Vital Ideation

Grafting Technology Into Clothing

2008-05-10T12:32:00.000-07:00

For a long time, people have thought about how “cool” it would be to have our electronics embedded right into the things we wear. Why carry your cell phone in your pocket when you can have it woven into your shirt? The realistic incarnation of this and other similar ideas have many flaws that prevent it from becoming a mainstream process. There are, however, many places where technology imbued clothing becomes highly sought after and extremely advantageous.

One of the first places I encountered this principal of high-tech clothing was actually through the book “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson. In the story, there are agents that walk around with their computers strapped to their bodies and are always plugged into the “Metaverse” (Snow Crash’s successor to the internet). In the book these people are called “Gargoyles” and are talked about with a negative connotation. The book goes out of its way however to make the things strapped to them as an extremely outlandish display of poorly grafted technology.

There is one particular area where integration of technology into clothing highly interests me and is being actively persued. Future Force Warrior is a US military initiative that is part of the Future Combat Systems Project. As our military heads into the 21st century, they are trying to develop more effective techniques to make our ground combatant more effective. One interesting aspect of the future force warrior is a new dichotomy between a network of both autonomous and remote controlled vehicles being controlled from anywhere in the world.

There are a lot of buzzwords that the military uses when describing what a soldier might look like by 2032. They want clothing and personal gear that uses anything from nanotechnology, artificially powered exoskeletons, to magnetorheological fluid, which is a science fiction holy grail of bullet proof armor. The one thing that the military does not particularly care about is whether or not the general public wants to wear these pieces of technology. For the military, the social stigmas that occlude technological garb in the standard civilian world do not exist.

The military uniform situation is another place where it is relatively easy to justify the existence of all of this technology embedded within the clothing. The military is notorious for going to extreme financial measures for incremental improvement in their fighting capabilities. If it can help a soldier be slightly more effective at his or her job without being detrimental itself, then it is a justified component to have included.

Throughout the past few hundred years, the uniform of an armed service man has changed only in material and look. Modern uniforms use sophisticated techniques to conceal and camouflage, while colonial troops displayed bright colors to distinguish friend from foe. I think that the future, however, is going to see an extremely large change in the concept of military uniform. If the military gets everything that they want within the next few decades, soldiers will have to “boot up” their uniforms and will be encased in a suit grafted with a mesh of sophisticated technological enhancements.

Final Reflection-- Why Vital Ideation isn't over for me.

2008-05-10T11:57:00.000-07:00

Summary: I am still not sure about myself as a designer in the context of having gone through all of vital ideation’s lenses, because feel like I still haven’t tapped into a lot of the value of this course. So, I’m going to keep taking it, on my own. :)
Vital Ideation has not really felt like a course to me until this point. The course itself was a Spring 2008 course organized by Olin students, and the was the idea of viewing the world through different "lenses" to influence design. The reason I signed up for the course in the first place was largely instinctive. I was a part of the early meetings when students talked about their ideas for “student-led courses” when vital ideation came up as an idea, but the impulse for actually taking the class was twofold. The first thing to note was that I often told myself: “I would probably love that class,” or even “I’m going to end up taking that class, as busy as I may be.” The second thing of note was other people, who, especially later on would tell me “You know you’ll love this class” or “You know you’re going to take this class.” Well, I signed up, and I am very glad I did.
Now the semester is over, I’m supposed to be done, but I’m not. In fact I’m sitting in the middle of a lounge in the middle of the night trying to synthesize this course, trying to find what personal value is buried for me, and I can’t really find it. I can’t for the life of me think about how this course has made me truly different, in a truly factual and accurate way. That is not to say that I don’t think I’ve learned much from the course, but I feel like its true value is still not known to me. I really do think that vital ideation isn’t over for me at all. The semester has ended, yes, but the class is definitely not over. In fact, the class feels like it is ready to begin, as corny as that may sound. I feel very strongly that vital ideation for me has been nothing more than a springboard for something of personal value that I can’t discern yet. I’ve spent something around 50 hours this semester, with and without others thinking, reading, writing, but mostly talking about a lot of different topics. It is easy to say that the course was about a variety of design lens, and that the end result is a dozen students who are now more aware about their ability to apply lenses to design, but that’s not so true for me.
In the end, I didn’t spend too much time this semester brainstorming and ideating around specific topics like designing for fun, or ecomimicry, or anything remotely close to designing for the next guy. All those were topics for vital ideation, but none of these things hold any real value to me as design lenses. I actually felt like all of our talks were simply an opportunity to engage in discussion with other students and faculty about a variety of topics, and much of the value for me was found in generating the (few) blog posts I did, reading other’s posts, and spending hours on the web finding what other people have written about similarly to myself and others. More value was found in our evening discussions, how they came up in different forms later, how they added to reflection from the UOCD course, and how all of it together made me somehow a bit different. Right now I don’t feel closure when it comes to this class at all. I’ve written about the things I feel strongly about, and started writing about the things I didn’t really care about so much, and then stopped. The most interesting thing for me about this class is how well it has connected with other things, and it is these examples I would like to reflect a bit more on.
First of all, I kept a notebook for a week or two, then spent hours writing about how much carrying design notebooks was a silly fad, and then stopped keeping the notebook. It wasn’t really intentional in that my notebook was buried under a pile of books and left there, but I certainly didn’t care enough anymore to look for it. It is interesting to see how the notebook changed for me, not physically as in what I wrote in it. Rather, it is my interaction with this notebook that changed for me. At first keeping a notebook was a “man, I should do that” sort of thing, but it soon turned into a “well, I’m doing it now, right?” sort of thing, where I couldn’t really seem to sync myself to having and carrying a notebook. It felt so artificial to me, that I stopped writing notes in it, except for very sparingly. I stopped “ideating” with it altogether very quickly and then turned it into a personal notes book for tasks, work, and any other thoughts that I might multitask by writing during a boring French class or ten. Eventually, as I mentioned already I left the notebook behind, and I’m glad I did. I found that pretending to keep an up to date record of my thought processes was not realistic. I have learned this semester that I think mostly out loud. I tend to talk a lot, and most of it is on the fly, not really knowing what comes five words later. Sometimes the most insightful things I feel I say I don’t actually understand until 5 minutes after I’ve said it. The result of this is that I wouldn’t record things accurately in a notebook, since I felt like I was recording meaningless things. Also, much of my thought process is dependent on clearing my mind and just thinking about something, which didn’t match up too well with recording my every thought on paper for a course, or even for myself.
The second point of connection that this course has had for me also syncs up nicely with another one of my blog posts, which originally was written halfway through the semester. I was a part of a one-credit education research project this semester which involved going on a trip to a high school in rhode island called the MET. We spent a lot of time reading and talking about the school, as well as an entire day at the school and many meetings afterwards to debrief on our experience. This course is also something I think hasn’t really gotten the closure I normally feel when a class ends. There is a lot more about this MET school trip and experience left uncovered. My second blog post was about connecting social networking elements with education and the school environment, something that was a very easy connection to make having seen students interact with both during school, even myself. I won’t get into the specifics here, because I want to reflect at a bit of a higher level than this, but overall I found multiple areas of this notion of connecting social networking and pedagogy that paralleled my experience at Olin, the MET, high school, elementary school, as well as through my siblings and others in general. In fact, I hope to ask a handful of students to actually read my blog post, because I know it will spark a discussion that will be infinitely more useful and valuable to me than that blog post was, even though I felt like I did get a lot out of the thought that went into that post.
Another point of connection for me was actually the art and engineering discussion that we had over the course of the semester. I was never able to put this talk and discussions we had about the talk into a blog post however. I always felt like I hadn’t really thought about anything interesting enough to connect to outside of what I had written about for one of my UOCD design reflections, which was as all about how design is a very akin to art. I spent a lot of time talking to my team about UOCD and how it was presented to others in our class. Without a doubt UOCD is one of the most polarizing courses at Olin as far as student reactions and feedback for the course. I personally loved the class, but I am still quite confused about how students seem to feel that the course should have been much more structured and deterministic. It seems like telling students that UOCD was an art class might have made it a lot more digestible as a course for a lot of people. I could try to explain my thought process here a bit more, but I’ll jump to another topic now.
There really is only one thing left for me to say about this course. I’ve decided that I’ve written about everything that I felt I really connected with well this semester. The only exception to this was the design for fun module, which I read other people’s posts for. I’m aware that the course description says that we needed something like 8 blog posts, but I think I’m going to stop at my four right now. (My first post was meant for both sticky ideas and notebooks, hence the length.) I’d much rather spend another 15 hours reading other people’s posts and hoping they spark future interesting discussions that write about topics I currently feel I have nothing new to say. So, after finishing this blog post I think I’ll be spending a couple hours over the course of the next week continuing to take Vital Ideation, but for myself, not really for credit. In the end it doesn’t really matter if I get credit.
Summary: I am still not sure about myself as a designer in the context of having gone through all of vital ideation’s lenses, because feel like I still haven’t tapped into a lot of the value of this course. So, I’m going to keep taking it, on my own. :)

Design for Fun -- The Needham Science Center

2008-05-09T20:30:00.000-07:00

The Needham Science Center is an absolutely ridiculous place full of well-designed educational materials. According to the email that I sent out to some students, the Needham Science Center has "a life-sized model of a whale, over thirty live animals, fantastic demonstrations that have been around since the 1960’s, a severed crocodile head that they found in a bottle of formaldehyde (which they unfortunately had to get rid of), and mysterious boxes stacked to the ceiling full of ridiculously awesome stuff that need to be sorted through!"

What the Needham Science Center actually does is travel around to all the elementary schools in Needham and give demonstrations and teach lessons for the kids. It's been around since the 1960's, and it was actually going to get closed down a few years ago. The parents in the area then raised over $200,000 in six weeks to keep the place open.

The things I mentioned earlier are pretty awesome. But that's not the half of it -- I forgot to mention the hundreds of animal skulls, the thousands of books, the dozens of Rube Goldburg machines, and the plethora of dead animals including numerous dead birds, tons of dead dear and moose, a number of dead deadly cats, a pair of dead polar bears, and one dead sea otter. The pictures don't do them justice. It's a lot of dead animals!

The live animals include a doves, rats, frogs, toads, snakes, owls, madagascar hissing cockroaches, crickets, a tarantula, turtles, lizards, a ferret, a chinchilla, and more. They told me that they used to have over eighty live animals, but that they had to cut back because they just didn't have the personnel to take care of them.

There are dozens of neat displays packed in the basement. For example, there are optics demonstrations for your arm disappearing, an intangible quarter floating in the air, a ferret changing color before your eyes, and a head floating in midair. There are fantastic contraptions demonstrating electricity and magnetism as well. For instance, there is a bike that you can ride to power a light bulb and a Van de Graff generator that's five feet tall.

One cool display was about bird calls. Stepping on the pedal lightly would light up the picture of a bird. Stepping on the pedal hard, a mechanical contraption would produce the sound of that bird!

When we went to help out today, we sorted thousands of rocks. Opening a random box, we'd find things like a chunk of topaz, labled "8" signifying its Moh's hardnesss. Or we'd find a well-sealed capsule containing a block of fibrous rock labeled "asbestos". You just never know what sort of crazy stuff you'd find in there!

All of the large displays in the science center are hand-built. A lot of the stuff is made of wood, nailed together, and spray-painted. There's a pretty nice toolshop in the basement for putting everything together. There's a vertical bandsaw, a drill press, and hundreds of hand tools. There are plenty of wires, switches, battery holders, circuit elements,lightbulbs, and the like for adding any electrical components. It really makes you think about the types of crazy people who built all that stuff over the years, and what they had in mind when they were designing it. Although most of the stuff is either rusting, chipping, rotting away by now, when you wipe off the dust and give it a go, most of the stuff still works. And for the stuff that doesn't work, if you look at the circuit and replace a part it'll usually come to life.

I can easily see how the resources in the Needham Science center can be used to intrigue, enlighten, and entertain the young minds of the children around here. The people who put there heart into these displays simply knew what they were designing for. They designed things that were educational, and they designed things that were fun. Educational and fun, fun and educational, thats what the Needham Science Center is about!

Design for Fun -- A Children's Museum Done Right

2008-05-09T20:23:00.000-07:00

After Ellen Thompson gave us a lecture and free tickets to the Boston Children's Museum, I went out there to check it out. And I must say, I was extremely impressed by the stuff I saw there!

The museum itself is rather small; I stopped by every exhibit in two and a half hours. But it was so fantastically well designed! Everywhere I looked, everything was colorful, or moving, or you could climb it, or touch it, or play with it!

What are the exhibits that I thought were the awesomest? I didn't take any pictures while I was there, but letsee what we got:

A. Climb
The first exhibit that you see upon entering the museum is the Climb. You can't tell from the picture, but the thing is three stories tall! Little kids climb from platform to platform, high up into the air. It gets them moving, and it gets them to judge distances and take risks!

B. Kid Power
I liked this exhibit a lot. The children got to use bikes and pulleys and such to generate motion. But there were a lot of hands-on displays which taught children about eating healthy and balancing diet and exercise -- an especially important topic in today's society!

C. Bubbles
This was just fun! The kids just got to make enormous bubbles! There were all sorts of crazy contraptions for making the things, you could make circular ones, rectangular ones four feet long, or ones that came up and encircled your body. Absolutely enchanting!

D. Raceways
Imagine a room full of a couple thousand golfballs whizzing around. Spinning, rolling, going up, going down, loop-the-looping, making the jump... Talk about testing out the laws of motion! It was pretty cool.

E. "The Common"
This wasn't really an exhibit, but it was a cool place to hang out! The well-designed and fun objects there included a chess set that had pieces almost as large as the children, and a projector shining butterflies onto the wall which would fly around and land on you!

F. Johnny's Workbench
I only began to do woodwork for the first time this semester, and these kids get to try it out at such a young age! These kids got to don miniature aprons and safety goggles and hack some wood apart, then build them into little boats. The tools they had access to included screwdrivers, files, hammers, and hacksaws (not kidding!).

G. Construction Zone
This was a pretty fun exhibit. They had some actual construction machines, and plenty of things to climb on, build, and play around with.

H. Boston Black
This was an exhibit dedicated to Boston's African American culture. Some parts of America still have a lot of racial tension, so it is good to see an exhibit designed to teach about black culture to children of such a young age.

I. A Japanese House
Speaking of different cultures, check out this exhibit! Get this -- they have an actual house, shipped from Japan, in their museum. Cool!

J. Recycle Shop
They sell all sorts of junk here, but the point is, it teaches children about recycling. It's great for children to learn about such an important topic early on.

In short, this a museum in which I feel they got things right. There are a lot of elements which fit my definition of fun from my previous post. There is a lot of running around, climbing, building, and playing. In addition, they emphasize extremely important topics for young children: they cover exercise, eating right, different cultures, and recycling. It's just an awesome place!

Design for Fun -- The Healthiest Kids I Have Ever Seen

2008-05-09T20:15:00.000-07:00

Some of the happiest memories of my life are in the kindergartens and elementary schools in Okinawa, Japan. Here, I was introduced to the healthiest kids that I have ever seen in my life.

The children are insane. They are fantastically cute, but they'll swarm and tackle you. Naturally, you counter by picking them up, tossing them sky-high, flipping them over, and spinning them around.

They are always running, and have an incredible amount of energy! I was in pretty good shape at the time, yet I would get outrun and left breathless by seven-year-old children in a game of tag.

The playground design was excellent. You reguarly saw things like 20-foot high slides that were ten feet wide and which were designed to be extremely low friction -- low enough that it wasn't possible to climb up the slide. The kids went down that thing fast! Yes, those are kindergarteners in that picture.

These children had no fear. I recall a playground at another kindergarten which had 15-foot high poles going straight up in the air. Kids of six or seven would climb straight up, hang from the horizontal bar, and laugh.

These kids would really get into the games that we played. Take, for instance, a game of duck duck goose. It was hilarious for all of us everytime a kid slipped and sprawled and skid halfway accross the floor because he was going so fast.

The kids were also sweet and had a good sense of right and wrong. For instance, if you left your wallet full of cash somewhere, then they'd find you and bring it to you. They wouldn't even peek inside.

These kids listened to their teachers. As rowdy as they usually were, when it was time for class, they would sit down and pay attention.

These children were also the nicest childern I have ever met. At the ten kindergartens and two elementary schools I taught at, never once did I see a child treat another child unfairly. Isn't that amazing?

These were also the happiest children I have ever seen. Of the 750+ children who I taught, I recall one time, just once, when I saw a kid not smiling. She wasn't sad, she was just not smiling. In America, her expression would have passed as "normal". However, at the school, I saw during the couple hours I was there, a dozen classmates and several teachers ask her with a concerned look on their faces, "daijobou ka?"

I used to teach at two elementary schools as a high-school student in America. The children there were extremely sweet, but it also had a lot of elements that I found largely absent in Okinawa. For example, in Okinawa, there were far less children acting like they had ADD, there were far less children bullying others, and there were far less children who were overweight and eating fries. What a disparity!

Okinawa has one of the highest life expectancies in the world. This is attributed to, in part, the diet high in goya (bitter melon), seafood, and most deliciously, pork. However, I think it's also because the lifestyle that the children have here is really, really, really healthy.

From Okinawa, I learned that happy is healthy, healthy is fun, and fun is happy. And I also learned (for a fact!) a number of things that are really really fun and happy and healthy:

- constantly running around

- constantly screaming

- constantly horsing around

- constantly being rowdy

- constantly being kids!

Sticky Ideas -- Sticky DS

2008-05-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

In our lecture on sticky ideas, Steve Gold introduced stickiness not as an idea, but rather as a product. In other words, what makes an product sticky? I recall a product that was introduced to me several months ago, and which has stuck with me since:

Well, yes, it's just a Nintendo DS. But make sure to buy that hardware that allows you stick a 4 gigabyte mini-SD card in the thing and run whatever you want.

What are some things that this set up can do? Let's see:

A. Emulate

Think about all your favorite DS games. Now imagine being able to load a whole bunch of them on a single cartriage and play them for free. I'm not condoning piracy, this is just what you could do if you wanted to. By downloading Brain Age, a Megaman game, and the new Advance Wars, you've more than recuperated the cost of the hardware. Next, think about how that was illegal as hell, and feel guilty about how you just screwed over all the game programmers and their families, you inconsiderate bastard!

Alternatively, you could download a bunch of freeware games instead.

B. Teach

There is a lot of homebrew software out there for teaching academic subjects. One very well-designed piece of software that was shown to me was a simple dictionary. It was smooth and easy to use. For instance, if I wrote down an Asian character on the touch screen, it would look up the definition in Chinese, look it up in Japanese, translate it to English, and pronounce it for you, if you so chose.

Another neat thing it could do was teach you actual subject matter. For instance, say you were trying to learn another language. It would explain the material, quiz you on the material, pronounce things for you, keep track of the things that you got wrong, go back to the things that you missed, and even give encouragement appropriately. The person who was showing me the product told me, in Chinese, "I felt that I was forgetting my Japanese, so I started using this Japanese program that teaches Korean." Yay, fun!

C. Instruct you on Cooking

Pick a recipe; or, search hundreds of recipes based on what ingredients you have available, the number of people you're serving, the amount of time you'll need to prep, etc. The DS will then go through, step by step, exactly what you needed to do for preparation and show you pictures and explanations on how to do it. The pictures are clear, and the product will even read the steps out loud to you. Everything is well ordered, so your carrots are chopped at the beginning and not right before you're hurrying to throw them in. Furthermore, your hands are probably busy, so you can just set the DS on the counter and voice-activate it. Just say, "next step", "repeat that", "louder", etc! Basically, it's just really well designed (if you like Japanese food, anyway).

In general, there are a number of things that I noticed that made the setup sticky. It was easy to use, it was useful, it was easy-to-use enough and useful enough so that you used it, it was hella personalized (the one that was shown to me was completely pink with a pink stylus and pink earphones). Furthermore, you loaded the applications that were personally useful (For instance, I'd probably have the Japanese - Chinese - English dictionary, but not the Korean or French ones). In the end, everything was so smooth with cute graphics and simple animations -- the thing just stuck with me.

Most of the apps are homebrew, so there is a pretty active community. I heard that high-schoolers in Japan would use it to study, because it's useful (and fun!). For those of you wondering about availability, to the best of my knowledge most of the programs are in Japanese, with English being the second most common.
In any case, I want one!

Introduction to Vital Ideation -- Notetaking

2008-05-09T19:29:00.000-07:00

Starting about two years ago, I began to experiment out of neccessity with various methods of taking notes. I had a job that could be tricky at times, hundreds of contacts to keep track of, and a dozen little things that changed every day which I needed to pay careful attention to. I did have access to many of the tools that seem to be so familar to Olin College students: namely, email and outlook calendar. However, I often needed to be able to keep track of events while I was on the move, and it was usually a bad idea to bring a laptop along.

The following are my experiences with but a few of methods with which I played around with:

A. Hipster PDA

The Hipster PDA is a cult classic among GTD fans, but I found it not to my liking. I couldn't stand the bulkiness, and, quite surprisingly, I found that access just took too long. Do you know how long it takes to remove that little binder-clip? I gave up on mine within a week.

B. Small Notebook

I use these to keep track of contacts. When I went to volunteer activities before coming to Olin, I would bring my notebook with me. It was great for collecting people's contact information! I got this one after I moved into the area this year -- hopefully, it will be a lot more full after this summer!

C. Post-Its

So, the picture is kinda how I use them nowadays... Anyway, these were extremely convenient back in the day when I had to work with a phone and a desk. They were perfect for taking quick notes, and you could stick them in visible places or on relevant papers and organize them in whatever way you wished. However, when you were on the move, I found the next method to by much more handy:

D. Index Cards

Unlike Post-It Notes, which will fall apart in your pocket, index cards are durable enough to repeatedly stuff in your trousers and take with you on the go. They are the perfect size, and fold up nicely as well. Back in the day, I used to keep them attached with a pencil as shown in the photograph. These are extremely handy and easy to access for the dozen times a day when I had to jot down a note. As things got done and I crossed them off, or when everything just got too messy, I would copy the relevant information into the computer, into a notebook, or onto another index card.

