Time spent in nature gives me confidence that patterns will emerge from even the toughest problems — and beautiful things will grow from the mud.

Have you ever been in a meeting with a bunch of people and felt like everyone is holding back? You hear people making statements, but the statements have no soul. Their bodies are in the room, but they are not authentically present. As a result, you end up with a bunch of stale, careful statements about what someone thinks someone else wants to hear. Here are a few tips to avoid these scenarios and be your most authentic self at work.

A meditation on sameness, snowflakes & nothingness. I went this weekend to a place in the woods called Pacem in Terris. One hour north of the city of Minneapolis. This is a place where you can spend time in solitude. Uninterrupted. For as long as you like. I thought just under 2 days would be about right for me this time.

My partner and I came up with a plan to buy a cheap house, fix it up and sell it. So we saved up some cash (with the help of some friends who let us trade work for a stay in their empty condo), took advantage of the first-time-home-buyers program stimulating the market in 2009, and bought a short-sale in South Minneapolis. Here’s how it went.

From low-fi, hand-drawn sketches to wireframes or clickable demos, we recommend prototyping with both your stakeholders as well as target users. Sometimes our prototypes are solely for the internal team to vet out interaction patterns. We often focus on an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) release. However, MVP is not an excuse to suck.

In terms of advertising, what’s holding back responsive web design is our desire to apply an old monetization model to new ways of publishing content…and it’s not working.