Marty Siegel:

reflectivedesign

Yesterday I spoke of “big concept” teaching and related it to a personal experience:

In the mid-sixties, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I took a course in physics. In those days, they didn’t offer “Physics for Poets.” There were only hard-core physics courses, taken mostly by engineering majors. But I wanted to know how the physical world worked, so I signed up. A good student, I attended all of the classes, took thorough notes, read the textbook, and completed all of the assigned exercises at the end of every chapter.

All went well until the first exam. I opened the test booklet and suddenly wondered if I was in the right course. “When did we learn how to solve these problems?” I wondered in bewilderment. I muddled through them, trying to remember the formulae I had memorized. Needless to say, I didn’t do very well on the exams or in the course and therefore redirected my interests elsewhere.

What happened? If I had had the courage to ask my instructor about the exam questions, the professor probably would have been puzzled by my confusion. We had different views of the subject. For me, physics was a vast collection of different problems, each with its particular formula. If a problem looked like example 3.7 in the text, I felt confident. Or if a problem matched well with formula 3.5.2, then the solution was forthcoming. But if a problem was new and different, I was lost. My professor, however, had no box in his head that contained this problem.

He understood physics in an entirely different way. For him, physics consisted of big ideas and central relationships like Force = mass x acceleration. Problems on the exam were not independent problems but variations on the big ideas. Nothing would have seemed unusual to the professor; each problem was a variation of something well known. But everything seemed unique to me, his naïve student!

Big concept teaching, something my physics professor did not do, can result in big concept thinking. I related the story of Robert, a first grade student learning to solve equations in one of four forms: simple addition, subtraction, algebra addition (e.g., 5 + X = 7), and algebra subtraction (e.g., 5 = 8 - Y). For each of these four forms or subconcepts, the teacher treated in the same way: “We begin with the equal sign — what you count to on one side of the equal sign, you must count to on the other side…” After solving many problems in this manner, Robert solved a new form involving negative numbers (4 - 6 = ?). Why did Robert succeed? Becuse he was taught the bigger concept that united all of the problem types, including one never seen.

Think of an extremely smart person, someone many would describe as brilliant. How would you describe this person’s understanding of their area of expertise, whether it be finance, art history, biology, or any other discipline? Typically, these people understand big concepts: they see their world as a handful of basic themes with lesser concepts as variations on these themes.

Most of us don’t organize the world this way. We  don’t see themes and variations, we only see variations, each one independent of the other. Our heads are filled with disconnected facts and principles. But the very smart person reduces this wide array to a small set that helps him or her quickly grasp new situations.

Why is this instructional design insight — big concept teaching and learning — important for interaction design? For one, every interaction, every interface, must be learned. A design will be easier to learn if it is consistent (shares critical properties) with other designs. For example, we can learn to operate a new Mac application if we know how to operate other Mac applications. Certain menus are positioned in the same way making it easier for us to learn the fundamental controls. The designed consistency creates a big concept design for the user-learners.

But there’s another implication of big concept teaching and learning for us as designers. You may think of the seven themes — human-centered design, transparency, computer imagination, and so on — as the big ideas that help focus our attention on good design. The techniques that we learn along the way — persona development, goal-directed design — are simply tools for the designer; they facilitate the designer’s job.

To focus merely on the tools (like focusing on single physics examples or forumlae), you will memorize single techniques. Useful, yes, but missing the point. Instead, allow your mind to be reflective and ask yourself what do all of these techniques mean. You can read many HCI books (my office and home are filled with them) and can easily become confused by the suggested techniques — trying to line them all up — looking for consistencies and inconsistencies among them. But the expert designer begins to ask what these techniques mean. Variations (don’t worry about the vagaries among the techniques) lead to themes. Big concepts lead to big insights.

I didn’t have time to share the following video with you. But I’d like for you to take the time to watch it. The video comes from the TED conference, a conference attended by many influential people in the IT industry. It is a 20-minute talk by Sir Ken Robinson called “Do Schools Kill Creativity?

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

We need to celebrate the “gift of imagination.” Robinson would say that we need to be prepared to be wrong. To put it another way, Richard Saul Wurman would say that there are three misrules we learn in school that do not serve us well:

• It’s better to say “I know,” than to say “I don’t know.”
• It’s better to answer a question than to ask a question.
• It’s better to worship at the foot of success than to understand the nature of failure.

How do we let go of these old habits?

Now is your opportunity to practice being wrong. Now is your opportunity to ask questions and make mistakes, individually and as a team. Our goal is to learn to think in big concept ways so that we may design in big concept ways. How else will we awaken possibility in people?

As designers and as world citizens, our future depends on it.

(As always, I’m interested in your comments.)

      

by Marty Siegel at October 10, 2008 07:01 PM

Kristy Streefkerk:

Thank you Google!

Seriously it is like Christmas came early this year!

Google labs came out with what could be the greatest invention for a wino like me!

So now ladies and gents between the hours of 11pm and 6am on Friday and Saturday nights, you will no longer be receiving anymore slurred emails from me!

That is unless, I figure out how to quickly and efficiently use the calculator after a glass or two of wine…

Now all I need is something like this for AIM and my phone….

by kristy at October 09, 2008 05:48 AM

El Wino

Wine class is back in session!!!! Which helps me live in my fantasy world of pretending that I am still in France living on a vineyard. And not sitting in front of my computer all day watching it crash (yes my work computer crashed 5 times today…)

So tonight in wine class we learned about the wines of Spain and Portugal… which I found fitting considering that in 245 days I will be in Spain with a bunch of Bloomington highschoolers, Mindy and Abby.

I am now officially excited to go to Spain and have a taste or two….

Let the countdown begin!

by kristy at October 09, 2008 05:44 AM

BlogSchmog:

Parental Concerns

Possibly not my best day parenting ever, but if I believed in grades, and in lame reassurances for failed attempts, I’d give myself an A for effort.