E. Design Notebook

This is a relatively new note-taking method for me; I only started using it last semester in Design Nature. I used it to write, sketch, and design, and I had all my notes in one place, which ultimately saved a lot of time. I ended up liking my design notebook so much, that I filled the whole thing up partway through the second project! However, this item doesn't seem like the type of thing that was especially convenient to use to just jot things down whenever; rather, it was much better to use as something to take with you to an empty classroom at four in the morning when it's nice and quiet to just sit down and work. Nevertheless, for this course, I carried my notebook with me wherever I went and jotted town ideas when they came up.

Now that I am at Olin college, my laptop usually follows wherever I go. Nonetheless, I find that I still prefer to keep track of a lot of things with the methods that saved my life. The non-electronic methods are simply irreplaceable -- the ability to sketch, the speed with which you can jot things down and convey ideas, the lack of start-up time, the fact that you don't run out of power, the replacability, the feel of pencil on paper, and the ability to sort and organize in a hands-on fashion -- these are reasons why I prefer to take notes the way I do.

The Best 10 Video and Television Ads

2008-05-09T19:15:00.000-07:00

10. Pepsi Jimi Hendrix “Phew that was a close one”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao6JntNIPHc

In 2004, Pepsi socked it big time at one of the largest commercial rivalries on the planet. Little Jimi Hendrix at age 11 equally spaced between the coke machine and the pepsi machine. Definitely shows the product, and makes excellent play off of the well known coke-pepsi rivalry. Also very funny. Doesn’t directly pitch the products, but ads a lots of “between the line” commentary that the viewer extrapolates from the short.

9. FedEx “Carrier Pigeons”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFGq0j4u15s

FedEx has lately had relatively large success with its most recent advertising campaigns. This commercial starts off mildly interesting as the man explain carrier pigeons to his bewildered boss. As the commercial progresses, it just gets more and more ridiculous until he explains how “big packages” are handled. At that point hilarity ensues. FedEx did an excellent job of mixing humor with their underlying message of responsible, efficient delivery systems.

8. Don’t squeeze the charmin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bl9uwFiXFY

1960s advertising at its finest. “Don’t Squeeze the Charmin” practically invented reverse psychology and to this day is still joked about (and even used in modern Charmin commercials). A little before my time, but still a classic that deserves to be on this list.

7. 2000 E-Trade “Wasted 2 Million Bucks”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnQMq5wtZcg

Okay, this commercial is just plain funny. I mean there’s a monkey dancing and two really out of beat guys playing along. Beneath this very simple humor, however, is a grand story about dot-coms at the turn of the millennium. The dot-com fever in silicon valley ran so high that venture capital money was flowing by the millions from all corners of the street. This ad represented the epitome of one of the big dot-coms of the day. The complete divergence from a “normal” advertisement ensures that it catches your attention and the monkey with the etrade logo definitely gets the name out there. For those in tune with the times, people caught on to the underlying message.

6. 2001 E-Trade “Chimp on a Horse”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONZFkqzuMjI

This one directly is intentionally placed right next to the 2000 E-Trade commercial. These two commercials actually say a lot about the time from which they represent. The chimp on a horse passes by the shadows of the dot coms after the bubble burst to the sound of dreary music and a ghost-town like scene. Then just to sum it up at the end, a sock puppet lands in front of the monkey who starts to cry. That sock puppet was a play at the iconic logo of pets.com. In 2000 pets.com had millions of startup money and flopped when the bubble burst. Once again, has e-trade’s logo prominent and makes a great 1-liner punch at the end: “Invest Wisely.”

5. Budweiser “Whassup” (Original 1999)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W16qzZ7J5YQ

WHASSSSSUP!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Need I say more?

4. Budweiser “What are YOU doing?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7iv7VNTkEA

This was the Budweiser making fun of itself in an incredibly masterful way and creating one of the funniest cultural phenomenons that made the Whassup campaign only more successful. The original whassup campaign made characters doing something so completely outlandish that it instantly became an aspect of pop culture. After some continued pushing by Budweiser, most notably the “What are YOU doing” ad, they secured “whassup” forever in the popular culture dictionary. And yet, they also successfully placed the actual product at the critical beginning and end of the ad. “Watching the game, having a bud” is also associated with this cultural masterpiece.

3. Dove “Evolution”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U

This exceptional video made by Dove as part of their “Campaign for Real Beauty” is a masterpiece of a film and became an instant internet phenomenon. While not directly advertising any product, they ad conveys a very well executed and powerful message that made itself well known in the online community. It even spun off a lot of parodies. One of them is done almost as well as the original. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-kSZsvBY-A&NR=1

2. Microsoft redigns the ipod

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0

This isn’t necessarily a widely televised ad per say, but it is still an effective marking gimmick that became instantaneously successful on the internet. This video is actually written by the Microsoft internal graphic design department as a “what not to do” video. It was done so darn well that it makes a powerful, yet extremely entertaining statement about the two companies. Great music, really good design, and funny comments easily place this on my list

1. 1984 Apple Macintosh Commercial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

A lot of hype, an excellent theme, and some great cinematography is what puts this one on the top of my list. This is probably one of the most famous ads of all time and demonstrates a dark fantasy that George Orwell + Ridley Scott can do so well. From a design perspective, this ad is visually powerful and emotional. The dramatic contrast between the sporty female hero and the bleak oppressing Orwellian background is subsequently imbued upon the release of a computer system. Extremely effective subconscious branding. No product is being pitched here. No slogan is being said. Just a really cool commercial

Ownership in the 3rd World

2008-05-09T19:12:00.000-07:00

Shortly after Presdient Miller came to talk with us, I had a chance to speak with some representatives of the World Bank. They came to Olin to hear about how we built our school from the ground up, because they were interested in doing the same thing in 3^rd world countries. The World Bank initiatives in higher education were set up to establish tertiary education institutions all over the world in 3^rd world and developing countries. Throughout this meeting, the one principal that stood out to me most was the concept of ownership that we had discussed many times before throughout vital ideation.

I also remember when we were talking to Presdient Miller how he commented on the great sense of ownership that one feels in the establishment of our school. When we have this sentiment in place, everyone feels like they are a part of the system and each in turn contribute a large amount of effort and energy back into the school. While this is partly due to the fact that we are new, small, and filled with a unique brand of people, the concept of involvement through ownership is still something relatively universal.

The parallel that I saw most between Olin and World Bank funded colleges elsewhere in the world is that if students can be involved in feeling like they can actively contribute to the foundation of the institution, then they can create a continual sense of ownership as it evolves.

The principals of ownership in the 3^rd world also extend beyond universities. I think that one of the reasons that many NGOs and free-stuff campaigns in 3^rd world nations don’t perform as well as they should is because of an inherent lack of accountability and ownership. For example, for a long time, major AIDS campaigns in Africa were devoted to delivering large amounts of free condoms to people. One problem was that since they were free, the condoms were valueless. If those condoms, however, have a small amount of value attached to them, then even though they are still near free, they still have some value associated with them. People buy those condoms with a little bit of their own money and suddenly own them. Giving away free things is not necessarily an effective way of engaging people.

This principal of ownership is another reason why I think that entrepreneurial ventures in the small scale are a great way to help promote growth in 3^rd world countries. Business over there does not mean starting a multi-national food chain; rather it means starting a small corner-side shop, or providing a needed serves and capitalizing on it. This provides not only a stimulus to an impoverished economy, but also instills a sense of ownership in the many business owners of these many small businesses. Once they have a vested interest in something that they own and care about, they are far more likely to make a more dedicated and positive contribution towards their cause.

This is the message that the Babson Global Outreach through Entrepreneurship tries to convey with their trips to third world countries. Their mission is dedicated around instilling entrepreneurial spirit into places such as Uganda or Sri Lanka.

Whether it be a new college in Needham Massachusetts, USA, or a home-made jewelry stand in Mozambique, having ownership in a shared creation can be a powerful motivator to inspiring individuals and producing positive results.

Video Games: The Epitome of Fun?

2008-05-09T19:08:00.000-07:00

Barry Kurdowitz, the MIT Toy Professor, came to talk to us, he identified various areas that make something a toy and make something fun. He identified a toy product as something designed to function primarily for play. Furthermore, there were various aspects that identified types of play. The ones that Barry used were sensory, fantasy, construction and challenge. He then went on to identify that these four attributes could be almost used as the axis of a graph to identify how various toys were used and perceived.

As Barry was talking about these various aspects, the examples he used were very distinctly physical and tangible toys. They included everything from dolls to Nerf guns to a cardboard box. For some reason he very briefly mentioned the realm of video games, but these electronic forms of entertainment were definitely not the focus of his presentation. While I think that Barry was right to not include the market of video games into his presentation, I believe that this can-of-worms is revolutionary in the fact that many video games exemplify everything that Barry defined to be “fun.”

The video game industry is an enormous international market with many different outlets. The NPD group reported that the video game industry was worth on the order of $10 billion. When I look at many of the extremely popular video games, I see many of them masterfully encompassing nearly all of Barry’s four qualities that he talked about. For example, look at the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG). There are an estimated 16 million subscribers for all MMORPGs, of that about 10 million are subscribed to the extraordinarily popular World of Warcraft series.

The common thread between many of these MMORPGs is that your avatar enters a massive world with millions of other players and embarks on social and self-enhancing quests. These games are extraordinarily sensory with rich visuals and sound. They have enormous degrees of fantasy as magical kingdoms or far off space battles unfold. They are highly constructive as players spend enormous amounts of time building their optimal character. They are finally very challenging as players are faced with increasingly more difficult tasks to encounter.

From the perspective of sensory, fantasy, construction, and challenge, video games such as MMORPGs should be one of the most “fun” things you can do. To an extent, this is true for some people as World of Warcraft is notorious for being overly addictive and destroying lives. However, if video games are the ultimate of “fun,” then why aren’t there more people playing video games?

This question is an extremely controversial one that can argued forever. However, I think that there are few very significant factors that prevent things like MMORPGs from becoming the ultimate in “fun.” First of all, there are lots of social stigmas placed against many video games. While many people may find World of Warcraft “fun,” most of them may not be inclined to partake in the activity in the first place. Even though there are video games that encompass many different fields and many different subjects, many people are still adverse to the concept of drawing their entertainment from a video screen.

This leads to another very interesting limitation in video games. For the most part, they are not tangible things. One crucial aspect about “fun” activities is having a tangible object to interact with. The idea of interacting with a mouse and keyboard is unappealing to many, but when the Wii introduced a whole new way of tangible interaction, an entirely new market of gamers was born.

Now what if we could take this abstraction to a whole new level in the future?

What if the games we played were extremely tangible? Imagine a video game that had the richness and depth as a modern MMORPG but could become something that was extremely real and tangible. This is starting to sound a lot like a “Holodeck” from Star Trek or other similar science fiction show. However, this is one of the reasons why I think a true holodeck is a very bad idea. If we made something that could tangibl fulfill our sensory, challenging, and constructive fantasies, then would we have something that was too fun. Would the addition to something this fun be overwhelming to society? Luckily, nothing like a holodeck exists…. Yet.

Modern Art

2008-05-09T19:00:00.000-07:00

Kandid's Gallery:

The images shown here are true works of modern art pulled directly from metropolitan museum of modern art. They are all works by one eclectic artist named Kandid. Imagine each of these paintings framed on well-lit wall. Imagine the plush benches and the midst of minimalist spaces with people slowly passing from painting to painting. Imagine people in hushed tones conversing about their perceived perceptions of these intricate images. “Where do these colors come from?” “Are they abstract representations of a bleak and sordid life of the artist interwoven amongst the faint outline of a flawless circle – a circle representing a flawless harmony found within the simple color palette?” When put in this kind of setting, and perspective, these small thumbnails come alive. They suddenly are more than various colored pixels, they are expressions of humanity – they are art. When I look at these images, I can see a carefully constructed human decision to express meaning and message with these colors, shapes and patterns. In the perspectives of modern art, they are very interesting and common examples of abstractness of human emotions, thoughts, scenes, and desires.

Even though these paintings seem abstract, the carefully selected combinations of colors, lines, and patterns serve a purpose to the whole of the painting. They represent the optimal point in the artist’s ultimate creative vision. Just know something about the artist, Kandid, I know that every single stroke and line is there for a purpose. When you know that every gradient and curve has thought, intention, and purpose, we begin to realize that seemingly random patterns in these images may not be random at all. This only exemplifies our appreciation for the artistic mastery of Kandid’s art pieces and justify the hubbub they are creating on the stark walls of this world-renowned art gallery.

Now please, before reading on, take a few moments to look at these works yourself. Take some time to analyze what Kandid was trying to convey with these three different and unique pieces. Talk about what it means to you and what you think it meant to Kandid.

The Art is in the Maker:

I think it’s now time to talk a little bit about Kandid, the artist that I’ve been raving about for the past few paragraphs. Kandid is probably one of the most unusual artists whose pieces you will analyze for their detail and intricate nature. Kandid actually has a webpage here: http://kandid.sourceforge.net/index.html . As I’m sure you’re aware of by now, Kandid is not human at all. In fact, it is a very sophisticated computer program that utilizes a new hot piece of computer science technology known as genetic algorithms. From the website:

“Kandid is a system to evolve graphics. Graphics, in Kandid, is not drawn by hand. Instead new forms can be found using genetic algorithms. To achieve this aim Kandid simulates evolution using sexual reproduction and populations. But there is no fitness function inside the program. Only the user decide which images are interesting."

To simulate evolution Kandid uses crossing over, mutation, populations and has a gene data base. Image calculation is based on Lisp like expressions, Iterated Function Systems (IFS), Linear Cellular Automata (LCA), Voroni diagrams, Lindenmayer Systems (L-systems), and layered textures renderd by Persistence of Vision”

Ecomimicry:

The question I rhetorically ask now is “Are Kandid’s productions Art? Can Kandid mimic human expression through art?” It is true that Kandid put a lot of “thought” into the color of every pixel and the direction of every line. Furthermore, Kandid used a process that is inherently very biological. Evolutionary and genetic algorithms rely on the process that got humans to where they are today. No two paintings will be exactly alike, just as no two biological offspring will be exactly alike. Each of the drawings that Kandid’s algorithms produced is unique and one of a kind. Can we say that Kandid did in fact create something unique?

While these may be just images and our minds may be relatively resolved one way or another, I also want to pose the question of what happens when our computer algorithms begin to mimic ecological functions such as evolution and genetics on a scale many orders of magnitude more complex than they are today. If a computer’s mimicry of nature approaches perfection, and we can no longer distinguish the end product of the two, then how do we determine ecology from ecomimicry?

What's happening to play?

2008-05-09T18:57:00.001-07:00

What’s happening to play?

Here’s a cool idea: give your kid a box. It’ll keep her entertained. And guess what? It’s cheap!

The interesting thing about toys is that kids have no say really in what gets bought. Parents make the final call on all purchases. And parents buy things they think are cool. Depending on a parent, a kid might get educational toys, or maybe they’ll get something outrageous and loud.

The thing about kids is that they’re really creative. Kids all over the place love to play with simple things like boxes, so why do we spend so much money on toys?

This questions hits pretty close to home for me since I have two sisters ages 4 and 9. I know it wasn’t too long ago, but when I was a kid, my sister and I kept each other company. We designed elaborate worlds with our friends to play our games in. One of my friends and I spent countless hours digging a hole in her backyard (in hopes of making a fort.) Every time we had a play date we’d dig deeper, for about a year. Somehow this kept us entertained. It must have made things easy on her parents too! And remembering all of this, I can’t remember a single toy that I used to be attached to. I had a calculator that I’d play with, and maybe a few plush animals. I remember playing with Hot Wheels and Polly Pockets occasionally, but mostly with things like Lego’s, Tinker Toys, and K’nex. Maybe this toy list for me happens to reflect my gravitation toward engineering, but I also feel like the toys I used to play with were things that let me be creative. Sure, K’nex gave me a little book to start off with, but after that I could just build whatever I imagined. And I never had trouble keeping myself amused.

The worst thing I can remember as a kid was running errands at Home Depot. This store was designed for people fixing up their homes-the last thing a kid wants to do. My sister and I used to go to the paint section together and play with all the different colors. After that we’d look at the countertop tile samples. We’d try to collect as many as we could every time we went. It was a game to try and remember how many we already had, and not to take too many that the man at the counter noticed.

So what’s wrong with the toys today? They’re educational, aren’t they?

Honestly, I can’t stand them. Maybe I’m idealistic about my childhood, but I see my sisters today who start whining as soon as they are apart from their Gameboys and Pokémon cards. I’ll usually try to suggest a game to them, but to no avail. They need something to keep them entertained. And this worries me a little. I guess it stands out because I can see the difference so clearly between my childhood and my little sisters, only about 10 years apart. I guess what bothers me about it is that as we (the toymakers) define a world more and more for these kids to play in, this leaves less and less room for the kids to imagine. And when you can get online and go to Neopets.com or to webkinz.com, why bother using your imagination? It’s all right there in front of you.

Play has transformed from some creative, fun interaction to some now form of managing assets given to you online, or playing by someone else’s rules. This is still play, but it’s radically different from my definition of play. I know this doesn’t tie into the idea of design too much, but my point here is that there’s an art to designing for fun. And that lies in the ability to create something that children can interact with in a way that allows them to fully be themselves, not something that constrains them to operating inside some outwardly defined criteria.

Teaching + Digital Communications = Multidisciplinary Fusion!

2008-05-09T18:06:00.001-07:00

On the subject of radical interdisciplinary design, we discussed in class the fusion of music and engineering, something I’m sure we will see posts about in the upcoming days. What I would like to talk about is the fusion of two disciplines which I have personally spent a lot of time thinking about before vital ideation, and am really excited to share with others. At first glance pedagogy and digital communications seem to have little in common. In fact, the notion of pedagogical research going hand in hand with network signaling and digital communications research seems outlandish and foreign at best. The thing is, any two disciplines must overlap in potentially powerful ways, and these two are no exception.

You can see from Figure 1 that the transmitter/receiver model is at least at a very basic level analogous to a teacher/student model where a lesson is transmitted to a student via some sort of signal. In this model a student’s receptivity to lesson X is based off their receptivity to specific teaching techniques. These techniques are used to varying degrees by a teacher, which can be depicted as the power spectral density of said teacher/transmitter’s transmit power, which in turn represents the amount of time teachers spend using a specific type of teaching technique. Figure 2 is a visual way to represent this last paragraph. You can see from the graph on the left, which shows professor “transmit” power as a function of the amount of time (shown on the vertical axis) they spend covering any material using different teaching techniques (shown on the horizontal axis.) Likewise the graph on the right shows student receptivity to different teaching techniques.

What a mouthful. To attempt to explain how this model might be useful, we consider the simple case of 30 students and a choice between two possible teaching techniques, Q_a = Auditory Learning and Q_b = Visual Learning. You can plot a student’s receptivity to these two teaching “techniques” on a two dimensional grid, where one axis is Q_a and the other is Q_b. The axes would range from 0->1 for each technique, where 1 is the hypothetical scenario were you as a student understand EVERYTHING that you learn using a specific technique. The ideal student would of course have a receptivity of 1 for both these values, but that wouldn’t make our model useful. The vector G₁would represent the 2-D vector representing these two student receptivities. We can create 30 students with randomly generated receptivity vectors [G₁, G₂, …G₃₀] such that each student’s total receptivity||G|| is within an arbitrarily-defined range such as 0.3 < || G|| <>

Now, in the digital communications world you represent the power spectral density of a signal by multiplying the transmit power and channel receptivity. For us this means that in order to determine amount learned we can multiply the learning technique time distribution vector (in our 2-d example) for a professor by a student’s receptivity vector (for the two techniques) to give the amount “received as a signal” by a student from each “technique” The sum of the area under this student curve is the “amount learned”!

I will conclude the following post with an explanation of the following figure, which shows the example case of our 30 randomly generated students and the imaginary teacher who hypothetically could teach them any possible range of two specific techniques. What this translates to in the end is the following choice for a teacher: How much time do I spend say, watching videos as opposed to lecturing? Now, this case is obviously ideal because we can’t assume that we will know the exact “receptivity” of each student to a specific technique, and that this directly translates to amount learned, but in this end this is just a model of a teacher/student system. Every model is broken right? The only perfect model of a classroom environment is the classroom itself!

Each parabola shown in the figure above represents the projected learning efficiency E for a given student across the different mixes of auditory and visual learning techniques output by a professor. The vertex of each parabola corresponds to the student being taught by a teaching style that most perfectly matches his(her) receptivity G_n This value corresponds to the mix that represents that student’s highest learning efficiency. If we were teaching only one student, we would therefore choose the Auditory-Visual mix to coincide with the student’s vertex in this plot. However, we must teach to the entire class; so how can we select the direction of T_x? If our goal were to teach at a rate that did not exceed any student’s learning efficiency, the plot above implies that we should select about an equal mix of Auditory and Visual techniques, and we should choose a teaching rate (i.e. learning efficiency) of approximately 0.27. Qualitatively speaking, this corresponds to the highest learning efficiency in the plot that is below every parabola (or, the teaching rate below every student’s maximum learning efficiency). Instead of choosing this “lowest common denominator” approach, we may elect to forgo the few students with the lowest receptiveness in order to increase our teaching rate. Based on our understanding of the figure, any intelligent selection will exist at either the intersection of two parabolas or at the vertex of a parabola. We therefore limit our search to these points. You could envision a graph where you highlight only these two types of points and as you eliminate students you would move further up on the graph and around to different points to maximize the learning efficiency for the remaining N students.

