brightly colored food

The School of Design is getting its act together and getting the grad studio a mess of subscriptions to design-related magazines. Our library actually has a pretty decent collection, but it’ll be nice to have have them nearby, borrow them for the weekend, etc.

If you had to pick a few of your favorites, what would they be? Not just slick, pretty photograph design rags either - what periodicals are most important to a designer’s education?

If you happen to be in Pittsburgh over the next couple of days, you should definitely check out the Robocup American Open. I’m not nearly as excited about robots as some of the people I work with here, but that’s still pretty damn excited.

As a few others have pointed out, the current excitement over “social software” is somewhat odd because this group is hardly the first to discover many of the issues they’re tackling. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I see little evidence that they’re building on the work of fields such as computer-supported cooperative work, computer-mediated communication, and social informatics, all of which have which have been around in name since the 80s hashing over many of the same issues with which social software now tackles.

Furthermore, as Matt Jones states, the tech concerns of social software seem to be overriding the human-centered concerns. One might argue that it’s a different approach to design - build the infrastructure, then let everybody tinker - but that still seems like engineering/requirements-driven design rather than design informed by human behavior and needs.

Here’s a post from Tanya with links to several good introductions on social informatics. She also mentions another article that contains a good overview of computer-supported cooperative work and also discusses ethnography, library and information science, computer-mediated communication, and computer-supported cooperative learning. Other approaches like social computing also come to mind, and I’m sure social scientists would have more to add as well.

In the end, I guess I don’t have a problem with people rallying around a new name - this is about group-forming, and new groups love to recognize/differentiate themselves with names - but it’s distressing to see decisions made that either aren’t informed by previous research or are made in the interest of technology without thinking long and hard about the human issues first.

Not that I’m anticipating it, but if DUX is no good, I’m definitely going to check out the Planetwork conference, also being held in San Francisco on the same weekend.

The list of presenters may be very well be even more impressive: Douglas Engelbart, Brewster Kahle, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Kapor, and with Bruce Sterling, Hunter Lovins, Howard Rheingold, and others who have yet to confirm.

Not your typical weblog, David Lu’s site is a portfolio of sorts, documenting his various projects during his time at Ivrea. Very cool - both the site and his work.

We spend a lot of time documenting process here, but it’s usually gift-wrapped in a more refined presentation format that loses some of the subtleties of a project. Kudos to David for taking the lo-fi approach and really capturing the breadth of his work and experiences at school - I may have to try something similar next year.

Interesting article in this month’s Wired about the future of the MIT Media Lab. The article discusses funding, recently relevant as I’ve been demoing of my previous audio research to local companies to drum up supporters for continued funding through a regional tech fund.

It’s not worth too much detail here, but ask me in person about it sometime - it’s been an interesting lesson in corporate R&D, funding in academia, and organizational politics in general.

That coupled with wrangling a summer internship, picking topics for my thesis essay and project, and keeping up with classes has made things a bit hectic lately. Four weeks left….

Just barely a year old and Boxes and Arrows is up for a Webby. Not bad. Congrats from myself and the rest of the alumni staff to the current staff. If we win, I’m buying all of you Bay Area B&Aers drinks when I’m back in San Francisco for DUX.

That said, all of the nominees in the Print + Zines category are solid: Metropolis, The Onion, Shift, and Alternet. Looks like some tough competition.

From Six Log

Yesterday I played with Hydra, a collaborative text editor that allows several people to write in the same document at the same time. It’s intended for coders using the Extreme Programming approach of coding in pairs. Being the curious sort, I (mis)used it with three other grad students to have a discussion about enchantment and wonder, last week’s topic in our seminar course (the one Marc Rettig teaches).

It was definitely interesting, though frustrating at times. Very different from a group chat session on instant messenger. Each person was engaged in multiple threads of conversations simultaneously, so sometimes everyone converged at one point in the document or worked in pairs, while other times we were off posing a new question or building out some other thought. As I the watched multiple lines of text stretch across the page together, everyone’s thoughts all intertwingled, it was the closest I’d seen to watching a document “grow”.

The experience of collaborating in such a discussion was challenging because it was at times like a wost-case scenario of partial attention: you want to be really engaged in what you’re currently writing, but ooh, I see someone just refuted something else I’d said, and wait, I really want to get in a point about that other thing before they move on. Conversations around an issue never fully resolved - there was always another discussion to go tend to.

The experience was deeply engaging, but in a different way than most other thought processes. If you could get past the information anxiety of the thing (not easily done), it was highly productive, albeit a someone fragmented and (again) intertwingled sort of productivity. As multitasking goes, it felt like how a drummer friend had once explained his feeling when he was playing different time signatures simultaneously using his arms and feet, one of those musical tricks like circular breathing that one could use to great effect if you practiced at it.