Carter and Archie: WA WAAA WAA He blah blah blah and He did this and that

Me: (reciting to self: I am calm, I am competent, I can help my kids solve this problem) Let’s get all our concerns on the table. Carter? What are you concerns?

Carter: He wants to use all the pillows for the pillow wall, and we need them for the pillow barrier. I told him, “be reasonable,” but he won’t.

Me: Okay. So Carter’s concern is that there won’t be enough firm pillows for the barrier. Archie? What are your concerns? (rinse and repeat several times, as Archie won’t stop crying, and Carter won’t stop talking)

Archie: I want to make a pillow wall. I need pillows.

Me: Archie is saying he wants to make the pillow wall now- what solutions can we generate here? Carter is concerned about the barrier and Archie wants to make the wall. (Thinking to self, any minute now boys will be working together to create solutions, bonding their friendship for life).

silence.

Archie: We could make the wall first.

Me: Archie has an idea. He suggests we should build the wall first. Carter? What do you think? Do you have any solutions?

silence

Me: Carter?

Carter: What? I’ve been plugging my ears if it’s not my turn to talk.

Eventually, I tire of the pillow debate and send them outside. After my own therapeutic flower-picking activity, I wander into the backyard.

Carter: Mom!! Watch this! (executes crazy-ass swing off of playset, slightly onto inflatable jumper, then onto ground)

Me: Wow. That doesn’t scare me at all.

Carter: Why should it scare you? I’ve only hit my head on the playset once doing this.

Yep, I’ve got some concerns today.

by Amy Makice at October 08, 2008 07:59 PM

Jenny Brown Hertel:

Jenny

. . . and I’m a Twitter addict.

I use Twhirl, a desktop application that that sends the latest tweets right to me, so I don’t have to go to a web page to read them.  I keep it open whenever I’m in front of a laptop.  And I’m in front of a laptop a heck of a lot.  So I’m almost always “on” Twitter.   The past two days, though, have been incredibly busy with classes and work, and from about 6pm yesterday until 1pm today, I wasn’t logged into Twhirl.

(Though, I will point out that during the debate last night, I was watching Election 08 on Twitter, so I wasn’t “off” Twitter for that long.  More on that in a minute.)

When I finally got back to my desk this afternoon, the first thing I did was go to the Twitter webpage so I could catch up on all the tweets I missed (Twhirl will only give me 20 tweets at a time, and I knew there’d be more than 20 unread tweets, so I had to use the web interface).  Since there was a debate last night, there were larger than usual numbers of tweets, so it took me almost an hour to read all the back tweets.

After I got done, I was a little mad at myself.  I really needed to use that hour on something more productive.  But, I just couldn’t help myself.  That’s when I realized I’m a Twitter addict!

And, I’m considering something that probably isn’t good for my addiction.

During the first presidential debate, I thought it would be fun to check out the Election 08 site and see what people were saying about what the candidates were saying.  And it was.  I found it incredibly entertaining.  In fact, I ended up not watching much of the debate and paying more attention to the tweets about the debates.  Same thing happened during the vice presidential debate.

I have two classes that require a research paper at the end of the semester.  In one, I have to critique an interaction using some theory we are learning.  In the other, I have to conduct research on a CMC mode in the setting of my choice. While thinking about possible topics for those, I hit upon the idea of critiquing the interactions of people with Twitter during the debates.  I then realized that that subject would also be an appropriate topic for the CMC paper.

While trying to figure how capture necessary data, I decided to ask a Ph.D. student who has already done some research related to Twitter for some suggestions. He first offered some great ideas, and then later suggested that we write a paper for publication where we create a corpus of tweets during a debate and analyze the information flow.

I’m very intrigued by the topic, and I’ve yet to be published.  Plus, I already have to turn in these papers in December for the two classes. So, it seems obvious that I should do this.

So, while spending time writing some papers about Twitter may not be good for my Twitter addiction, maybe this Twitter addiction will be good for my academic career!

      

by Jenny Hertel at October 08, 2008 07:47 PM

Kristy Streefkerk:

Running towards the Rubber Ducky…

So now that Laura has convinced me to run in the Rubber Ducky 7miler in a week and a half, I figured it would probably be a good idea to learn how to run more than 3 miles at once. So here is my problem, I get bored when I run… mainly because I usually run alone and on a treadmill… thus after about 20 minutes I am bored out of my mind. So today I ventured out onto the seawall and braved the wind… dragging Mary with me.

For the first time ever, I didn’t look at my watch until we were about 20 minutes into our run, and it was more out of curiosity than trying to figure out when we could stop…

We ended up going 4.5 miles in 45 minutes - not too shabby if I do say so myself… now I am pretty sure the 7 miler is doable… and that I won’t die. And assume that if I keep my 10 minute mile pace going I could do the run in an hour and ten minutes… hey who said you have to be fast???

by kristy at October 08, 2008 02:55 AM

Tiffanie Shakespeare:

being drugged vs being sick

After being really sick for about a week I finally gave in and went to the doctor. They ended up giving me a bunch of random meds to get rid of my symptoms, things to suppress my cough, reduce fever, both alleviate my headache from congestion and the congestion itself. Who needs to actually feel sick? And so I spent some time in a drugged up haze.

My question though is this. Don’t we get symptoms for a reason? If not to help myself heal at least to send a signal to myself “hey, slow down! you need to rest.” If I can’t feel any symptoms then how do I differentiate between getting better and getting rid of my symptoms? Don’t get me wrong, I hate the drippy nose and hacking cough as much as the next person, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s a reason I have the symptoms I do. Do I really want to suppress that cough if there is ickiness in my lungs? I wouldn’t think it would just randomly evaporate after x number of days. Then again I’m not a doctor so what do I know?

by Tif at October 08, 2008 12:41 AM

Richie Hazlewood:

Informatics Caption Contest (Faculty Edition)

I borrowed a digital camera from the tech support guys, and found the photo below. I can only imagine what is going on in this conversation. So I propose the 1st Informatics Caption Contest (Faculty Edition). Just submit your caption...