The process for choosing this path up the graph can also be described intuitively as follows. Imagine you pressed a single finger up from the bottom of the last image shown. It would naturally center itself at the highest vertex or parabola union, which corresponds to the teaching technique mix (and the maximum learning efficiency threshold) that you would use to teach all 30 students. Next, say you wanted to exceed this threshold; you would effectively “ignore” one of the lowest parabolas and move to the next highest available point. This would be akin to teaching above the maximum learning efficiency for one of your students. This allows your technique mix to adjust itself to find the next maximum point. We can also plot the learning efficiency threshold height as a function of the number of students above the threshold; as discussed above, you can expect the maximum available threshold to increase as the number of students above the threshold decreases. With one student, assuming of course that our professor can transmit something perfect to that student’s receptivities, you achieve a learning efficiency of 1. With a decreased number of students under the threshold you achieve a lower perfect teaching efficiency for those students.

You could envision a scenario in this model where you chose your teacher signal at a point along this “path” up the vertexes and parabola union points that would maximize the overall amount of learning in the classroom. The “perfect learning efficiency” model up to this point hasn’t taken into account the fact that in the end the choice of a teacher’s T vector will lie somewhere on the 2-D student receptivity space for each student, and that on this space each student has their own perfect learning receptivity point. A teacher wanting to optimize his signal output would first decide an acceptable threshold for student learning, and then determine which of these points minimizes the distance between all the students he(she) is trying to teach for.

I welcome others to come up with two other seemingly random disciplines and merging them together somehow! I'm sure you can think of something in a quick 10 minutes. The basic idea for this post came about after a discussion asking the question "What if all knowledge could be plotted on a n-dimensional grid?" Without meaning to this successfully put linear algebra and digital communications in the same discussion space as pedagogy and learning. There are many more questions where this one came from, the real question is, do you ask yourself silly questions often enough to find real value in some of them?

A “Myspace High School” Mindset

2008-05-09T16:49:00.001-07:00

PROBLEM: It has happened in elementary, middle and high schools across the United States,

Principals, teachers, school districts have complained that every day students would waste valuable "computer time" during school hours looking at Myspace, updating their profile or something of the sort. What's the value in that anyways? Right? …

SOLUTION: The result is that popular website such as Myspace, Facebook, and other social networking sites have been blocked so that students cannot go to them at all.

REACTION: The reaction, many students are bitter with the administration of the school, their teachers, who previously "nagged" them to stop using Myspace. Still other students have found one of the many ways to go around these blocks and still go to their favorite sites while professors aren't looking.

Am I advocating that schools allow students to use Myspace during school hours? No, not really. Actually not at all. What I'm actually going to write about has to do with how useful applying beneficial system-level patterns and behaviors such as those found in social networking sites to other contexts where the benefits should be translatable, such as schools. To do this we'll look at a sample scenario in the online social networking world and try to envision what a school environment would have that add similar benefits.

John comes home after a day of school that wasn't particularly interesting. He sits down at his computer at home, skims through his junk hotmail email that he left open this morning before school, then clicks on his myspace bookmark and quickly logs himself in to see what's new. No new messages it seems, but he has a handful of comments on his recent blog post titled "why I don't like math class" or something. He replies to the comments, then glances around some of his friend's profile pages for updates. He received a group event message for his "I love llamas" group, which he skimmed over but didn't really reply to. I could go on about John and his interactions on myspace, but that's not too exciting. …*etc*…

MySchool. (Yes, I know the name is silly.) Mary spent most of the day the same as any other school day. Her school had computers in every classroom, so she spent about a third of every school day working on projects and other things on the school laptops. This Friday her two last big social science blog entries on genetics are due. She almost finished one of these posts titled "my family history of diabetes." Not many people had yet uploaded their blog entries, so she wasn't able to get started reading the other 5 blog entries she was assigned to read and evaluate. She got home and went back to check her class's points in the intramural basketball league which see could track on the group page for her "MySchool." The school page let you chat with other students in your classroom during your open period of class, during lunch, as well as before and after school, but it wasn't active during other classes that might be having a lecture or a focused work day. For example, that day during Biology they'd had their final talk on genetics, and a couple times they'd been asked to quickly find a biology topic they though was interesting and upload a couple links to a new assignment page in their biology class folder. They had to stand up in small groups and present two of the articles they had come up with, and then the entire class had to write a short biology class bulletin on two of the topics they found interesting. The idea was that some students who hadn't started their genetics blog posts could get a head start themselves or with the help of others during these activities. In fact, Mary's second post was going to be about this bizarre epidemic in Papua New Guinea someone presented on that was aggravated by the cannibalistic tendencies of the tribes that were afflicted. Now that she was home though, Mary could stop worrying so much about class work and instead signed onto her school page to chat with some of her friends that were still at school or even home at this point. She was supposed to meet with a handful of people yesterday that she didn't get a chance to meet with about their final Math Podcast on their calculus topic of choice, which of course they hadn't gotten started on yet. …*etc*…

Well now. I'd be very interested to see what else people have to say about connecting social networking with the current student learning environment in high schools. There are certain school districts that are moving towards what is called "electronic portfolios," including the entire state of Rhode Island, where in 2008 15 schools have piloted a program which has begun to digitize the student learning experience. Who knows? Maybe US education would benefit from fusing the "biggest waste of student time" that is Myspace and electronic student portfolios.

The Creative School

2008-05-09T15:28:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty excited about what Alyshia wrote, and I'd like to write my post on radical interdisciplinary design focusing also on education. RID is pretty much taking multiple unrelated fields and trying to do something useful with them combined. In this case, I'm thinking about combining a variety of artistic, scientific and other such fields to create a school.

Looking back on the things that have fascinated me late in my high school career, I realized that I always loved fields, exercises, and assignments where I created things. This would be as opposed to taking info in, spitting it out, performing, or finding out-- though I had a reasonable love of the latter of those.

For example, I never learned much in English class until I tried to create my own language (which was incidentally after reading Lord of the Rings). Then subjects and objects made sense, and gradually other things fell into place. I never enjoyed poetry until I tried writing it on my own. I never enjoyed performing on my violin, but it led me into music composition, which I enjoyed immensely. And now, though I can stand applied physics and computer science theory, and so forth, I'm always doing projects on my own, and designing new things to do-- everything from learning programming languages to designing a simple computer to be made out of TTL chips.

So the idea here, the reason I'm writing all of this, is because it dawned on me: what if there was a school that taught everything in this style? If I could roughly divide the arts into the performing and the creative, it's always the creative ones I've enjoyed (this is not to say that dance, music, etc are not creative-- but I'd rather do choreography and composition).
Why not teach all the sciences in as hands-on a method as possible. And by the time we start thinking about the liberal arts, it's awesome!

So here are some of my ideas a curriculum (and keep in mind, this would be something aimed more towards the 5th to 12th grade, but that's sort of up in the air still).

Arts
-Music: music would be taught through composition. Students would also be able to learn instruments, because reading music and the ability to play other students' compositions are still valuable. It's hard to feel comfortable composing if you can't improvise on at least one instrument.
-Visual arts: Painting, drawing, sculpture would all be staples of the art program. Students would also be encouraged to push the bounds of art and integrate it into other fields. In some ways, aesthetic design.
-Dance: an emphasis would be placed on allowing students to choreograph their own dances and shows. Of course, dance would also have to be taught so students were comfortable with making their own.

English and Literature
-English: students would be able to create their own language, which would begin after learning a second language had begun, and presumably would tie into English
-Geography: learning about how geography impacts society, from the obvious levels usually covered to stuff on the scale of Guns, Germs and Steel, students would have the opportunity to create their own "countries" that they could give a geography, culture, religion/s, government, and so forth. I know I would have totally dug this assignment as a sixth grader.
-Literature: Emphasis would be placed on writing in imitation of all the styles read: short stories, novels, non-fiction, biographies, poetry, etc.

Science, Math
-Science: the focus of science would be on creation of projects and demos that show the principles learned. Special emphasis would be given to application (engineering?).
-Math: Personally, and I don't know how applicable this is to the younger grades, but a huge amount of emphasis could be placed on drawing connections between mathematic and scientific concepts. For instance, over the past few months, we've been studying Fourier and Laplace transforms in Signals and Systems in the context of circuits and electromagnetic waves. However, they also have application in mechanics, image processing (and compression), sound processing, voice recognition, and so forth. However, I had to investigate these things on my own, and I've been absolutely fascinated.

Anyhow, that covers some of my initial ideas for such a school. As is evident, it would be a setting for major RID-- all sorts of fields would be covered, some would be ignored, but all would be used in a way so as to give students confidence in their own creations by bolstering their ability to create and recreate anything that they'd like.

Teaching-a radical idea

2008-05-09T12:47:00.000-07:00

Take a bunch of kids.

Make a list of what they need to learn in school every year.

Get rid of school.

Take them to a museum instead. Not just any museum though. We’re going to take them to a museum specifically tailored to their education. All of the exhibits in this museum are going to be part of the curriculum, and the classroom is going to be the entire place. Students will still have a teacher, and project rooms inside the museum that can be requested for room. There will be a consortium of museums that work together so that exhibits don’t have to be changed too often. With this, we can have kids shuffle between museums, and get an amazingly hands-on education.

And why is a hands-on education better?

Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately in light of the educational discussions going on at Olin right now is the right way to learn. Olin preaches a hands-on engineering education. Being thrown into things and figuring them out for yourself, rather than being taught. One drawback to this is that this method of learning can be very discouraging, and when discouraged, if a student doesn’t put the work in to understand some key concepts they can very easily fall behind. Even though this method of learning can be very difficult, it’s the way I’ve always wished I could be taught throughout my high school career. I used to get upset that my teachers told me information, rather than giving me the tools to solve it myself. And I found that when I did do things on my own, I always internalized the concepts much more and retained them. When I arrived at Olin, one of my worst subjects was electronics. One of the things I loved about the way I was taught was that, as long as I put effort into learning and wanted to understand, I had a TA there who would not tell me the answers, but guide me in the right direction. This method of help made learning something difficult easier than it ever had been.

Because of the supportive environment at Olin, this method does a pretty good job of ensuring that people actually don’t fall behind. I think it’s a pretty different idea, and even though it’s probably not going to happen in museums, this idea could open up a lot of questions about education as it is now.

Why do kids have the curriculum they do? Is learning in a classroom actually effective? If it is, why do we try to incorporate so many hands-on activities for kids? And why don’t we have different stimulants for kids every day, rather than bringing them to the exact same place, with almost the same lesson..?

Interdisciplinary? What isn't?!

2008-05-08T16:53:00.000-07:00

The adjective interdisciplinary is most often used in educational circles when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand.

--Wikipedia

We live in the 21st century. The things that surround us are the artifacts of hundreds of years of people making stuff. We have language, literature, art. We have physics, electricity, and televisions. We have roads, stop signs, and crosswalks. We have plastic bottles, Gatorade, and recycling plants.

How many of these things could be produced by a sole practitioner of a single discipline?

Hard Problems

It turns out most of the simple stuff got solved a long time ago. There was an age when a carpenter, using nothing but his knowledge of woodworking, could crank out a furniture set for a family. I guess that's still true, but how much furniture is hand made anymore? Now we design for manufacture, design for shipping, design in line with the popular stylistic tastes. If you're going to be your own carpenter you probably also need to have a good business sense and understand how to file your taxes.

How many people does it take to design something of larger complexity - a car, for instance. The construction of the frame to deal with stress and crunch zones to protect passengers, the chemical composition of the tires to resist wear and grip the road in inclement conditions, the programming of the microcontrollers that fire the airbags and blink the turn signals, the optimization of the drive train to maximize fuel economy, the design of the body of the car to be aesthetically pleasing. Designers talk to electrical engineers talk to mechanical engineers talk to chemical engineers talk to machinists talk to salespeople and marketing talk to customers talk to plant operators talk to governmental regulation agencies.

It's All a System

We live in the most complicated system man has ever produced. I have borrowed a picture of it from Wikipedia. Pretend the part that says "System" means "everything man has ever created or done" and the part that says "Surroundings" means "stuff not on Earth" and you have a rough idea of it.

Now, we can of course define smaller sections of the System that encompasses humanity and its endeavors, but if we draw anything sufficiently large, we are going to draw a box around people with fundamentally different fields and views. The era of "Mechanical Engineer" vs. "Electrical Engineer" and "Producer" vs. "Consumer" is fading away. Nowadays, people have a stronger understanding of more fields. Biology involves Chemistry, Chemistry involves Physics, Physics involves Mathematics, Mathematics ground Computer Science, Computer Science drives the computer you're reading this on now.

If you wanted to do disciplinary design, it's too late.

Advertising

2008-05-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

When Ian Dapot came to talk to us about advertising, he introduced two popular forms of advertising. For Chanel No. 5 perfume, a sexy fantasy world is created in the commercial. This inspires audience members to buy the product so that they can experience that kind of world. For iPhones, the commercial emphasizes the human interaction with the product. I was intrigued by these two forms of commercial advertising and I wanted to take see if I could find a form of advertising that combined the two or if I could find a third form of advertising unlike either of these. I did both.

Herbal Essences:

Herbal Essences shampoo takes both the fantasy world and product interface into account in its commercials. For example in many Herbal Essences commercials, a woman is seen shampooing her hair and moaning in ecstasy followed by her tossing her perfectly dried and styled hair. This idea helps to convince the audience that the product is sexy but also shows how the product works. The following video is an example of this commercial.

In other commercials the woman is interrupted from her everyday activities by a band of attractive men who come to shampoo her hair. The commercial therefore emphasizes the sexiness of the shampoo as well as showing the end result of the smooth, volumized hair. Below are two examples of these commercials.

Obviously Herbal Essences does a good job of creating a sexy fantasy surrounding its product as well as showing the results of this product. The commercials show the viewer how much better life would be with Herbal Essences and convince them that this shampoo is the best for getting luxurious hair as well as living a sexy fantasy life.

2000 Super Bowl Commercials:

When I started to think about commercials that had nothing to do with what they were advertising, I instantly remembered the dot com commercials from the 2000 Super Bowl. The best commercial that had ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with selling its product was the “We just wasted $2 million” E*Trade commercial. This commercial has nothing to do with the website or with creating a fantasy world where you would desire the website’s uses.

But when I went to look for this commercial I found other wonderful commercials that to me had nothing to do with the product like the one below.

In this video three parrots fly around the pet store and mimic the commercial below. But parrots in a pet store have nothing to do with Budweiser. Obviously this commercial was a sequel to the "Wazzup" commercial below, but even that one has nothing to do with Budweiser except for the fact that they are holding the cans and watching the game. One could argue that that is the fantasy world that Budweiser was trying to create in the commercial, but it seems like a bit of a stretch.

Another great one from Budweiser that year was the "How are you doing" commercial which just continued to poke fun at the original “Wazzup” commercial.

And finally there is this video, which is the pets.com hand puppet sharing in the pain of lonely pets. This again has nothing to do with the products sold at pets.com

As you can see there are many different reasons that commercials are effective. Channel No. 5 sells because of its sent and because of its glamorous reputation. The iPhone sells because it is sleek, elegant, and easy to use. Herbal Essences sells because it is sexy and because it makes you hair feel softer and more voluminous. E*Trade.com sells because it is easy and straight forward to use. Maybe the commercial above doesn't represent that, but it makes you curious about the website. Budweiser sells because it is about the game and hanging out with friends. Budweiser also has the sense to make fun of itself and carry out a joke like "Wazzup" into other realms and contexts, which helps it sell even more. Pets.com sells because the hand puppet is cute and because it is a good place for you to find pet products with ease. Though some of these advertising methods are more effective than others, they all seem to work well as advertising techniques.

Theme Parks: Design for fun!

2008-05-07T19:24:00.001-07:00

What else is designed for fun other than theme parks? Everything in a theme park is devoted to entertain “children of all ages.” Rollercoaster, water rides, arcade games, shows, face paint, you name it; it’s all there for your entertainment. But what makes a theme park fun? Waiting in line? Spending far too much money? NO! Of course not, it is the trill, the excitement, the escape from “real life” that makes theme parks so much fun. I’d like to take a quick look at some popular theme parks and explore why they are fun to me and why I think the engineers behind the scenes designed them the way they did.

Disney World:

About: Four theme parks, two water parks, and twenty-three themed hotels rolled into one getaway vacation that will ultimately destroy your bank account, but hey you had fun right? Disney World is the most visited and largest recreational resort in the world. Disney World is a great vacation spot as it has fun and excitement for all ages. There are rides and games for the littlest of children, but there are also more intense rides for those who seek a thrill. But it’s not only the rides that draw crowds to Disney World, it’s those cute characters who sign autographs, let you take their picture, or perform in shows. It’s the magic behind the rides that draws the crowds. Walt Disney was a brilliant man and he took pride in making a theme park that was a place where both adults and children could have fun. Though Disney World was the second theme park created by Walt Disney (Disneyland being the first), it was his dream park since it had a very desirable location and could be build on a grand scale. Disney's vision has continued to grow over time as Disney World itself has grown. Disney World holds a special place in the hearts of children of all ages.

Design: Disney World is designed for you to have to come many times. With each park having its own twist and each hotel having it's own theme, it is no wonder that people travel to Disney World many times before they get bored (if ever). It also has one of the largest kid themed parks. Most children cannot ride on roller coasters since they are too short, but when you introduce rides and shows geared toward younger crowds, children want to participate and parents want to allow their children to experience the "magic" that is Disney World. It is also in a location that allows the park to stay open year round. This allows for more business. By splitting up the parks into themes and designing rides and attractions into those themes, Disney World is able to bring in a huge crowd and keep them entertained every day!

Universal Studios:

About: Universal Studios Theme Parks are based around the movies that the company has produced. The original theme park, Universal Studios Hollywood, started by running tours of the soundstages and backlots where filming was underway. Today the parks have thrilling rides and shows, and even a working movie studio. I would argue that Universal Studios Theme Park is not for very young children. That being said, it can still be a ton of fun with children who are old enough to appreciate it. I feel that the shows and rides are directed at an older audience than say Disney's Magic Kingdom, but they are still very fun. Universal uses special effects and movie catch phrases to capture its audience and draw them in and it does a great job of doing this.

Design: Universal does a good job of breaking the park down into zones as you can see below.
But not only does Universal divide up its park to allow for maximum fun, it also creates rides based on commonly known movies. This alone draws crowds. Also Universal has special effect shows and gives tours of real movie studios. These are things that you cannot find elsewhere and therefore people are drawn to the park.

SixFlags:

About: SixFlags is the largest chain of theme parks in the world. There are over 21 locations in North America alone. SixFlags uses the image of Bugs Bunny and pals to help draw crowds. SixFlags is different from the other two previous parks because it is very ride based and prides itself on having some of the biggest and best roller coasters in the world. In 2005, SixFlags Great Adventure in NJ opened the Kingda Ka, which holds the current record for tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world (and also probably the record for longest wait to get on).

Design: SixFlags has a great thing going with the shear number of parks they own. Sure they don't get the kind of traffic that Disney gets at any one location, but combined they get a good number of people there each year. The beauty of SixFlags though is definitely its rides. SixFlags definitely tries to outdo itself and other parks each year. Kingda Ka was just one example of how SixFlags can outdo every other coaster. This year SixFlags has announced seven new coasters across the country and I am sure that they will be big hits.

Theme parks are dedicated to having fun. They incorporate "magic," thrills, excitement, and shows to keep you entertained and to hope you return. I love theme parks and there is nothing better than spending an entire day riding roller coasters!

Fun for Kids

2008-05-06T00:32:00.000-07:00

During the summers of High School, I worked at a pre-school where children ages 3-5 would come and play each day. These children had the best imaginations and the best understanding of fun. They would always bring out the fun in me too. Many times I would come home covered in paint because the kids had shown me how much fun finger painting could be again. Every time a kid would paint something at the easel I would ask them what they were painting. I’d get some response like “well” *points to a big blue blob in the middle of the page* “this is a doggie, and” *points to yellow blob* “this is Mommy,” if they were 3, or “this” *points to potato person with legs* “is my friend Tommy” if they were 5. I was always amazed at how much imagination the kids would have and how much the development of the mind cut out the blue blobs and turned them into people like objects. The kids kind of made me jealous in a sense because they still had their full imagination. Not to say that I don’t have any imagination, but I don’t have nearly as much as I did when I was 3. I remember getting a play kitchen when I was 4 or 5 and though it came with play food, and a plastic oven and stove top, I did not want to have to prepare food for my family, no, I wanted to go to the moon. So I strapped on my bike helmet knocked the play kitchen on its side opened the “oven” door and sat in it turning the dials and successfully piloted a flight to the moon, landed, got out and walked on the moon, and then safely returned to earth.

This brings me to a great point. Fun things can be more fun if they can be used in multiple ways. While I enjoyed the play kitchen greatly, I also wanted to use my kitchen as a rocket ship. I highly doubt that the toy designer thought that that is what a small girl would want to do with her play kitchen, but it was. But there is something to be said for this. Maybe a better toy designer would examine the design and say hey, if I flip this over and open this “oven” door here and this “microwave” door here, it kind of looks like airplane wings. I think a great toy designer would take a minute to examine all of the potential uses for their idea, not just his or her own intended uses for it. Though I highly doubt that all of the potential uses could be apparent to any one person, I think focusing on this aspect of fun could help many toy designers to create even better toys.

This also raises another question. If play for children of these ages is about imagination and making use of the objects you have to aide your play, then are the toys we give them too constraining and too limiting. If I could use a cardboard box to create a car, or a cave, or an air plane, then why do I need a toy that is constraining my imagination into believing it is only what it appears to be. If I were designing toys (and had far too much money to spend) I would love to develop a line of toys that are very abstract and suggest many different things at once. I do not know how children would react to this type of toy and as far as I know, it has never been attempted. Imagine a plush toy with Velcro-removable parts. The toy would be very plain and could be decorated with different things depending on what the child wanted it to be. Of course this is a spur of the moment idea, so it is not fully developed (or even very good). It would be great to work with 3-5 year olds to develop a toy that would be unisex and fun for all sorts of play though.

