This little letter was written by my niece, Ruva when she was over for the holiday last year. She’s 7 years old and learns at Phoenix Primary School in Malawi. After bugging me to write something to her parents, I decided to let her write a letter I promised to post on my blog.
Copied below is what she had to say:
I have recently become an avid podcast collector over the past month or so and I’m clearly enjoying it. Long before downloading podcasts was even considered normal consumption of internet bandwidth, many of my mates were onto downloading a ton of them, daily. I remember just how odd that struck me and I couldn’t figure their line of thinking whether they thought the internet would be shut down one day and they’d regret missed opportunities or they were seriously putting them to good use. To this day, i’m more clueless than I was then, having downloaded a few now, I can tell you, consuming them is the hardest part.
It’s a few days after the two week Culture Shift ideation and hackathon hosted by the British Council, Jumpstart and Culture Code (UK) and for most of us, we are still basking in the afterglow. It was a wonderful event hosted to help local artists mingle with the techies and try to hack together some real solutions to their problems.
Any talk of perfection is often linked to minimalism.
Growing up and learning about design, I was advised to know when something is both nice and useful when “when there is nothing more to remove”. That became the mark of near-perfection to me. As a result I have tried to abide by this rule when going about design and writing. This decision has come to haunt me on several occasions with comments centering on the work appearing “bland”, not exciting, very quiet and such. So maybe sometimes I personally have taken it too far? A big possibility given i’m not much of a designer but minimalism doesn’t just stop at design.
It’s a new year(!) and we all know what to expect, bigger things! 2011 was nothing but brilliant and I am 100% sure 2012 will be just as fruitful!