s behaviors were indeed negative, I cannot internalize the values that drive how she interprets people’s behaviors. I can certainly appreciate that perspective, but the extent and intensity of the reaction makes no sense to me.
That’s one example, there are hundreds of things like that. When I can’t solve a problem to my satisfaction, even if it is not my problem, I get extremely frustrated, much the same way she does when subject to someone being rude to her. In my thinking, there is no problem without a solution. I have always been the kid that had an answer for everything; whether or not that was the answer people were looking for. That drive is what led me to the career I now pursue. In my head, everything has a next step and every question has an answer: If you don’t know the next step or the answer, you haven’t looked hard enough or you haven’t asked the right questions. So, this past month when we had 5-8 flies flying around the house at any given time (I HATE flies), I cleaned every nook and cranny, ensured every window, door and access to the outside was sealed and eliminated any possibility that flies could get in or grown in the house. Plus I killed all the flies currently roaming. And the flies continued to appear. This kind of situation gets me at wit’s end and leaves me feeling overwhelmed, disappointed and distressed. It’s a violent reaction. I like this example because language has no impact in the issue. I hate flies in English, Portuguese and French and I can’t understand where the flies are coming from in either language. Thinking about the problem in any of these languages leaves me equally distraught. There are people I know who respond to a situation like this with “oh it’s a mystery” and “we’ll never know” or something else of the sort and are able to let it go; some can dismiss it immediately even. My reaction makes no sense to them.
Moral dimensions are so central to how we think that it is not surprising how much impact it has in how we behave, including how we express ourselves through language. All this thinking is telling me I need to study this further because Lakoff is not quite cutting it anymore. One initial question that comes to mind is: if language is the basis of our thinking, we can identify and de-construct it with something like speech analysis or a similar tool. If moral dimensions are the basis of thinking, how do we analyse it? what methods capture that level of abstraction?
Thanks Andrew!
Filed under Food, Good Experiences, Me, me, me!
June 17, 2007 at 2:34 pm
I’m thinking that a popular sentence in blogs is “I haven’t posted anything in ages” (or some variant). Actually, Google tells me “I haven’t posted” occurs 1,160,000 times. It doesn’t imply we are all procrastinators, just that we feel guilty for not posting when we get back to doing it. Silliness.
I’ve been buying a house and working hard so I decided blogging was not a priority right now. I will make it a priority again after I move into my lovely new place (next week) and things start to settle down. Meanwhile, I’m sharing my brisket recipe because yesterday I cooked the most delicious brisket I have every a) cooked and b) eaten.
I don’t cook with recipes and don’t like following instructions so consider these ‘guidelines’ for a yummy saucy brisket. Be creative!
Liv’s No-Fuss Brisket
Effort: 15 minutes preparing, ~3 hours cooking (unattended)
Ingredients:
- 1 3lb Thin Cut Brisket (check this if you don’t know the difference between brisket cuts)
- 2 large white onions
- 2 tablets of beef bouillon
- 5 table spoons of Dijon Mustard (I recommend Maille)
- 2 tea spoons of powdered cumin
- 1/4 cup sea salt
- your preferred spices
Preparation:
Wash and clean the fat off the brisket. Recipes usually recommend leaving some fat on the brisket to add to the flavor and prevent it from drying. I agree with that but my tip is that it is hard enough to take it all off, so the amount you can’t remove will be more than enough to keep the fat flavoring you need. Poke holes with the tip of your knife on both sides so it can absorb the juices well.
Slice two onions (0.5cm - 1/6 in slices) and place as much of it as you can fit at the bottom of your baking pan. Coat it with powdered cumin. Grab a handful of sea salt and rub all around the brisket. If you’re a fan of garlic, stick whole cloves into the holes you poked (don’t overdo it, use no more than 3-4 cloves for 1 lb of beef). Place the brisket in the baking pan over the onions.
Pre-heat the oven at 450F - 230C.
In a separate dish, dissolve 2 tablets of beef bouillon into 1.5 cups of hot water. I prefer Carne-de-sol bouillon, but that’s not easy to find outside Brazil. Beef will do just fine (that’s what I used last night) and you can use other bouillons to vary flavor. Add 4-5 table spoons of Dijon mustard and mix until it’s uniform.
Coat the brisket in the pan with the sauce and add any spices you like - I recommend some more cumin, freshly grated white pepper and a few bay leaves, but I believe people should spice their dishes with their preferred spices, specially when they are cooking hearty comfort-food meals. Don’t add more salt, remember you have sea-salt and concentrated beef bouillon in there!
Place the remainder of onions on top of the brisket and wrap the pan in aluminum foil. Make sure it’s tightly sealed and place it in the oven, bringing it up to 500F - 260C. Leave it alone for 1 hour then bring it down to 350F - 175C for another 2 hours.
Go do something while it cooks otherwise you will be tempted to open to see how it’s going. Resist the temptation. While you wait I recommend making plain white rice to have with the brisket or a simple couscous with parmesan cheese and/or pine nuts.
After all the cooking is done, remove the aluminum foil and coat the brisket to make sure it’s moist. Bring the oven up to 500F - 260C and let it bake uncovered for 15 minutes - this allows the sauce to thicken. You might want to slice it to serve - if you’re cooking for the week (as I am) I prefer not to so it doesn’t dry up) - otherwise, it’s ready to serve.
The meat should be so soft you won’t need a knife. It literally melts in your mouth. If you try this, please leave a comment and let me know how it turned out.
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