How Technology Affects Human Interactions

2008-05-05T14:24:00.000-07:00

When Nina Fefferman spoke to the vital ideation group, I was highly interested by her studies on ecomimicry. She analyzed human reactions to a virus outbreak in a virtual world and used her results to make generalizations about human reactions to catastrophes such as incurable, rapidly spreading diseases. I was surprised to discover that she was trying to parallel reactions in a virtual world to real life because I do not feel that people react the same way in a world where life is trivial and death is not final. I liked the idea though of studying interactions between people and also studying technology’s role in it. So I devised a way to look at how technology affects the ways in which people interact, specifically how people communicate. I feel that people today have such a craving for instant (usually text based) communication and have lost sight of the intimacy of face to face communication, or even vocal communication altogether. Basically, I wanted to explore how big of an impact instant forms of communication impacted people’s world and how this was dependent on social upbringing. In order to study this, I took a survey of some college students and some professionals over the age of 35 to see who valued what form of communication and to see if I could conclude any broad statements about communication from these results.

I was curious about many forms of internet and cell phone communications, but I decided to focus on text messages, instant messages, emails, and phone calls. The following questions were included in my survey:

1. In a typical week, how many times do you text people from your cell phone?
2. How many characters is a typical text for you? What is typically the theme? or do you text for everything?
3. Who do you normally text?
4. In a typical week, how many personal emails do you send?
5. Who do you normally send emails to?
6. In a typical week, how much time do you spend on AIM or other chats?
7. Who do you normally talk to on AIM/chat?
8. In a typical week, how many times do you call people from your cell phone?
9. Who do you normally call?
10. What makes you call rather than text or email?

The results were as follows:

you can see that the number of texts sent for students and for professionals has approximately the same distribution. It is quite apparent though that the hours on IM vastly differ. Professionals don't seem to care for the communication that IM provides, whereas students seem to highly value this form of communication. Email was fairly distributed for both professionals and students. Students tended to send slightly fewer emails than professionals, but did not drastically differ. The number of calls made was significantly lower for students than it was for professionals. This is exactly the result I was expecting to see. My claim was that students spend more time using instant forms of text communication rather than placing phone calls. The results for IM and for phone calls seem to support this claim, though much more data and higher sample sizes would need to be taken before a final conclusion could be drawn.

While the data for questions 2, 3, 5, 7, and 9 was very interesting, question 10 gave me much insight into my claim. Many students responded that they only called home because "it's family, that's just what you do" or because "my mom forces me" or something along those lines. Students also said that they place calls for longer conversation things, but not for quick exchanges like "hey where are you?" and they would rather text or email for those exchanges. Students also say calls are used in a more urgent fashion than emails or when they can't access a computer easily. Professionals say they like the personal aspect of being able to hear another person's voice and and touched how much tone can add to a conversation. They also brought up how phone calls are more urgent. It seems that personal contacts get phone calls from professionals and business contacts get emails.

Overall, I was able to see that students spend far more time on IM and professionals make more phone calls. Everyone agrees that phone calls are more personal and better for long friendly conversations. It was interesting to study how technology has affected communication and given more time and resources, I would like to explore this topic more.

Targeted Advertising

2008-05-03T13:34:00.000-07:00

One of the ways that advertising has fundamentally changed in the last few years is the introduction of online targeted advertising. In the past, if I wanted to reach a certain target audience, I would have to find magazines or television shows that I knew were popular among my target group and place advertisements in them. Obviously, if I want to reach cat lovers because I am selling a new and improved scratching pole, a pet magazine is a better place than a sports magazine. Online advertising lets this go even a step further, because now it is possible to target people based on even more specific criteria and without as much knowledge of what is popular in the group.

Google AdWords is an advertising product that lets advertisers display their ads next to Google searches for related things. "Your ads appear on Google When people search on Google using one of your keywords, your ad may appear next to the search results. Now you're advertising to an audience that's already interested in you." This is taken a step further with Google AdSense, which places ads from advertisers on other websites based on contextual analysis of what a site is about. "Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant, unobtrusive Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your users are looking for on your site, you'll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages." Advertisers want to reach people who like flowers, you run a website about flowers, their ads go on your site. That makes sense.

Facebook is taking the equation up even another notch. Advertisers can purchase ads on Facebook targeting people at specific schools, with specific interests, of specific ages and genders. If you ran a pizza shop and wanted to have a special promotion for students from a nearby college during the Superbowl, you could target people who specifically have said they like football who attend that college. Here I create a Facebook ad that probably only targets me. That's not creepy at all.

What all of this means for me, the consumer, is that I am getting ads that I actually like. No longer do I get ads for X10 wireless cameras and lawnmowers, now the ads I see are for web design, photography, and other things I care about. Obviously the technology isn't perfect - and it'd be creepy if I got no irrelevant ads at all. Still, the advantages to this system are obvious for both advertisers and customers, and things are just going to keep heading in this direction. Facebook has announced that they will enable "social ads" on other sites. Interesting technology, but where will it go?

Obviously, all of this raises privacy concerns, and how much do I really want to see advertisements, even if they are for things I like? I like fun and amusing ads about things I like, and I have actually clicked some of the ads Facebook has showed me since they started getting relevant. I think relevant ads are great, but we need to make sure we don't do things that jeopardize individuals privacy.

Changing Things.

2008-04-27T14:21:00.000-07:00

So, the first thing ‘design for the next guy’ makes me think of is the principle of living with the 7^th generation in mind, or thinking about what’s going to make something easier for the people after you. The funny thing about designing for the next guy is that it usually makes designing for yourself a little harder. There are a few ways I can look at design for the next guy:

Option 1: Make everything the same

Today we see this all over the place: for something like building a house, a car, or a computer, people have created standards for things like sizes and energy ratings. This makes things a lot easier for example, when someone has a mouse or a printer you want to use (hurray for USB)! Now, if you want to change things, you can just go buy another version of whatever it is you want that fits into the same place as your old one! This works out pretty well for most people, if you think of ‘next guy’ as the rest of the current population, rather than someone in the future who’s trying to change things. There are a few problems with this though.

As far as manufactured products go, say you wanted to change the way that your computer fundamentally works. Of course, the way we do things now probably isn’t the only (or best) answer. What if you could do it better? Well..honestly, it’s probably not worth it. If I make something amazing that can’t interface with anything else, it’s either going to be pretty useless or it’s going to be a new adopted standard. You can see where this is going..

First, this can work pretty well with a physical requirement, but what about with some kind of a system, like a college? What would doing the same thing that everyone else does mean? Well…it would mean that the faculty are comfortable there in the sense that they won’t need to spend as much time learning the ropes as they would at some place that’s radically different than everywhere else. It would mean that students would more than likely know what they’re getting into when the decide to go there. It would mean that when people working here needed to change jobs, they wouldn’t need to go into hours of explanation about what the place they’ve been working at is, and why it’s legitimate. It would also mean that graduate schools would accept our students, and know by the titles of the courses what they learned.

But what else does this imply? For a place like Olin, this would mean that we’re the same as everywhere else. This would mean that we don’t question the way we do things: we just do them that way because it’s easier. But for something like a college system (something that’s not a manufactured product), how hard is it really to have a different system everywhere? Are there more benefits than drawbacks?

Option 2: Make everything change

What are the benefits for a college to be different? How do you define Design for the Next Guy in the context of something that’s its own internal system?

Well, to start off, Olin has its very own identity. Most schools do. I feel like Olin has a little more of that than most places. Why? We’re new. We’re tiny. We’re redefining engineering (or at least that’s what we say we’re doing). Since I don’t want to end up talking about Olin and what it is for too long, I’m going to bring up a few of the points from President Millers talk:

“Olin College Open Doors”

This was one thing that President Miller kept saying, over and over again. Olin College opens doors. We’re not here to define a future for someone. We’re here to make possible whatever can be made possible. This view is incredibly different than anything I’ve heard anywhere else. But I’m going on with the amazingness of Olin..Let’s change the subject.

I think this quote is most relevant here since it shows how schools and systems can have their own very radical identities, but still work in the world.

Think about the way we define ourselves: What are our values?

One thing that a lot of us complain about at Olin is that not everyone is in line with our set of values. But then, what are our values? Olin was designed to be constantly changing and reinventing itself. I mean, our mascot is the Phoenix. And what’s cool about this is that we don’t just have people here who agree with us. Having all sorts of people here to be committed to the college, but also to push it in a slightly different direction leads to a lot more discussion than there would be if we all agreed all the time. And that discussion leads to a huge questioning of beliefs, which in my mind is much better than just blindly moving forward. If your beliefs can survive that questioning, you know they’re true for you. If not, well, it’s a good thing someone made you question them.

The ability to change our values also does ensure design for the next guy, I think. Olin can become whatever we want it to be. We do have a few rules and guidelines, but this place is incredibly flexible.

Scrap Everything-It all expires.

This reminds me of something from a philosophy class I took in high school. My professor was talking about Buddhist monks, and how every so often they’d make this elaborate picture out of colored sand. Just on the table. And when it was done they’d brush it all away and make a new one again later. It represents how ephemeral everything is. And this works with ideas and systems as well. They’re designed for a very specific time and set of circumstances. And just because they used to work, and work well, doesn’t mean we should keep using them. This doesn’t mean we should get rid of them completely either, but it does mean recreation is a great way to make sure we’re still keeping things within our set of values (or within our newly defined and revised values!)

So What is Design for the Next Guy?

It’s making things changeable. And how do you do that in a massive system? It takes a lot more work, a lot more time, and a lot more effort. But it makes things flexible. It doesn’t mean that something is set in the way it is until someone come along with the drive to change it. It means things are easily changeable and always changing J.

Playgrounds

2008-04-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

I loved playgrounds when I was little. I lived across the street from my elementary school, and frequently went to play on the playground it had. It wasn't that big, and I got used to it, so when we traveled across town to the other schools' playgrounds it was a big adventure. They were unknown and half of the fun was exploring them. Sometimes we even went to really big playgrounds that schools in other towns had.

Ultimately, what makes playgrounds awesome is that they're a place with no rules, and you have to invent them for yourself.

Playgrounds for Adults

Last summer I visited the Ontario Science Center, which features an area called the Weston Family Innovation Centre. While a somewhat vague name, the actual place is a giant room with all types of activities geared at people roughly ages 14 to 22. There's an area to take apart and put together electronics, making your own paper airplanes, comparing friction of different materials, and more. While it's full of "exhibits", most of them are entirely free-form and you have to figure out what you're going to do with it to play. Being presented with a set of tools and toys and having to figure out how you want to combine them is a very different experience than walking through a flat 2D museum.

Similarly, when I visit LEGO stores, I notice that it's just as often parents playing with the LEGOs as kids. Fathers and sons both build little cars out of LEGO and race them down a ramp, or bored parents put things together while their kids run around looking at all the different kits in the store. Opportunity in the form of supplies, but with no specified direction.

What Should I Make?

Lately I have been playing with an Arduino microcontroller. The Arduino sites defines an Arduino as "an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments." I borrowed a bunch of electronics parts (LEDs, resistors, a breadboard, connectors, etc) from my friend Brad and have been putting little things together to try out the different functions of the Arduino. So far I have replicated a red-yellow-green traffic light and written some stuff to a SerLCD I had laying around from last semester.

I am finding it lots of fun to make all these little things, but I am just doing it for fun. I have no class project, no goal I am trying to attain, and I don't know what I should make next. I am in a sandbox - what is the next cool thing to build? I'm going to keep poking at different things so I can figure out all of the Arduino's capabilities, but then I will probably bring it all together into some bigger project. Why? Why not.

No Rules, No Requirements

I feel like the major advantage to free form playing with ideas and tools is that everyone can put a different spin on what it is that they are making and doing. Everyone has a unique view on the world, and everyone finds different things fun. Giving people tools lets them do and lets them make. I like this concept, and want to try to figure out how to engage more people in this creative playing and making.

How can we build more sandboxes for "grown ups"?

Who says what Fun is anyway?

2008-04-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

A distraction

I know you really want to read this blog post, but here, play this game first.

Google Image Labeler

I'll wait - don't worry about me.

Wasn't that fun?

Congratulations, you just spent your time, for free, improving the quality of Google's image search projects. I bet you don't feel ripped off or cheated at all. In fact, you may have even enjoyed it so much that you played a few rounds. So Google, a big company, is getting you to do work for them by disguising it as a game.

Disguising? They pretty much flat out told you what you were doing.

Who says what's Fun?

Tom Sawyer, that's who.

I think that this concept of turning things normally considered "work" into "fun" is a really powerful idea that can change the way people view certain tasks. Google's Image Label game is one example, and Tom Sawyer convincing his friends that whitewashing a fence is a fun activity - even getting them to pay him for the privilege - is another, but they seem relatively isolated. What are other ways our society promotes "fun is work is fun"?

Look at Toys

Toys are fun, right? We make balls, puzzles, and action figures, and all of these are great "non-work" things to do. But what else do we make?

Oh man, I love chores and yard work! They're the best! I can't wait till I get some free time, I am going to go vacuum every room in my house! While I, as a budding young adult, may not enjoy these activities, the sense of 'helping out' and the fantasy play that children get out of these toys are what make them fun.

Skewed Perspective on Fun?
Ultimately, what I think everything boils down to is a misguided sense that work and fun must be separate activities. People who love their jobs find them enjoyable, and people who don't can't wait to get home to do something else. Notice that retirees tend to play golf and work on hobbies instead of continuing to do what they were doing professionally? This implies that there were things that they wanted to do while working that they didn't get to do. If someone totally completely loved their job, why would they ever leave it?

Make it Fun

Here is a list of businesses that work because the products they produce are fun.

Hollywood

Music Industry

Apple

Soap Bubble Companies

Board Games

Bowling Alleys

Laser Tag

When was the last time you got really excited about your thumb tacks, your stapler, or your forks?

What about glow in the dark thumbtacks, those big twisty straws, or bowls with cartoon characters on the bottom?

Make the experience fun.

Continuation- Designer Values

2008-04-25T13:07:00.000-07:00

On My Design Notebook:

I never made a blog entry on keeping design notebooks. I just couldn't think of anything to say at the time, as I hadn't kept a notebook yet. I've gotten into the swing of the notebook thing, and I have to say, I'm pretty fond of it. Good for passing notes, good for organizing thoughts, good for writing things down. I have learned I'm much better at thinking of ideas for things I want to do- and not so great at just randomly "desining." So my design notebook isn't like a professional designers would be. Or even like my one from Design Nature was. It's much more just a record of ideas, thoughts, and inspirations.

On Why this entry:

However, that wasn't what I intended to talk about in this blog. This blog is actually just for fun since I have 8+Lecture Credit.

It actually boils down to more- I really like this blog. I end up learning a lot more while writing in it, because it gives me time to think about different concepts and ideas, research what I'm interested in, and get a better idea of what is going on around me.

I like the structure that classes, even indpendent ones, provide for learning in. As such, I'm going to be taking two classes this summer. I also took one last summer. I don't take these classes for any particular reason- though AHS credits so I can worry less about my schedule don't hurt.

I take them for the same reason I take any class- to learn. (This could be a topic for an entire additional entry...)

I think we should all keep learning and keep this blog to make us think and reflect more- and have good documentation of that reflection.

How this relates to design:

I think that part of being a designer is being very open minded. Being open minded isn't always easy. It can acutally be pretty difficult. It's simple to get set in a mindset of what you do, and why you do it, and keep going in the same direction. It's easy to assume you're right and not question what life is about, or assume that you've covered all of the important factors before making decisions.

So, I'd like to make a heuristic (woo UOCD!) that "Every designer should make sure to take the time to learn something completely different, so they don't forget how to learn." Getting out of your comfort sphere helps you remember what it's like to be someone else- possibly who you're designing for. I'd say that this isn't just a design philosophy for me- it's also a life philosophy. It's adapted out of what my mom told me about what she does in order to keep being a good professor, so that she won't forget that it isn't easy for her students.

What I'll be doing:

I'm going to be taking a clear cut class: Occupational Health. I'm very excited about this class because I think it will be different than what I've covered before. I'm usually of the philosophy that people "aren't working hard enough" or "those factors don't really matter, they should fix them themselves". I hope that this class will give me into health issues related to real people (not unhelpful in my eventual goal of going to medical school).

Secondly, I'm going to be taking an Intro to Women's Studies class. Any of you who have met me know that I'm not really a fan of things like this usually. On the whole I'm much more of the philosophy that extensively discussing gender differences hinders things more than it helps them. However, I do acknowledge that there are real societal gaps between the genders that need to be repaired. In an ideal universe we could remove all bias, values, and indoctrination that people start with in order to have a clean playing field in a generation. Since this will not happen, perhaps I should start thinking more practically about how to limit differences between gender (more specifically I tend to focus on women in math, science, and technology, because that's the field I'm in).

I'm hoping that these classes will also help to shape my views as a designer and refocus how I view the world to be as flexible and adaptive as possible.

Museum Goers: Curious

2008-04-25T12:53:00.000-07:00

Answering Erik's Question:
Modularity does effect design. I was actually considering this yesterday- for our software design project, we've very clearly delineated into three sections, that could each be replaced individually, but each set of material is fairly standard. Thus subbing out the scripts to call data would be easy, but the data would still be in a very common MySQL Database. On the other side, making HTML webforms is pretty standard, and they can be easily changed to include PHP or something other language. Any individual piece can be changed without ruining the whole.

I think that modularity allows for iterative design- changing small things and then changing more small things. It seems like a great way to be able to change momentously without having anything be too scary at the time.

What IS Radical interdisciplinary Design?

Diana's speaking with us was interesting- it was the most structured of all of the presentations we have had thus far. It was also the most technical. One of the things that struck me about it was the fact that yes- design can be technical and engineering-y. We'd been discussing about how design tends to be between art and engineering, and this talk reminded me of why it is closer to engineering, from some lenses. The chaos equations are definitely something I regard as highly technical, and math-like, whereas music is an artform. The combination of the two was interesting, and definitely provided a new perspective on design.

At our discussion we also conversed about Artifical Intelligence and how that can also be construed as a type of interdisciplinary design- it's using technical concepts in order to illustrate psychology and other very human factors. By radically interdisciplinary design, were we actually referring to the gap between technical and human factors?

Why Design to be Radically Interdisciplinary?

Do people like it? Is it more interesting? Why? I think one of the things that tends to be appreciated is the "unexpected" and radical interdisciplinary design definintely falls in this spectrum. Why else? Life is radically interdisciplinary- you can't separate how your body works from what you're able to do with it. Your cells have limits, and thus you can only run so fast.

Also, how does interdisciplinary related to integrated? Life itself is integrated, you'll very rarely have someone in the real world come up to say "do this math problem." It's much more apt to be "find a solution this" and along the way you define the math and solve it yourself. It's a question of applicability, and you're sitll involving people along the way. I think the concept definitely ties into User Oriented Design, but also relating different fields. Designing something for a biology start up is different than designing for academia research labs, is different for designing for an elementary school science kit, even if all of them might be working with something basic, like blood testing or DNA.

What types of people find Radically Interdisciplinary things to be entertaining?

Olin students. All I can think about this is the entire war on ICB- and how integrated it should be. As well as how students clamor to take "Materials Science/Stuff of History." People love to learn the context for why they are doing what they're doing- it's motivation. Integrating things makes them both more real, more in the framework of life, and more memorable. Learning math and physics together gives you scenarios to apply the math in. Learning math and physics with a product in mind (antenna, CRT) shows you how and why products people ahve work the way they do.

I think this can more be generalized into "curious people." Curious people tend to want to know why the world works the way it does. These type of people are the kind of people who always want to learn more- taking classes, talking, being involved, going to museums...

So? What next?

Tonight I'm going to an event at the Museum of Science in Boston. http://www.mos.org/events_activities/special_programs&d=2624 The program is basically to help the museum figure out what appeals to adults and how to work with exhibits to keep them fresh and ineresting. My goal for the evening is to somehow spark a discussion about a radically interdisciplinary exhibit...

If there is one once they redo the museum, I will be proud.

A few thoughts on Design for the Next Guy

2008-04-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

In his TED talk, Lawrence Lessig talks about creating a read-write culture-- one in which people are free to mash up content they have to make new content. The internet is a primary example of this, though Lessig also quotes John Philip Sousa appearing before congress making the same example with rural choirs and their sheet music. The idea of a read-write culture is sort of fascinating to me. I have always pegged myself as a creator, if anything. But I have not technically "created" anything! --only taken others creations and mashed them up in a way to call my own, from legos to websites. Everything I do is a mix of what others have enabled me to do. But even so, I have found this creation invaluable.

The read-write culture is very deeply tied into Design for the Next Guy. Read-write culture allows for people to make changes to a project or institution, to "edit" it in a way they would like, and have full permission to do so. In a lot of ways, designing for the next guy is similar-- you must design now so as to account for the decisions of the future. And what better way to account for the decisions of the future than to have a very liberal criteria for what decisions are allowed!

If that sets you on edge, you're not alone. I feel as though that's only one half of design for the next guy. The other half is the more conservative side, the type we typically see (I think) in institutions. Whereas open-source projects allow for many writers to write in different ways how they want (to the point of taking the entire project and then going from there in a different direction), institutional design for change, especially when it involves economics (or, I don't know, say, education) must be more wary about these directions.

Institutional DftNG, like the kind we see at Olin, is governed by a few key rules, some of which President Miller explained beautifully: have everything expire, recognize the role of institutional values, etc. In Olin, all things are set to expire at some point, and main segments of the CORe constitution show how to abolish it or the honor code, meaning this extends from the institutional level to the students' level. Institutional values are another interesting story. The MET school in Rhode Island prides itself on its core institutional values, which means that the teacher turnover after four years is well over 10% (maybe higher than 20? I can't remember), simply because every teacher is reviewed, and if they aren't exceeding these values, they're out. Olin could do much the same thing if it wanted or needed, but our institutional values are slightly /less so/. The need to be a continual test-bed for engineering education is tempered by conservative professors wanting to build up resumes that would do them well at any other institution in the US-- and not that we can blame them, but Olin is what it is because of it.

