Yesterday was a pleasant way to start the quarter. I had two very small classes: Interactive Product Design and Human Computer Interaction were both full of committed and intellectual students, so my Monday and Wednesday looks to be quite informative. I spent the three hour break between classes working on the book revisions. Having taken about a two month break from the text, finding holes in what I've developed is like shooting fish in a barrel. Live and learn, I suppose: for whatever reason, I forgot about the iterative nature of design in written work. I wonder if that's because I still don't view writing as design?

Every now and then I think of new potential dissertation topics, and one that's been floating around in my head is to understand what is both literally and metaphorically going on in people's brains when they write. I'm curious if it is, in fact, the same as what goes on when they are creative - sort of an extension of Csziksentmihalyi's work, but focused only on literary development. There's this weird connection between Dewey and, well, everything else that keeps coming up in my research, and I wonder if his work actually holds All Of The Answers. I need to read some of the harder stuff that I've been purposely avoiding.

One of the things I've been noticing in myself recently is the struggle between creation and motivation. It seems that the more creative I feel, the less motivated I am to capitalize on that creativity (and vice versa). That is, if I wake up feeling energized and ready to write, I don't seem to have much to say. On the other hand, if I'm lounging around contemplating the world, I begin to forge deep connections and associations regarding my work: and then don't have the "energy" to follow-through on them. The downtime in between classes (both daily, and also during break) seem to force this dichotomy. The less I have to formally "do" pertaining to my job, the less I find myself "doing" at all. I'm sure this relates to the platitude of "idle hands are the devil's workshop" - vacation seems to breed a sort of sluggish incompetence in myself which I can't stand.

It's a good thing school start tomorrow :)

In the heart of this thick bipolarity, I managed to complete and submit some work to Ambidextrous, a journal offered by Stanford, and to coauthor work from my Interaction Design Seniors (which was submitted to DMI, Fun N' Games, Journal of Research Practice, and Adbusters). I am also waiting on a submission to the IDSA Educational Conference, which is going to be held in Austin in the summer.

And yesterday I planted some flowers.

I'm back in Savannah, and although it's grey and cold, it is less grey and cold than PGH. I had forgotten about the bone-chilling wind that whips across the bridge across Panther Hollow, but remembered pretty damn quickly on a walk back to Craig Street.

I had the pleasure of meeting with Dan Boyarski for a brief period of time on Wednesday. Dan is one of the people among the Design faculty that I've always admired the most, specifically for his honesty, integrity and vision. Meeting with him was uplifting simply because of who he is and how he communicates. It was interesting to hear that the design department is reviewing the undergraduate curriculum for appropriateness (specifically with regard for traditional hand skills as compared to the new methods and techniques afforded by technology), as that was the same motivation for our undergraduate curriculum revamp. I hope they do, in fact, decide to merge the majority of ID and CD into one main Design track; while this totally confuses the job placement process, it allows for students to gain a better understanding of what design thinking and design process actually is. I'm also not sure that a school with CMU's reputation cares about messing up with job placement - Career Days always attracted some of the most impressive firms, and I certainly don't think that would change. I'm curious to see how they negotiate the form development issues; I think they realize that the traditional shop/bauhaus style exercises are limited in capabilities, but I don't think CMU provides Design enough of a budget to switch to more of a 3D printing type of environment (and one certainly has to create a real object in order to understand form, so I'm not sure what the middle ground is).

I'm going to look at our new 3D printers today: I think we have a total of three new machines, which should be pretty wild during finals.

Finally a bit of downtime; the day was exhausting, but generally quite fulfilling. My talk was attended by about twenty-five people, and the reception was quite positive. I don't think that the amount of expected negativity was prevalent: there seemed to be a great deal more designers there than were engineers. I had some engaging discussion with a number of different people today, and it was interesting to see how my ideas faired when presented to a group that isn't embedded in art and design on a daily basis.

I'm answering email at Ken's house, and then it's off to dinner; I'm ready for a nap.

Each day I get an email from notifier@grants.gov that informs me of new grant opportunities. I've never applied for a grant, but I subscribed to this list to find out what sort of things the government is interested in funding. Contrary to the military-focused government we see in much of the popular news, NSF continues to fund a great many projects that have nothing (at least blatantly) to do with warfare. For example, they are offering between $3,000,000 and $10,491,000 (?) for section 514 Farm Labor Housing (FLH) loans and section 516 FLH grants for the construction of new off-farm FLH units and related facilities for domestic farm laborers. So if you would like to make a farm, now is a good time to do it. I am curious to see the process by which this money gets assigned/created/printed, as there seems to be no method to the creation of these grants. For example, in addition to being able to fund a farm, today I can also - if I am a federally recognized native american tribal government - apply for up to $6,000,000 to help assist and facilitate my tribe. Tribe facilitation is less expensive than farming.

I think I will try to write more frequently, as it helps focus my mind while I am waiting. In this case, I am waiting for Professor Bonnie John to pick me up so we can go have breakfast.

I received an update from one of the two publishers I've floated my text by, and the results were generally very good. They had five reviewers look over the text and write extensive notes; while one of the reviewers flat-out hated the work, the rest found it to be generally pleasing but lacking in organization. Particularly useful were comments like this:

"I don't think the current structure works. The author can write, that's not in doubt. There is a strong emotive style, which strikes me as perhaps working better in fiction, polemic, or biography, although I realize that it is not my job to make such comments/judgements. I offer them only as feedback, to be discarded if not useful. From the evidence here, I would recommend turning this book into a polemic on interaction design and the difficulty and necessity of working with and adapting to other disciplines as part of the entire design and development process. I don't see the value in a scholarly approach in this case. Tell it like it is, and write for the true audience which are the oppressed and confused interaction designers trying to accommodate their ideals and talents to the context within which they have to work".

The next step for me, then, would be to rework a great majority of the structure of the text around a central theme; although the theme was certainly in my head, in retrospect, it was not made clear. The theme of the text is on Understanding Interaction Design (which is also a much more applicable title than what was originally used), and the content should reflect this theme: Interaction Design has very little to do with the intermingling of pixels on a screen, and everything to do with creating a cohesive and understandable dialogue with a human being.

Now I'm in Pittsburgh; tomorrow I'm giving a talk on Poetry and Interaction Design. It will be interesting to see how it goes over :P

I just barely survived St. Pats; sun + beer + visiting law students and a weird canadian kid = hung over.

J's birthday :)