brightly colored food

Matt Jones posted his notes from the Doors of Perception conference. They are rich. Next year. Must go. Must. Also, catch his post about “social software and shipbuilding”. Oh, to be a social shipbuilder right now - what a wonderful area of research and work.

Locally, I’m currently discovering the deep, resonating joy that comes from working with a sufficiently large group of scary-smart interaction designers. There’s a whole mess of em here. It’s been an adjustment from the world of work, where you might get one or two great people working with you, or the internet, where everyone knows what everyone else is thinking, but actual collaboration is rare. It’s that high-bandwidth variety of communication, the face-to-face kind, grounded in a context of shared inquiry and exploration of some fairly high-level themes. It’s life-affirming in the way that all good work is.

Grad school is a difficult process, one of reflection under strife. Half the time you wonder, “what the hell exactly am I doing here and what do I hope to get out of this?”, the other half is “how the hell am I supposed to get this much work done?” In the last week I feel like I’ve hit pay dirt, getting a much better sense of perspective and meaning on the whole thing. It’s a nice motivation as I move into the last four weeks of the semester.

I’ll be posting some links to some papers later this week, some stuff relating rhetoric to design that provides some of the basis for the way we approach the idea of interaction in our program. I’m curious to see what the rest of you think of it - it’s easy to dismiss as mere philosophy, not relevant to the day-to-day stuff you do, but if you start to internalize it, it provides a wonderful way of understanding the concept of design.