{"id":558,"date":"2013-01-21T10:00:41","date_gmt":"2013-01-21T16:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/?p=558"},"modified":"2015-11-07T15:43:05","modified_gmt":"2015-11-07T21:43:05","slug":"software-design-and-urban-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/software-design-and-urban-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Software Design and Urban Design"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Thinking outside the box<\/h2>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft\" style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?lt1=_blank&amp;bc1=FFFFFF&amp;IS2=1&amp;nou=1&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;fc1=000000&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;t=businunusu-20&amp;o=1&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;m=amazon&amp;f=ifr&amp;ref=tf_til&amp;asins=0133815269\" height=\"240\" width=\"320\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Jim Collins, author of <a title=\"Beyond Entrepreneurship (Amazon)\" href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1Pv8dq5\">Beyond Entrepreneurship<\/a> (recommended by <a title=\"Cory Miller\" href=\"http:\/\/ithemes.com\/our-founder\/\">Cory Miller of iThemes<\/a> at <a title=\"Pressnomics\" href=\"http:\/\/pressnomics.com\/\">Pressnomics<\/a>), suggests that budding entrepreneurs can innovate by studying something that may seem completely unrelated to your craft &#8211; &#8220;thinking outside the box.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Lately I&#8217;ve been interested in cycling. When I&#8217;m riding, rather than putting my mind on auto-pilot (like many drivers do), I find that my mind is more alert. It&#8217;s partly due to the fact that I&#8217;m trying to avoid getting killed by drivers on auto-pilot. But it is also because I&#8217;m going slower, exposed to the air and the elements. I can hear a deer in the passing woods or smell fresh bread from the bakery. It turns out that &#8220;<a title=\"Slow Down! (Chris Lema)\" href=\"http:\/\/chrislema.com\/slow-down\/\">slowing down<\/a>&#8221; is an excellent approach to problem solving. In my case, &#8220;thinking outside the (computer) box&#8221; had just become &#8220;thinking <em>while<\/em> outside.&#8221;<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<h2>A different perspective<\/h2>\n<p>Because of the detailed ground-level perspective I had been getting, I&#8217;ve become enthralled with the minutia of urban design. My new obsession was somewhat legitimized recently when I was on a trip and noticed a business acquaintance was reading the same book as I was: <a title=\"A Pattern Language (Amazon)\" href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1LZ32fI\">A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander<\/a>. While I was reading it for urban design, he was using it to model real-life patterns into online social tools.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not alone, far from it in fact. Automattic (WordPress.com) founder Matt Mullenweg seems to understand that we can learn from urbanism, see <a title=\"Companies Die, Cities Thrive\" href=\"http:\/\/ma.tt\/2012\/12\/companies-die-cities-thrive\/\">Companies Die, Cities Thrive<\/a>. Additionally, <a href=\"http:\/\/vegasgeek.com\/whats-going-on-in-downtown-vegas\/\" title=\"What\u2019s going on in downtown Vegas? (VegasGeek)\">my business partner<\/a> is involved with Las Vegas&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/downtownproject.com\/\" title=\"Downtown Project\">Downtown Project<\/a>, which is essentially <a title=\"New Urbanism (Wikipedia)\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/New_Urbanism\">New Urbanism<\/a> being applied to downtown Vegas. While he&#8217;s not involved with urban planning, the changes are palpable, and already bearing fruit: Fremont East in downtown Las Vegas is possibly the best part of the city.<\/p>\n<h2>More to come<\/h2>\n<p>Since I&#8217;ve been trying to do &#8220;off-topic&#8221; (<a title=\"Casual (category)\" href=\"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/category\/casual\/\">Casual<\/a>) posts every other post, they appear roughly once a month. I wanted to write this as a sort of introduction since I now have about 6 months of posts drafted that are related to <a title=\"Urban Design (category)\" href=\"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/category\/casual\/urban-design\/\">Urban Design<\/a>. For those looking for more brain-food in the meanwhile, these are the main sources I follow:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space\" href=\"http:\/\/urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com\/\">Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Streets.MN\" href=\"http:\/\/www.streets.mn\/\">Streets.MN<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"twin city sidewalks\" href=\"http:\/\/tcsidewalks.blogspot.com\/\">twin cities sidewalks<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Strong Towns\" href=\"http:\/\/www.strongtowns.org\/\">Strong Towns<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You can probably find similar resources and movements related to the places you live and work.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also read several books regarding transit and urbanism (besides those mentioned here), and I hope to provide insight into their theories by examining some practical applications.<\/p>\n<p>While all of this really has nothing to do with software design, studies of efficiency &amp; economics, and connectivity &amp; accessibility have quite a bit in common with software, and more-so the <em>business<\/em> of software. Hopefully in my brain all of these things are cross-pollinating without me consciously knowing.<\/p>\n<div class='kindleWidget kindleLight' ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/wp-content\/plugins\/send-to-kindle\/media\/white-15.png\" \/><span>Send to Kindle<\/span><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thinking outside the box Jim Collins, author of Beyond Entrepreneurship (recommended by Cory Miller of iThemes at Pressnomics), suggests that budding entrepreneurs can innovate by studying something that may seem completely unrelated to your craft &#8211; &#8220;thinking outside the box.&#8221; Lately I&#8217;ve been interested in cycling. When I&#8217;m riding, rather than putting my mind on&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/software-design-and-urban-design\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,5,1,3,65],"tags":[148,67,68,93,66],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bikes","category-books","category-business","category-casual","category-urban-design","tag-books","tag-design","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-library","tag-urbanism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2130,"href":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions\/2130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}