October 07, 2008 07:31 PM

BlogSchmog:

Presidential Concerns

Carter and I had almost an hour to debate politics on our way to the Bloomfield Apple Fair last weekend. In between giant lawn signs for Mitch and a pretty cool homemade Obama sign, Carter outlined his desires for the next president.

Carter: What I really hope is our next president takes on King Arthur’s philosophy.

Me: (resisting the urge to start singing Camelot) Yes? What’s that?

Carter: War is only the very very last resort.

Me: (lost in patting myself on the back for such brilliant parenting as to produce such a thoughtful kid)

Carter: Of course, my larger concern is Area 51.

Me: Huh?

Carter: I’m afraid the next president, whether it’s Obama or McCain, might abuse Area 51.

Me: Again, huh?

Carter: (working on his patient voice) It’s likely there’s some powerful alien technology there, and the next president could use it as a terrible weapon. I don’t want that to happen.

Me: But (struggling) that isn’t happening now, right? The current president isn’t using alien technology, right?

Carter: Well Mom, I think there’s a good chance the next president will be smarter than this one.

One can only hope.

by Amy Makice at October 07, 2008 04:50 PM

Down for Maintenance

Twitter scheduled a little maintenance window tonight. It didn’t last long and I sure successfully improved something. I’m hopeful I’ll be able to say the same about my own downtime.

Twitter’s downtime has a new look

For me, writing is about rhythm and energy. Lately, both have been necessarily focused on academic work and the initial drafts of my first book. The schedule has been light on sleep and heavy on slowly crafting words for publication. By the time I get back to the browser bookmark to BlogSchmog, I can barely type my username. The guilt became so bad, I had to disable my RSS feeds to keep my eye on the ball.

With deadlines looming, I have been too busy writing to blog.

On the plus side are a few papers of various sizes that I consider solid work. Given that we sacrificed income for accelerating the degree pursuit this summer, I was happy with the results. I triple-booked the first half of the current semester in the process, however, and am paying the price with regularity. November brings relief on several fronts … just in time for a full-press on qualifying exams in January.

In between paragraphs, I have reflected quite a bit on what 2010 will be like. The most aggressive time table allowed by my doctoral program has me graduating one year from today, when I could be ABT (All But Tassel). I’m braced for a slightly longer trek, but won’t have the tolerance or bank for much more than that. Academic hiring—which likely would involve relocating from Bloomington, Indiana—won’t begin until next fall to land a job two years from now, so with a great deal of certainty I’m projecting a return to industry at least for while. That job likely will be local. It may become permanent.

In the meantime, blogging may pick up, or it may not. Depends on stamina and brain cells.

by Kevin Makice at October 07, 2008 06:17 AM

Kristy Streefkerk:

Craig and Jo’s wedding!

Last night we celebrated Craig and Jo’s wedding in full force…. that was once we got there….5 minutes before the ceremony started… this is what happens when you put Matt, Ben and I together…. in a foreign land (aka rural Indiana)..

The ceremony itself was beautiful, Jo’s dress (which her mum made for her) was a perfect fit for her personality, and Craig didn’t disappoint us when he walked down the aisle and took a second to strike a pose and give a thumbs up as he passed by the pews.

As you can see by the photos, there was singing/dancing/creation of new dance moves/removal of high heeled shoes, good food - amazing cupcakes and plenty of Manhattans for Matt and Ben to consume. (I still don’t get how they could drink those things…)

At the end of the night I managed to get us lost on the way back to the hotel… because I am smart like that… and hey who doesn’t want to drive through the corn fields at midnight? Though Matt did point out that it was like we were in a horror movie…

by kristy at October 06, 2008 05:21 AM

Indiana…

Before I go and pass out in my bed to regroup from two nights of sleep deprivation… So Wednesday night I hopped on a plane and headed to Indiana to attend the PDC (Participatory Design Conference) in Bloomington - hosted by my Alma Mater (the School of Informatics).

Overall the conference was great - it was refreshing to be back in an ‘academic environment’ just to get another perspective on the design process and the importance of finding time to incorporate user participation into design - something that tends to get ignored when you are facing tight deadlines…. It was also great to see some familiar faces and check out the research that some of the Phd students at IU are working on.

Friday night after the conference I had the opportunity to have dinner with the current and former members of the IU water polo team… the sad thing is that when the current players walked in - I didn’t know a soul… yup I feel old… after dinner all the old folks headed out to Nick’s… for some beer (you know to get warmed up for the early morning match we had the next morning)

Speaking of the game the next morning… it probably wasn’t such a good idea to get home from the bars at 3am… I’m just saying. So after a couple hours of sleep and some eggs benny we hit the pool. Thankfully, no one drowned. And we only lost by one point.. that was after Barry made us play sudden death overtime…. My highlight was winning one swim-off… (even though I need a good minute to recover afterward - 2012 here I come!). Barry also complimented us at one point by telling his current team ‘you may be laughing because they are old and dat, but they’re old and fat and beating you…’ (we only found this out because Creighton, our 8 year-old coach for the morning, overheard Barry say it and decided to come report back to us….) In honour of his comment we cheered ‘Old,Fat,Win’ before the third quarter.

by kristy at October 06, 2008 05:07 AM

John Michael Vore:

Foucault's "exchanging": bailing-out paradigms

In The Order of Things, chapter six is called "Exchanging." Michel Foucault here, continues to makes his case for the shift in paradigms from the 16th to the 18th century. In sum, "Where natural history revealed squares of identities separated by differences, the analysis of wealth reveals 'differentials' – tendencies towards increase and towards diminution" (p. 189).

"Exchanging" has to do with economics, markets, prices, values and currency. "...Money can represent more kinds of wealth only by circulating faster," Foucault writes (p. 185; emphasis added). "...[S]peed of circulation is defined by the number of hands through which money passes during the time it takes to return to its starting-point..." He continues: "This speed is limited in two directions: an infinitely rapid speed would imply an immediate exchange in which money would have no role to play, and an infinitely slow speed would mean that every element of wealth possesses its permanent monetary double."

