Corinna Sherman

The second semester of my Master of Design in Interaction Design program began this Monday, and I can already tell it will be a cold, hard marathon to the end. I’ve been training by walking to and from school each day in the snow, uphill both ways, with a fully loaded backpack. Today was a relatively balmy 34°F day. Sunny. Atypically devoid of precipitation. But I am not letting that lull me into a false sense of security. Oh, no. I am taking vitamin D supplements to get me through the Pittsburgh winter, and I’m keeping a regular sleep schedule to keep the germs at bay. My challenge this time around:

Graduate Design Studio II featuring a semester-long team project to design a social service, sponsored by either Microsoft or Motorola (to be determined by a brief yet brutal death match on pay-per-view)

Research Methods in Human Centered Design covering a series of methods for explorative, generative, and evaluative research (my favorite to imagine: “velcro modeling”) to support the project work in Studio II

Graduate Design Seminar II reading and writing about interaction design (Will anyone top Henri Bergson for most baffling argument? Stay tuned…)

Adaptive Service Design exploring service design that leverages context-aware technology such as mobile phones, intelligent environments, and robotic products (super excited about this one!)

Information Design and Rhetoric exploring how rhetoric can provide systematic frameworks for designing information products in complex situations (more reading and writing guaranteed to blow my mind, plus two projects)

And just to prove it’s on, I’m going to stop this post now and go do some reading. Stay warm, people.

I live in a building
that someone else built.

I eat food
that someone else grew.

I know the joy of music
because others shared it with me.

I know how to write
because someone else taught me how.

I have been fed, clothed, and sheltered
when I had nothing to give in return.

I have learned by the examples of others
what it means to be a good friend.

So many of life’s blessings
came without my having earned them.

So much of life’s meaning
comes from those who do not count the cost.

To all these people
who have made my life what it is:

Thank you.

Posted via email from corinna’s posterous

Yesterday I watched the first episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse on Hulu, a drama in which the heroine Echo’s memories are regularly expunged and recreated by a secret organization. The process allows Echo to forget painful experiences in her past. But in forgetting life’s most painful lessons, she loses knowledge that could help prevent future tragic occurrences. Then today I read this article from the BBC about how a heart medication could suppress the emotional intensity of memories, allowing people to blunt traumatic effects of the past. The parallel struck me immediately, and it made me wonder: How should we help individuals cope with past trauma?

Six years into the Iraq War, we have no shortage of citizens suffering from traumatic experiences: war zone conflicts, the death of loved ones, job loss, and home foreclosure. Some people have been so affected that their everyday quality of life has declined dramatically, and perhaps for individuals, starting over with a clean emotional slate would seem a blessing. Imagine for a moment that it were possible to push a giant reset button on the collective American psyche, that with the aid of a little pill, we could wipe out all our past suffering and look into the future with vision uncolored by experience. Imagine that happened right before the 2008 election.

Tell me, exactly which lessons are best forgotten?

The Newseum web site shows front pages from daily newspapers every single day. As such, it showcases a wide range of design choices, from typography to spread layout to use of color in graphics and photos, as well as editorial choices pertaining to content.

For instance, here is today’s front page of a paper from President-Elect Obama’s state. And here’s one from McCain’s state, Arizona.

The Arizona Daily Star went with a bright red graphic and oversized headline about diet disasters above the banner that instantly draws the eye. A Veterans Day story follows directly below the banner, but the dominating element on the front page is a large color photo of Bush and Obama conversing in the Oval Office. The editorial choice to insert the word ‘Friendly’ in quotes in the story’s headline amused me, but I think it says more about the headline editor than either of the men in the photo.

The photo in the Arizona Daily Star is nothing, however, compared to the nearly 2/3-page inexplicably high-contrast image on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. Who appears to be leading whom on this White House tour? No “Double Chin Takeout” headline distracts from the main story, although the newspaper’s name in presidential blue Blackletter type hovers over the photo, surrounded in a white halo. Um…okay. Then there is an even smaller Veteran’s Day article on the Tribune front page than there is on the Daily Star’s, wedged at the bottom between the weather summary and a photo of “Elvis’ mystery woman.” I’ll give you one guess who the entire editorial staff voted for last Tuesday.

Compare your local paper to some others from other regions and see how they differ in presentation, scope of coverage, and visual emphasis. Then compare to your favorite online news source. Where do you get your daily news from most frequently? Why? If you only ponder these questions, that’s cool, but I’d love to see your opinions in the comments.

I had no idea that the “what do you do?” question was so emotionally loaded until I ran across this post, and the slew of reader comments that follow, on the New York Times Freakonomics bleg. I confess, I don’t really get why people would get offended by ignorant questions about what they do for a living. Offended by malicious questions, sure. Condescending questions, of course. But we are all ignorant about other people’s specialties, and the person who makes an effort to dispel his own ignorance by asking someone more knowledgeable than himself, in my opinion, deserves some patience. After all, most people don’t feel comfortable revealing their ignorance in front of strangers. Asking questions can be scary! So, at my next meet-and-greet, I am going to do new acquaintances a favor and give them some unexpected tidbit of information that will make them appear well-informed the next time they meet someone in my field of expertise; I hope they will do the same for me. Hopefully it won’t go like this flowchart from http://www.monster-munch.com/

So What Do You Do?

