As Far As I Can Tell

Today is the beginning of my 28th year here on spaceship earth. I think it’s going to be a big one for me.

This year grad school takes on a different structure for me since two classes are devoted to thesis work. The thesis is split between a project and a paper, each with a different adviser and for me at least different topics. I make my own schedule and meet with my advisers only once a week; it’s much more self directed.

My paper is on a topic I’ve been interested in for a long time: designing adaptive products. I’m working with Richard Buchanan who has a particular structure to the way he wants the paper written, which is good since I’ve never written anything of this length before and need all the help I can get.

I started by choosing 3 words to guide my work: Product (what), Adaptation (how), and Autonomy (why). I am interested in how products mediate our relationship with the world and how designing for adaptation can increase people’s involvement in shaping their lives and lead to greater personal autonomy.

I’m reading three books, written from three different backgrounds and perspectives. Each one maps to one of those words though there are aspects of all three in each book. My readings are: How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built; by Stewart Brand, Democratizing Innovation; by Eric Von Hippel, and What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, And Design; by Peter-Paul Verbeek. You might have seen these hanging out in my new “Reading List” weblog sidebar.

I finished the reading last week so now I need to start making sense of them in light of my theme and finding some connections. I’ll post the paper when I finish, it’s due by the end of this semester. I’ll post info on my thesis project later.

I was excited to see Apple’s new iPod offerings the other day and after reading about the accompanying new version of iTunes it seemed like a good upgrade. The feature I wanted the most was browsing by album art since iTunes has previously always focused on individual tracks rather than managing complete albums. Other media players, like the new Windows Media 11, already have a mode that visually groups songs into albums and displays the cover art.

Unfortunately their implementation makes it unusable because of the performance hit on my computer. There’s a memory leak involving album art where every time you see an album cover it loads and holds it into RAM. Even after you’ve switched modes, scrolled off screen, or minimized the application it doesn’t release it. As a test I watched my RAM hold steady as I scrolled through my library in regular song-based text mode. When switching to album art view the usage steadily increased as I scrolled, and the cover flow mode was even worse.

I like to leave iTunes open for weeks at a time and this memory leak makes that next to impossible unless I stick with the old viewing options. Hopefully they’ll fix this leak soon since this technical problem is inhibiting what is ultimately a better way to interact with full albums. It sad to see that not only the concept of iTunes is getting bloated (music, movies, tv, and now games!?), but the software code along with it.

This morning I’m headed downtown to Emergence, the first design conference hosted and run by students at Carnegie Mellon. This year’s theme is focused on service design and my colleagues on the conference committee have done a really great job of pulling this together.

I’ll be taking photos today and tomorrow but hope to sit through some sessions as well. In particular I want to make sure I catch Jennine Winhall from the UK Design Council’s RED group and Tamara Giltsoff from live|work.

Update:
The conference was great, and the website will soon have links to blog posts, podcasts, and presentations. In the meantime here are my photos. You’ll find lots more under the emergence06 tag on Flickr.

I’ve been a big fan of Found Magazine since the first issue years ago. It’s influenced me to pick up discarded notes whenever I see them, though I’ve only run across a few gems. This morning on my walk to school I found this one:

That was all, the beginning of an unwritten letter to “Boo Boo”. I like thinking about who Boo Boo is and what this letter might have been about. Any ideas? Do you want to try finishing the letter?

It’s not that I have a problem with mornings, just the waking up part. I’ve tried various alarms from radio, CD, computer controlled, beeping, and buzzing. Eventually I learned that the type was unimportant as long as there was more than one. I put the second one across the room at first, I used to keep a third in the kitchen, and my current strategy places it in the bathroom. By the time I shut if off I’m already next to the shower; I might as well get in.

One summer when I was too young to be employed in any other way I worked on a detasseling crew. I would wake up at 5 so my mom (bless her) could take me to the bus full of other grumpy, sleepy, 14 year olds. We would stop at a field before the sun had fully risen and wet with morning due I would slosh through the mud, stinging my forearms on the corn leaves as I used them to shield my face. I was unusually small for my age so I would often have to jump for the tassel, cutting my chin on the rough leaves as I landed.

The memory of being cold and wet, halfway down a row of corn at 6 a.m. has frozen in my mind as what “morning” means. What could be more opposite then a warm blanket, soft pillow, and a cat curled up by my legs. Regardless, I do need to wake up and I’ve devised other tricks besides alarms over the years. I’ve scheduled morning classes, met friends for breakfast, and currently I’m waking up before Meredith to force myself to get going. If I don’t wake up I’ll make her late and it seems that responsibility is my best alarm clock.

I actually really like the morning once I’m out of bed, the quiet and calm being just right for a hot cup of coffee and an update from NPR. Getting up early means my first emotion of the day isn’t stress and I can ease into my schedule rather than jumpstarting it. I still don’t want to get dirty, wet, and cut-up in a corn field first thing after waking up, but I might used this extra time to start blogging more regularly.