Pretty quick week, and full of interesting stuff; I had material due in several of my classes, and was fairly impressed with the quality of work. I'm absolutely in shock that the quarter is almost over; hi, three weeks left? When did that happen?

Went to see The Slackers the other night, which was great; the seven piece setup is awesome, and the quality of sound the can produce in such a small room is really amazing. Bob and I went to watch Carla present some of her work tonight, and it motivated me to re-install Flash; who knows what may come next!

Very strong discussion in class yesterday regarding the nature of freed; the interconnections between brand and autonomy go largely unnoticed, and instead, the constant focus seems to be on "brainwashing". In fact, the notion of "gullibility" was brought up by David - are consumers gullible? In an effort to promote brand, should we in fact capitalize on this notion? Issues of user-centeredness (hi, making life BETTER?) seem to take a back burner whenever the discussion takes on McDonalds.

Unrelated: two of three of my student teams were accepted in the CHI 2004 Student Competition! Off to Vienna in April (assuming I can scrape up the budget) ... Awesome.

Finally; via besigner: totally twisted and absolutely amazing flash movie.

We've been talking about maps quite a bit in information architecture - specifically, the impact of metaphor and abstraction on realism in order to push visualization, comprehension and ultimately, knowledge. This is a very interesting take on mapping, and unique convergent discussion of mapping meeting industrial design. The flash demo is quite illustrative as well. Going to discuss Tufte on Thursday ...

Although ridiculously long, today was excellent; I was dramatically impressed with the level of thought that went into the discussion in HCI this morning. Students had expressed interest in more design theory and design research, so we read and discussed Vitta's musings on the role of designer and the culture of products. Interesting to relate his writing - geared at traditional, Italian product design, towards interaction design and the more digital, futuristic aspects of design. The talk today was all about the football game - specifically about the halftime show - which is an interesting parallel to our discussion about Vitta. If the designer - artist - singer - becomes the focus of their design, and is seen as simply a signature on the bottom of a canvas, what does that make Janet Jackson?

Ah, ready to crack open my new books. I'm mostly excited by this one; I wonder how I can get paid to read design theory.

Oh, wait.
:D

Furious at movable type; stupid piece of garbage decided to corrupt itself this morning:

An error occurred:

Can't use an undefined value as a SCALAR reference at /home/sites/site10/web/mt/lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBM.pm line 354

Not to go into any depth on why this error message is ridiculous, condescending and simply lazy, I spent three hours of my morning refreshing my MT entries; I lost the majority of January. Oh well.