Networking gurus will often say that when you approach a group of people you should smile. This is terrible advice unless you are a naturally smiley person, in which case you obviously shouldn’t suppress your nature by hiding your smile. For the rest of us, putting on a smile can be a very good way [...]
Continue Reading →In the first Monkey Shouting I raised the question of who you should approach first at a party. The answer is not a simple one and not everyone would agree on the right approach. But here are a few things to consider. The feeling of having fun, chatting to people, and being entertaining is not [...]
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I have to admit that I have selfish reasons for being glad that the book Sleights of Mind by Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde is such a well written and researched piece of work. It makes me foolishly happy to know that there are others out there who are excited by what we can learn [...]
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The title quote is from The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde but like many of my generation I first heard it from Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of suspense recently as I prepare a Designing Mystery workshop for The University of Salford. I went back [...]
Continue Reading →This is the first in a series of posts sharing tips for dealing with networking at industry events that I’ve taught over the years. These are ideas that anyone can use to make work events less daunting and more fun. Some are tips that professional performers have passed down over the years, others I’ve discovered through experience. I hope you find some of them useful.
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Hipstamatic, the groovy iPhone camera app, has designed suspense and mystery into both the app and its marketing with mixed success. If you shake the iPhone, Hipstamatic will give you a random combination of settings so the next photograph you take will be a mystery. This is a lovely feature and I’ve seen it being [...]
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This is a fun game I came up with about six years ago when teaching Animation and Game Design students and I’ve since introduced many other people from different fields to the idea. Take a stack of paper and draw or print six empty comic book style frames on each one. If comics aren’t your [...]
Continue Reading →I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Bulgaria over the years working on various projects and I’ve always really enjoyed my time there. I love the sense of humor in Sofia, the only humor I’ve ever encountered that’s even more sarcastic and cynical attitude than us Brits. The downside of this attitude, according to [...]
Continue Reading →I’m reading the work of Robert Kurzban, an Associate Professor of Psychology who has written about hypocrisy. He argues that we are capable of believing contradictory things because we are like iPhones. Our brains are made of lots of specialized “Apps” that are good at doing one thing really well. Its perfectly possible for the [...]
Continue Reading →I’m just reading a review of Mark Stevenson’s book An Optimist’s Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets out to Answer ‘What’s Next?’ in The Guardian. I found this quote, where the work of Ray Kurzweil is being discussed, very interesting, “Kurzweil holds that all technologies increase in performance exponentially – as computers have in [...]
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