But let's go back to the more liberal, open-source type of DftNG. Here we see particular emphasis placed on lack of ownership. With many internet memes (a great example of read-write culture in action), losing ownership is just what needs to happen to make something skyrocket. The intellectual owners of so many things mashed up into internet memes could have kept their work solely in the original context, but have probably attracted more attnetion to themselves and their work by letting it go. It brings to mind the adage, "if you love something, set it free".

Recall that this would hardly work in institutional DftNG. Olin can't just be "set free"! It must be closely managed, and not everyone who wants to come in and make something of it can just walk off with it. Instead, there are much more tempered methods of changing it for the future. At the same time, it's important to recognize that Olin is also fundamentally built for the next guy. President Miller, somewhat akin to the organizations that let their property go to the internet, knows that Olin will not be in his hands forever. He, unlike the aforementioned, will take much care to make sure it at least goes into the hands of someone extremely capable with it.

One aspect of DftNG that I really wished we had discussed more is modularity. In programming, in which DftNG is often a huge concern, modularity reaches ridiculous levels. Code is often super-easy to implement, and classes are specifically designed to be versatile for any situations one might want them to apply to. At the same time, they're well-commented and completely open-- the owners don't care if you make them a little bit more your own. So, for the next poster, if he or she so chooses, is the question of modularity. How does making something break down into chunks affect how the next user will shape it?

Stigmergy and adhocracy

2008-04-23T15:58:00.000-07:00

I'm going to use what I've heard of Pres. Miller's talk as a jumping-off point for talking about something I've been thinking about for a while: adhocracy and stigmergy, and the relationship between them.
Adhocracy is a way of organizing a community effort that allows anybody to assert initiave, control, and leadership at any time (but doesn't compel anyone to follow them). Hierarchies spring up when needed, fall down when not. Actually, all bureaucracies are really ad-hocracies... they just don't advertise that they're socially constructed and that their longevity comes from everyone believing that they're The Way Of Things instead of a malleable system. what I'm calling "adhocracies" here are communities that advertise and make explicit that they are ad-hoc.

Stigmergy is the distributed construction of an artifact where the creators use the construction of the artifact itself as a means of communication - you "talk" about making changes to the thing by actually making those changes to the thing. Wikis are a good example, as are really rough foam prototypes in UOCD, as is a good improv troupe performance.

Stigmergic things are usually constructed by adhocracies, but many exceptions exist - think of a bubble-gum/graffiti wall (stigmergic but not ad-hocratic, since it lacks a cohesive community). Ad-hocracies make stigmergic things by definition, since ad-hocracies themselves are stigmergic (so at the very least, you're talking about changing the structure of your community... by changing the structure of your community.)

I bring these terms up in this very ill-thought-through post because at Olin, I often found myself at a loss for the right words to describe the systems I saw, and wanted to expose more folks to the terminology in case it's helpful.

System dynamics (particularly human system dynamics), education (particularly things studying informal systems of learning, as in self-studies and unschoolers) and the sociology of hacker cultures (Eric S. Raymond's stuff is classic, if showing its age somewhat, and only giving a freeze-frame snapshot of one possible world of hackers) are other good places for getting this stuff. Epistemology, too - software testing is one weird place where that particular area of study started making sense to me in the context of how organizations like Olin grow and change and move.

I'll also note that sometimes the best thing you can do to encourage "change" and "grassroots involvement" (or whatever you want to call it) is to make these tacit structures explicit. The first procedure in a set of procedures should always be for a way of revising those procedures (see: CORe constitution and "abolish the Honor Board.").

That's it. Hopefully this incoherence will make someone think of something - spout me back something (mallory.chua at alumni) if you'd like to toss ideas like this around.

Elements of Advertising

2008-04-23T06:30:00.000-07:00

Ads that Instill Ownership
Advertising once again brought back a concept that keeps surfacing during Vital Ideation- Ownership. Ownership first surfaced during the concept of "sticky ideas" and it makes sense that it would come back during the unit on advertising, because advertising is supposed to be sticky.

The two concepts we discussed were both ones that you could imagine yourself in the situation of. What other types of ads can be sticky? Ads that seem memorable to me are:

1) A flying squirrel ad from the superbowl a few years back. I think 4ish years ago. However, there was a more recent just squirrel ad recently, so no luck on finding a video of it. I think it was just humorous or totally unexpected.

Humorous Ads
2) Those ads that discuss "Real Men of Genious" for a beer company- "I salute you Mr. Taco Salad creator..." I remember these because they're hilarious. I don't in anyway relate to your average beer drinking man.

A few examples:

One that I haven't heard: Notre Dame Fan:

Perhaps they ran it in Indiana where there would be more ownership?

Mr. Giant Taco Salad Inventor:

I have heard this one. It's one of my favorites.

Jorts Inventory:

This one was new to me, too. Maybe they only do this one around fashion people?

Regardless, the ads are hilarious. Youtube "Real Men of Genius" to get more. However, they seem to be funny regardless of who you are. Perhaps this is because they play off stereotypes? Or deal with simple enough items that everyone has heard of them?

They've also made a ton over the last decade:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_of_Genius#List_of_Known_Commercials

I've never heard most of these. Perhaps part of their advertising appeal is not flooding a market so you get really excited when one comes on. It makes me want to go buy Bud Light just to show "hey your advertisement is awesome." I think on the whole they have great advertisement- they're the same people who brought us the frogs. Thus humor seems to be a great selling point for Ads.

On the other side, what makes an ad truly awful to hear? I know that there are some ads that I find almost painful to listen to.

Ads that you do not find ownership in
3) One of them is ads for "computer training.com" This ad extols on "how much money are you making? you too can change your life! just take our online skills challenge and if you pass you can pay $30000ish to take our classes and be a Microsoft Certified Professional." The ad makes me angry due to prior context I have- it seems fairly ridiculous to encourage this as a way to learn about computers and change fields. The ad also seems to emphasize a lack of need to work.

Most ads come in on the neutral scale. I'm not sure how much advertising actually effects my purchasing- I tend to inherently distrust it "if you have to advertise, why would I want it?" because good things tend to find their way around through word of mouth by early adopters. I think that might just be part of being young and having friends who like new things.

Ads with a small manipulable piece
4) One neutral, yet memorable ad, was a radio advertisement for Canada. The reason it was memorable wasn't the entire ad content- but simply one little piece. The phone number the ad said one could call for information was "1-800-O-CANADA" This was funny because it led to a conversation including "1-800-O-ELLEN-C" and "1-800-O-GREG-MM" trying to figure out the most ridiculous telephone numbers we could make for ourselves. Past that there was the concept of 1800.coms, so 1800oellenc.com as a viable domain name. As much as this ad didn't give us a sense of ownership- it gave us something vague enough to play with to see where we could take it. So I think being a spring board for more thought also makes a good advertisement.

On the whole I'm still a little skeptical on the advertising front, but it's fun to look at and figure out what elements of ads make them most interesting.

Accessible Technology

2008-04-21T20:22:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, Olin professor Brian Bingham spoke with us about Art and Engineering. He talked to us about his friend's art project, Ingram Clockworks, and some of the "whimsical engineering" projects he has worked on with his friends.

One of the points that he emphasized was the idea of "communication" and the different vocabularies used by artists and engineers. He pointed out that people don't go to art school to learn how to paint - they go to art school to learn about different frameworks and styles and this underlying language to communicate ideas with other artists. This isn't purely it - you get better at painting by painting, but learning the vernacular of your trade and how you fit into the world it encompasses is an important part of an education.

In the modern day and age, many artists are moving past traditional mediums and into spaces that formerly didn't exist. For instance, check out LED Throwies, which repurposes LEDs into temporary (guerrilla) art installations. Kinetic Sculptures are another genre of art that incorporate technologies like motors and microcontrollers to create a piece that can move on its own, turning a sculpture into something alive. There's one big barrier with these forms of art though - if you're not a technically inclined person, figuring out how to program a microcontroller or wire a circuit can be a tremendous roadblock.

It's rather daunting to stare down a 500 page PIC microcontroller manual, teach yourself how to use a circuit layout program, or learn how to program even a simple software application. These are skills engineers often take for granted, because we like them to start with and we're specifically taught how to do them in school. The 'curse of knowledge' prevents us from seeing things from the other perspective. Earlier today I was digging through Facebook's documentation of its application platform, and if I weren't comfortable with web application programming and markup languages, probably would have no idea what anything meant. This isn't conducive to convincing people to incorporate technology into their works.

So the question is, How can we make technology more accessible for whimsical, artistic applications?

There are some products being developed specifically for this purpose. The Arduino is an open source microcontroller designed to be easy to use for a variety of prototyping applications. Check out this cool light fixture powered by an Arduino. Additionally, sites like Instructables offer step-by-step tutorials to teach people how to put together their own projects. People from all over the Internets post their projects here for others to learn from, building a vibrant community of Makers.

I think it is important that product manufacturers keep their audience in mind. Even if you're making something that you expect to be used in one certain application, how can you keep things open so that other people can easily engage with and build on top of your product? There are many opportunities for visually stunning and beautiful mashups of traditional art and cutting edge technology - we just need to make things easy to use so that artist-engineers can turn their ideas for works into realities and not get caught up on technical snags along the way.

Let people play, and they will make amazing things.

Advertising

2008-04-21T18:19:00.000-07:00

This post is a turn-around from what I've done previously. Here, I'd like primarily to expose some stuff I've found, rather than generate some way of thinking about something. I feel as though advertising is something I know very little about, and one lecture was definitely not enough for me to make an opinion that I could type out for an hour. So, instead, I just googled and tried to come up with some sweet ads. This site had a zillion, so I picked my three (3.5?) favorite. There's four, and two are from the same campaign.

Tide Football Ad
http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/tide_football?size=_original
This has some just wonderful graphic art done for it. I love the juxtaposition of the small red blob with the large white one, and I feel like the logo feel is right-on.

World Vision Sex Trafficking PSA
http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/world_vision_sentence
This is pretty intense. I don't think it necessarily is a grammatical sentence, but if you don't pass out by the end, it really doesn't matter anyways. It's certainly bold, but in a non-obnoxious way. Maybe because its message is actually agreeable?

Same message, new medium
http://adsoftheworld.com/media/ambient/world_vision_do_disturb?size=_original
The reason I'm posting this one as well is because it utilizes a totally unheard of medium. Now, there's always the problem of reading it as "do not disturb" out of habit, but 10/10 for the idea. I'm curious to think about campaigns that rely entirely on media such as this one.

Penguin Books Success Story
http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/penguin_books_malaysia_success?size=_original
At this point, I can't really think straight. But this is a really good ad, I have to say. Between the allusions, puns, ironies and great graphic work, I feel smarter just reading it. Well isn't that strange. I suppose that's really what they were going for. Maybe I'll feel smarter if I read books printed by Penguin.

What have I learned by looking at a hundred ads and picking the ones I liked best? Well, first of all, they're edgy. Edgy is really an overused word, in my opinion. But then again, about the only non-buzzword we actually mention in vital ideation is "ideation". And "ecomimicry", but we made that one up. Go figure. Anyhow, edginess comes in many forms, and it's a fine line between tasteful and tasteless. However, because those lines for each individual don't match up, it certainly seems in a firms best interest to design somewhere along an average edginess for an average audience.

Ah, well now that I've spent an hour doing this post, I feel like I could go on for another hour. Perhaps some other time...

Designing for Olin College?

2008-04-13T21:17:00.001-07:00

So our most recent speaker, President Miller of Olin College, was speaking to us about “Design for the Next Guy.” This actually ended up meaning “planning large organizational structures.” Planning large and flexible structures is extremely difficult. One of the things I’ve been thinking about as a result is the balance between creating a structure that maintains itself, doesn’t need much change as people come in and out, and creating a structure that changes with the people that are involved but still maintains its overall characteristics or mission.

I think the advantages to something that dynamically changes is less needs for huge improvements at once because they are made in minor amounts over time, and additionally, something that will be able to maintain itself even as context changes.

One of the things about Olin is that we’re supposed to be dynamically changing with individuals who come in and out of the school, and also in order to create a “best practices” of engineering. Yet I’ve been here for two years and feel like despite being involved I’ve only had incidental effect on the overall direction of Olin. I feel like being here without making a serious mark on the culture or educational plan means that you could’ve had a similar experience at another institution. I chose here to be part of a culture of change, and not to just learn how to be an engineer.

This got me thinking on the topic of how to actually enact change, and how to make the most of your time at a given place, or institution. For me, this is crucial for having a worthwhile experience. This is not just another lens for me- this is in a way, “my lens.” Next year I’ll be taking a Leave of Absence to refocus my direction here at Olin and enable me to find my place in the big picture of change- how to design for the next group of students who come through with different ideas about life, how to design for future faculty- be they innovative or traditional, how to design for inclusivity rather than exclusivity, and how to design to make Olin College fulfill its founding precepts.

For me as a designer, design can be more about a system and interactions and enablement, rather than just about form or aesthetics. In the scheme of engineering to art, design is in the middle, and I think closest to a type of “system engineering” than most other types.

So this doesn’t answer what I’ll be doing next year, and how I’ll be “designing for the next guy.” One thing I think is critical is a continual review of what’s going on in a big institution if you’re indeed trying to prepare for the future. I think something Leave of Absence aids is that necessary time to reflect. It also is something that is part of the institution- having a group of students outside of the framework is something that could be consistently implemented to help make change in the system. Maybe we can’t be a group that starts the concept of LOA- but we could start it as a way to reform the institution we attend, and we could institutionalize it in itself, to help document adequately, and to have enough success such that individuals continue to do it. Ways we’ve thrown around documenting it do include continuing our design notebooks (particularly as we work with businesses), and writing a blog, or a book. Writing something of this magnitude could possibly expand to encourage students at other schools to attempt similar projects, and possibly make the entire higher educational system more dependent on student reflection and review (I can dream!).

Another way I’ve always regarded being able to change an institution is to accept all types of people who arrive- there is a definite need to balance following the historical concepts and reasons for founding, but also being able to adapt to current individuals. I’ve realized my inherent bias in this area- because I want to stick to founding precepts, while at the same time ignoring those who wrote them in favor of my own specific views, within the bigger picture. It’s most definitely a careful line to walk.

I think one of the ways I have tried to impact Olin in another way is through being the Tour Coordinator this year. One of the advantages to this is that I do a substantial amount of tours myself- with my own portrayal of the benefits of Olin College. This is powerful, particularly as we have more and more external visitors to campus, looking to model off of us, or at least review how different types of engineering education are done. Having a system that is reviewed and taken on my others is another powerful type of designing for the next guy- it leads to peer institutions with similar developments that later leaders can read off of. Another benefit of tours is working with potential future students closely- determining the types of students who choose to come to Olin. These students will be helping to shape the future.

So, in all, two of the critical features for designing for the next person include sustainability and review, as well as accounting for future peers and members.

Toys and the Media

2008-04-13T16:41:00.001-07:00

So one of the threads I started musing about after our first toy lecture was the concept of how toys relate to media, advertising, portrayal, and society. Some “toys” are for education rather than for fun, or are some toys for teaching things about society? For instance, one common game amongst children is “house” and people play “house” which I assume helps them learn how to have a house to tend in the future. There are also toys like Barbie, which are controversial because of what they teach, or the expectations that they create in society.

How do societal standards relate to toys?

Every toy you see an advertisement for tends to be flashy and exciting. Think back to old fashioned toys- usually homemade, usually wood, usually not advertised or bought. The things I think of are like stilts, ball and cup games, spelling word blocks, the wood panels you can flip back and forth, etc.

Toys, just like everything else (clothes, cars, houses, kitchens…) have gotten a revamp. It seems like things that used to be viewed as tools, or means to an end, are now viewed more as social symbols. Some toys seem like they don’t entirely have a point. One of the ones I’ve never understood is “Bratz” dolls. Why would you want something that’s supposed to be bratty and obnoxious? There were already so many other dolls in the market before that, and I can’t find a benefit to having a bratty doll. Additionally, some things seem to make a splash and be wildly popular, yet aren’t very far distinguished from other toys.

Take “Tickle Me Elmo”- a toy that seems to be on the news every Christmas as frazzled parents rush through toy stores trying to find one for their child. Why? There are lots of fuzzy toys that make noise. This doesn’t seem to be a particularly unique concept. Is it the fact that it is “Tickle Me Elmo” that makes it so coveted?

I think that it is the case more and more that things, even toys, are valued for being what they are, or for their connotations, and not for how fun they are to play with.

Is there anything the media doesn't touch?

My Attempts at Toy Design

2008-04-13T14:54:00.000-07:00

One of the things I noticed during Barry’s talk was everything about toys needs to be appealing. Even the graphic to describe toys (the tetrahedron with colorful axes, and the grid of present toys) were appealing. How has this changed over time?

From the talk we learned that toys are grouped into four different types of play: sensory, fantasy, construction, and challenge. These are all relatively easy types of interaction, with toys not even being necessary. For instance, feeling grass or sand is sensory, playing make believe, fantasy, putting various things together, construction, and challenge can be word puzzles you devise in your own mind. All of these things can be obtained without a toy, so why are toys so crucial? Also, how could you make simple toys more “fun”?

I started from the very simple example of blocks- how could blocks be more fun or captivating?

So I realized that all of these are taking a construction toy, and making it more complex by adding another element. These all add a sensory or challenge type addition to the simple toy of blocks. I don’t know how many of these toys actually exist, but all of them seem like they could be amusing. I think the most fun would be moldable blocks so you could create your own structure (like sand in a somewhat rigid case) that lit up based on interactions with other blocks. Perhaps there could be puzzle cards like in taboo to try to figure out the best ways to have them interact.

Squishy Blocks
Differently shaped building pieces
Blocks like stress balls
Permanently moldable blocks
Interactive Blocks
Talking blocks
Light up blocks
Blocks that light up based on patterns in how you assemble them

I went through a similar exercise with dolls too. I ended up with “Dolls that quiz you for the SAT.”

I’m glad I don’t actually have to make my toys- one of my friends is in the class at MIT. She was in the group doing mechanical toys: ladder robots, now with no ladders, and racing hovercrafts. Both of these toys seem hard to build to me.

A Mash-Up

2008-04-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

Our guest speaker for "Ecomimicry", Nina Fefferman, told us about her research into the World of Warcraft "Corrupted Blood" 'virus'. Specifically, as an epidemiologist, the studied the insights that a digital outbreak of a contagious disease could shed onto how social systems (like thousands of gamers) respond to an epidemic. She backed observations about how the real world worked out of a crude approximation of the real world with thousands of players controlled by real people.

In our discussions of Ecomimicry, we talked a lot about how these large social systems online can emulate real social systems. We also talked about how one could intentionally design a system to take advantage of these parallels and behavioral mechanisms that emerge. In the case of online communities, people coming together creates an emulation of the real world. But the opposite is possible - we can create a system that emulates the way people work, without the people.

I did some quick Google searches for demos of particularly neat swam robot behaviors. I came across this site, which seems to be a slightly abandoned page by a research group investigating using the idea of "pheromones" to let the swarm robots communicate and work together toward goals. Insects use pheromones to signal to each other, so this team has taken the idea from the biological space and used it to establish a set of rules about how these robots should all behave. It is this emergent behavior from simple rules that is going to keep pushing what large groups of autonomous agents are going to be able to accomplish.

So here's my idea for a mash-up: Groups of people from all over the world are cool, albeit somewhat limited in their ability to physically affect the same place. Swarms of robots are cool, albeit somewhat dumb. What if we created a system where individual people were able to take control of a swarm robot to accomplish some task? It could be something as useless as "spell out a word" or as complex as "sort these boxes on the factory floor." If you could drop 10,000 robots on a disaster scene and volunteers could drive them around and flag distressed people or dangerous sites, how useful would that be? Nothing can improvise solutions to complex problems as well as the human brain, but it's hard (and expensive!) to get a lot of human brains together in the same place. Amazon's Mechanical Turk does the same things for purely-digital mundane tasks (Is this a picture of 79 State Street?), but imagine harnessing the same mechanism to do things in the real world.

Thousands of people, thousands of robots, useful telepresence work.

Principles of Ecomimicry

2008-04-11T15:07:00.000-07:00

"Those were great days to be a night elf"
--Nina Fefferman, concerning the WoW "corrupted blood" outbreak

Ok, so the quote wasn't necessary, but I feel as though it adds to the flavor, since it was from our ecomimicry lecture. Second, despite the post title, I'm not writing a textbook. Instead, I'm going to reminisce, starting with a tangent.

In linguistics, one of the biggest unanswered questions is how to figure out if you're talking about the same thing as someone else. Linguistics is a bit of a funny field, as you can see already, but the point is, we all have different connotations when we come to the table with a word like ecomimicry, which, incidentally, we all made up. So I'd like to add my two cents to its definition.

To me, ecomimicry is the study of large-scale natural systems for application in human engineering. It is quite analogous to the biomimicry of plants and animals. When we look at plants and animals for inspiration, we look at what they do well, and then extrapolate that to human building materials, human construction techniques, and a human mode of understanding. When looking at ecosystems, we look at the same sorts of things. Nature is pretty good at keeping itself in line, and it hasn't been until the last few decades that we've managed a half-decent punch (in the form of 10 billion tons of CO2 per year-- take that earth; we are the champs!).

So what sort of things can we learn from nature? Well, one of the biggest principles, in my opinion, is the large amount of negative-feedback loops woven into the system. For instance, take a forest fire. From a human perspective, that's something that would throw an ecosystem off (and perhaps by some definitions, it does). But wet climates and cool temperatures keep fires relatively at bay most of the time, and if one should break out, its effects will immediately be counteracted by a handful of pioneer shrubs that need have minimal needs for life, and would, why yes, just /love/ to live in the newly fertilized soil. So nature does everything it can to counteract the effect of any major disruption-- or at least in the case of forest fires. Can we similar effects in tornadoes, hurricanes, viruses, etc?

