How do I navigate and remember information from my 100 open tabs and bookmarks?

My problem with keeping too many tabs open in my browser has become so bad that I am actually developing a fear of links.

Because I worry I will find more interesting information, and it will be another tab, and more things getting delayed, and more information to process, when I already had so many open interesting things to read.

Sometimes I give up and solve the problem by creating bookmarks. But thats not a valid solution because those bookmarks also get unmanageable and inevitably I ignore the bookmarks because they are out of sight and open up more tabs.

Firefox in its beta version, maybe its new version, Havent used it, introduced a way to organize and group tabs by themes. This was good for a while, but it didn’t quite solve the problem.

But all of this brings up a different issue as well. Many times I keep tabs open because they are relevant to a project I am working on, or a post I am writing or something. And to close it, means that I won’t find it again. The information is not crucial enough to take up important space in my bookmark bar, so it never makes it there.

There needs to be a way to navigate and recall the information that i go through on the web.

I initially thought that I would be using twitter to keep an archive of information I found relevant, but I have increasingly discovered that it is not a valid tool for that, it has no built in search feature, no way of organizing data to other relevant data, no topics architecture, etc.

What I feel I need is the digital equivalent of a library or a bookshelf. A way to organize and archive my links and tabs, by topics, by author, by blog. With a dewey decimal system, or a dating system, and built in search. Its like my bookshelf but digital, so that I can come back to it, and glance over it.

Kindles are great and all, but the bookshelf in my apartment lets me glance at it and find many books relevant to what I am working on, and I can pull them all out. Kind of like opening a bunch of tabs.

Clearly, this would also need a section that organizes things that are most recent, that I didn’t get a chance to read yet, or perhaps that I haven’t organized yet. All of those open tabs are like a bunch of books on my coffee table that haven’t been put on their proper spot in the bookshelf.

I’m sure theres something that exists for this, somewhere, right? #milliondollaridea!!!

So the final question really is 2 questions.

1. How do we navigate through transient data (tabs that aren’t destined for bookmarking)?

2. How do we remember on the web?

How are you learning?

Because learning and education are things that I think about a lot.

Because I am now 1 month away from being graduated.

Because of many other reasons as well, I have started to think about this question.

Being in a university, is a very safe experience. It is a lot like being spoon-fed, you have a traditional learning environment and teachers, and courses and majors and disciplines, and if you manage to get a very good advisor it is entirely possible to go through college without ever making any serious decisions about what you are learning.

This is not at all to say that decisions aren’t being made at all, but many times, we don’t questions certain things about our education. A graphic designer doesn’t ask why he has to take color theory, its already been decided. But a graphic designer also doesn’t ask why they aren’t taking calculus classes.

So essentially where I am headed is this idea that we get a spoon-fed education but in the end we don’t come out like gingerbread men out of a cookie cutter, we all have different skills and different competencies, even if we took the same classes.

Thats because we teach ourselves, somehow, somewhere. Some of us read, some of us write, some of us surf the web, etc. Theres more in depth discussion on how we learn here and here @ whataretheseideas. The second link discusses the differences between active learning and passive learning.

Now that I will no longer be a student, I will have to become way more active in my education, I won’t have the luxury of being spoon-fed anymore.

And so I have been thinking recently, that there are so many new innovative things happening related to education. MIT Open CourseWare, Khan Academy, Ted, Skillshare, Brooklyn Free School, etc.

The resources exist to teach yourself, how do we do it?

How does one remain an active learner after college?

Are there systems in place that can help one navigate new tools?

How do you learn?

How does one live after college without working for the man?

There have been many many depressing articles about post college life for students. I don’t think i need to share them, im positive everyone has read them.

They’re bleak

There doesn’t seem to be many choices. In fact GEN Y, I think, is already slated to be the most educated generation ever, because there isn’t much choice but to go back to school.

So this begs the question “what is the alternative?”

