It does, you know. You just have to get it hot enough.
…way too much going on right now, so I haven’t had time to post much. This stopped me dead in my tracks, so I thought I’d share.
Almost 10 years of Design magazine, digitized and OCR’d. This a part of a very massive data store about designy things.
That sounds pretty sexy — I think that’s how I’ll describe what I’m doing this summer. Ok, I’m really just going to catch up on a bunch of reading, do some writing, practice drawing, and set up some metalworking equipment so I can make some things. But with a sexy title like that, my summer plans sound much better.
I took a couple of weeks to decompress for school but I need to get back into the study groove. I have a lot of real work (the stuff that pays) to do, but I’m going to try and stick to a self-study schedule for design, security and Japanese in my free time.
My books on the “In” pile so far fall into two piles, design and security.
In the design pile:
The stack of security books is big enough that I might end up skimming many of them:
I’m also considering re-reading some of the classics that I read in school the first time around: Alexander’s design books, Foucault’s History of Science, that sort of thing. It’ll be interesting to see how much my worldly experience changes what I get out of the canon.
This week puts a year of undergraduate design school under the covers and turns out the lights.
I’ve learned a lot in the past nine months, some of it what they wanted me to learn, some of it that could only be learned by someone my age spending a semester or two with a bunch of 18-19 year olds fresh out of high school.
If I could only remember one thing I learned this year, it would be the value of process. As an engineer (and before that, a journalist) I was never trained to keep, much less value, the things I created while working towards a solution. Different solutions to technical problems? Erased. Countless whiteboard diagrams? All gone. Meeting notes? Only those that contain the actual solution we derived during a meeting. Drafts of writings? Tossed out as soon as I turned in the final copy.
The trick for me is going to be learning how to translate design process to engineering process. We have process in engineering, we just don’t think of it as process. We consider it waste: bad ideas, wasted time trying to implement various solutions that don’t work, etc. At best we save all our email and can go back to find out what we might have been thinking when we decided to do XYZ or why we didn’t do XYZ’ or why we wanted to do XYZ in the first place.
I probably learned a lot of other stuff, but right now I just want to lie down and sleep for a month or so.
I haven’t been writing much lately because between work and class, I have about zero free time to think about anything else.
We just finished a large chunk of product design model building and entertainment exercises that I loved but that I am so glad to be done with. My weakest area is drawing, and that’s the area that we cut back on while focusing on 3D models. My visualization studio is also going amazingly well, I really like taking a class where I’m learning theory and tools that I can immediately apply back to work in a couple of weeks when the semester is over.
There are a few things about the design pedagogy at school that aren’t quite right for a non-traditional student, but I’m optimistic that these can be worked out. If the vast majority of your students are straight out of high school it makes perfect sense to tailor a curriculum to fit those students. I seriously needed Drawing I (and would benefit from taking it again!), but there are other classes where I hope that prior experience coursework will let me place out of the intro class and into something a bit more challenging.
A few things I’ve wanted to write about in detail but I’m kinda swamped with work and school.
Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. A collection of graphs showing the history and interconnections between various genres of electronic music. Lots of samples and written descriptions to go along with the graphs.
Processing, a new environment from Ben Fry and Casey Reas. Processing makes it easy for non-programmer types to do simple visualizations of data. Processing built on Java, and programmer types can easily take advantage of the full Java environment if they wish.
A Timeline of Timelines, from Cabinet Magazine.
James Victore will speak at Carnegie Mellon on Monday, March 19 @ 7:00 pm. His topic:
“Graphic Design Just Isn’t That Interesting: A discussion of the role of the designer in relation to ethics, morals and selling crap to people who don’t need it.” Margaret Morrison Breed Hall, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA.
Visual Complexity, a blog about complex visualizations of data.
Technorati Tags: cartography, design, idm, visualization
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