Another theme of ecomimicry, in my eyes, is that of high and low level complexity. In other words, systems often appear extremely complex at one level, but much less complex at another level. Let's take a look at the weather. Yes, the weather is certainly difficult to predict (and that could be a defining characteristic of high/low level complexity), but we know some simple rules that are useful for predicting weather given location, past conditions, etc. For instance, near the water, we'll often have more snow in colder climates, but bodies of water temper weather changes that are more severe elsewhere. Also, in the rocky mountains, it will rain almost every afternoon for a few minutes to an hour or two. In southern India, it will every almost every year for well over a month. Haha.

But at a very low level, there are trillions of smaller systems that make up each part of the weather we normally think about. Whether atoms or molecules, the heat generated by a tree, the heat kept by the sea, or the effects of an undersea vent opening, every smallest thing plays into an incredibly complex system we cannot even begin to comprehend at that level. So we turn to weather as a very large system, where it is governed by "simple rules with unpredictability" (which I would call a trademark of high/low level complexity).

These are some of my thoughts. I'm curious to know what others make of ecomimicry. Undoubtedly, some of it will differ vastly from the connotations the word has in my mind. Any linguists here?, enjoy. I'll leave you with a comment from my friend Nik, who watched the Matrix and understood things in a different way than the writers.

Trinity: Sentinels are killing machines designed for one thing-
Dozer: -search and destroy!
Nik: Way to not know how to count to two, idiots!

Online Relationships Mirroring In Real Life Relationships

2008-03-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

After hearing Nina Fefferman's talk about the World of Warcraft virus, our group discussion focused a lot on how virtual worlds can replicate the real world. The WoW Virus gave epidemiologists an opportunity to study how virus transmission works. This is very difficult to study in real life, but the virtual world closely mirrored how things work. We brainstormed a few areas where virtual worlds also resemble real life. E-commerce is obviously a major part of how people purchase goods these days, and e-mail is similar to real mail.

However, one area where we had some contention among the group was how well online social networks emulate real life social relationships. Some others in the course felt that relationships forged entirely online could never replicate those made in the real world. Others felt that there was no difference between the two. Since we are all in college, many of our friends from High School live much too far away to stay in touch with in person, and are relegated to the realm of Facebook wall postings, e-mail, and phone calls. Can a social relationship start and thrive merely through these non-real-life mediums?

Major Distraction

To isolate the issue of electronic vs. long distance, let's look an experiment I conducted when I first came to college. Intriguied by the idea that my friends and I were about to disperse from my hometown and meet hundreds of new people, I decided it was a pretty good situation for everyone to make some pen pals. On the premise that it would hinder productivity, I named the experiment "Major Distraction", and created a website where my friends could sign up to get a pen pal. Everyone who signed up (including a few people that had no immediate connection to anyone in the group) was paired with someone else, and both people were told to write letters to each other.

It worked great. Everyone wrote to their penpals, and vibrant new relationships were formed - for an average of two letters per pair. Then communication died.

Why did no one stay in touch beyond the initial few letters? I think that the ultimate problem was the activation energy required to communicate. You had to write a letter (slower and more time consuming than a quick IM or wall post), find an envelope and stamp, and get it to the USPS. That meant a non-trivial time investment that most people just didn't want to make as they were starting college. Taking the time to explain to someone we didn't know how our lives were going on paper was just too much effort. Is a high-effort friendship with a stranger not worth it?

Natural Selection

To constrast this "I'm not willing to put time in" situation, let's look at another experience I have had. While I was in high school, I played Natural Selection, a first-person-shooter meets real-time-strategy online multiplayer Half Life modification. In online gaming, it is common for players to organize themselves into team groups called "clans". Clans play against each other in organized matches as part of online leagues. I was a member of a clan called BS, which didn't really stand for anything, but occassionally stood for "Brotherhood of Steel".

We had a rather sophiscated organizational system. We all hunt out in an IRC channel (#nsclanbs on gamesnet, I think), scrimmaging against other teams during our free time. For a little while, we even had access to our own practice server, where we could play against each other to improve our skill and refine our strategies. We weren't the best players at the game by any stretch of the imagination, but our creativity in strategy is what stood us apart. We were ranked in the Top 8 among NS clans for a little while, and were able to hold our own.

Since we chatted online so much and played intense games together, we all become what one member of the group called "e-friends". Since voice chat was a big part of the game, I grew to recognize everyone's voice, and understood each member of the clans specific play styles, strengths and weaknesses. The guys from the clan I remember are: bit, un lapin, amelek, the giving tree, the killing tree, riotingnerd, ev0x, and deimos. There were definitely more, and people wandered in and out of the group over time, but we were definitely a cohesive entity. I've met ev0x in real life, and am Facebook friends with a few others.

Are these people that I still have close friendships with? Not really, but I definitely look back on my days playing NS with them fondly. We still talk occassionaly, and I would say I am as close with these people as anyone else that I stopped being friends with during early high school. Just because I met them and knew them online doesn't mean that my relationships with them are any less real than anyone else I have ever met.

In Conclusion

I think that "e-friends" can play just as large a role in someone's life as real friends. They may only exist on the other side of copper, but you actually get to know these people as you play or work with them. It isn't as though you chat with someone once online and you're instantly best buds, but over the course of years, you definitely establish a real relationship between real people.

Architecture: Where art meets engineering.

2008-03-17T13:17:00.000-07:00

When the ideas of art and engineering were discussed together, the first thing that came to mind was architecture. Buildings should be aesthetically pleasing, but also structurally sound. Now if that is not a perfect example of the collision of art and engineering, I don’t know what is. There are many examples of modern art and engineering coming together such as this building.

This photo was found at http://www.eos2007.de/berlincitytour/media.files/Berlin-City1.jpg

Or this building

Which was found at http://www.contemporist.com/photos/bolgen_02.jpg.

Or even this one

Which was found at http://www.duesseldorf.de/touristik/bildarchiv/grafik/n00156.jpg.

Also you should check out this website http://www.contemporist.com/category/architecture and check out old posts as well. (Also explore other genres other than architecture which are listed at the top.)

However, what really interested me as both engineering and art feats were cathedrals. Over winter break I spent a few weeks traveling through Europe and I saw many old and beautiful cathedrals. These building posses so many features of great art and of great engineering and they beautifully play off of one another. One cathedral that we saw was the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence Italy. This cathedral has a very Gothic feel to its outsides, but its main feat of engineering is the very large dome on the top.

The outside of the church.

The dome of the church.

This dome was the largest dome at the time of its creation. It is 42 meters wide and it is created by making two concentric domes. Brunelleschi, the dome's creator came up with the idea of how to build the most massive dome as well as the tools he needed to create the masterpiece. This was a great task for an engineer to tackle, but it was also a great task for an artist. Brunelleschi had to make the dome something beautiful and interesting for the people of Florence for years to come. I truly think that he accomplished this task very well and created a great work of art and of engineering. Although the interior was completed by other artists, the interior was also a magnificent feat. Frescoes (plater based paintings) cover the inside of the dome. Frescoes must be painted quickly before the plaster dries or they are destroyed. Therefore the entirety of this dome interior took years to complete.

The inside of the Dome.

Another cathedral that is a great combination of art and engineering is none other than the Basilica di San Pietro. It was designed by the great artist and architect, Michaelangelo. This cathedral contains the largest nave and tallest dome of all Catholic Cathedrals in the world. It is unbelievable to behold both from an engineering and a artistic point of view. I cannot begin to explain the magnificence of this great building, but here are some pictures which capture the greatness of the art and engineering that went into this cathedral.

The dome of St. Peter's Basilica. A view from the roof.

The furthest point of the church from the entrance. Here you can see how the art work and the architecture are one and the same and cannot be separated. Look at how the support pillars frame the sculpture on the back wall. Also all of the gold you can see on the ceiling is mosaic tiles. The artwork and the engineering are greatly incorporated here.

Again you can see how the architecture plays into the art of the building. The shapes and designs cut into the structure of the building are so intricate and purposefully made. This building is such a perfect collision of the two worlds.

Here is a view of the church from the base of the dome interior. Look at how massive the building is, every inch of which appears to be covered in artwork. Even the flooring has intricate designs inlaid in it. Here you can see the support pillars which are not only there for engineering purposes, but add greatly to the beauty of the church.

As you can see, St. Peter's Basilica is a great example of how beautiful architecture can be. This building is a masterpiece of art and engineering and carefully combines the best elements of both to create one of the most unbelievable places to behold.

Fashion Lecture: Replacement for Sticky Ideas

2008-03-12T20:12:00.000-07:00

Last week I went to the lecture on Clothing: the Portable Environment. And I absolutely loved the lecture. I am greatly fascinated by clothing, fashion, and clothing design, but this lecture took the things I am really interested in to a new and interesting level. The lecture was thinking about clothing as a portable environment, meaning all of your life support etc is contained in your clothing (think astronauts), which is something I have never before thought of as fashion. But more importantly, the lecturer addressed the importance of the user and the others impacted by the clothing and the many small level design decisions that go into all of the clothing we see today. These two points are not things that I have thought about as much as I should have in my short experiments with fashion design (I have made a few garments from scratch from my own designs). The reason I have not explored these areas is twofold: (1) I typically design for myself (so I am my user) and there aren't too many people that are impacted by my designs (I guess some people might find some of the cuts I like offensive, but I am not worried about this as the user) and (2) all the fabric and materials I use have been previously manufactured. I am not starting completely from scratch, nor do the designs I create require materials that are not manufactured before I get them. I have been drawing basic garment designs for about 4 to 5 years now. However, I never thought that I could make my own clothes until I had spent a semester at Olin and after becoming addicted to Project Runway. I don't think one or the other alone would have caused me to start experimenting with my own clothes. But together they gave me the nudge I needed to try something scary and new. I now absolutely love designing my own clothes and wish I had more time to do it. The experience of designing from scratch (even for myself) has been a challenging, but fun and rewarding experiment into my capability as a designer and garment constructor. There is nothing better though than getting compliments on something you made from scratch.

Fashion designing for me goes through many stages:

I. Drawing Phase

A. creation of basic shape

B. decision of color

C. plans for details

D. plans for construction (sometimes these aren't written down though).

II. Shopping Phase

A. selection of fabric in the right color

B. selection of detail elements (beads, ribbon, etc)

III. Construction

A. finalization of all details (any edits necessary to make garment feasible for creation)

B. measurements and cutting

C. sewing and multiple fittings

I am crazy with the way I design and I realize it's infeasible for a good fashion designer because I do not draw a sewing pattern and I don't pin to a mannequin (mostly because I don't own one). Therefore I measure myself a ton and cut a basic shape, then use myself as a mannequin stand in and finish the way I want to attach the fabric by pinning it while I’m wearing it. This causes some interesting dilemmas, but I still love the process!

Here are some examples of clothes and original sketches I have made in the last 3 years.

Here’s a sketch I made. Notice the dimensions which are what I used for the final construction.

Here’s the final construction. The front is pictured on the top and the back is pictured on the bottom. Notice the design changes I made when you compare the sketch to the final construction. The orange fabric no longer parts all the way down to the blue and there is only one button instead of three. Other than that it holds fairly true to the sketch.

Here’s an image of me wearing the shirt! Yay!

For this garment I made two separate sketches which I combined in the final design. The figure on top was used mostly for color whereas the one on the bottom was used primarily for shape.

Here is the final construction of the dress. The front is pictured on the top and the back is pictured on the bottom. Notice the design change in the straight cut of the bottom of the dress and the lack of beading on the front.

This drawing is interesting because I had already maintained my “fabric” in the form of an men’s extra-large tie-dye t-shirt and planned to add in the black material and cut the neck and shape the body.

Here’s the final design. Again I changed the design so that the neck was high in the back instead of coming to a v. The front is pictured on the top and the back is pictured on the bottom.

Here’s me wearing this shirt as a Halloween costume!

So far in my experiments with fashion design I have not put too much thought into the type of material I have been using. However after hearing the lecture today I am very inspired to think about the material as well as the weave of the fabric. I have made garments that do not work quite as well as I had hoped due to the fabric choices I have made. From now on I will be much more conscious of the decisions I make, even on that scale of design.

Teaching Creativity

2008-03-11T21:20:00.000-07:00

So one of the things that arose in our last talk was "can't teach creativity". Which struck me as interesting, as my mom teaches a class in EXACTLY THAT! She always calls it her creativity class, but the actual name is "ORG 680/MGT 682: Creativity" at Oakland University in South Eastern Michigan.

This week I've taken some time to go through
1) 3 powerpoints from the class
2) the syllabus
3) "critical questions"
and
4) a description of the project

My mom has mentioned many times that teaching this class is particularly difficult because its "full of engineers." She says the most challenging part of that is engineers expect a "right" answer and she does not teach that there are "right answers" in the creativity class. I think this is an interesting concept, particularly related to UOCD and creativity classes.

If there isn't a right answer, how do you judge things?

Anyway, reflecting upon the syllabus:

The texts required in the class are:

Management and Creativity by Chris Bilton, 2007, ISBN-10: 1-4051-1996-9, ISBN 13: 978-1-4051-1996-2, Blackwell.

The Imagination Challenge by Alexander Manu, 2007, ISBN: 0-321-41365-2, New Riders Press.

Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Publisher: Random House (January 2, 2007), ISBN

which is interesting, as this class has already had us reflect upon Made to Stick. I originally found out about it through my mom's course.

These books, along with the description, make the class seem much more about creativity in management and business, rather than straight up creativity. I think it's much more feasible to teach creativity *in* something rather than alone, because it provides a much firmer context to provide examples within, rather than defining an abstract (nebulous?) concept. So I would title the course something more along the lines of "Practical Creativity (innovation?) for your everyday life." This ties into one of the projects being redefining the MBA program at Oakland based on what you've learned in the class, or creating a scenario related to some other school or work situation to use creativity.

One other thing of note in the syllabus was that readings were front-loaded and deliverables back-loaded. This implies that some background information is needed to be creative. I found this paralleled with UOCD readings before the phases. Perhaps creativity is generally taught in an uncreative way? This would be further echoed by the powerpoints that contain text based on books on creativity- valuable information, presented in a standard format to get it across to allow to spring to the next location.

On the whole, I'm still reflecting on this concept of "traditional means to teach untraditional topics so that people can work outwards on their own".

Is this a topic we could use spiral learning with?

Arts vs. Engineering, A study in Bissociation

2008-03-07T21:52:00.000-08:00

In our UOCD class, we have reading every two weeks. Usually rather dull, one passage stuck out to me-- a passage about bissociation. Bissociation is taking two unrelated ideas, and then trying to think of an idea that involves an intersection between them. We will get to the examples soon (for those not in the know), but the point remains: bissociation is a powerful tool for ideation, and after the book example where the author generates almost a half a dozen patentable ideas in a number of minutes, I had to try it.

As far as I know, bissociation is largely unregulated and undirected. However, I tried to apply it in particular to the last lecture, which contrasted art with engineering. So I generated 15 "fields" in arts and engineering. They were paired up down the line, and the ideation began. Here are some ideas for your consideration.

painting + computer
How about a touch screen computer that recognizes a number of stylus-type tools that are touching it. They could represent different users in collaborative work or multi-player games, or they could represent different brushes in art/drawing programs.

drawing + application
How about if mouse gestures were used commonly across an operating system, or at least in the document explorer and all major applications. They're handy for firefox, but I want more.

sculpture + webapp
Famous work of art at museums could have small cameras located near them that show, online, who's viewing the art, who's drawing it, who's sitting down at that bench in the middle of the room, who's running around... or who's stealing it in the middle of the night (MFA heist, anyone?).

modern art + embedded systems
For a cool gallery exhibit of art, try this: The gallery is darkened, but upon entering, each user is given a headset that has an infrared beam shooting straight out in front of it. Sensors pick up the IR and light up the works near where they're looking. Alternatively, the whole environment could be structured to react to be pitch black with no IR, but alive and lit with IR.

kinetic art + circuits
Initially I thought of trying to represent circuits as cars. It seemed good until I realized that voltage would be something like "tail-gating and pressure from other drivers to speed". No component, either in traffic flow or in circuits, seems directly translatable to something in the other realm. Let me know if you think of one.

composing + signals/systems
It would be cool is some program let me make MIDI synths (or alternatively, actual synths) by viewing the Fourier transform of the wave and then dragging frequency responses for various frequencies to greater or less amplitudes.

dance + materials science
Lauren (yes, the Lauren we know and love) helped with this prompt. We thought of a spectacular dance show that was inspired by cool materials:

tap-dancing on pools of non-newtonian fluids
tango with suits made of color-changing-with-temperature materials (ie moodring jumpsuits, which is a cool band name, b-t-dubs)
blind-folded capoeria.

The rest of the pairings, which I will leave as an exercise for the reader (ie put 'em in the comments) are...
graphic design + robotics, writing + urban planning, screenplay/drama + mechanical design, film + vehicles, rock/modern music + buildings, musical + manufacturing, landscape architecture + interface design.

I realize I left out a wide variety of both arts and engineering topics, not to mention fashion design and poetry. Another exercise for the reader I suppose.

Simulations for Ecomimicry

2008-03-05T17:57:00.000-08:00

After discussing the World of Warcraft viruses I was left to pondering what other ways to create ecomimicry would be. Apparently it’s realistic to have people manipulating virtual simulations- likely because people continue to act in the same ways that they would in the real world. I think it’d be difficult to mimic human behavior because it’s so unpredictable due to the wide variety of psychological impacts.

However, I got to thinking about other ecological systems, and animals and plants tend to follow more set cues based on their needs and survival instincts. As I was thinking about it, I remember something that my Sibb (an Olin term for a freshman you work with), Jonathan Reed and his partner Jacob Izrealevitz made a matlab simulation of something I view as “ecomimcry.”

So I had him send me the code, and I’ve been looking through it and playing with it. The main parameters that you can change at the beginning of the simulation are how many of each type of organism you create and the amount of food in the system. The simulation has three different types of organisms- foragers that look for food, cultivators that grow more food, and reproducers that make more cells.

This obviously isn’t a perfect system, because very few organisms make their own food, and things very seldom perform a singular role in society. However, it is a very basic tool for ecomimcry, and even this small model takes almost 600 lines of code. When the simulation runs it provides output in the form of a graphical display- it runs “turns” of organisms each performing an action and you can watch food appear and disappear, organisms grow and shrink, and the opacity change based on how much food is around them. The color of an organism indicates the role it fulfills.

So there are a few snapshots of the system, and I’m going to spend some more time making a list of ways the system could be made more realistic (hopefully simply) and perhaps trying to modify it. If you’re interested in seeing the code, let me know, and I’ll send it your way!

This is a system in flux- there are a few organisms of different types and sizes, and lots of food. Depending on how they take turns, it could go anywhere.

This is a system at the end, after all the organisms have died. See how sparse the food is? They exhausted their available resources.

Finally, this is a system with a ton of foragers. These cells all went and ate all the food being created by the green cells.

So, this has been a fun evening playing with the only ecomimetic system I have access too.
Stay tuned for updates on me trying to figure out more of the code and find improvements!

Improvements:

1) More different types of cells, or cells that go through series of actions- that is for awhile they feed, then reproduce, or something, based on a lifecycle, rather than simply favoring one action.
2) Cells that work to benefit each other or hurt each other, a predator-prey concept.
3) Other things- like geographic locations etc. so cells behave differently based on their location
4) Evolution so that cells slightly modify behavior or do a combination of small amount of things each time.

Sticky!!!

2008-03-04T12:27:00.000-08:00

Steve Gold talked with us about this vague, ambiguous concepts of "Sticky Ideas." His definition was that personal ownership and the conferance of value from the object to the person is what makes ideas sticky. Value was the "glue" that makes people and ideas stick to each other. I don't know how much I agree with this but I do know that there are certainly some things that are "stickier" than others.

As I was going through these last couple of weeks, I was trying to come up with a list of fads at Olin.

whiteboards
hating Bio
propped doors
Timbuk 2 bags
linux
Windows bashing
"Outlook runs my life"
Checking e-mail all the time
nalgenes
leathermans
Robots
Bashing Babson
Complaining about UOCD
sustainability
baking
bunny ears??? (why am I seeing these all over the place?!?!?!)
Guitar Hero
Project Runway
SigSys Parties, UOCD Parties, Etc.
sleeping in lounges
"stealing" cookies from d-hall
calling it the d-hall
mid-afternoon snack
not wearing seasonable clothing
not getting enough sleep and bragging/complaining about it

These are just a few of the weird cultural idioms that we have at Olin. What is it that makes these ideas stick to so many of us. Taking a cue from UOCD, I have decided to find an interesting way to group them.

I guess you could say I am taking this idea of stickiness and working backwards with it. How can we use these sticky ideas to find out more interesting things about Olin students.

In grouping these ideas I came up with a couple major themes.

1. This idea of being tough and "hardened" by the workload here at Olin

hating Bio
Timbuk 2 bags
linux
Windows bashing
"Outlook runs my life"
leathermans
Bashing Babson
Complaining about UOCD
SigSys Parties, UOCD Parties, Etc.
not wearing seasonable clothing
not getting enough sleep and bragging/complaining about it

2. This desire to be social, a little a-typical from the traditional engineer

Propped doors
Checking e-mail ALL the time
Guitar Hero (believe it or not, some video games are about the social. DDR is another example. This ties into lounge culture in general)

3. A desire to be creative and a little out-there. We are still engineers after all and I think we really resonate with that idea

Whiteboards
Robots
Sustainability
Baking
Bunny Ears
Project Runway
calling it the d-hall

4. And then of course there are physical needs that we solve in perhaps more unusual ways due to our environment.

Nalgenes - kind of a new england-y thing I think
sleeping in lounges
"stealing" cookies from the d-hall
mid-afternoon snack

From this little exercise of mine, I think I can give at least one reason why some things are sticky. The ideas that resonate most with a person or a certain group of people are those that fulfill some of their basic "needs."

Wow, i am actually learning something in UOCD! That is pretty exciting.

