You know you are getting old when you mis-hear something that leads to more interesting that what was actually said.

I sat in on Professor David Socha‘s class on “Evidence Based Design” for MSCSS students at UW Bothell last evening.  David gave me the gift of sitting in on my “User Centered Design” course last quarter and I am returning the favor for him this quarter.

As David was providing the course overview and describing the different types of prototypes, he emphasized the importance of low fidelity versus high fidelity prototypes.  He shared that with low fidelity prototypes you get great insightful feedback on your ideas, while with high fidelity prototypes you get feedback on font sizes and colors and button locations.

One of the students volunteered that this reminded him of a great website to look at.  I thought I heard him say “the human cloud.”  What an interesting term.  I had not heard the term before so immediately did a Google search to see what he was referring to.  There were several great websites and the essential theme for “human cloud” was another term for “wisdom of crowds.”

However, just to make sure that I had heard the student right I asked him what the specific URL was for his comment.  He replied “Hugh MacLeod’s gapingvoid.com.”

This mis-hearing is a perfect example of “On the Way to Somewhere Else“.  It could have taken months to come across the meme of the “human cloud.”  However, through the wonders of getting old and having gradual hearing loss, I found a new meme (“human cloud“) and was re-introduced to a favorite author and cartoonist – Hugh MacLeod.