What Makes Me Tick

In our first Thesis Development class today, Frank Chimero urged us to index what we like and our passionate about in a way to start thinking about thesis. He stressed that the difference of work vs labor is that work takes our energy, while labor gives us energy. The only way to achieve this is to work on something that we truly self identify with, and are truly passionate about.  

Luckily, I’d already started a list similar to this, inspired by Caterina Fake’s blog post “Make Things” in which she ends by listing the things that people have made that inspire her. Dennis Crowley followed this up by his own inspiration.

While this list might seem exhaustive, its just scratching the surface of things I catalog on a daily basis that inspire me. But the things below are those that I continuously find myself referencing, whether it be in conversation to others or in my own head as I work through design problems. There’s a wide variety of formats and and media below in films, blogs, videogames, personal projects, and multi-billion dollar companies.

Nike+, Foursquare, Flip Flop Fly Ball, Boxee, Mario Kart, Feltron reports,Madden videogame franchise, Last.fm, BERG London, Exit Strategy, Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns, Kanye West’s Good Fridays, Fantasy Football, Hood Internet, Runkeeper Health Graph, Goldeneye, Museum of the Moving Image,Limbo for Xbox, Just Cause 2 death map, If We Don’t Remember Me, Bill Bowerman,  Pixar,  FourSquare&7YearsAgo,  TurnTable.Fm, John Jay and the W+K Family, Attack lunch wall, Arrested Development, Portal 2,  ESPN 30 for 30, Jeff Bridges’ Widelux Photography, Pennant iPad app, The Eephus League of Baseball Minutiae, ORK Posteres,  Chalkbot, Wu-Tang Clan, Processing, New York City Roadmap for the Digital City, Yeah Right!

But now its my turn to make something.