Note that some of what has created the need for the current round of rescues from the Federal government has to do with the bundling of mortgages, that is, taking mortgages out of the hands of local banks and trading them around the world. The credit risk inherent in borrowing money for a home thus touched more and more hands because of high-technology, technology which could compute derivatives - near permanent monetary doubles, these complex representations; and our internet could deliver nearly immediate exchanges. Thus a new space in which wealth could grow appeared, a virtual space which could manufacture oscillations between the extremes of financial circulation unearthed by Foucault in Cantillon and the Physiocrats.

Let us continue with Foucault's accounting of 18th century discourse: "...the problem is not to discover by what mechanisms money circulates or fails to circulate, how it is expended or accumulated..., but what the necessary quantity of money is in a given country that will provide a sufficiently rapid circulation and pass through a sufficiently large number of hands. Thus, prices will not be intrinsically 'fair', but exactly regulated: the divisions of the monetary mass will analyse wealth according to an articulation that will be neither too loosely or too tightly knit. " (p. 186; emphasis added).

This past week, in America, 700 billion dollars has been suggested as the temporary fix needed to increase the circulation of money through the "right" number of hands. The "debate" on the bail-out first hit a wall because the right number did not seem to include many or most Americans: the cry, "no Wall Street bail-out!" was heard. As this past week wore on, a new story emerged, more about how the credit "freeze" was trickling down to main street. Local banks couldn't extend credit to small businesses, because they couldn't get money from the big banks. Pay-rolls might not get paid....as it turns out, this bail-out is all about you. Without the bail-out, money may not reach your hands. You'd be out of the financial loop.

Will the plan work? Time will tell, everyone says. "...Time belongs to the inner law of representation and is part of it; it follows and modifies without interruption the power possessed by wealth to represent itself and so analyse itself by means of a monetary system...this function of time within wealth...[is] a pledge...assimilated into credit: ...the duration of the credit, the rapidity with which repayment fell due, the number of hands through which it passed in a given time, [are] characteristic variables of its representative power. But all of this was merely the consequence of a form of reflection that placed the monetary sign, with relation to wealth, in a posture of representation in the full sense of the term." (p. 189).

Some readers might want to throw up their hands, perhaps even see money as "the root of all evil," or that it is a"false idol". Yet that misses the point, here, in the Order of Things, which attempts to describe the escape of representation from the divine, e.g., representing in the fullest sense possible. Roots and idols were old ways of thinking - from a paradigm which sought to arrange and govern perceptions and things-in-themselves entirely on how much they reflected a hidden divine nature; a limited, censored use of representation. It was an old tradition, a cognitive regime of mind-control, something which most fundamentalist religions still use: no words but God's or Allah's. That paradigm sought to harness all of cognitive life - all things intellectual - to the "discovery" of God in everything, and nothing else, period. As in, "there is nothing else, so don't ask."


THE MEDIEVAL, GOD PARADIGM constantly and purposefully missed the tree for the forest, always a mythical eden. A person with eyes living under this paradigm only perceives a given tree if that tree reveals the divine, otherwise it has no individuating characteristics worth noticing. This gets cognitively tricky because it applies to individual persons, too: in most fundamentalist thought the individual only shows up in as much as he or she "reveals" some divine law, either through living it (and denying self) or breaking it (and denying "God"). Which is to say, the individual is most individual when she is least individual, in short – possessed; this definitional lock-up is what distinguishes a paradigm.

This cognitive burden makes some 21st century people think religion is bunk; that's because we were born into a different, later paradigm than those still maintained by religions (no matter what religion we adopt, or refuse to adopt). The newer paradigm allowed for each and every tree and every member of every other species that makes up the forest to be categorized without regard to any given creature's relationship to a divinity, or even exitence of any divinity; in short, representing, itself, got free. This is very difficult to conceive for us latter-paradigm saints, who are used to using language, film, speech and IMs to represent a zillion things. So, put yourself back into a time when few were literate, and representing was in the hands of the rich and/or religious. Everyman was, in reality, Helen Keller, talking with her hands only to those they could physically touch.

Those empowered to represent the world were the artists-with-patrons who, as you might know from Art History 101, had to paint religious imagery. It took centuries to free up thought from this one end goal; it also took centuries for tools to show up which allowed Everyman to get into the game of representing reality. When, eventually, more and more people were freed from the necessity of endless journey God-searches, a tree could simply be a tree, escaping Kaballah, even escaping natural science Tree-of-Life analogies, so, eventually being not merely a symbol of a 21st century green movement, but its embodiment (plant a tree!).

This post-Medieval paradigm also, over time, allowed for the individual person to arrive on the Western intellectual scene; and only when more individuals showed up, of course, was there a "scene," and not a moment before.


WITHIN THE IDENTITY PARADIGM, a collection of adopted identities would become who one is, not some quest for the divine in which no body can show up, ever, e.g. "a quest" which never ends. One still hears remnants of this: "it's the journey, not the destination." Within the Identity Paradigm, you are what you eat, so to speak; you are each step of the journey, each detour, each description you give of it, and the destination: you think, therefore you are. You are all the things you say you are, which can really suck, it's so much work: so in time we would invite psychologists to help us edit the myriad self-representations which crowded into our once relatively empty brains.

Looking back on the old, closed, dogmatic, mono-God-centered paradigm, it is difficult not to be dismissive: they seem closed-minded, what with their incomplete maps of the world and Terra Incognita. Our world was unimaginable to most learned folk before the 19th century; and "openness" remains difficult, such that some confuse "hockey mom" talk for it or straight talk, when, truly, such talk comes from a mind yearning to be closed.

