He’s Just Had Coffee

From WorldChanging: Ecolizer Designwijzer’ is a simple tool for designers and product managers. It’s a set of cards bound like a Pantone color guide which let you use eco-indicators to analyze and compare environmental impacts of commonly used materials and processes. Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) for the people, and in a matter of minutes […]

Further to that post yesterday I’ve been pondering the Next Action idea from Getting Things Done and how it relates to the basic work processes in Extreme Programming. They both accept a view that action permutes continually and so it’s best not to plan ahead too much. Plan if you feel you need to, but […]

“things don’t start out organised and they don’t stay organised because we’re moving all the time. If you know what order your notes should be when you start, you’re not doing research any more and you should sit down and start writing!” - Mark Bernstein at Blogtalk Downunder today. blogtalkdownunder

Just A Guy - Adam Gurno » Tricking out the Hipster: http://gurno.com/adam/j2/index.php?p=44 Adam Gurno’s worked out how to print onto blank index cards from his printer and spent the day going wild with cool ideas…

… as I’ve dubbed my new scheduling technique (which by the way is unstoppable). So we had an all-hands group meeting last week during which The Schedule needed to be discussed. I’d let people know that I wanted to try working with the schedule in a new way. Cards are great for tasks (done in the style […]

I took these along to a big meeting the other day and at least three people asked for the website address to buy their own set. They’re a lovely artifact.

… it’s been a little slow recently, life has been busy. As promised here are some pics of the new card sets I bought. First Spolin’s Theatre Game File: … via Flickr. You can click for bigger versions. All pics I put on this blog are liable to show up under the tag “cardthinking”.

So, further in the theme of Tim letting himself buy sets of cards that he loves: I order a copy of Viola Spolin’s “Theater Game File”. They arrived today and made me very happy. Pics follow when I get a chance to shoot ‘em.

So, I took my deck of task cards along to the last meeting and talked to the other producer and one of the project leads about what we want to get out of the schedule. We all acknowledged barely concealed hatred of the Gantt and they’d noticed the same flaws as me. Classical “XP-style” card scheduling […]

I’m involved in a project at the moment in a project management role. The project coordinates about 12 people towards the creation of a piece of interactive art. Up until recently, we have managed the team (who are mostly contracted designers and programmers) via regular meetings, but in the last couple of months it’s been a […]

I can’t remember where I came across Oblique Strategies, I think probably over at 43 Folders. Created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt as a stimulus for creativity and a way out of blockages. The more I started thinking about cards and how much I like them, the more I got curious about investigating the […]

So… I’ve been pondering how effective index cards are in Extreme Programming design; and I started wondering about the other places we use cards to help us think, help us remember things and kept thinking of new examples. Hence… Card Thinking. I’ll be trying to use this blog to talk about different ways we use cards […]