Last weekend was Barcamp Manchester in Manchester, New Hampshire, which had a pretty good turnout of around 50 people. This year there was a new event, The Make Room, made possible by the donation of several awesome Make Magazine Boxed Set collections by O'Reilly Books. The various books were handed out throughout the day to the people who obviously needed them, and the Box Sets were reserved as prizes for the Make Room contests.
I first entered the Popsicle Stick Bridge Building Competition, but alas: my clever design relied on craftsmanship to implement correctly. I ended up pulling out of the contest, but this left me with leftover parts for the Chindogu Competition.
Chindogu is the Japanese art of inventing items that solve a problem which are burdened with unfortunate and/or embarrassing side effects that, for all practical purposes, render the invention useless. I seem to enjoy making things in this vein: the Procrastinator's Clock and the Gauntlet of Productivity are two such items that I've posted about in the past. Apparently the muse is still with me; I'm very pleased to present the prize-winning chindogu of Barcamp Manchester 2007, an invention I call The Social Yardstick.
INTRODUCING THE SOCIAL YARDSTICK
The Social Yardstick allows you to always maintain an appropriate distance from the people you care about.
Physically, The Yardstick is a measuring device that collapses to fit in your pocket. The prototype here is constructed out of popsicle sticks and packing tape. Each popsicle stick is labeled a listed below:
Acquaintance -- This is someone you know only slightly.
Co-Worker -- Someone you work with regularly, but probably not daily. Casual friends too.
Co-Conspirator -- Someone you are working with, perhaps sharing a hidden agenda or personal goal. You're close, but not too close.
Best Friend -- Someone you're pretty close with. They're inside your personal space.
Close Family -- That is, family members that you actually like.
Sweetie -- You've slept together. Or really want to.
You -- This is the end of The Yardstick you hold.
The idea for The Social Yardstick was trigged by something that Lokesh Dhakar said at the table I was working at. I was stretching my popsicle sticks (leftover from my failed bridge) in an accordion-like fashion, and he said something about measuring space. I then thought of a time when some friends of mine were having a secret office romance; I'd observed them talking one day standing way too close together to be casual co-workers. I mentioned this to my friend later in case they didn't want to blow their cover. If they had some way of measuring that space between themselves, they could have maintained discretion with ease! And thus, the Social Yardstick idea was born.
The basic principle: your physical distance from someone often telegraphs how "close" you are. Here's a diagram to help illustrate the point:
In case you're wondering: the distances in the diagram are roughly based on what "felt right", though I can see now that it seems roughly based on the width of a person's body.
USING THE YARDSTICK
To use The Social Yardstick, merely unfold its length and stretch between yourself and the person you are standing near. Read the label on the segment that is closest to the other person, and adjust your distance appropriately. Here are some other example uses:
If you are talking to someone you consider an acquaintance and he/she is standing too close, deploy The Yardstick and make sure that your allocation of personal space is not violated.
Conversely, if you're hanging out with your sweetie, use The Yardstick to close the gap: nothing quite says "I Love You" than ensuring you're both inside each other's personal space, short of...well, you get the idea.
You can also use The Social Yardstick as a relationship discovery tool. Say you are in a situation where you are trying to figure out the relationships between two people so you'll have something to talk about at the water cooler. While both parties are standing in place, have the first person hold the stick close to their body and stretch it toward the second person. The label on the stick segment closest to the second person will reveal their actual relationship! You may be surprised by what you find! Just remember: as with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, the act of directly observing your subjects will alter the measurement (e.g. people cough, avert eye contact, and move apart). You may need to apply indirect means of observation over several sessions to arrive at a conclusive reading.
The pre-calibrated distances on The Social Yardstick are based on Urban New England Standards of Personal Space, which is what I'm most familiar with. You may find that you need to adjust for the differing expectations of your locale and culture. For example, people who live in sparsely-populated rural areas probably need a longer yardstick. Likewise, people who work in loud office environments may have to stand closer to just hear each other. And all bets are off when you're in an elevator or picking a urinal in the Men's Restroom.
If you have built your own Social Yardstick or have made something similar in the past, let us know in the comments below! Support Social Unity through Appropriate Personal Spacing!
Setting one's clock ahead by 15 minutes is a useful trick for procrastinators. I do this myself with my alarm clock, not that it ever does me any good, in the hopes of being a little bit earlier out of bed. This comment by "Vadi" in Academic Procrastination gave me pause:
If this advancing clock can be done for dates it will be great. Perhaps you have a Calendar that is a day in advance? But somehow that idea still looks far fetched. Any good suggestions?
That does seem far fetched, but I got to thinking about why the "set your clock ahead" trick works. I think it presumes the following:
You have a terrible sense of time, or are obsessed by last-minute details, either of which cause you to be late.