Open minds are dangerous territory to closed minds; four centuries ago, the Church closed the mind by creating heretics; to survive, some had to appear closed in order to safe-guard knowledge from dogma. Today, touting a closed mind, as fundamentalists do both in America and abroad, simply repeats a repeat, though it's come to sound like bravery. Closed-minded paradigms, in the 21st century, are blind paradigms; "keeping the faith" is not about firm principles, but about an inability to grasp fundamental change. It is not anti-intellectual in some democrat v. elitist way, but anti-cognitive in the way in which one chooses to get smashed or stoned because life seems overwhelming. It is stupid-minded, like driving a car with one's eyes closed.


MONEY, IT CAN BE DIFFICULT TO REMEMBER, IS A SYMBOL. It is a thing which represents. The possession of symbols was always highly regulated. Early on, symbols were so limited, that freedom meant having the t-shirt with the emperor on it. What was hip was one thing. (This is an anachronistic analogy, but play along.) Then freedom meant having the t-shirt with the right divinity, or no T-shirt at all. Later freedom meant having a T-shirt without either the emperor or the divinity; later it meant a simple T with colors. By the 20th century, a T-shirt could have philosophers on it. By the end of the 21st century, you cold put yourself on a T-shirt in most Western countries. Or you could put a corporate identity on your T-Shirt.

This is a bit labored, this extended analogy, but it can be difficult imagining freedom without judgment as it expands, arriving where it is, today. A T-shirt with only the emperor or one divinity was an advance over no clothes at all, etc. Now, imagine that money is the T-shirt. It's ability to represent expands and contracts, yet its ability to represent must be regulated, or it ceases to represent anything. You thus cannot print money with your computer and a printer. If each of us did print our own money, rather than counterfeit a country's currency, money would cease to be a means of exchange.

Derivatives, on the other hand, these new ways of representing micro-slices of wealth: what have they done to exchange?


WHEN ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT MONEY, we're usually practicing some version of the Identity Paradigm's discipline, History. Doing a money history eventually brings to mind "roots of evil" because, chronologically, answering "What happened?" began as a sorting out of good and evil forces. Later it became an analysis of what people did and the decisions which led, or didn't lead to actions.

When things go badly, we "naturally" want the bad to be extra-human, super- or sub-human - so as to get some distance from it. Partly this is cognitive: distance gives perspective by which to see and adjust. Some time allows us to see more clearly, allowing us to run in and out of the cognitive space created by the Identity Paradigm, the one which gave rise to yous and mes, the very ability to imagine that something could be one's own fault, or one's own problem. Or that the appearance of something bad might require something of us, rather than something of God.

Some of the initial talk of evil after cataclysm comes down to laziness: if what's evil is too close, we might actually have to do something about it. Again, time sometimes allows us realize it's better to do something rather than nothing, or that doing something may not be that bad, maybe even preferable to what seems so threatening that it's evil.

We deflect fearful, threatening things, then watch them as they are reflected back through the hierarchies of identity which we believe in: how authorities we believe in see the challenge, how family sees it, how friends see it. It is through this deflecting/reflecting that we eventually come to have a handle on it, within the Identity Paradigm. The Identity Paradigm has a million possible mirrors; the God Paradigm, just one.

Identity Paradigm searches for causes and effects can easily and quickly melt into God Paradigm longings for the Prime Mover, or evil-doer. Yet, as Doris Kearns Goodwin remarked about Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression, finding evil doesn't empower. So Roosevelt would say: "if man made it, man can repair it; the mistake is not to try." Blaming "evil" takes solutions out of the realm of the man-made and into mystical territory. We need to confront a fear, what terrorizes, what is evil, to break it down; to move forward, we must get our hands on it.

Roosevelt's phrase thus captures the tension between paradigms. It will always be tempting to slip back into the God Paradigm and fantasize about being powerless: maybe somebody or something else will save us. Yet we have to come back into the Idenitty Paradigm through which we cognitively live (in the West): being able to represent a problem puts it back in one's hands, anchors power in one's hands. This was the journey of the American Congress over the last ten days: running from Responsibility, then taking action.

In many ways, fundamentalist thought wants everyone to return to simpler cognition, one in which there is a unity between perceptions and reality, where the gap shrinks between inumberable choices and the "right" choice, a time when what is knowable was less confusing. Good & Evil, for most, present the illusion of choice, of course, when there is none at all.

One is free to choose a closed system of reference, where everything comes down to what God would or should have done. But in the 21st century, if He, She or It hasn't done it, I'm sorry to say, then you're taking on the God-persona to figure out what to do. One cannot escape the Identity Paradigm any more than one could the God Paradigm, before the Identity Paradigm existed.

In open systems of thought, one is called to ask more and more people what to do, to get everyone looking for a solution; if one is a leader, one then, of course, gets everyone behind moving towards such a solution. Open systems are about movement; closed systems are about snapshots, being frozen in one's tracks. An oddity from the Vice Presidential debate this week was Governor Palin's dislike of "wealth redistribution"; all wealth is about more and more redistribution, else it ceases to be. One cannot go backward once one has opened up cognitive territory; though one can talk the talk of "good old days," the walk in life moves in one direction: forward.

In the paradigms of the 13th to 17th centuries, the herd was always at the mercy of divine forces we could not and should not try to understand; sheep take it on faith. There was no perspective from which to analyze metaphors like "sheep" within the God Perspective: (a) first of all, the parable was the Word of God (e.g., no questions!) (b) there was no cognitive structures or real-world tools with which to list sheep characteristics and compare them to people characterstics in some systematic way thus demonstrating likenesses or differences between Dolly, Dolly Madison or Dolley Madison.

From the 18th century until today we have attempted to discover what we can and what we cannot understand (and thus control) by thoroughly cataloging everything in the world we find. Fundamentalists would quibble about whether man causes global warming because they yearn for the End Time. They prefer we do nothing at this moment of American financial crisis, as well; they always want to things as out of their control; they must, 'tis paradigmatic. As Governor Palin said in Thursday night's debate: government should "get out of the way."

