If you look in a conventional dictionary, the definition of “digitalization” reads:
“Digitalization: The act or process of converting from analog to digital.”
— Wordnik
And for “digitization” it reads:
“Digitization: The conversion of data or information from analog to digital or binary.”
— Wordnik
So if you grow up in the normal world where dictionaries matter, you’re not going to immediately make a distinction between the two words. However, if you’re in the management consultancy space, there’s a certain utility in refining the meaning of these two words to have different meanings. …
Throughout my cheese journey, I came upon the fact that French bakeries carry two kinds of baguettes that look identical but are fundamentally different in composition because of the type of yeast used in each. One is called pain au levain and the other is called pain à la levure. I was taught this easy tourist-y mnemonic for remembering the difference between the two: the former ends in “n” and that means “natural yeast.” The latter means “chemical yeast” which is a more common approach today.
I mean, they’re both just loaves of bread. …
This fact never struck me as noteworthy until I moved from Seattle to Boston for college, and I happened to have classmates who wanted to touch my hair. The common reaction was always, “It feels like a brush!” It’s the kind of thing that I, literally, just brushed off. I also had a roommate who begged to know what I put in my hair to make it do that. When I told him it’s genetic, he wasn’t satisfied and often rifled through my toiletries to locate the secret. Poor fella.
If you look back at the history of computer graphics, you’ll notice how the modeling of hair wasn’t really commonplace when modeling characters because wavy hairstyles weren’t renderable in the beginning. Around the same time of my hair discovery, and when I started to write code, I noticed how easy it was to model my kind of hair with straight lines and a little bit of math. By comparison, it was much more difficult to create anything with curves in it — which is what one would expect from a more common array of non-Asian-centric hairwear. But that didn’t matter because my hairstyle wasn’t representative of what was desired to be a more “normal” view of what a person looks like. After all, how do you sell computer graphic realism with stick figures with hair like COVID-19 spike proteins? Well, that was the 80s so the metaphor didn’t matter back then. …
Since Google seems to know everything, I took that initial prompt to lightly dive into these four areas that are of interest to me. I hope they’re of interest to you, and do keep in mind that I’ve editorialized what I’ve read online — so I may have gotten the trend wrong. So trend-grab wisely :+).
Fast Company gathered expert opinions that cover a broad range that I summarize as follows:
You see, learning is a passion of mine. And I find that some things are harder to learn than others unless you really get your head in the game, which is especially hard when you have a full-time job. I reasoned that if paying for a gym membership can be a motivator to go to the gym, I needed to locate a paid way to learn WTF “digital transformation” means. I’d come into contact with it via the management consultant world and it was bugging me that I hadn’t found a crisp meaning. So I splurged on an MIT-branded experience on the topic, instead of just watching a few YouTube videos like I usually try to do. …
And because writing doesn’t come naturally to him — he left home when he was 13 to work and is functionally illiterate — it’s even harder to make a remote connection to him.
I was so hungry to see something visual. Perhaps it’s because I was one of a handful of freshmen who had brought the new Apple Macintosh computer to campus — and was made fun of because it had pictures on the screen rather than just text. To the upperclassmen and my peers, it all seemed terribly unnecessary.
But then there was a special presentation toward the end of term, where the brilliant, gnome-like instructor, Professor Hal Abelson, slightly aged and slightly balding, figuratively let down his hair. Having a computer science professor with a name reminiscent of the “Hal” computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey always got me in an excited mood for the future. Hal took us through some new animated visualizations of The Game of Life as rendered onto a videotape by a colleague of his. …
It had a handwritten yellow discount sticker atop an austerely designed black cover with big white type and orange-red horizontal lines. Its original publication date of 1960 partially explained why the book cover looked out of fashion and yet it still stood out in a way that spoke to me. The price definitely worked for me too.
My first read didn’t get me anywhere because the book was written in design-ese. At the time I spoke fluent engineer-ese, which made it easier for me to read equations, principles, and anything involving computation. But the book stayed with me throughout the years, and eventually by the fourth read I found myself chuckling at Banham’s droll yet witty prose. I guess that was proof that by then I’d become fluent in design-ese too. …
In the spring of 1993, my experiences as a hardware and software engineer collided with the art world as an installation in Kyoto benefitting from the educational direction of edutech pioneer Nobuyuki Ueda. Having worked for too long in the abstract world of electricity and cyberspace, I hungered to see it made real, in order to understand it better. Thus was born the Human Powered Computer Experiment, which was “performed” by Dr. Ueda’s graduate students in a two-day long workshop where human beings embodied the working components of a computer.
Normally I send out my CX Briefings via Mailchimp, but I changed phones and didn’t keep my authenticator app settings so I am temporarily locked out. So I decided to get this #CX Briefing briefing out by Medium instead :+).