In the opening chapter of Henning Nelms’ 1969 masterpiece Magic and Showmanship: A Handbook for Conjurers, there’s a short passage entitled “Conjuring for Conjurers—and Laymen” in which he essentially validates the importance of user testing. I’ve included the entire passage at the end of this post for reference. There are a few takeaways from the passage, [...]
And we’re back for Part II. Part I ends on a note about empathy as a critical skill for magicians, con artists, filmmakers, designers; essentially, anyone who creates anything with an end user in mind. Jamy expresses concern for his fellow magicians who get so caught up in the methodology and technology that they forget why [...]
Seth Raphael, the tech-savvy magician and founder of X-Pollinate, speaks with frog design’s Sam Martin for their 11th issue of Design Mind. The article is titled “The Alchemist: The sufficiently advanced magic of Seth Raphael” and it’s among a number of other great articles in this issue dedicated to the presentations and conversations at the TED Global Conference [...]
Jamy Ian Swiss, aka “the Honest Liar”, opens up his talk with what he does best: an entertaining routine of sleight-of-hand magic. It’s really no surprise that he was a guest speaker at the 2009 Gel Conference. After all, Jamy has offered advice to designers before. This talk, however, was much more focused on an [...]
I recently visited my parents in California and, as usual, my mom had a long list of things for me to take care of during my short stay. When I moved out many years ago, I left a lot of my childhood possessions in the garage. Now that my parents are moving and want to [...]
If you’re a science fiction buff like me, then you’re no stranger to the works of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. While many consider 2001: A Space Odyssey his masterpiece, Clarke contributed volumes to the genre – all of which are to be truly valued. I often cite one of his Three Four Laws of Prediction, [...]
In WIRED’s 17.05 issue, we find a surprisingly rare (or at least seemingly rare) interview with the silent man from the magic duo Penn and Teller. And no, Teller does not tell all. The article opens up with a trick. Penn and Teller call it “Looks Simple” and at first it doesn’t appear to be [...]
This blog post is a spoiler. Seriously, don’t read it. Instead, read the actual article in WIRED yourself: JJ Abrams on the Magic of Mystery. I urge you to. … If you’re still reading, then I assume you came back to see what I have to say about it, so here goes. Mystery is everywhere. Activities [...]
In the January-February 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review, there’s an interview with Alex “Sandy” Pentland of the MIT Human Dynamics Lab. He and his team of researchers are able to predict who would win a business plan competition, with 87% accuracy, without even reading or hearing their pitch presentations. The article is titled We [...]
Magician and “endurance artist” David Blaine tells TED how he prepared for and successfully broke the world record for breath-holding at an incredible 17 minutes and 4.4 seconds. This new record was set on April 30th, 2008, and aired live on the Oprah Winfrey Show. As I mentioned in a previous post, David has a [...]