You actually do care being on time, but your friends have started keeping a separate timetable just for you thanks to your legendary unreliability.
Enough awful things have happened because of lateness that you've resorted to pre-emptively tricking yourself by advancing the time on all your watches and clocks.
Now, the problem is that you know that I know you know you've already set your clock ahead, so you cleverly take this into account and end up being even later. It's a vicious circle. What we need is a way to channel fear and anxiety positively, while keeping you from getting too comfortable with your clock.
Enter the Procrastinator's Clock. It's guaranteed to be up to 15 minutes fast. However, it also speeds up and slows down in an unpredictable manner so you can't be sure how fast it really is. Furthermore, the clock is guaranteed to not be slow, assuming your computer clock is sync'd with NTP; many computers running Windows and Mac OS X with persistent Internet connections already are.
So why go through all this trouble to make a clock that's sometimes fast and sometimes not? FEAR, UNCERTAINTY and DOUBT, my friends! If you use this clock to keep appointments and deadlines, and you really care about being on time, you have to assume that the clock might actually be telling the correct time though it's likely to actually be up to 15 minutes fast. Yikes! All that anxiety should give you a good kick in the pants to get moving, because you can't really trust the clock to be anything but on time, even though it probably is fast.
I offer this clock in the spirit of Chindogu, the Japanese art of creating almost useless objects. Technically, the clock maintains a "time buffer" of "fastness" measured in milliseconds. This buffer is modified every second by a certain amount, either adding or subtracting a number of milliseconds. Every once in a while, the delta value changes and the rate of change may increase or decrease. The time buffer is added to the actual time before the display calculations are made. The whole point of all this is to keep ya guessing as to what the real time is. The clock should be, on average, about 7 minutes fast, but betting on the law of averages in the short term is a good way to screw yourself. So just assume the clock might be on time, but accept it's probably fast. Since you don't know if it's fast by just a few seconds or several minutes, it's safer to assume the clock really is telling the right time, which is just what you should be thinking :-)
Incidentally, there's a Procrastinator's Watch that weights the minutes instead, which is genius. However, it's far too reliable and therefore relatively easy to "game" by clever procrastinators. To be useful, we really do need a clock that's reliably unreliable and predictably unpredictable to keep them guessing---and motivated---in the right way.
[...] I think what really sticks is being the oldest of 4 and the only girl: bossy, yet nurturing. Benevolent dictators lead best. Know of any, anyone?
I know a few people that fit the "oldest, girl, bossy" category, and I find them fascinating to watch. I myself fit in the "older brother" category. As I've been thinking more about independence with respect to the Pursuit of Happiness, I think I actually may be headed down the path of Benevolent Dictatorship. It sounds awful on the surface, because here in the U.S. we have the expectation of democratic process as a kind of entitlement that is our birthright. In the context of business, though, this is an attitude that doesn't fly; when people decide not to participate, it's the people who choose to act that get to call the shots.
To illustrate that point, I've recorded a very short (90 second) audio supplement, retelling a story that I happen to like a lot about The Little Red Hen. Download below, or look for the MP3 player link at the end of this post.
Anyway, I thought I'd throw Barbara's question out there for commentary. Are YOU a benevolent dictator? Are you OPPRESSED by a benevolent dictator? Is it a good gig? Inquiring minds want to know!
I was visiting a company in the Boston area last Tuesday, and happened to walk by this awesome Vespa scooter accessorized with an Apple Sticker. Two stylish icons of design, separated by some 40 years of technology. Yet, they both somehow draw from the same pool of associations.
This was quite a mystery until I found this photo on Flickr, showing Steve Jobs (with Apple hardware design deity Steve Wozniak on the right) wearing his trademark turtleneck at age 21.
Jobs still seems to favor turtlenecks today. So the chain of association goes something like this:
Mystery solved! I have my "hip" sister to thank for that, because she's the one who told me about the whole scooter thing in the first place. In celebration, we must all watch The Lambretta Twist and smile! Beep beep! :-)
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About Dave
I'm an investigative designer, and I write about design, development, and productivity tools.
![The Social Yardstick [folded]](http://davidseah.com/_eecontent/imgcache/images/07/466-0728-socialyardstick.jpg)
Last weekend was Barcamp Manchester in Manchester, New Hampshire, which had a pretty good turnout of around 50 people. This year there was a new event, The Make Room, made possible by the donation of several awesome Make Magazine Boxed Set collections by O'Reilly Books. The various books were handed out throughout the day to the people who obviously needed them, and the Box Sets were reserved as prizes for the Make Room contests.
I first entered the Popsicle Stick Bridge Building Competition, but alas: my clever design relied on craftsmanship to implement correctly. I ended up pulling out of the contest, but this left me with leftover parts for the Chindogu Competition.