Sometime next year, The New School in partnerships with Shareable.net are working on a “workshop”, “event”, something that is meant to invite graduating design students to participate and imagine a lifestyle where they can achieve this.

This looks like it will be really cool, partially because it begins to address a lot of my concerns, not about life post college, but about having students do something, disrupt (my favorite word recently).

So in preparation for this, i am attempting to begin to imagine a resource tool kit for what the graduating (graduated) students could arrange in ways to begin to design a new way of life for them. I am not positive how to approach this but my idea is to first understand what are my basic needs in NYC on a daily basis and what resources exist for me to begin to meet those needs?

I can imagine that i need

– Food

– Transport

– Free time to be creative (in whatever practice I studied)

– Housing

-Communication (phone, internet, snailmail)

These are seeming really obvious, as they would in beginning to formulate a research question.

I want to begin to collect services, objects, apps, anything that begins to support a student in those categories.

Clearly i also need to make those categories more refined. Good design researchers would tell me to chronicle everything that i do, or go out and follow graduated students to base what their needs are. (im just finishing university now so an abundance of free time doesn’t exist)?

1. Does anyone have any research that might assist in this? Perhaps an artist followed people for a day? Something of that sort?

2. What do we need to go through our days?

3. Can you recount to me everything you did yesterday?

Should we simply make beautiful things?

This is in essence, a counterpoint to my last point on the inherent ugliness of sustainability.

It should probably have been a comment, but I wanted a separate discussion on this point, forgive me.

I think it was around december 2010, when Elaine Scarry came to the New School to be the Keynote speaker for a design conference called “The critical gift in design.” She gave a talk, mostly on her book “On Beauty and Being Just” and a little bit on her book “The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World”

It is about her comments on beauty that I dwell.

Scarry says that there are qualities of beauty that are important enough for us to see it as a goal.

The one that came to me was the aspect of beauty as being “unselfing”. When we encounter beautiful things, we step outside ourselves and perceive the world.

Indeed she says “beauty raises the bar for what counts as perception.”

It is a strong argument in that we normally can only see ourselves, and when we encounter beautiful things we step outside of ourselves and perceive the world.

Scarry went on to say “Beautiful things make us want to protect – to care for those things”

This is my counterpoint to the last post on the inherent ugliness of sustainability. If beauty allows us to perceive the world through a process of unselfing and then ignites within us the cause to protect those beautiful things. Is it not fair to say, that sustainability is not beautiful enough? We should make more and more beautiful things, to allow for people to perceive the world.

This is followed, by Scarrys third site of beauty which is creation. Beautiful things make us want to create.

So we go from encounter to unselfing to perception to creation. It is a really beautiful path.

There are 2 questions that I have here.

The first: So should we just make more beautiful things?”

The second: How can we capitalize on perception?

If we are in a race against time with the planet, can we capitalize on beauty?

Can we use beauty and its unselfing as a design goal?

Or will that subvert beauty and make it ugly?

Ok sorry, that was more than 2 questions.

How do we move past surface level design problems?

“we’ll need to move beyond a use of design to handle aesthetic problems and tap into the power of design to solve for meaning.”

A quote from a great piece at Fast Company about how design thinking can help prevent another mortgage bubble.

The really great article above talks about continuums process of moving into a problem that was initially a graphic design problem and realizing that what they had was actually “a service design problem posing as a graphic design problem.”

I think that this is extremely crucial in looking at how design is changing. There was a really great interview with Hugh Dubberly where Dubberly talked about the nature of design needing to change, and that design practice was not growing. Part of this was because we needed to move design out of the art school and put it next to business, law, medicine, science. Its a really great read.

But this brings back this really interesting challenge of how do we actually understand the problems that we are working with. There was a great discussion happening in an earlier post where I asked the question “are we designing away designers?” Because it seemed to me that as service and social designers began to work with more organizations outside of design, the tools were being re-appropriated and designers were becoming obsolete. However, the comments were rather hopeful, in that there was an urge that the tools would spread because this would democratize design and lead to better problem solving all around.

