This post is dedicated to my mother, Yumi, who always told me throughout my life, “I believe in you.” It always made a difference.

I think that I’m more susceptible to clickbait titles than most of my peers because I grew up in a household where The National Enquirer was one of my primary sources of news.

My mom was always busy running the tofu store with my father, and as a big fan of Elvis she always wanted to keep tabs on his latest resurrection from the grave. So whenever she rushed through the shopping line at the supermarket, that’s when she would pick up her newspaper. As a result, I developed a strong interest in Bigfoot, UFOs, and of course the Loch Ness Monster.

When I later left for college I…

I think we’re all feeling a bit dumbfounded by how we took the feeling of safety for granted before the pandemic. That odd sensation you get when watching a movie where nobody’s wearing a mask in a dense crowd is real. Or, at least for me, the newest member of my “unfavorite dreams” circus — the one where I can’t graduate from high school, the one where all my teeth fall out — is now the one where I’m exposed to some terribly deadly virus. It’s a vulnerable time for many of us. …

SXSW is in March 2021 and so the annual CX.Report is coming soon …

I seem to have drifted away from the space of design in the last few years.

That became particularly obvious to me when I bumped into a collection of my old “design-isms” over on my main site, design.co. There’s a list of my design tweets from the early days of Twitter, before anybody really cared about Twitter too much.

Back in the 00s, there weren’t a lot of @people on Twitter, so it was a productive karaoke mike for me to test out ideas in what I felt was a safe place. But it’s changed as a place to publicly experiment, and…

Whenever I start to feel my worldview shrinking, instead of thinking expansively and looking outwards, there’s a passage from David Foster Wallace’s famous “This Is Water” commencement speech that speaks out to me:

“And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of…

My best performing piece on Medium is “How I learned what “digital transformation” truly means after waving 👋 to a couple Gs”. In that post, I discuss how the words “digitization” and “digitalization” have completely different meanings. I couldn’t figure out why this was the case. It turns out it’s the dictionary’s fault.

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. …

I’ve never been a cheese fan, but in the days before COVID-19 I had the opportunity to visit France, home to some of the best cheeses in the world. So I did my best to adapt and tried all kinds of cheeses while I was there.

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. …

I have straight hair. Extremely straight, spiky hair. It’s super rigid. And because of its rigidity, it sticks up on its own when it’s cut short.

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…

It’s never easy to figure out what will happen in a new year, but according to what Google’s incognito mode says to me when I search “trends for 2021,” I need to care about tech trends, home decor trends, fashion trends, and food trends to start.

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 :+).

Tech

Fast Company gathered expert opinions that cover a broad range that I summarize as follows:

• Safe convening technologies to regain physical intimacy after the vaccine happens.
• “3+2” hybrid work week: 3 Work From Work (WFW) days + 2 WFH.
• Like the disruptive commercial force…