Corinna Sherman

I just attended a university lecture by Chuck Klosterman, journalist, pop culture philosopher and author of books such as Eating the Dinosaur. In a self-aware storyteller style reminiscent of a stand-up comic, he talked about a variety of things, including

Why are things the size they are?
How are a blues club and a zoo similar?
What is the relationship between reality and realness?
How is the Unabomber’s Manifesto relevant to society today?

These kind of lectures remind me why I enjoy the university environment. Not only was the talk entertaining and interesting, the students in the audience asked questions that were equally thought-provoking. I especially liked the debate that sparked over whether new media creates a low ceiling for creative thought – whether the images we see in television and movies limit our ability to imagine things outside our own experience.

Earlier in the afternoon, I attended a talk hosted by the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. Ezio Manzini, founder of the DESIS (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) Network, described how designers are harnessing social resources to tackle sustainability issues. Citing examples from urban vegetable gardens to co-housing, the smiling Italian emphasized four characteristics of successful projects in this area: small, local, connected, and open. The Q&A session afterward for this talk provided additional food for thought.

What kind of foundation is today’s generation laying for future generations?
Are designers becoming a professional field without an industry?
What is the relationship between sustainability and resilience?

I look forward to pondering these questions further, in between the bursts of concentration I will, of course, devote to my course work and thesis topic musings…

I turned in a first draft of my paper entitled “What is interaction design?” this morning for seminar, churned through the weekend’s trend analysis findings with my studio classmates this afternoon, went home, took a nap, and arose groggily an hour later feeling like I just came out of a weekend-long design bender that I can’t quite remember. Scraps of paper litter my desk, covered with the fragmented ramblings of a deranged design philosopher in my own handwriting. An avalanche of articles in varying states of annotation clutter my virtual desk. I sweep them clear with a single Command-Q and begin reading the assignments for this week. Highlight, summarize, synthesize, repeat. I shall be insane by spring.

I just finished making an interactive composition in Flash for my Computing in Design class entitled “Help Hammy.” My concept was inspired by the Lucas Arts puzzle adventure games, in which a player explores and interacts with the environment in a spirit of playful discovery. “Help Hammy” was my first serious foray into Actionscript, which happily, has syntax very similar to Java. Learning how to animate in Flash was a bit trickier for me, and as you can see, artwork is not my specialty! However, I learned quite a bit in the process and hope you enjoy the result.

Concept sketch

One of the instructors in my graduate design seminar related a reaction that someone once had during a class exercise years ago. It went something like this: “Why should my work serve future generations? What have they ever done for me?”

He brought it up as an example of the egocentrism he wishes designers to  purge from their mindsets. But I think a serious consideration of these questions reveals a very compelling answer in favor of a future-oriented approach in design.

What have future generations done for us? Well, their very existence validates that the present generation will have survived successfully enough to propagate our species. We won’t have blown ourselves into oblivion or rendered our environment otherwise uninhabitable. In short, future generations signify that we won’t have screwed up humanity beyond all hope. Naturally, future generations can’t communicate this comforting revelation to us. The fruits of our labor will be realized in their lifetimes, not ours.

So, getting back to the original question, why should our work serve future generations? In the spirit of being audience-centered, I shall address this question from a self-interested perspective. Future generations will be more affected by our actions than we are, just as we are more affected by the actions of past generations than they were. You can call it the butterfly effect, compounding, or whatever you like. Our work affects future generations whether we intend it to or not.

If we work either without regard to how our actions will affect future generations or suspecting that our actions are likely to cause harm to future generations, we  decrease the likelihood of their existence. The grosser our negligence, the fewer future generations there will be. If the number of future generations goes to zero, then our generation is the end of the line. We end humanity. Do you want to take credit for that? No? Then get to work and stop bitching. The future is waiting.

Of course, if you are really, really successful at eliminating all future generations, there will be no one left to blame you. So I guess the takeaway message is, do whatever you like, but do it well.

I am learning new words, and some new meanings for old words, in the course of my graduate education and thought it might be helpful to start compiling a list for my own reference. Keep in mind that these are the definitions I have pieced together from various readings and, as such, they may be incomplete, wrong, or atypical interpretations of their use within the design discourse.

affordance
noun
invitation to a particular action

A rubber sheath of a suitable diameter on a kitchen gadget, for instance, may be an affordance to grip that spot.

feedforward
noun
relating to control design (buttons, knobs, touchscreens, etc.), communication of the purpose of an action

The iPhone’s “slide to unlock” message, as a feedforward mechanism, communicates the purpose of the sliding action.

inherent feedback
noun
feedback strongly coupled to the action

The audible click when one presses a mouse button signals that the mouse has registered the action.

teleological
adjective
the philosophical study of design and purpose

Sometimes academics casually strew words throughout their papers that I’ve never heard of and can’t find in a standard dictionary. I’ve included a few below. Please comment with their meanings if you know them.

inforced
verb

heterarchical
adjective

“…it fails when applied to problems that involve people as informed agents, in heterarchical forms of organizations like markets.”     – The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design

praxiographic
adjective

This one, I suspect, is rooted in the word “praxis,” which refers to practice as opposed to theory.