Sticky thoughts are squishy.

2008-02-29T22:08:00.000-08:00

My thesis: Ideas stick in your craw when they "fit" a certain way in the kinks of your mind - and what this means is that "sticky" ideas tend to be malleable and flexible and customizable (but not so vague they swoosh around like vapor instead of taking hold). Think of those gummy sticky balls that you get for a quarter from vending machines - the kind you're supposed to throw against a wall. Something like that.

Greg says taking ownership of something makes it sticky - it's got to be "mine" before I'll remember it or care. That means I've got to be able to smoosh the idea into something that's attractive to me - and that this smooshing needs to be insanely easy for something to be "sticky."

Erik makes lists and collections - his way of mashing an ontology to fit his mind. Alyshia brings up the idea that people around us (and what's sticking to them) are a compelling factor in what makes ideas stick to us - something that cross-platform (cross-brain) compatible has to be kludged to fit the varied people it transforms.

I'm severely overusing the word "stick" here.

People learn, in part, by making connections - and the more connections they can make between their old worldview and your new idea, the better chance you'll have of making your idea stay in their mind and carry on to action after you leave. Classic example: look at widespread world religions and you'll see how Christianity, Buddhism, etc. adapted by smooshing into local cultures? (Heck, the very timing of Christmas itself is an adaptation.) Other examples are food (McRiceburgers, Thai pizza), language (creoles and foreign loanwords) and PBL/Do-Learn (start with something concrete, then move into the abstract).

So what?

Sticky ideas are hackable. They have to be. The more ways you give people to work with, use, and sometimes transform your idea, the more they'll pick it up. An idea will never be sticky in exactly the way/shape/form you first have it in your brain - if you want it to get out and get spread by others, you must, to some extent, just let it go.

Mine

2008-02-27T22:34:00.000-08:00

Stickiness

Steve Gold gave us a wonderful talk about stickiness for Vital Ideation. He focused on a fundamentally different idea of what “sticky” meant than the book “Made to Stick” did, but Steve’s thoughts encompassed a whole new set of ideas than I had previously considered.

One of the key points that Steve made was asking whether ideas are sticky, or if it is their implementation that makes them so. Arguably, there are ways to package up things that will make them more attractive, no matter what they are.

Furthermore, Steven questions whether things stick to people, or people stick to things. In fact, the stickiness is bi-directional.

What makes them stick?

Steve argued that the thing that makes people and ideas stick together is a two-way flow of value. The thing you are stuck to is giving you value somehow (an iPod, for instance), and you are giving it value (a reason for being, money, time, etc). It is because of this two-way flow that there is this Velcro effect.

But what causes this two way flow? One of the most interesting concepts Steve mentioned is the idea of “mine”.

Mine

There are lots of objects we interact with every day. Cars, food, facebook profiles, rooms, water bottles, pens, shoes, shirts – the list is endless. However, some of these objects we think of specifically as “mine.”

Some things are obvious. These are my shoes and those are yours. This house is my house and that house is your house. Give me my pen back when you are done with it.

Still, some things possess greater degree of “mine”-ness as others. You probably wouldn’t feel weird if you lost your pen and had to borrow someone else’s, or ate at a restaurant instead of your house. You would probably start to feel weirder if you fell in a pool and had to borrow clothes from a friend. A sense of “not mine” would start to creep up on you. If you lost your iPod or your cell phone, someone else’s is almost an entirely useless replacement – you simply can’t do with someone else’s what you can with yours.

Irreplaceable

I feel as though the stronger this concept of “irreplaceable,” the stronger the feeling of ownership. When I use other people’s laptop, I am much less efficient than when I am using my own, because it is somehow foreign and uncomfortable despite being exactly the same. The programs aren’t in the same place and the keys feel a bit different. My laptop has the top row rearranged to spell “MARRA” and has stickers on it that I recognize it by. It goes with me almost everywhere, and finding a thirty minute block where I don’t need it so I can give it to IT to replace my speakers is difficult.

You can get a new stapler very easily. You won’t miss your old stapler. A stapler is a commodity good.

You can’t get a new iPod in the same way. It is not a drop-in replacement. The difference will be tangible.

People are more comfortable with and take care of things that are theirs. I would feel no remorse snapping my pencil, I can just get another. I will edit my Wiki page to say what it should, but I am afraid to edit other people’s pristinely marked up pages. When I have ownership I am not an outsider. Ownership is comfort. People care about and take care of things that they feel ownership of. No one wants to see their toy break, their idea get shot down, or their essay get an F.

But this feeling of ownership is not a permanent one. Toys that I cherished in my childhood I now donate to charity. My MySpace page went from being checked multiple times daily to being deleted. The laptop I carry around with me daily now will be replaced by another in a few years. It is something that comes and wanes, and perhaps something that can be harnessed.

Creating Ownership

So as budding entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers, the question is: how do I make you feel this powerful ownership over the things I make?

Customization creates ownership. My Build-a-Bear has a green shirt and cool hat. My iPod has gem rhinestones around the screen. My Webkins has a different name than yours. Your thing is no longer a commodity; it is its own unique entity. There is a book I intend to read called “FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication.” It is about how some time in the not-too-distant-future everyone will be able to customize products in the same way that we can print custom party invitations today. As technology enables more and more individualization of products, people will become more aware of the differences between mine and yours.

Ability to affect change creates ownership. If I let you comment on my blog, then maybe you feel like you are part of a discussion. But if I let you all the way on the inside and let you post to my blog, then you are now an insider with control over its direction. These sorts of small viral communities have popped up all over the internet, and there is no barrier of entry to joining. You simple can participate and become part of the crew of “regulars” and feel part of the place belongs to you.

These are just a few of the many ways to create ownership in the way that makes ideas and products “sticky.” More and more, we will see these trends of personalization and viral communities, among others, influence people’s perceptions.

Take Home Messages

You would care a lot more if someone erased your iPod than stole your stapler.

You would rather sleep in your own bed than a hotel bed.

Mine and yours aren’t interchangeable, and that is critical.

Three Reflections on Stickiness

2008-02-26T17:01:00.000-08:00

For the stickiness deliverable, I’ve written three short reflections tangential to the aforementioned concept. The first, “Covered in Stickiness: A True Story of Tree Sap, Honey, and iPods,” has nothing to do with the sub-title. The second, “Me in Media,” wonders about the role of multimedia in perception of self. The third, “I Am What I Collect,” meanders through thoughts on sets as a description of a person. “But self! How can these be related to stickiness?” you might ask yourself in surprise. To me, stickiness is very strongly correlated to self-perception. The reason I keep something with me has a lot to do with the way I look at myself.

These contain obnoxious amounts of self-reference and opinion. They’re thoughts, not research papers, and are to start discussions, not end them, so it would be great to see a comment or two at the end! :)

Covered in Stickiness

A True Story of Tree Sap, Honey and iPods

Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick and undoubtedly society’s choice experts on the idea of stickiness, say that a sticky idea is something that stays with you really well. You remember it, and it influences the way you act, what you buy, etc. However, stickiness can also be viewed from a product sense, to which entrepreneur Steve Gold’s stickiness lecture for Vital Ideation was more akin. I’m going to investigate the case of the latter (or, more specifically, things that would relate to the latter more).

Sticky products are things that you want to buy, and why you buy them is anyone’s guess. My personal guess is that sticky products define who you want to be. My guess is also very much like a philosopher’s personal theory that is quite accurate in some cases, but overall can describe nowhere near the entire story. So in that sense, I’m annoyed with it. I will continue anyways.

I immediately sat down to define myself by my possessions—to see what I’ve bought that defines me. Trying to describe myself with my possessions was a slightly unnerving exercise, as it probably should be. But I started writing labels and making bubbles and arrows and dotted lines and boxes, and when I thought I had generated enough fluff, I took a close look and noticed some trends. Here’s what I found…

Me in Media

Defining the Digital Identity

Perhaps it’s a function of the fact I am a student of engineering growing up in the digital age, but I found that electronics and electronic media (which is the sole use of the term I will be using in this paper) strongly define who I am.

The largest theme on the paper that I was ideating on was a large cloud shooting off of “laptop” called “MEDIA” (yes, in engineering all-caps). Now this is a bit tangential to a product already, but I found that these things matter most to me. So I went with it. In MEDIA, I have my pictures, my music (and podcasts), my videos, my writing, and a few things I lumped in as “digital creativity”—my code, multimedia projects, music compositions, etc.

Again, these are not things I bought to define me. Instead, they are largely things I’ve created. The computer is a great way to store created things. Not all types of created things, of course. Paintings and classical music are orders of magnitude more satisfying live. But I don’t paint, do I? And yeah, I compose, but software transcribes the music. It gets played elsewhere.

But if I were to lose all that, it would mean a good deal more to me than losing my credit card, guitar, and (limited college) furniture. But the point remains. Most creation of any sort has some decent way of being stored in a digital format, and this collection of digital media defines me because what I create defines who I am.

I Am What I Collect

The Role of Collections in Self-Definition

On my page of self-defining fluff, I noticed another trend. This particular trend begins with an “l” and ends with “ists”. Congrats! It’s “lists”! My page was practically covered in lists! And the cool part about these lists is not the practical nature they served.

What I mean by that is that these lists of things were not grocery lists, task lists, homework lists, etc. They didn’t correspond to things that needed to get done. Instead, they were lists of things slowly accumulated, all belonging to a specific genre, and all describing me. These were lists that integrated over time to add up to this every-changing function of self.

What does that mean? It means that instead of checking all the items off, I added new ones with the expressed purpose of further defining myself with that collection. For instance, consider books. I have a bookshelf in my room, and I am dang proud of it. Whenever I go into a new room or house and see a bookshelf, I often ask permission to look at it. Why? Because I learn about you through your books (to those of you reading aloud at home, that last sentence can sound pretty creepy with the right inflection). My set of books define me—entrepreneurship, Catholic, history, outdoors, math and science, programming and reference books—with of course more than a few random ones here and there.

Another list I had was my media, but I already covered that in decent detail. The thing I did not mention is the fact that I wrote down “collection” a bunch—the right term to think of may be “synergy” (apologies, buzzword, I know… I don’t like them any more than you do). Synergy is the word correlated with the phrase “the whole is more than the sum of its parts,” and in this specific case, refers definitely to the fact that my music collection, for instance, is more than just a bunch of songs/albums. As a set, it defines me. If anyone had the same music collection as I did, well for one I would be surprised (considering the size of it), but second, I would probably freak out and start asking them a ton of questions. After all, anyone who has all my music has all my personality, right? Right??

Ask yourself if that’s a reasonable thought, because I’m not that it is. But I would naturally want to see if coincidences extend, and some part of me would love to see that they did. But I will take the safe road and assume they don’t, as the number and size of each of my collections is enough to statistically distinguish me from any other person on the map. Perhaps that’s why I say they define me…

eNotes in the 21st Century

2008-02-21T15:46:00.000-08:00

The method for which people have taken notes have not substantially changed in the past few centuries. The concept of paper and pen and any combination of the two have been the foundations of ideas, thoughts, worries, and creation for everyone in the past, and most people in the present. I realize the advantages and freedoms that something so simple can provide, but what sparks my interests is how technology has been able to solve many of the shortfalls of this ancient system and provide a new and useable solution to this everlasting activity.

Why eNotes are BAD:

Let me premise by saying that electronic solutions to note-taking are NOT perfect and NOT practical for all applications. I feel obliged to tear apart electronic media before I raise it on a glorified pedestal. Electronic solutions are currently more expensive than paper. The PDA that I will be using as my special case cost me about $500. It would take a lot of notebooks and pencils before you reach $500 worth of supplies.

Electronic solutions suck for drawing neat, fluid, and creative sketches. In the applications that I will talk about, you can’t sketch a landscape as well as you can on paper. You can’t draw the subtleties of a human face, and shade areas beneath the nose with portable electronics. (Assuming you don’t have a camera, which is integrated in many devices now anyways).

You also can’t add physical artifacts to your notes; there is no such thing as scotch-taping a leaf or bug or knick-knack into your electronic notebook. It takes an average of 2.8 seconds longer on e-paper to get to the point where you start writing down ideas than a regular notebook. (This is an average of 3 trials that I tried myself). Another practical distinction is that any non-textual characters (such as higher-level math or arrows between boxes), are more difficult to draw, require you to switch modes, and will be slightly less neat than on paper.

Finally, electronic media is slightly more complicated than paper. It takes exactly 4 button pushes on my PDA to start writing while paper takes a couple of page flips before you found the place you last left off.

Why eNotes are Good and Why I Use Them Frequently:

For the discussion that I am about to raise, I am using my Fujitsu-Siemens Loox N-560 PDA as an example of an electronic solution to Paper. I must point out that the electronic device you are using does make a significant impact on the performance. I personally spared no expense to make sure I got one of the better PDAs on the market, so this is definitely a good-case scenario.

The best scenarios to use PDAs and electronic note-taking media is whenever you need to record a though, idea, or expression that you or anyone else says that is in plain English. Luckily for me, this is a relatively large percentage of anything that goes through my ears, eyes or brain. Note that this excludes higher-level math and abstract picture things. Since the interface to my PDA is regular manuscript handwriting, I can record information just as fast as I can on paper. Furthermore, if I bust out my external keyboard, my recording speed increases by a factor of 4.

The media in which I record is a simple text application that can be enhanced as much as the application can. This means that it is trivial for me to add an infinite number of colors to my page, and change the font styles, sizes, lists, etc. On paper, I would need a lot of pens to make a lot of colors.

One of the most appealing feature to me is the fidelity of the information that is preserved with my eNotes. Every night, when my PDA synchs with my computer, it creates a backup on my computer. Then every night, my computer backs up its entire hard drive to a managed online storage solution. I would consider the integrity of this data to be far greater than a sheet of paper in a tiny notebook. There are many pieces of information that I want to jot down and remember forever. With my electronic format, I can far more easily guarantee the safety and security of my data. I realize, however, that there are hackers, and computers crash, and files corrupt. Because of these concerns, the protection of data goes far beyond my PDA and I personally go through great lengths to ensure backups.

Size is another issue that really sets PDAs apart from many other types of note taking on any media. Unlike a laptop, I can have all of the benefits of electronic media without a large barrier between me and a potential subject that I am taking notes on. Furthermore, a PDA can fit in my pocket and has 4” of useable screen resolution. One specific design consideration for my Loox N-560, was that the screen has a full 640 x 480 resolution. At that resolution, the pixel density of the screen approaches my visual perception. With this amount of detail, I abate the common issues of very little usable screen real estate. With this model, I have as much physical space as a pocket-sized notebook.

The fact that the PDA and all the information it contains fits in my pocket, is one of its most powerful features. Think about how many notebooks it would take to match the 4GB of memory that my PDA holds. Assume you have a pocket-sized notebook that’s 3” x 5” and you’re using a 0.5mm lead pencil to fill up the 15 square inches of usable space. Assuming you can fit about 100 words (600 characters) on one side of a page, you would need about 3,579,139 pages to match the 4GB that my PDA can hold. That many pages has the same surface area as 17 acres of land.

Finally, my PDA is far more than just a place to take notes. It is a notebook, and audio recorder, a video player, an mp3 player, a GPS navigation system, a calendar, a task manager, a photo album, a storage device, a calculator, a library of books, and can take the form of any application you can load onto it. That much versatility in a single device can’t be matched by any paper notebook that I know of.

When a PDA solution is executed properly, I believe that it can be an extraordinarily valuable asset that can far exceed the functionality of traditional paper under most circumstances. It is an investment that I do not regret and still use habitually today.

Sticky Notebooks: Part 2

2008-02-20T21:19:00.000-08:00

I think I left off last time describing my two design notebooks:

So I had a couple thoughts about the notebooks, though I haven't made any decisions about them yet: I need to resolve this “two notebook conflict” somehow. The problem is that different categories of things have already been separated into different notebooks. The notebook doesn’t feel like mine right now either. It feels like a tool-something useful, but not something that’s part of me. Things are dated, but they’re sloppy, and not something I feel I’d go back to. But am I even supposed to go back to this? Is this notebook something to be used to help me in the present, to be discarded immediately? The sole purpose for me would be to get things out of my head and onto a piece of paper-something I might have otherwise scribbled on the back of my homework for someone to see, that probably won’t be important ever again.

A lot of other people taking this class have notebooks they’re more attached to. One person is using an electronic device, while others are using old notebooks from past classes. Some people bought notebooks just for this class. Our notebooks are already ours, just because they look different, they’re different sizes and shapes.

Notebooks are sticky ideas

Something isn't sticky of it's own accord-it's sticky because /we/ make it stick. People around us make it stick. The classic example is the ipod. Everyone has one (except me..) at least, that's how it feels. Why? Because it's a sticky object-and it's not just an object, it's an idea. Our notebooks have everything that makes something sticky. We put time and thought into our notebooks. We put part of ourselves into them-our notebooks are something more customizable than almost anything we have.

So...what now?

I'm still not sure what to do with my two notebooks, but I don't think most people could possibly just use their notebooks for idea generation and design. Maybe if I stop worrying about what my notebook is supposed to be, it'll become what it should be.

Stickiness Charting

2008-02-18T16:48:00.001-08:00

What really is stickiness?

The primary focus of Steve Gold's presentation for us, and our original discussion was more along the lines of sticky products and ways of making products stick through proximity (propinquity!) and customization. However, my initial thoughts on stickiness were much more along the lines of the book, which deals with how people remember different things, and how to make people remember. The criteria for success were exactly that:

Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credibility, Emotions, and Story.

So my thought was: what type of medium gets these things across the mostly clearly?

What's easy to remember?

I've been actively thinking about what I'm remembering, from a variety of forms of learning, including:

1) UOCD Readings (with diagrams)- Text and Figures
2) A play I saw this weekend- (August Osage County)- Dialogue
3) The food I ate this weekend- Text from the Menu, Taste/Smell
4) A musical I am stage managing (Into the Woods)- Lyrics and Music

Interestingly, I'm usually pretty good at remembering words. I think it's a lot easier than trying to replicate an image or a figure, and I'm completely tone deaf. Thus I figured I'd remember the things with verbal components more.

However, I've actually found that that really isn't the case. I'm going to work with the things that I remembered best from these things, and attempt to combine them into a "rememberability matrix."

I remember the food I ate extremely well, probably the best of any of these things. From this I've decided to create a matrix of memorability. Look for an update on how that came out soon!
nfro
For the record...
from UOCD I remember graphs showing how valuable things were, why personas are valuable, and Venn Diagrams.
I remember every detail of my meals.
I remember some of the play, particularly some interesting lines, and the general plot.
and I remember lots of Into the Woods, but possibly because I've seen it so much. It's more difficult to remember parts of the songs that are the same melody with different lyrics.

after awhile here's something i came up with:

i combined the concept of UOCD using a three-way grid to determine something and made a sticky grid based on: how you perceive it, what it is, adjectives that describe the information.

Carrying a Notebook is a Fad.

2008-02-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

Well, isn't it? Maybe not a fad, but it is at least an idea that has caught on for one reason or another. For what it's worth, 'tis a "sticky" idea at the least. What is the value of a design notebook? Part of me feels that individuals walking around with a notebook feel better about the fact that they carry one than about how much usefulness they get out of carrying it. I mean, it can be a hassle. Get changed, get stuff for class, oh yeah! grab my design notebook :). What makes someone do that in the first place? Well, carrying a design notebook is a sticky idea. Hopefully by the end of this post I will have made a bit of sense out of why this is the case.

So, I decided last week that I would hold out on writing about design notebooks until I thought of something interesting to write about. The topic of the second Vital Ideation lecture was "Stickiness," and part of me feels that the act of carrying a design notebook is something that falls in line with many of the principles we discussed when talking about a product's stickiness.

The first things that come to mind...
First off. I think that the act of carrying a notebook around is the sticky part of this whole idea. The "design" modifier is really only a specific case of this phenomenon. The carrying of some sort of notebook, whether for ideas, doodling, sketching, tasks, or some combination thereof is what can be considered "sticky." The first things that come to mind when I think of a design notebook are the following:

Moleskine --
"the legendary notebook used for the past two centuries by great artists and thinkers, including Van Gogh, Picasso, Hemingway and Chatwin. With an elastic closure and an expandable inner pocket made of cardboard and cloth, which contains the history, they are ideal for students"
It is actually kind of ridiculous how many different types of notebooks they have on their website. There is something special about this personal notebook idea. Something that makes people pay lots more than they should for bound paper for your pocket. Notice the sketch-book of Vincent Van Gogh himself to the right. How it shimmers with knowledge, uniqueness, genius and who knows what else. Is this what makes personal notebooks so sticky? Here is one of Olin's very own on personalizing their Moleskine.
"I just retired a Moleskine and got a new one that I have to set up - I figured I'd take you guys along for the ride. "
So begins the blog post, which describes the act of setting up the notebook as a "ride" itself. From tables of contents to specialized lists and such, the customization that goes into this moleskine rivals that of a personal computer. Crazy huh? It's only a notebook you might say, but it seems to be more than just this.
Lifehacker. Oh lifehacker and other such "tech trick tips for getting things done" websites. If I actually listed all the posts on maintaining, purchasing, improving, creating, modifying, and streamlining personal notebooks, I would be spending hours compiling all the posts and linking to them all in this lowly blog post of mine. If you pass the lifehacker test* of being described in more than 3 or so blog articles, I think you qualify to internet and/or nerd sensation (see also: fad & obsession.) Well, maybe not. (*note this term has never been used before and will never be used again in any formal writing)
PDAs, the Internet, and all other Electronics. Funny that this is one of the first things that comes to mind when I think of (personal) notebooks, but it is true. One of the intrinsic values of the personal notepad, whether for design or otherwise, is that it isn't a technical gadget, but it can be as personal and individualized as a computer, cell phone, misc. Apple product.

