Let’s suppose that time travelers existed and were able to come back from the future and visit us.  I’ve often thought, “Couldn’t we just test this by designating a place and time for them to show up at?”  It turns out that a few years ago, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking did just this. For...

You walk into a large gallery. On one side of the room are photos and paintings of malnourished and suffering people. On the other side of the room are photos and paintings of malnourished and suffering dogs. There’s also related audio, video, written backstories, and media. You explore the room for...

There’s a lot of very different things being called “immersive” these days. Everything from VR to restaurants have been called immersive and there's a lot of people who say they work in immersive. But when a word means a lot of things to a lot of people you can get a lot of misunderstandings. I find...

I was recently interviewed by my friend Laura Bond Williams for an article in a local magazine. One of the questions she asked was something along the lines of, “how do you deal with rejection of your work?” I’ve tried a lot of highly experimental ideas with my projects over the years and have exper...

Note: This post is part of my “Museums Project“, a collection of 200+ high-concept ideas for museums. What's In The Museum? Is boring stuff still boring when you put it in a museum? Is interest really just a matter of making people curious about nuance? Does everything shine brighter under a spotlig...

Sometimes I’ll be working on a project over a period of days, weeks, or months and come to a point where the outlook for the project is not good. It might be due to: Life stuff has come up which will take much of my time.A key member of the team drops out.A gigantic hurdle has been uncovered, such a...

Right now I have a list of over sixty changes I want to make to The Eureka Room. Some of them will take maybe an hour, some much longer. How do I choose? Here's three different approaches I could take. The "ROI" Approach One common approach for prioritizing work items is to use ROI (return on invest...

I'm going to spend some time here writing about how tools can get conflated with craft. There's a few ways I've seen people get sidetracked by tools from developing their craft. I highlight three of them here. Having Tools Is Not Your Craft (unless it is) I’ve played music for about thirty years. In...

Word count stats for IRLXD.com I'm excited to say that this post will bring my blog to a total of 200,000 published words. That's the equivalent of four novels. I started writing shortly after the pandemic started. I wasn't sure what it would be about or if I had enough to say. Apparently I do. The...

Third Places If you haven't read my post about Third Places, they are define by wikipedia as "the social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place") in community building. There's more to it than that, but I'm going to leave...