an incomplete and incoherent manifesto for life

1. all models are incorrect, but some are useful {box & draper}

2. when in doubt, be interested

3. fail forward, fail fast

4. there are no grand truths, just small stories, local meanings and approximations

5. go where you love being, and love where you are
   if you hate your city, you probably just don't know where to connect with your crowd. if you can't find a crowd, make one.

6. worth owning: books, make tools, and cooking gear
   everything else is dead-weight and incurs effort.

7. obsess over something

8. think, do, document, reflect, re-orient, repeat.
   honour thy error as a hidden intention. {eno & schmidt}

9. design against yourself
   uncover your biases, and design your world to compensate against them.

10. work and life are the same
    take what you know in one and apply it to the other. watch boundaries vanish.

11. repetition is a form of change {eno & schmidt}

12. be gameful, playful, and artful

13. travel uncomfortably

14. rest. disconnect. slow down. listen to silence.

15. it is more important to be human than to be right
    break rules when necessary.

16. do good. you will always know what that is.
    and leave each place better than when you found it

17. this manifesto is a model. see #1, #4 & #8.

life is complex, and as a design researcher at sonicrim, i help people understand and tame this complexity and, hopefully, make better products and lives.

this website collects a set of observations and speculations about the world as viewed through the lenses of the interaction design and design research disciplines. as i learn more about living on earth and being human, both professionally and personally, i continue to document here my syntheses on complexity and designing a more humane world.

my portfolio is not something I can share freely online because of confidentiality constraints, but you can view my resume as a pdf file.

in the meantime, i can be found performing my networked identity on linkedin and facebook. I listen to altogether too many genres of music, and last.fm is where I go to try and make sense of it; a friend and i also blog about world music. Now and then I upload my travel and documentary photography on flickr, but I haven't found a good way of connecting it with my dopplr or tripadvisor accounts yet. I read a lot of blogs and books, but about the only thing I manage to do with them is to share and enjoy - and occasionally they manage to make it into my bibliography. I also manage the workshops team for the Fuse Factory.

you can follow me on twitter here

or email me @ arvind at sensemaya dot org

a note on the origin of this website's name