Government is a difficult thing for ideologues who don't believe in the Identity Paradigm, that construct of American founders which gave birth to the phrase "of, by and for the people." Conservatives don't care about "the people," they care about converts: recall, not everyone goes to Heaven on most religious schemes.

It should seem odd that a candidate for Vice President wants to expand that office, yet also says government is the enemy. "OK, Government is the enemy, but you want to be 2nd in Charge, and have more to do?" Maureen Dowd nails the Governor's no-speak talk with humor in "Palin's Pompom Palaver." For a look at this schizo-mindedness with McCain, see The Daily Show coverage of McCain's responses on the Bail-Out, done simply by replaying his contradictions over the course of one ten or twelve minute interview. One cannot say of Senator McCain, "he was for it before he was against it," because he is simultaneously for it and against it.


AS IT HAS BEEN FOR TWO HUNDRED YEARS, the burden of the conservative is always to both be someone and nobody at the same time, caught in between two paradigms of being, the Identity Paradigm into which they were born and the God Paradigm for which they yearn, out of time. Conservatives thus look for identity by-passes: they look for religious affiliation or "the family," a place in which self gets tied down and quickly lost to procreating. They look for "correct values" amongst themselves. The conservative group is usually a family affair. Conservatives are consummate warriors, always harking to first causes, ultimate causes that invite, you, too, to by-pass yourself. No wonder the Senator's head seems to be spinning in the The Daily Show segment: in the cognitive trap of conservative American values, McCain is not fighting for Americans, he's fighting for himself; but because he buys into the God Paradigm, he cannot see himself. Or rather, he does everything he can to not talk about himself, until cornered: and then he let's you know he'll fight nasty.

The burden on liberals is to always be somebody, but not too much of somebody; the critic of liberals is always ready to talk about conceit; having one's group, one's gang – helps here, as well as it does with conservatives, so that a cause is never about one's self, but about "us." Senator Obama is thus about a movement. The emphasis is on diverse values, so liberals look for signs of "equality" amongst themselves. Equality enables the liberal mind-set to accept identity if every single one of them is no greater than any other individual (whatever that means). Liberal groups tend to be more ad hoc than conservative groups, "alternative families" which provoke the ire of conservatives who insist on one kind of family, dogmas and DOMAs (so-called Defense of Marriage Acts).

Both liberal and conservative conundrums reflect the cognitive difficulties of an ever-expanding ability to represent over the last four centuries of human history: amidst a million signs of life, what, if any, have to do with "me"? Some want destiny to choose, any kind of prime mover, any God one would, of course, then fight to protect: as Senator McCain says, he had to learn to fight for something "greater" than himself. Some pull together a sense of self from the many signs of diversity around them, the many ways of being, thinking, getting together in innumerable ways.

Senator Obama had to find himself amidst a diverse history; Senator McCain had to find himself outside his personal history.

These points attempt to reflect Foucualt's talk of changing cognitive structures through the centuries. The real debate always comes down to one between those who act as if they have no agency except through a higher authority, and invite us to trust them to do whatever they want; and those who accept responsibility for their agency, acknowledge it, and invite the rest of us on the journey with them. The first group will call the second immoral, ungodly, etc. The second group will see the first as closed-minded liars. Both are right, of course.

In many ways, 200 hundred years after the last paradigm shift, we're still trying, as a culture, to say, it's OK that thought not be dominated by dogma, that culture can represent people in as full a way as it possibly can. In the American bail-out debates, we came dangerously close to retreating into the fundamentalist identity so much that we nearly jumped into a financial abyss. We may well have created a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom, world-wide economies out of control. Come November, perhaps we will put the reigns of government back in the hands of those who want to use them for more, rather than less, people.

Some larger questions, however, have to do with how little most people – even Government regulators – understand the new kinds of monetary representations called "derivatives." While our politicians and commentators still struggle with pre-paradigm and current-paradigm narrative conflicts, next-paradigm representations are shaking America and the world. In this, we are flying blind; our technologies have created a monetary-information complex which has brought credit to its knees. We all have some catching up to do.


THE INFORMATION PARADIGM IS HERE TOO STAY. The Info Paradigm doesn't care how you or I negotiate self-representation, as it happens above and below identity, tied to it only when interaction designers, programmers and computer engineers give us interfaces. Though the early hype about the internet was that it belonged to no country and escaped geography, the better understanding is that it removed geographic barriers to knowledge: anyone with a connection can find out what used to be reserved to experts. Yet we still don't know what to do with the hacker who knows as much about say, quantum physics, as the Ph.D. Expertise still remains tied to geography and routes of power.

The engines of progress – processors –are moving more and more towards smart machines which won't need human interaction, at all, in order to churn out physical or digital widgets; in the future, wealth could become less and less anchored to a given human's need, but rather represented, by virtue of information technology, in a way that strips away any ideological reason to refuse to meet that individual's basic needs. Yet we have not reached the point, today, where all the information on the information super-highway seems human, mangeable, relevant. We are still in-between the Identity Paradigm and the Information Paradigm, so we still tag & anchor information rather than simply presenting it. From within an Identity Paradigm, a thousand tags overwhelms; from within an Information Paradigm, the raw data could enable humans in ways we can, today, barely imagine.

So, in between the Information Paradigm and the Identity Paradigm, we find again a reason why Human-Computer Interaction Design matters. Someone in high-tech designed the software and hardware which circulated harvested wealth through fewer and fewer hands more quickly than ever before. In Derivatives 2.0 one hopes they'll include the rest of us. As some comedian joked: $700 billion? Couldn't they just give every American $1 cool million, and be done with it?

To figure out how stuck you are in the Identity Paradigm, think through your reaction to this immodest proposal. The more you buy into the Identity Paradigm, the less you'll like it. Lliberal, conservative or independent, no matter your identity politics, I'll bet monetary identity politics matter the most.