So, I started carrying a notebook myself. sort of.
I started carrying my own notebook mostly because I thought it was nice to be able to keep track of tasks, add tasks and then rip them out when I was done. It was also a convenient source of doodle space and paper during French class. But the real reason was that I had finally convinced myself that carrying a personal notebook wasn't completely a "hey they do it, I should do it too!" thing. Additionally, I found that carrying a notebook could be particularly useful personally as a way of keeping track of tasks from random things I am involved in which I sometimes forget to do/not put into outlook or any other-sort-of-reminder format.

The idea of carrying around a notebook to write down random thoughts on was one that I'veheard suggested for about a year now. ...Moleskine this, ideas notebook that... Maybe being at Olin has something to do with this....ok fine. It has a lot to do with this. I know my friends from back home would scoff at the idea of carrying a notepad around. "What the hell for?" they would surely tell me. Often times in this past year I have thought--"Wow that would be a really cool thing to keep track of, maybe in an ideas notebook!" Finally I have one, but I don't use it for ideas.

Most people don't use notebooks for idea generation.
That's odd. I don't actually use my notebook for idea generation. And I don't think many people do either. I supposed I am very biased in this, but I generally don't sit around by myself and come up with ideas. If I'm sitting around thinking about something that is interesting enough to warrant being copied down in a notebook of ideas, then I'll find people who I know would be interested and talk to them, who will not only potentially polish the idea if it isn't a horrible one, but the discussion that the idea will kick off will likely be of the variety that keeps me up for hours longer than I should instead of doing "coursework." Silly academics.

I suppose the only time that I have used my notebook to jot down random stuff has been during lectures from cool speakers, or while I was supposed to be doing other things, like during French class, when I sort of do other work I find more engaging in my notebook while i sort of interact with the rest of the class. I guess my notebook has been useful to me. And I guess in the end that's the point right?

A low-tech! personal ___(insert word of your choice)___ notebook is a sticky idea. For me, it allows me to _______ and also _______ wherever I am, sort of like a PDA or something. The best part is that when ____ happens, I can _____ using my notebook. How sweet is that?

My notebook represents who I am as a designer, engineer, over-committed student. Tis my PN. "Personal Notebook" :D :D :D

-Marco

Sticky Notebooks: Part 1

2008-02-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

We've had two talks thus far-Matt Jadud on Notebooks, and Steve Gold on Sticky Ideas. It's actually kind of a good thing that I'm late on my first post, because the topic of sticky ideas ties in well with the ideation notebooks we're all carrying around for this course.

Most of what Matt talked about was his /own/ notebook-or notebooks, and what he's used them for, how he's felt about them. He highlighted how a lot of the information in them was just scribbles-the notebook wasn't some pristine space that he had to keep neat and clean. This made me think about my own notebook-

Right now it's lined..that's the first thing that comes to mind. And having lines makes me want to stay inside them. It structures my notes and ideas, and tends to limit them. Occasionally I'll realize the lines are there, and purposefully write against them.

That wasn't what I intended to talk about though: The story of my notebook starts last semester-before I knew about this class. I decided that I needed some kind of notebook to carry around with me, just for those little things that come up that I don't want to forget (like when a song I don't have in my itunes comes on the radio, or someone mentions a website or book that I might find interesting). I also decided that I'd write my thoughts in it. I didn't know yet what I'd do with them after writing them down, but I just had this feeling that putting them on paper would make them go somewhere. So I bought a nice little book at CVS for a dollar. It's spiral bound (the sprials are annoying already), and has a green plastic cover.

I lied, actually. I bought two. One's more pocket sized than the other, so it's easier to carry around. The conflict here? I have two notebooks. What am I going to do with them? I started writing tasks in the smaller one-I rip them out when I'm done (I usually can't seem to finish the tasks I wrote down though, so more often than not they stay in the book for a while). Even when I don't finish them all though, I find it helps to have everything written somewhere-like the planners we used to get for free in high school. I stopped carrying a planner once I came to Olin, but my planner was something I couldn't live without a few years ago.

In the larger one, I started taking notes. About anything. I've got notes about both Vital Ideation talks, notes and comments to the person sitting next to me on a robotics lecture I attended, and notes I took about Cafeteria workers for a design course. I’ve never had a notebook that served quite this purpose before-usually things get written on the last page of an existing notebook (who ever uses every page in their notebooks, right..? )

This is starting to get a bit long, so this post'll be continued in a few days :).

No-longer-tortured confessions of a notebook bum

2008-02-14T19:02:00.000-08:00

I've waited far too long to post and all the good topics (colored pens, note organization...) are taken, and I wasn't there for Matt Jadud's talk, having been... well, working in Manhattan at the time. (For those of you who don't know me, I'm not actually an Olin student - just used to be. Class of '07. My name is Mel.)

And what this means is that I get to improvise around what information I can glean from the wiki on the weekly theme. Basically, I make stuff up in the absence of actual content. Or to make that sound somewhat better, it's my hope that these weekly reflections will (1) make me look up from my coding and knock me into the world of ideas on a regular basis, and (2) provide a breather of perspective from outside the bubble, where I'm colliding with things that aren't midterms and credit-hours (more like taxis and bug reports). (I mean "colliding" in the poetic and not the physical sense. At least for the taxis.)

It seems like this week's theme is "vital ideation," aka "the whole class," and... design notebooks! I've been a chronic doodler ever since the days of boredom back in elementary, and used to draw Sierpinski gaskets, Hilbert curves, and more in the margins of my math notes, but that wasn't "design." Later, Fritz the Homework Penguin showed up on all my problem sets. And then quick song parodies, and sketches of the people sitting ahead of me, or drawings of the tip of my left thumb. Not really design.

Or is it? I used to feel all guilty about not keeping my notebooks "intellectual" or "inventor-ish." Ben Linder filled his pages with gorgeous 3D cutaway sketches of apparati; other classmates bristled with neat formulae, pencilled-in circuit diagrams (with lots of eraser marks to show where resistor values had been tweaked), or even colored sketches of costumes for a play. I... drew my thumbnail. And cartoon versions of math symbols that talked in Shakespearean verse.

But that's the way my brain works, and the stuff it occasionally needs to spew out (along with experiments on how lightly I can draw a pencil line, or the train stop to get off at). Design doesn't just mean "class notes," nor does it mean "design of things," as if every page of the notebook had to be funneled towards some known end goal. It's a place to braindump and structure and re-dump things back into my brain. It's like plugging in extra mental RAM.

So what does that design? The way I think. What I think of, what I write down, what I give myself permission to say, and to whom. I need to move things from my mind into the real world, and writing them down is the first step in mentally shifting me towards making that happen; somehow, a project proposal is different when you're holding it than when you're tossing the exact same words* around in your head. Then you can scan it, share it, shred it - but you're dealing with your thoughts-made-word, and that makes it easier to make the jump to word-made-flesh (why yes, I was raised Catholic). And it makes it much more definite and visceral when you rip out an idea and attack it with scissors than when you go, in your brain, "meh, I won't think about that any more."

*note my bias towards the verbal! Our language is a powerful shaper of how we think. I'm still only fluent in American English, but would love dearly to be able to keep my notebooks in Chinese, Italian (with backwards handwriting), and... many others. I've tried keeping notebooks where I avoid the verbal by only drawing, or vice versa with only words, or words and abstract shapes (no real-world objects allowed), but I find anything less than my full range of output options leaves me feeling stymied rather than challenged. (Exception: I hate clipping external objects into my notebooks. They're strictly two-dimensional marks by me on paper. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps the bulk.)

Sure, Fritz the Homework Penguin won't be waddling across my kitchen floor anytime soon. But the math symbol cartoons turned into Rhomeo and Julihat and a roughly dozen-person production at one spring Expo. And the fractal doodling turned into my first foray into teaching at a math summer camp at my high school. So you never know. And yeah, sometimes my notebook turns up things like alternative train door closing mechanisms in between the drawing of the plastic bag my groceries came in and a couple of half-finished sci-fi novel plots. And sometimes there's actual work in there; some computations for part tolerances, some pseudocode and a chart of data flow.

But I pity the clerk who'll have to go through my scribbles for "prior art," if I ever make something important enough for someone else to get into a legal tiff over some day. "What relation does this French-speaking rabbit have to your processor design?" they'll ask**. "Well, both were on my mind at the time." "Is this a... necessary part, the rabbit, for your invention to work?" "Necessary for me to think of it in the first place," I'll answer (if I'm being completely honest). My brain is a space where many strange things collide, and from this mess occasionally emerges an intentional design.

Design notebook? Yes, if I use the term loosely. Designed notebook? I choose my paper and my writing implement and my own restrictions on usage based on the direction I'd like my brain to go in (or not). But it's my notebook, in any case, and useful to my life, and it's good enough to make me happy.

**Yes, I know that patent proceedings don't actually go this way, and I'll redraw any very important diagrams before submission, and label them nicely with ID numbers and stuff. It's called "artistic license."

Mel Chua is a lazy bum who staunchly refuses her parents' orders to get a job. During her "year off" (right now) she overcooks spaghetti and attempts to save the world. Her current notebook is a somewhat world-ravaged green Google minitome from Leslie Hawthorne that she keeps forgetting is in her pocket. This weekend she will get a larger one.

My Journal, My Life

2008-02-14T08:05:00.000-08:00

So, here I am writing my post at the last minute. Literally, the last minute. In fact, the next talk starts in 55min.

After Matt's talk, I started thinking about how journals (or design notebooks) fit into my life and how I had never really noticed that before. I still have my journals from 1st grade, when I was learning how to write and we had to write one sentence and draw a picture every day. It was pretty intense - after we wrote our sentence we had to go show it to our teacher who would correct our spelling and grammar.

In middle school, I carried a big purse and always had a notebook inside. I would write lists of things to do, angsty poetry, and notes about things I needed to remember. I made a lot of big plans in those notebooks. I had a 30min bus ride to and from school so I had plenty of time to record my thoughts and feelings inside its spiral bound pages.

As I got into high school (and started driving myself to school), notebooks became less of a driving force in my life. I would take notebooks on trips to write down my memories or make lists. I'm famous for making lists. At least 50% of my notebooks are just lists. Lists about what I wanted to own in my house someday. Lists of places I wanted to visit. Lists of websites I was going to create. Lists of books I wanted to read. So much of my notebook space is/was about things I want to do and may or may not ever do. I suppose that's still a flaw of mine - I always enjoy planning much more than the follow through. Gradually, I transitioned from notebooks to blogs. Sometimes I would still write in my notebook, but only so that I would remember what to write in my blog later. My friends and I got really into it - we all read each other's blogs religiously. Of course, the downside was when you had to change your URL because someone you didn't like had started reading your blog. Somehow, that didn't seem like a reason to stop.

Having mostly transitioned to electronic forms of recording my plans/lists, I still keep a couple notebooks on hand, but they have very distinct purposes. I mostly use the purple one for trips - so far I've written about 2 pages in it. The brown one is actually a photo album I use for ticket stubs - a memory of the music/theater/art productions I have attended. I love flipping through it for random memories like the Philly Folk Festival, the Sex Worker's Art Show, and my name-tag from Olin's Candidate's Weekend. I like that it's visual. My last notebook, and most private, is the pink one. I actually made that notebook myself in a high school art class called "Textiles". In that notebook, I hide all of my secret feelings and romantic woes. That's the notebook where I dump out everything so I can get over my ex-girlfriend. The notebook where I convince myself that everything's going to be okay - I'm better off single. I guess in many ways, it's the most important one.

It's interesting to think about how the role of notebooks in my life has transitioned. I'm interested in seeing how my design notebook from this independent study evolves.

I may add more to this later, but this is a good start.

Designing a Low-Definition Digital Ideation Platform

2008-02-13T22:52:00.000-08:00

For my Everyday Ideation deliverable, I wrote up some thoughts that I posted earlier into a somewhat coherent essay. It's not quite the standard deliverable I had foreseen myself making, but it's too interesting to pass up.

It can be found here.

Here's the 5-second version:
-the way that computers naturally display and store information is fundamentally different from the way notes and sketches naturally display and store information
-the way in which we use our computers prohibits us from thinking in "design mode" as we would while using a notebook
-here are a few starter ideas for designing a program that would encourage on-the-fly "design thinking"

Comments welcome!

Soley Design? I Think Not!

2008-02-13T19:05:00.000-08:00

Intro to the Notebook!
Matt Jadud helped us kick off the Vital Ideation course last week with an introduction to design notebooks. What a great way to start the class! We got to examine many aspects of design simply by inspecting the work that Matt has done over previous years. And not only were we introduced to the many design aspects he implements, but were told to adopt a style that works for you and to stick to it. "Remember your design notebook is written for you in the future, not for anyone else." Design notebooks do not have to be always neat and perfect but can be sloppy (okay maybe only a little) and contain confusions or maybe even entirely unrelated things, but as long as it aids in your design process than the notebook is fulfilling its purpose. With my notebook I plan to have designs, but also lots of doodles, ideas, random writing, notes from discussions, flowcharts, and anything else that will get my ideas out of me and onto its pages. Here's some pictures of what it is like...

Here's a doodle.And the layout of one of our meetings. Sometimes having location and quotes help me remember the meeting better.
And sometimes my notebook gets really messy. But that's okay because it's only for me (just in the future).

Design Dilemma!
Immediately after Matt's talk I started writing down notes, scribbling, drawing...just getting my ideas onto paper. But slowly, keeping a design notebook started to slip off of my priority list. Why did this happen? Matt had explained in his talk that there was more to design than notebooks, more than just ideas on paper--it was about scheduling, staying organized, and having low stress so that the ideas flow more easily, and it was on these points that I was failing. Lately I have way too over committed with classes, clubs, and activities and this has lead to an tremendous increase in my stress level. So whenever I sat down to try to think about design, my mind was in 1000 other places--when is my next appointment? have i finished all of my homework? what happens if the world blows up?. It is really hard to think of anything to design when your mind is not remotely focused. Matt really emphasized this in his talk, but I didn't believe him until I experienced it first hand! To help cope with this design difficulty, I have been trying to schedule in time just for design and though it has been hard, I really like having a time devoted solely to design and I want to do it more often! When something is important to you, you find time to do it no matter how busy you are because you can make it a priority. This is what I am doing with this course and with designing in general.

The World in Color

2008-02-13T08:37:00.001-08:00

In his presentation last week, Matt made a point about the use of color in notes. In Software Design last semester, he also made a point to use different chalk colors to more effectively illustrate points. I recall being frustrated at how poorly these multi-color diagrams translated into my notebook in boring old black. Somehow, the idea of using more than one color to copy down a picture containing more than one color never struck me.

Since last week, I have been using two or three different colors of pens when taking notes. I find it tremendously useful to be able to draw a graph's axes in one color, the plot of a function or two, and comment on various aspects within the graph without having to worry about losing clarity to "too much black ink." Small tangential notes, or comments on math steps are perfect to do in another color. They don't interfere with the flow of the notes, but add additional information.

This combines with another observation about note-taking that I made recently. For a long while, I unconsciously took notes as densely as possible. I tried to write on every line and only really skipped lines between sections. This meant that all of the information I might need was all in one place, but it made it veryr difficult to access again later. Frequently I will remember where on a page I wrote something, but not on which page, and will have to hunt around my dense notes to find the bit of information I am looking for.

What I am doing now is leaving much more white space and intentionally making my notes more logically organized on the page. I'd rather that I spread things out in a way that makes sense to me and is easy to go back to later and reference. This seems somewhat obvious, but it still feels weird to have some pages in my notebook that contain only a few individual pieces of information. However, they contain the information in a way that is very easy for me go back to and quickly understand, rather than being mushed up with everything else.

Rather than use flat words to illustrate how I've changed my note-taking style to use color and organization, it seems like pictures might be a better option. (copy color diagram, use color. easier to understand, spread notes out. show concept, use photos. Maybe I'm improving?)

An Illustration

Here I was able to plot several difference graphs without getting them mixed up, as well as include comments without "ink overload"

Again, I was able to write something and mark it up with comments without interfering with the readability or flow of the "non-comment" notes.

I drew the base circuit in one color, comments in another color, and a formula for impedence in another.

For me, this is a pretty low note content for a page. I normally draw much smaller graphs and don't spread things out this much, but by arranging my notes and using color I am able to more easily understand them, which is good, because they are my notes.

A Wrap
I am a big fan of this new style of note-taking I am using. I suspect I will get better at it, since I've only even started to think hard about how I organize notes a week ago. Note-taking had become so second nature that I just did it on autopilot. This new "structure and semantics" thing is such a great idea.

Why didn't they teach me this in 6th grade study skills?

P.S. - I'm probably going to keep posting all of my deliverable photos into my Vital Ideation Flickr Pool, because it's rather easy to do.

Design Notebooks - Merging Design and Organization

2008-02-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

After hearing Matt's talk, I have started to give a lot more thought into how it is that I organize my life and free my head so that I have room to design.

It was interesting for me to look deeply at how I used my notebooks and how I organized my tasks.

I'll start with how I organize things.

I try to make list and cross things off my lists. These lists include post-its stuck to my desk or a page torn out of a notebook. I also use the tasks on Outlook which helps me to schedule my time and make sure I allot time for everything to get done. Having a paper list on my desk saves me from taking the time to turn on my computer, check my calendar, check facebook, check my e-mail and otherwise waste lots of time.

The organization of my school notebooks is a new thing for me. In ICB I had the mid-semester notebook change problem which is never good. I went to only putting notes in my notebooks and not homework. The problem with that is that sometimes your homework is better notes than your notes are. I struggled off and on with how to structure things and i came up with this solution:

I staple lab handouts and homework assignments on the back side of the pages. When I get a homework assignment or a lab back, I stick that in too. That way, all of my notes are on the front sides, and the completed, neat versions of my homework are on the back sides of the page. Occasionally I will do scratchwork on the problem set or lab handout. It the scratchwork doesn't quite fit on the page, I just cut out a tab and fold it in. This keeps everything neat and together. One problem I foresee with this system is the fattiness factor. These notebooks are going to be HUGE once the semester is over. I hope it will be worth the obnoxiously huge notebook to have everything together and organized.

The design notebook I carry is a residual from Design Nature and POE. There are lots of calculations and sketches in it. I think the key facet of my design notebook is that there are pages of order and pages of disorder and that doesn't really matter. If it is something important, or something I have to scan and submit for an assignment, I make it neat. If not, who cares. Like Matt said, I am writing this to my future self not to anyone else.

I think my favorite part of this notebook is the Baxtor Beaver costume sketches!

Well, I think that is all I have to say on the topic of notebooks both organization and design. I think the key lesson is to find a system that works for you and to stick with it. Carrying around a notebook and not writing anything in it is a waste. I try not to worry about keeping things neat when I know I will never really look at them again but I try to maintain general order when my future self will want some reference material. It may not be the best system but it works for me.

2008-02-05T16:14:00.000-08:00

Matt Jadud's talk today went pretty well. He was recommended to us by our course adviser, and so setting up the intro talk was actually somewhat last minute. Fortunately, Matt's pretty chill, and even though we started late, our video camera broke and the audio is terrible, things were fine.

Matt gave a hilarious introduction to design by narrating a brief history that covered everything from the garden of Eden to the invention of the space shuttle by da Vinci. He spoke extensively about his notebooks from grad school and how he used them, which was the best part of the presentation, in my opinion.

I have some new thoughts about the importance of notebooks over computers.

-roughness
-quickness
-drawing

Notebooks have a certain roughness that computers lack. This is actually fairly closely related to quickness, but I'll try to distinguish between them. When I draw or write on a notebook, my lines aren't perfectly straight, and my letters aren't perfectly formed. To be honest, when writing quickly, I use a disgusting half-cursive-half-print style that's almost impossible for anyone but me to read. But this roughness is not only unique, it is /essential/ to the character of the notebook. When I write "gvt" on a page, it almost unambiguously means "government" to me-- the information is conveyed quickly and efficiently. But when I type "gvt", the computer underlines it jagged and bright-red (and has even on the blogger text editor, though I think that might actually be a Firefox feature) and if I run a spell check it won't care for the abbreviation unless I add it to the dictionary and so on! The computer places almost no value on roughness-- its strengths are orderly.
Notebooks have a quickness about them that is hard to imitate in computers. Content can start being created anywhere on the page, and in seconds a page can be filled with an information structure. In the part on roughness, I mentioned that my lines aren't straight, and my letters aren't perfectly formed. In fact, if the lines I drew were straight on my page, they would take infinitely longer to form, and if my handwriting was a font, I would still be tracing out my first letters. Likewise, if my computer worried about storing every odd line, letter, doodle and so forth I've written as a set of extremely detailed vector graphics, it would be a tremendous waste! They are two completely different models for the display of information, and I bet a lot of great ideas are still waiting to be discovered regarding transfer between them.
The third quality I mentioned was drawings. It's darn near impossible to draw with the mouse, and it's darn near impossible /not/ to with a pen. Sound good? Good.

Alright, I should probably get back to some other work. Also, if you're still reading this and in VI, don't feel compelled to write another post about Matt's lecture (it's not a course requirement), though by all means go ahead if you want to add something. Alright, I'm out.

Design Notebooks

2008-02-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

Today, Matt Jadud spoke about Design Notebooks. He shared with us some highlights from his design notebooks from the last several years and explained the different ways he uses them. We learned about different ways to organize our thoughts, but the primary point was that everyone thinks and learns in different ways and the key is to customize your notebook for yourself. Order vs. chaos, sketches vs. outlines, use of color and style are all techniques that work better for some people than others.

As everyone taking Vital Ideation is carrying a design notebook for the course, Matt's talk will prove to be very helpful! The video camera we were going to use to record the talk broke, but an audio recording of this talk will be posted.

Welcome to Vital Ideation!

2008-01-23T14:51:00.000-08:00

Hello!

This is the blog that will host all of the deliverable submissions for students taking Vital Ideation, a student designed and run course at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. Vital Ideation is a one-credit student organized course being run Spring 2008 that focuses on viewing design through different "lenses".

For the most up-to-date information about the course, visit our Wikiversity page for the course. Stay tuned, this blog ought to start filling up in the next few weeks!