I’ve been thinking quite a bit about process this week. Creative process, collaborative process and efficiency of process have all been top of mind. I often go across numerous projects at a time. Jumping from one to the next and back. Over the years, I’ve refined some methods to help me multitask. But I’m blessed and cursed, as I can keep much of it in my own head. As a storyteller, experience designer, educator and entrepreneur, I often do the multi-hyphenate hustle (a term that I first heard from Michael Premo at Forward/Story in 2014) and in the diversification I find inspiration as one project often fuels the next. As I jump in a non-linear fashion across the work I’m attempting to document it, identify connections and leave time for reflection. While it is often challenging to sum up what I do in a neatly defined description, I’ve come to realize that for me the work is all part of an iterative process. That the story itself is being shaped as I go.

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. Jean-Luc Godard

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Here are some things that the Internet taught me this week.

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1. Monument Valley Team Reveals The Cost And Reward Of Making A Hit iOS Game

Games and the formula that leads to their success can be a bit of a mystery, perhaps more so on mobile. One of 2014’s big hits, both in terms of critical and audience success, was Monument Valley by ustwogames. Read More…

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2. Speak & Spell: A History

…The Speak & Spell is a teaching machine specifically in the tradition of B. F. Skinner, reflecting some of both Skinner’s design principles and his theories of learning, decades older than the popular Texas Instruments device. Rather than selecting the correctly-spelled word in a multiple choice quiz, for the example, the Speak & Spell prompts the user to construct the response. It praises; it corrects. Read More…

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3. Slow Journalism: Deep Storytelling in the Digital Age

The fast pace of the modern lifestyle — born from high-speed, hand-held, wireless connectivity — has not only changed the way we send, receive, and consume information, but has transformed the way journalists operate. This has led some of them to make a concerted effort to slow down and take a different tack. Read More…

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4. How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: Lessons in Mindfulness and Creativity from the Great Detective

“A man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. The habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts,” wrote James Webb Young in his famous 1939 5-step technique for creative problem-solving, “becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.” But just how does one acquire those vital cognitive customs? Read More…

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5. Project Ara: hands-on with Google’s latest modular smartphone prototype

Right now, there’s a war to make the thinnest smartphone in the world. Google is a part of that with Android and with its Nexus devices. But it’s also attacking the very idea of smartphones as we know them with Project Ara: a project to build a phone that doesn’t cram everything into the smallest package, but one that lets you pick out and swap every important component. It’s a lot like the way many desktop computers still work — but for your pocket. Read More…

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Bonus Experience: Play This Creepy ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Twitter Game After Midnight

Pulpy “choose your own adventure” stories that originally became popular as dog-eared paperbacks during the ‘80s and ‘90s have made a comeback on social media in recent years, and “A Dreadful Start” is definitely the most evil of the bunch.

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The game — which doesn’t have an official title, but I’m calling it by the name of the first stage — takes you on a journey through 23 Twitter accounts, all linking to one another, as you choose your fate in a breathless flight from deadly and mysterious fanged creatures with the ability to speak and be reasoned with — if you make it that far. When I played the game, I died several times in gory fashion. Read More…

For more visit Culture Hacker it’s a daily collection of the things across the web that catch my attention and are providing inspiration for the book I’m writing.

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