Within the Identity Paradigm, money is the only thing which allows your freedom of representation to expand; the only thing, without which, who you are contracts, ultimately killing your ability to exchange anything at all. As Foucault writes in The Order of Things, "It is...the same archaeological network that supports the theory of money-as-representation in the analysis of wealth and the theory of character-as-representation in natural history" (p. 189).

NEITHER THE GOD PARADIGM OR THE IDENTITY PARADIGM WORK. We used and use our deities to create enemies and kill them; to designate wealth, and limit access to it. We used and use identities and labels to create enemies and kill them; the representation of wealth has been greatly expanded, but holding onto it made more difficult.

It is only in Western history that there is a progression from the God Paradigm to the Identity Paradigm: Al Queda wants, of course, the Allah Paradigm. The wildly uneven distribution of wealth around the world continues to mean that most people still do not have their basic needs met: nutrition, health, safe quarters in which to live.

In the long stretch of history, God Paradigms and Identity Paradigms routed knowledge, narrowing what we could see of the rest of the world. That limited what problems we knew about, what problems we could imagine trying to solve. Most people didn't always know that most people didn't have the basics; of if they could look around and see everyone else mired in poverty, they couldn't see a way out. The Information Paradigm could change this.

The American Federal Bail-Out has now taught us that we can mobilize immense financial resources not just to fight a war, but to unfreeze credit. Most Americans were against it, because they believed it didn't affect them. As the Information Paradigm continues to assert itself, more "light bulbs" will go off in more and more people; it will simply stop making sense that wealth continues to be so limited that so many continue to not have their basic needs met.

Does this then prophesy some "socialist" revolution? Not in any way that I know of. The Information Paradigm doesn't label. It simply provides information where, in the past, information didn't show up, or couldn't show up. The competition for the Future, in our current present moment, will be between the Allah Paradigm which never recognized the Identity Paradigm, and the West's Information Paradigm.

In another 25 years, the winner of this very real battle will be whichever paradigm meets more basic human needs - and not just in America, but in the entire world. The conservative turn of American life over the last 25 years was a throw-back, a grasping for any solid value in the face of the opening doorway of the Information Paradigm. The Bush Administration, with its NSA sweeps of American's private digital data, has shown us how the Information Paradigm works when it is harnessed to the Identity Paradigm: terribly.

Yet, conversely, the Identity Paradigm can represent basic human needs in a thousand ways, so many that they are difficult to ignore; the Information Paradigm will broadcast this knowledge to more people than at any time in human history. The view this offers will, for most people, shake every belief to its core, forcing many to make changes they could never imagine. E.g., a massive paradigm shift. The massive world-wide protests before the American invasion of Iraq were the prelude; most of the representatives in America got it wrong - from a lying Government, to a cowered corporate media. The world-wide movement came close to working; next time, it might.

I think Most Americans, whatever their faith, are done with looking backwards for the answer. The Future is bigger than even the movement which shows up in the crowds for Senator Obama's Presidential campaign. The best this writer can do is to say this: in the past, the Big Picture was only available to individuals by virtue of wealth or power. Ten years from now, if the Information Paradigm takes hold, and another natural disaster like Katrina hits an American city, we won't be waiting for the government to mobilize: we'll have the tools, ourselves, to mobilize. That's the best example I can give, as I try to imagine a world in which everyone has access to the Big Picture.



Works Referenced

Damski, Jon-Henri; Vore, J. Michael (illustrator). The Damski Deck. Firetrap Press, Chicago: 1997.

"Derivative (finance)" article at wikipedia.org. Accessed on October 4, 2008:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)

Dowd, Maureen. "Palin's Pompom Palaver," in the New York Times, October 4, 2008. Found on-line October 8, 2008, here:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05dowd.html

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books Edition, New York: 1994. Chapter Six, "Exchanging" (pp. 180-196).

The Daily Show. "Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Bailout Bill Passes," aired on October 2, 2008. Found on-line, October 3, 2008:
[http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=186776&title=Clusterf#@k-to-the-Poor-House---Bailout-Bill-Passes

© 2008 John Michael Vore; v3r6

by noreply@blogger.com (Informatics411) at October 04, 2008 04:43 PM

Erik Pukinskis:

Clean bill my tushie

Heart over at Women’s Space linked to a great post by Lucinda Marshall about the bailout bill.  It begins:

Call me a lazy citizen, but it is 9 am and I have not yet finished reading the 451 page bailout bill that the Senate passed last night.  But then again, I’m guessing that none of the Senators read it either.

How else to explain that suddenly on page 115 there is a section titled “Energy Production Incentives” that goes on for well over a hundred pages.  My favorite provision in that particular section pertains to top-loading clothes washers (page 223).

Read the rest.  And read the bill itself here.

It’s funny that this happened, after House republicans said they would make sure it was a “clean bill”.  I suppose they can blame the democrats.  Unfortunately, as far as I can tell it is not possible to determine who lobbied Chris Dodd to get each one of those little extensions and revisions into this bill.  So I guess we can blame Dodd.

At first I was thinking he added all that to get the bill to pass, but the bill passed easily (263-171) so that doesn’t seem likely.  Although maybe those are provisions needed to get representatives to sign on.  That would make more sense, given it hasn’t yet passed in the house.  I never thought about that, but both houses of congress must need to worry not just about getting a bill to pass in their own house, but making it likely to pass in the other house.  Must be helpful to have friends in the other house.

by erik at October 03, 2008 09:47 PM

Aaron Houssian:

Participatory Design Conference 08

I am at the Participatory Design Conference and have really enjoyed the first official parts of the conference and during the opening keynote Finn Kensing he showed a Venn Diagram of several fields and that PD overlapped several including HCI, IS, EPIC, CSCW.  It seems that many times HCI user centered design or user involvement [...]

by aaronh at October 03, 2008 02:00 AM

Jenny Brown Hertel:

Jenny

I am currently attending the 2008 Participatory Design Conference.