That scenario also lead to the idea that perhaps once the tools of design were used, designers would be left with the choice to work on the more difficult problems of society.

The article at Fast Company, begins to hint at the fact that we already have the chance to start tackling these more difficult problems if we simply start to rethink the questions that we are asking. The case study shows a great example in which the graphic design problem was just a surface level problem and that reframing the question allowed the designers to really begin to look at the larger deeper causes behind home purchasing and the problems therein.

What I wonder is how do we do that consistently. I have recently been on Sparked.com a website where people can help nonprofits from home in their spare time, and I look at many of the problems that these Nonprofits have and it seems to me that i am more often questioning the assumptions they made in order to get to the problem that they posed. We could have many service design problems posing under graphic design problems.

How do we uncover them?

Is part of the solution, the accelerated spread of design tools to other disciplines so that at least the companies that come to us for help, have a better understanding of the problem?

Is it really only in crisis that we really start designing?

On another blog of mine I wrote a long paper outlining an idea that in order to begin to ensure a future for ourselves, we have to abolish the notion of safety and comfort. Because, real design, real making, carries within it the idea of taking away someone elses pain; and this is something that design no longer seems to do.

Rethinking the Artificial http://bit.ly/ecFkta (it’s long and dense so I wouldn’t bother, but hey, why not)

I read an article in the NYT today : Newly Homeless in Japan Re-Establish Order Amid Chaos http://nyti.ms/i2GdkC

This article was moving in many ways. In it you will read how people are naturally creating order for themselves, and envisioning services in order to make their stay more meaningful. In order to cure each other of their pain in the aftermath of the disaster that has happened.

Are we really incapable of truly making when we are not in crisis? It seems like the fastest way to save the world is to accelerate its demise. To allow everyone to feel pain, so that everyone can begin to make in order to relieve.

Do we really need crisis and destruction to begin making?

Are we designing away designers?

I had the pleasure of being present today at a lecture by Lucy Kimbell on Designing Services and Designing Societies.

In the lecture she talked about the ways in which design is being used at the level of Govn’t and societies and that what that means is that designers at that scale are moving away from designing artifacts to designing processes. It is less about design as problem solving but more about design as problem finding/framing/constructing.

What that means on simple scale, is that the problems that are currently being tackled by communities and governments (particularly by David Cameron and the Big Society) are very similar to the process of design thinking and the ways in which design thinkers go through their problems.

e.g. There were a a group of organizations that were involved in working with various different families. These were social workers, police, community boards, food kitchens, churches, etc.

Seating these people around one table to attempt to design some sort of policy is easy. Its not easy to get them to communicate effectively. This is where design comes in. In the example used by Lucy Kimbell, they developed a persona about a family and made it open enough that everyone of the involved parties could offer feedback on how they would approach that problem. This allowed for conversation to move to a level where everyone could understand the others approach. The rest of the workshop utilized other design tools to frame the problem. Here the designers weren’t designing artifacts but were designing the conversation amongst non designers, using design tools.

The take away here is that the persona is a very powerful tool to allow different people to look at one problem and approach it in a way that everyone can participate. Design, is clearly very useful at this level of conversation and policy making. Designers are experts at framing problems.

What becomes worrying for me however, is that the designers seem to be making themselves obsolete. Once the community has experienced the design tools and acknowledged them as being important, whats to keep them from using it themselves? Why would they call in the designers again next time? Especially, if the designers are charging for a process/service and not an artifact?

We have already seen design reappropriated for business and management via Design Thinking and Consultancy.

Designers are no longer necessary there.

Now we are seeing design being used on governmental and policy scales.

Soon they won’t be necessary there either.

Are designers designing themselves away and assimilating into other disciplines?

Or will design have to return to being linked to an artifact?