Flomerblog

In an effort to publish more blogs, I am publishing the outline for this post instead of the full blog post / essay version. These were my reflections right after finishing FlipTales: 1 - Benefits of developing a project over a long amount of time - willingness to delete half the content ... read more

In 2022, I wrote/drew a comic for the After the End anthology. It was an amazing learning experience, and I thought it might interest some of my friends to catalog everything I learned. Not so much because I expect them to make comics, but because I think it's a useful ... read more

Grand pianos are remarkable objects. In the hands of the right pianist, it can bring an audience to tears. We cart pianos around to funerals, graduations, and weddings. Seemingly every important occasion would welcome a piano with open arms. An alien observing earth might call them "meaning machines" ... read more

A note from 2024 Ryan - This is no longer a very accurate reflection of how I work. Perhaps I'll write a new version of this soon. As I have gained more experience as a product designer, I think it has generally gotten easier for me to navigate the process of ... read more

What if educational toys are actually a violation of children's basic rights? As someone who has spent a lot of my career designing toys with educational goals, this would be a pretty big blow to my work. I've always thought that learning is an inherently good thing, so why would ... read more

I was recently the victim of a crime for the first time. It was just property crime - everyone was safe - but it still had a profound effect on me. "So this is what everyone is so upset about," I thought. In San Francisco, Nextdoor is flooded ... read more

So many of the ideas I had about design, a career, my place in the world, have been completely flipped on their head lately. I wanted to write myself a letter, as a means to process some of the thoughts I'm having. First things first, therapy is an awesome thing ... read more

I've recently been learning more about machine learning, and I had a realization late at night that I thought was worth sharing. It's an example of how studying computation can be useful for developing ways of thinking outside of computation. The seed for this realization was planted when I watched ... read more

From May until September, 2019, I was working at a software startup, Resource. Ever since first hearing Joe Gebbia's story about Airbnb while I was at RISD, I've been fascinated by the story of going out to California (where I was born) and working with a team starting something from nothing. ... read more

During my visit to Anji last year, I saw and experienced a number of things that deepened my understanding of play and its power to help children understand the world around them. One of the most memorable was a conversation between a school principal from Anji, and a principal from ... read more

I have a recurring daydream that my future teenage daughter comes to me on a Sunday afternoon and asks for 10 dollars. "What for?" "Wanna watch a movie with Eric." "Who's Eric?" "He's my boyfriend." "Digital?" "Dad don't use that ... read more

I've been doing freelance brand design work on the side for a few years. Each time I do go through the process, I become a bit more comfortable and confident in my methods. This year, I finally feel like I'm able to let my branding process be informed by my ... read more

Last night, I participated in a chamber music gathering at a friend's place. It was an interesting event to think about in the context of learning. It reminded me a lot of the samba school that Seymour Papert talks about in Mindstorms. There was an equal mix of amateurs and ... read more

I was very lucky to recently join Adriana Young's class at Parsons/The New School. We were looking at User Personas for the students' projects. They are doing human centered design, which basically means you try to understand what people need/what their problems are before you start to design ... read more

At littleBits, we have a way of thinking about different types of knowing. We sort them into three categories: Knowledge Skills Perspectives Knowledge is the kind of knowing that you access like a stapler. If I have a problem (two pages not connected) I just apply the stapler, and my ... read more

In the first Anji Play newsletter, Jesse, Chelsea, and the Anji Play team offered the following exercise: When your goal is to convince someone to take an action, to change their stance or to change their community, you must first allow them to identify your ideals within their own experience. &... read more

I just read Mitch Resnick's book Lifelong Kindergarten, which I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in learning and play and how they intersect. I wanted to write down some of the parts that I found to be the most thought provoking. This post will touch on the approach ... read more

This is one of my favorite projects from my time at RISD. Major shoutout to Ben Basseches and Erik Lack for their major contributions to the project. Below are the user testing sessions in order of appearance. Q: Does the interaction between moving a muscle and hearing a sound facilitate ... read more

The Code Kit was by far the biggest undertaking I've ever done as a designer. Over the course of my one year on the project, by the numbers the team completed (estimated): 200+ invention ideas 100+ code block ideas 60 collateral prototypes 60 pages of storyboards 45 user testing sessions 10 photo or video shoots 4 iterations ... read more

In the development of the littleBits Code Kit, Chloe Varelidi created an amazing community of educators that were passionate about the Code Kit. I learned so much from the experience that I thought it deserved a blog post of its own. The Educator Advisory Committee was composed of a very ... read more