Ben: Coffee

If I had one word to describe my year off to date, I’d say “Reflection.” If I had two, they’d be “Reflection” and “Design.” But, if I had a third word, it would be “Coffee” (the fourth phrase would be “really bad music” just in case you were wondering).

Coffee has become a strong passion for Chester, George and I. It started out from our work on designing products for the specialty coffee industry, but it has become so much more.

We have tried dozens of coffees from across the US brewed in many different methods. We’ve grown from buying coffee that costs $4/lb to tasting (but not really buying) coffee that is well over $100/lb (though we usually settle on coffee which is around $14/lb). We’ve met a ton of amazing people who share this passion. And we’ve learned a lot… enough to know that we know almost nothing about coffee.

There are a few things that I really like about coffee.

First and foremost, the mathematician and engineer in me like the fact that producing good coffee requires the optimization of dozens of coupled variables. As much as we try, there isn’t a closed form solution to this problem; there isn’t an equation which will produce the perfect cup of coffee. As a result, there is always room for experimenting and trying things out.

The entrepreneur in me likes the fact that the Specialty Coffee Industry is young and growing at a non-trivial rate. This means that there is lots of excitement in the industry and lots of change in the technologies. It also means that what is considered the best today will be laughed at 6 months from now. Things aren’t stationary.

The anthropologist and designer in me likes the fact that everyone is so passionate about their work. They love spending time working on coffee, and are such rich and complex individuals as a result of it. It’s pleasurable to design for them.

The humanist and socialist in me likes the fact that the community is so considerate. Everyone is driven by something higher than money- good coffee. People in rival companies help eachother out. There’s always someone out there willing to help you out, even if it doesn’t help them out any. It’s great.

It also helps that I really like coffee shops and the taste of coffee.

It’s super fantastic.

Ben:What am I doing?

I’ve often promised to tell people what I’m doing. Here it is.

Texas Mathworks Alumni Network: In the summers I work with an organization called Texas Mathworks which runs math camps for middle school and high school students and develops innovative math curriculum at the junior high level. They’ve been running a summer program for high school students for 18 years, but have kept in touch with very few alumni. I’m taking a user-oriented approach to developing this alumni association so that it will be something that is useful to all parties involved. So far it has been a lot of research and interviewing.

Umbrella Labs Coffee Roaster: Several of my classmates started a company this summer called Umbrella Labs. Essentially, Umbrella Labs is a product design firm. Our first product is a computer controlled coffee roaster which gives home coffee roasters additional power over their coffee roasting. I’ve been focusing on the user end of this design, identifying what features are necessary, and learning about home coffee roasters.

The Foundry@1795: As president of OEG (Olin Entrepreneurship Group), I’ve been working closely with a few classmates to help develop the Foundry, Olin’s student business incubator. We are especially looking to help it grow over the next few years. So far it’s been a good deal of strategic planning. We hope to have a business plan for the organization by the end of the semester.

IdeaTree Design:Last semester, I cofounded IdeaTree Design, a socially conscious engineering design firm. Over the summer, three students spent a huge amount of time working on the concept, and this semester I am leading a design project working with a group called Helping Hands. This project has really just started and will be engulfing more of my life in the weeks to come

Flash Conference: Last semester, Matt and I worked to put together the first ever “Flash Conference” at Olin. This was a weekend long design conference which brought students from across Boston together to spend time developing new appropriate technologies. This semester there is another one planned for this upcoming month and while I am not in charge of it, I’ve agreed to help out in considerable ways.

Barista-ing: Perhaps this should not go on here as an “official” project, but in working on this coffee roaster, I’ve become increasingly interested in coffee. As a result, I’ve purchased an espresso machine and a grinder and am really getting in to making and drinking coffee. Over the next few months, I hope to become a better barista, because that’d just be sweet.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some, and I’m sure more will come up later.

Ben: Organizing My Time

The most surprising thing about this year is the fact that I have a lot of “flex-time.” When I wake up in the morning, I get to decide what I work on. Throughout the day, I decide what I want to do. In the evenings, I decide what I want to do.

This has been interesting because I’ve never really had this much time to do my bidding with before. During the year, there’s always been classes, and the summers had jobs and activities.

Needless to say, (except by Uncle Ben), “with great freedom, comes even greater responsibility.” With all this time, I have to figure out what I do with it and, well, use it.

I started out the year with the idea that I would work on a different project each day. This, I figured, would make it easy for me to focus on what I was doing, and would help me insure that I did everything I needed. After trying this for a week or two, I realized that this did not work at all.

No matter how I tried, I couldn’t stay focused on one activity all day, when there were so many other things that I could do. I fought myself to continue doing this for a while, but finally gave up when I realized that I was going against my style.

Now, on any given day, I will work on many different things for varying amounts of time. I might interview someone for one project for a while, and then send an e-mail regarding another. Later, I’ll start working on something new. I have found that this works incredibly well for me.

I must just like the scattered lifestyle.

Ben: Standing on Top of Mountains

When people ask what I’m doing this year, I always reply, “Well, I’m working on a variety of projects to help me figure out what I want to do with my life.”

The next question is, “What sort of projects?”

The thing is, I don’t have a planned schedule that I can hand people to say what I’ll be doing at what hour, or day. But this seemingly lack of organization is intentional. Now it is time for a story.

At the end of summer, I went up to Maine to Bennett’s house with several other Oliners (See Bennett’s post). In addition to visiting the folk festival and going to the beach, a few of us took a late night drive up to the top of Cadillac Mountain. This mountain isn’t big by any stretch of the imagination, but it is on the water front. So come midnight, four of us were sitting on top of the peak talking (with Eric Munsing bouncing around taking tons of awesome photos). We starting talking some about the upcoming year, and then it happened: someone asked the question about what I was doing.

I struggled for a bit discussing what my original plan was, and then just decided to talk. I explained that I didn’t know exactly what I was doing because at that point I did not have enough resolution to adequately judge the paths ahead of me. I then pointed to the trails below us and said, “What if I looked down at the forest, and traced a path for you to follow. Since we are so high up, you’d be sure to end in the right place, but here is the catch: you couldn’t deviate from the path at all.”

With this statement, we all agreed that it would be silly to plan the path entirely from on top of the mountain and not alter the path at all. Sure there is some danger in deviating from the path (just ask Little Red Riding Hood), but it is also dangerous to never deviate from the path. Consider if I had told Bennett to follow a path that led him right into a tree, or perhaps down a steep slope that I couldn’t make out from 1000 ft above.

With this realization, it hit me. I realized that it was okay not to know exactly what I was doing, as long as I had a vague sense of what I’d be spending my time doing. I realized that during the year, I’d have many opportunities to make choices and it would be better to make the choices in the moment, when I had more information about my surroundings, than standing far away. Perhaps these choices meant that I’d end up in a different place at the end of the trail, but I’m alright with that. I live for the path I’m walking down, not the spot I end at.

All this being said: I do have a few projects that I’m working on, and so watch in the next few days for information on each of these.