Prefaced by a florally-inspired infographic, this article on the design process fits it with what I’m learning in design school now.

http://www.designtoimprovelife.dk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=17

Also on the website are the 2009 winners of the INDEX award. Inspirational stuff!

Posted via email from corinna’s posterous

Reading #2:
“Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”
Working Papers from the Urban & Regional Development
Horst W.J. Rittel & Melvin M. Webber

Bitch bitch bitch. Whine whine whine. Suddenly everybody’s an expert, and nothing’s good enough, despite the fact that we have well-trained professionals in countless fields. Well, if you think the situation’s bad now, just watch while we tackle issues that are actually hard! Goal-formulation, problem-definition, and equity issues are going to weaken the professional’s support system in a serious way.

In the 1960s, professionals in the U.S. were asked to consider the systems they dealt with more actively, what they do and what they should do, rather than what are they made of. This “goal-finding” turned out to be difficult. Boo. Meanwhile, people began protesting the systemic processes of contemporary American society left and right. Think the civil rights movement, the student movement, the anti-war movement, consumerism, conservationism, etc. Planners had to pay more attention to end-results, because obeying The Man was no longer a valid excuse for screwing up.

In the face of discouraging complexity, planning and policy sciences have been regarded as potentially viable means of improving society. But are social professionals up to the enormity of their task?

We have learned to question not only the efficiency but the appropriateness of a given solution. We have also become more sensitized to the interconnectedness of systems and, thus, more apt to realize that a targeted action may have undesired consequences.

Problems no longer appear as straightfoward as they once did. Defining and locating the problems turns out to be as difficult as outlining their solutions.

Creating a planning/governing system is difficult for one gigantic reason: we can’t see the future! It doesn’t help that societal problems do not have a steady state solution. They are less like science and engineering problems and more like Whack-A-Mole. We call them wicked problems in reference to their tricky and difficult-to-describe nature. Also because we’ve always wanted to see how many times we could use the word “wicked” in a scholarly paper. 49.

Even the task of describing wicked problems appears to first require identification of their solutions. If that doesn’t blow your mind, consider this: no matter how good a solution we find, there could always be a better solution. There is no way to tell for sure, so we just stop working when we get hungry or sleepy.

Also, there is no do-over for solving wicked problems. The system cannot be reset, and we can’t tell how long the effects of a particular attempt will last.

Come to think of it, we don’t even know what our end goal should be. Crap.

Posted via email from corinna’s posterous

I am in design school, but I am not a designer. As I plow through stacks of assigned readings, my non-designerly brain is straining to distill erudite works into comprehensible nuggets. And entertain itself late at night. Here goes…

Reading #1:
The Design Way
Chapter 1: The First Tradition

Everything kickass in human history that someone did on purpose should be considered design. And the geniuses who achieved these things should be called designers but probably weren’t because the world has never fully appreciated the awesomeness that is design. (Note to future-designer self: Create an experienced reality to fix this!)

Imagine something that doesn’t yet exist, then make it: that’s design.

Designers can’t know the full impact of their creations ahead of time. They’re not God, duh. But their creations can still have large-scale impact, either good or bad.

Why do we design? To survive, to improve, to develop, to create. And because we can. Designing gives us a sense of control over our lives and an opportunity to move closer ourselves to perfection.

Back in Plato’s day, thought was hot, and manual labor was not. This situation didn’t bode well for design, which unites thinking and making. The situation today isn’t much better. Consider: we still distinguish between blue-collar and white-collar work. Does maintaining this distinction serve us?

The pre-Socratic era had the idea of design broken down into useful chunks, but by the middle ages, it had become oversimplified to the point where people mostly abandoned design as an answer as they struggled to deal with the changes taking place around them.

Nowadays, people react to problems in their lives by trying to solve them. But some problems cannot be effectively solved with a problem-focused mindset. They are part of a larger system that cannot be optimized by ignoring all but one or two of the revelant variables.

Design wisdom combines reason with observation, reflection, imagination, action, and production. Being design-wise means you can shift from an analog experience of life, to a digital or analytic perspective of the world, and back again.

Agents of change: chance, necessity, and (design buzzword…) intention.

“Design utilizes a process of composition, which pulls a variety of elements into relationship with one another, forming a functional assembly that can serve the purposes and intentions of diverse populations of human beings.” (pulled verbatim because this sentence did interesting things to my brain)

A designer should critically analyze the nature of design. Think and practice with intention. Spread the word.

My favorite in the 50 Strange Buildings collection is #30: Erwin Wurm: House Attack (Vienna, Austria). The name alone won me over, but the visual is priceless. What’s your pick of the bunch?

http://villageofjoy.com/50-strange-buildings-of-the-world/

via threadless.com

I found this t-shirt design online and love it:
“I Am Shy But You Can Reach Me” – Abstract, Nature T-shirt by Sarah Musi

Plus, I thought it would be a good way to test out my new Posterous bookmarklet button.

Posted via web from corinna’s posterous