Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
I love Maya Angelou's promise that we all have the space to place new steps of change.
Happy Friday. Happy New Year.
Futures Thinking
Mental time travel might help us to circumvent impulsive choices or opportunistic motivation.
Left to right: Halima Rafi, Ynès Bouamoud, Sebastian Baez Lugo, Christel Maradan, Patricia Cernadas Curotto, Yacila Deza Araujo, Olga Klimecki
"Plenty of research has shown that thinking about the future can shift our intentions to behave better, from planning to save more money for retirement to helping out in a theoretical situation.
"But do these intentions translate to a change in our behavior? This is what Olga Maria Klimecki-Lenz, who is a neuroscientist and psychologist, as well as a practicing mediator who has worked with diplomats and heads of state, and Cernadas Curotto, a psychology researcher at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and their colleagues set out to answer through a study published earlier this year.
"To probe the theory, they asked study participants to spend just one minute thinking of either as many things as possible that might happen to them in the next year or as many animals as they could. Next each participant played the Zurich Prosocial Game. In the game, the players race against a clock to navigate through mazes and score points by collecting treasures. On the screen they can see another “player” navigating different paths to different treasures. As obstacles appear before the players, the participant has the ability—but not the instruction—to help remove them for the other player. Those who had spent their fleeting minute thinking about the future helped the other player much more often, suggesting that just a brief mental trip into the future can actually make people behave more generously toward others." -
Article: How Mental Time Travel Can Make Us Better People
How We Work
"We talk about 'comfort food' and 'comfort viewing' but I’ve never heard anybody talk about 'comfort work'."
"Comfort work is work that I do when I don’t know what else to do.
"I know I need to work, but I don’t know what I should be working on, or I can’t work on the thing I should be working on because I’m too tired or depressed or otherwise unmotivated.
"Comfort work must be comforting and it must be actual work. This sounds simple, but it’s an odd combination. Comfort work is work I’ve done before that I know I can do, but it still must present enough of a challenge to be considered actual work." - Austin Kleon
I love this concept of comfort work. Compiling this newsletter is comfort work for me. Making blackout poems is comfort work for Austin Kleon.
Blog Post: Comfort Work
Writing, AI
It's happened. AI is being used in one of our own projects.
We're getting really close to launching a new website for longtime client Wolfworks. This morning on a punch list call I asked about the status of copy about the company being employee owned. They shared this in a common Google Doc:
"Wolfworks is a Worker Cooperative
"In a worker cooperative the employees own and democratically control the company. Owners have an equal say in decision-making and share in the profits of the business. Worker cooperatives prioritize social and environmental values, and aim to create a more equitable and sustainable business. At Wolfworks, we believe that everyone we hire has the potential to become a good owner, not just for the skills they bring to the company but for their commitment to our values and vision."
Then almost incidentally Jamie Wolf said: "By the way, with very minor editing ChatGPT wrote that." The realty of an AI-assisted world just got personal for me.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer: ChatGPT
Writing, AI
A few thoughts about how AI might change the teaching of college writing.
"It’s hard enough to teach something that the culture itself doesn’t widely hold up as a common source of admiration or at least fame. I’ve often found myself thinking that the shame is not just that so many students leave college without learning to write well; it’s also that so few will ever need to.
"But what about when the culture ceases to need writing skills in a more literal sense? Will we continue to teach writing like we do basic math — sort of ceremonially in case someone finds themselves on a desert island without a calculator…or an AI? Here are a few thoughts about how the teaching of college writing might change." - Daveena Tauber, Ph.D.
Article: What Even is Writing?
Intellectual Property
On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain.
"On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These include Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, the German science-fiction film Metropolis and Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and a novelty song about ice cream. Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different." - Jennifer Jenkins
Article: January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are Open to All
Retail, Public Space
Turning the focus from the buildings that house the shopping to the people who do the shopping
"What might bloom in the husks of dead or dying malls might not be squalor, (author Alexandra) Lange writes, but opportunity. Rather than tear them down, she argues, let’s reimagine their use of public space. That malls are no longer efficient engines of pure moneymaking is perhaps a good thing. Yes, their empty shells are an invitation for decay, crime, and ruin pornographers, but she makes the case that all the thought that went into their construction should not go to waste. The mall in its heyday may never have realized its promise as a public square, but perhaps it can do so now in its afterlife. In Wayzata, Minn., for example, senior housing, apartments, and a hotel have emerged from the tomb of a shopping center. In Austin, a foreclosed mall has become a community college. Given that so many malls sit atop wetlands and other environmentally sensitive areas, Lange notes, the properties could simply be returned to nature to create a more traditional kind of public space, as in Meriden, Conn., where a park and an amphitheater have replaced a moldering mall.
"Whatever moral or economic or land-use injury the enclosed shopping center inflicted in the past, the buildings are here now, and Gruen’s hope that they would become exemplars of high-minded urban planning—which has remained dashed ever since the permits for Northland’s airport-like loop for buses and taxis got lost in the mail—could still be fulfilled. As Lange observes, 'Any travelers in the world of dead malls must ask themselves whether they are prepared to fight to put people back into the gutted buildings, or if they merely intend to pick over the aesthetic bones.'” - Melvin Backman
Article: Suburban Arcades
Advertising
Advertising trends circa now
As we turn towards the new year, the advertising industry continues to ride a roller coaster of changes and unknowns. The editorial team at Digiday has done their best to summarize in one infographic what is happening.
Article: The Definitive Digiday Guide to What’s In and Out for Advertising in 2023
One-liners
Dieline is a "bespoke creative platform that exists to serve the packaging community". Here are some of the more interesting news stories they featured in '22.
Article: Heinz Partners With Pulpex To Develop The First 'Paper' Ketchup Bottle
Article: Coca-Cola’s New Sustainable Packaging Replaces Plastic Rings With Paperboard
Article: Nike's 'One Box' Reduces Packaging Waste By Half
Article: QR codes and the Future of Connected Packaging Design
Article: Happier Unveils 'World's First' Refillable Toothpaste Dispenser
Article: This Plastic Wrap Alternative Uses Potato Waste and is 100% Home Compostable
Article: How Patagonia’s Packaging and Branding is Pushing the Fashion Industry Towards Sustainability
Playlist
"Sprezzatura seeks to enable the public to live an original and innovative artistic experience by redefining the spaces of expression and modes of transmission. The artistic projects are based upon the idea of a Dialog of Cultures, a sort of intimate conversation between voice, arts, people and aesthetics."
These values are at the heart of the new creation, Sprezza World, which combines and merges musical cultures from different time periods and continents."
In these hauntingly beautiful performances the group invites countertenor Sébastien Fournier to perform medieval songs with them. The mix of ancient melody and lyrics with modern instrumentation and jazz sensibility bridges the ancient with the new.
Video: Beata Viscera - Pérotin Le Grand
Video: Janus Hons Pris - Richard Coeur de Lion
Website: Spruzzatura
Image of the Week
“'Ghostletters are fleeting witnesses,' says Tom Koch, author/editor of Ghostletters Vienna (Falter Verlag), 'existing under the constant threat [of] being dismantled or painted over. They leave their traces all over the city—on storefronts and above shop entrances where lettering has been removed. Many have remained a visible part of the cityscape for years, if not decades.'”
Article: The Daily Heller: Ghosts of Signage Past
What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
If you get value from Love & Work, please pass it on.
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