Emily Chang – Designer

Ideacodes is proud to be featured in Netdiver‘s highly selective portfolio section and What’s New. Netdiver, created by the extraordinary Carole Guevin, is a digital culture magazine that’s been going strong for over a decade. It’s “one of the pioneering new media portals devoted to tutoring, empowering and stimulating creativity as well as excellence in design projects by the international community involved in the design industry and beyond.” Carole writes: “Ideacodes is an award-winning strategic design consultancy in San Francisco who create social applications, concept-driven websites, web products, integrated marketing, and sustainable technology solutions and was co-founded by Emily Chang and Max Kiesler, a multiple-listing Netdiver alumni.” Thanks to Carole for the honor.

After spending the last two years as eHub, obsessively profiling and trying out almost every web application that’s come out, I’ve decided to try something different from a new perspective.

I just launched PicoCool, a site that’s dedicated to bringing you tiny and obscure content from the world of peer media, social networks and subcultures.

It’s a shift away from focusing on the technology and the people behind these technologies to focusing on the content and news created by people. PicoCool is the first site to focus on the content being created by people through participatory media and niche communities. It’s not about who’s popular or who has the most points, it’s about the things we create, the ideas we have, and the creative or daily minutiae that makes us human.

On a personal level, I think this site will be a lot of fun. These are the things I notice while browsing through peer content and the things I bookmark. It combines my lifelong interests: underground trends, subcultures, innovations, art, human experiences, products, technology, communication, philosophies, digital living, the obscure and the tiny.

Somewhere in the undiscovered and the mundane lives real brilliance. PicoCool is about uncovering these microscopic moments when things first begin.

Here’s a photo of the notes in my sketchbook from Friday.

In it, I wrote: “It’s not about the business, the technology or the next feature (or scandal). it’s about the people who use these social networks. Who are they? What’s their life like? It’s about the content and trends being created by real people…The social graph editorialized.”

I hope you’ll join me over at PicoCool. You can become a member, subscribe by email, subscribe by RSS, or just stop on by.

Reactee has mashed-up it’s services with Twitter to create a great hybrid of two services that I already like independently. Reactee has created an easy way to make your own t-shirts customized with your Twitter username.

I’ve already made mine (http://reactee.com/emilychang) and purchased one. You can get your Twitter Reactee here. eHub did an interview and a review of Reactee last month as well.

Ever since I started using Twitter, Tumblr, and Stikkit, it seems I haven’t been able to finish a blog post. Instead, I’m just Twittering, collecting, reading, posting: generally zipping through the electronic universe leaving a varied trail of my activities and thoughts.

This speedy trip has its ups and downs. On the one hand, I know that my various bits will find their way to people through these networks. I’m also capturing most of my output through my data stream/lifestream. On the other hand, my attention is so split by these activities that I can’t find the time to slow down, reflect, analyze, and write a post.

Like many of my fellow weblings, I’ve got a drafts folder filled to the brim. What happens to these thoughts as time moves on? Hopefully they resurface in our heads and evolve into full thoughts. If they don’t, we forget and they sit in our drafts queue like an incomplete thought.

A few weeks ago, I twittered:

And got this response from Twitter user, digitalvillages:

So today, in honor of my blog’s second anniversary, I tried to do just that. It was harder than I thought. As a stream of consciousness post, all the disparate pieces seemed more like notes from some imaginary conference. So instead, I decided to start a category for “Pico post”, as a kind of hybrid between Twitter and micro-blogging, answering the question “what am I thinking?” I’ve posted various drafts according to their original date. Perhaps this is blog sacrilege, but I’m not really worrying about blog rank or traffic. I just want an semi-accurate reflection of my own thoughts here in this digital archive. These are bits and thoughts that haven’t made their way to a full blog post. Maybe they never will, but at least I’ll remember what I was thinking, and when.

Below in reverse chronological order are some of my drafts turned into pico posts.

Thoughtful Reduction and the Miniaturization of Expression

My OS Doesn’t Work Like My Mind

Self-Sousveillance

Capturing the Flow of Design

Fluid UI: Multi-touch screen

I Like Being in Other People’s Stats

Old Wisdom

Why I Use Social Software

Tell it All

Fast vs. Slow

Internal Elegance

The Shift