Here is a version of a Toy Story 2 trailer video cut to the audio track from a Dark Knight trailer. Although both the video and audio sources were probably used without permission, the resulting recut on YouTube is entertaining in its own right because of the juxtapositions the creator chose to make. Watching it reminded me of the ongoing debates surrounding copyright and fair use which Professor Henry Jenkins explores on his blog. Disney in particular gets a mention for its extremely aggressive copyright control practices.

I stand on the edge of a precipice, breath in throat, poised to leap into the great unknown. A thrill runs through me, tinged with the shadows of familiar fears and doubts. But on the eve of my old life, anticipation for the breaking dawn steadies my trembling legs. It roots me as it spreads through my flesh and bones, infusing my life blood with a demanding pulse of its own that will no longer be ignored.

And so I jump.

I fall.

I fly.

There is an interesting article in The Atlantic about how the Internet may be shaping our thought patterns. The author makes the generalization (based on anecdotal evidence) that people tend to skim rather than read online, and that our ability to read with deep, sustained engagement becomes impaired as a result. He claims he cannot even read a long article anymore without getting distracted.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but it sounds to me like the author is taking web surfing and multitasking to extremes. I get a lot of information from the Internet, but I don’t consider it a replacement for in-depth magazine/journal articles and books, and I still enjoy delving into a weighty tome for an hour at a time. Or several hours, if my newly arrived copy of Breaking Dawn has anything to do about it. People get information from a variety of media presented at different density levels, and that seems to me like a pretty healthy state of affairs. Sometimes we just want an overview, and sometimes we actually want to learn enough about a topic that we can carry on a conversation with others about it. How deep we want to go just depends on where our individual interests lie.

Admittedly, magazines nowadays (MIT Tech Review being one guilty party) are trying to appeal to the stereotype of a skim-happy public by encapsulating their articles in blurbs at the front of the magazine. Reading these predigested morsels in print, however, strikes me as a waste of time. After all, if I wanted shallow summaries, I could always go to the web site. (Well, actually, I’d check my RSS feed, but that’s beside the point.) If I have gone to the trouble of procuring a physical magazine, with pages I can stare at without getting computer monitor glow fatigue, that conforms to the shape of my grip and doesn’t mind getting rained on or stuffed into a bag alongside sharp metal objects like keys, I’m going to read whole articles. But maybe that’s just me.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been exploring ways to improve my overall health. Like most people, I figure the best places to start are diet and exercise, but when I sat down and actually tried to figure out what to DO about diet and exercise, things quickly got confusing.

Some Internet research reveals that there are an overwhelming number of diet plans out there: Atkins, Beck, Eat to Live, Food Combining, Glycemic Index, McDougall, Metabolic Typing, Ornish, Pritkin, South Beach, Zone, and on and on. Some plans include psychological reconditioning strategies as well as nutritional guidelines so that you improve your changes of sticking with your plan over the long term. Others, like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, have support networks with monthly subscription costs and commercially prepared portion-controlled meals you can buy.

To further complicate things, there’s also a whole slew of alternative health care trends and products. Some of my friends have endured week-long detox regimens, ingesting nothing but lemon water, nothing but fruit, or nothing but vegetable broth and ice cream. When I went to my local vitamin shop for guidance, there were shelves and shelves of some truly scary-looking products designed to cleanse, irrigate, enlarge, shrink, and/or repopulate various internal organs. I had no idea that our bodies are so totally incapable of taking care of their own housekeeping.

I didn’t want to do anything drastic that might jeopardize my health, and I didn’t want to spend money on subscriptions, so in the end I decided to track my exercise and diet habits through a free website called PEERTrainer. The site promotes its social support network as the key to help its users reach their fitness goals, but I since I was mainly interested in using it as a personal online health journal, I just created a private group for myself and got started logging my daily workouts and meals for later analysis.

I promised myself that I would truthfully log everything I ate, no matter how terrible it might look on the screen. Almost as an afterthought, I also resolved to exercise six days a week.

It’s been two months now, and I’m calling an end to my little tracking experiment. Here are my conclusions drawn from both my research and personal observations of myself and others:

1. Exercise is more important than diet.

If you can only make one change to improve your life, make it 30-60 minutes of daily exercise. Athletes can have really lousy diets and still outperform the rest of us. Exercise plays a crucial role in weight maintenance, regulation of mood, sleep, and stress, and keeping the body physically youthful. Cardio, strength training, and flexibility are all important, so it’s best to mix up workouts through the week to reap greater benefits and keep things interesting. Buddy up or attend group classes. Other people can be great motivators for those of us who aren’t lone wolf runners. Push yourself to the point of discomfort but not pain. If you never feel uncomfortable, you’re not pushing hard enough; get a heart monitor if you’re worried you’re pushing too hard.

2. Eat whole, natural plant foods.

The most reliable scientific research shows that the best diet for maximum health and longevity and minimum occurence of Western diseases like cancers, heart disease, and diabetes is a low-fat vegan diet with plenty of fresh and frozen green/low-starch vegetables, fruits, and legumes, a moderate amount of starchy vegetables and whole grains, a small amount of nuts, seeds, and avocados, and not a whole lot of anything else. Snack on fruit and raw vegetables. Stay away from refined anything. Organic is nice in philosophy, but it’s probably not essential for good health.

3. Plan ahead.

It’s really difficult to buy healthy ready-to-eat foods in the U.S. To make matters worse, there are an overwhelming number of temptingly convenient unhealthy foods for sale in stores and restaurants. Buy the majority of your food from grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and CSA organizations. Supplement with homegrown produce and herbs if you can.

There. Now stick those three points on an index card, stop stressing, and go enjoy your life.