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April 22, 2005
That feeling
It happened today, for the first time in a long time. The feeling is inexplicable. Perfect. Amazing. I cannot realistically portray what I mean, but I'll try. Have you ever been with a group of people, doing some sort of work, when all of a sudden everything just sort of blurs into slow motion, and all around you is the haze of perfect flow? Everyone is on the same page, all parties are thinking the same thoughts, everybody believes strongly in the cause, and you're working in sync toward your goal. That happened this evening. It was brief, and my teammates may not have noticed, but *that feeling* was most definitely there for me.
*That feeling* is the reason I have decided to dedicate this portion of my life to Human-Computer Interaction. I do a ton of group work, and during all of this work I'm in search of these perfect little moments. Sometimes I try to steal them, but that never works. That feeling hits when I least expect it. I remember the first time. It was 3rd year of college and I was in a Cognitive Engineering class. I remember sitting in a CogSci lab with my 6 group members staring at a huge Affinity Diagram doing some concept creation for our project, "PictureThis." We were on fire. It was amazing. Concepts were flowing from this group like I had never seen. One person would suggest a feasible, but boring idea and the next person would add an element that just made it work perfectly. Another person would shout out an idea that was just horribly off base, and the next person would take a piece of that idea and turn it into something that just seemed to fit in our solution. Since that moment I have known that I wanted to delve deeper into the world of HCI.
I am absolutely sure these moments of perfection exist in fields other than HCI, but they have rarely occured to me. When I ran the ropes course at my childhood summer camp, a few situations were simply perfect. I remember driving around in my first car that were perfect, but those were generally alone. In HCI, moments where I have *that feeling* are few, but they are more often than in other fields. Perhaps there is a field where I can come into contact with this feeling of perfection more often...but for now, I am quite happy with my momentary feelings of bliss.
Posted at April 22, 2005 12:27 AM