When I got the email a few months ago through my school listserv, I thought it looked interesting.  And, since the worlds of HCI, and Participatory Design (PD) intersect nicely, and since usability is part of HCI, and since it was going to take place right here on the IU campus (which means no travel, lodging, or other extra expenses), and since I am a full-time student and could get a discounted rate, I figured I’d ask my boss to let me go on the department’s dime. She was awesome and said yes.

At the time I signed up, I figured it would be a good opportunity to learn about PD, since I’m not too familiar with it.  Plus, I enjoy attending conferences.

Now, that I’m in day 2, I realize just how incredibly lucky I am to be here!  This converence has been happening every 2 years for the last 20. This is the first time it’s been in the US.  It’s usually in Europe, though the last one was in Canada.

The wealth of papers that are scheduled to be presented are quite impressive.  There are so many good ones, it’s really hard for me to decide which sessions to attend.  I love, though, that I was given a book that contains all of the papers, so I can at least read the ones I’m not able to see presented.

Oh, and during the “Introduction to PD” session yesterday, I realized that I DO already know what it is and have in fact been studying and practicing it for the past year.  It’s just that the term “Participatory Design” isn’t what we’ve called it at the School of Informatics in my HCI courses.  Contextual Inquiry, Prototype Testing, User Testing…those are all PD.  Yesterday I walked in feeling like a total noob in the world of PD.  Today, well, I’m still a noobie, but at least I don’t feel like a total noob since I’ve got a year of study and 3 months of work at it under my belt.

Some general thoughts/observations about the conference:

• I am in the minority in that I am an American.  The majority of the attendees are from Europe (Denmark, Germany, Sweeden, Italy…) Yesterday, I was in a session where I was one of only 3 Americans, and the only one from IU.  I really expected there to be many more IU folks, since it’s right here on campus.  (But, I now realize I’m very lucky in that I was able to arrange to miss classes and my work allowed me the time…and paid for it.  I’m sure cost and other commitments prevented many people from attending.)
• The attendees sure do love their coffee!  I arrived about 15 minutes before the Keynote today, and all coffee was already gone.  During the first break, the first carafe of coffee was gone in less than 10 minutes. I usually have a cup or two at home in the morning and that’s it.  But, yesterday, I found myself drinking coffee all day long since it was available.  Of course, I had problems falling asleep last night!  So, today I didn’t have any before the Keynote (since it was gone LOL), but by the morning break, I was feeling sleepy, so I am having a cup now.  But, that’s all.  I’ll be switching to water for the rest of the day.
• This is the first conference I’ve been to where they gave you travel coffee mugs and encouraged you to use them throughout the conference, instead of paper or plastic cups.  I think it’s a great, and simple idea to promote sustainability!  I just wish I saw more attendees using them instead of the paper and plastic cups.
• You can definitely see the influence of the European background to this conference.  The coffee breaks are scheduled for 30 minutes; lunch is an hour and a half.  All of the other conferences I’ve attended just put coffee out in the hallway and you grabbed some during the 10 minutes you had between sessions, and lunch was 45 minutes.  Also, not one single session or talk or paper presentation I’ve been to yet has started on time.  I thought I was running late this morning when I walked into the auditorium at 9:02am for the Keynote that was to begin at 9:00.  But, I was only the third person who had arrived.  The first speaker actually walked in after me.  It’s no big deal.  Just interesting to me, as most other conferences I’ve attended were very strict and tight with their schedules.  (I do want to point out that even though they’ve allotted longer times than I’m used to for breaks and lunches, they are packing in A LOT of sessions, so content does not suffer.)
• I guess this is the first “academic” conference I’ve been to.  All other conferences were corporate.  That could explain some of the differences, too.
• As I said before, there are a lot of Europeans in attendance.  There was one person from Japan and one from China in one of the sessions I was in, but the majority are white.  I find that interesting because in the HCI/d program here at IU, there are a large number of Indian and Chinese and Korean students.  I was assuming the same would be true for here.  I enjoy when my assumptions are proven wrong.  Makes me think more! LOL
• As usual, the lounge areas of the IMU is full of sleeping undergrads.  I find it rather amusing, but wonder if it makes other conference attendees think that American students just sleep all the time.  LOL

Ok, the first paper presentation is about to begin, so I’ll stop here.

      

by Jenny Hertel at October 02, 2008 03:27 PM

Erik Pukinskis:

Fight the good fight

Legislation was just introduced to the House of Representatives decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana. The bills need more sponsors in the House. Here’s a letter I just sent to my representative asking her to help.

(by the way, both my my Senators and my Represenatative are all women. So cool!)

Dear Representative Davis,

This is the first time I am contacting you since I moved to San Diego two years ago. I am writing to encourage you to sponsor two bills which were recently introduced to the House:

H.R. 5842: Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act

and

H.R. 5843: Act to Remove Federal Penalties for the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults

I believe that decriminalizing the cultivation, possession, and sale of marijuana would do six wonderful things:

1) free up the money currently spent on enforcement for more important things
2) increase public access to a drug which has more health benefits than alcohol and tobacco, and is no more harmful to society
3) decrease crime by removing a major source of revenue for criminals
4) stimulate the economy and create jobs by driving drug revenues to legitimate businesses
5) decrease the crowding crisis in our prisons
6) partially balance the drug incarceration rates, which are currently drastically and unfairly skewed towards people of color

Please consider supporting these bills, which will help our economy, improve our health, make our streets safer, and diminish racism.

Thank you for your time,

Erik Pukinskis

by erik at October 02, 2008 04:04 AM

C’mon

“The trafficking of drugs finances the work of terror, sustaining terrorists,” said President Bush in December 2001.

Yeah, so why not make it legal for US businesses to produce and sell it, so that it will finance the US economy instead?

by erik at October 02, 2008 03:18 AM

Tiffanie Shakespeare:

triangles

It’s become so easy to be so prevalent on the internet that it’s hard to keep track of what actually reads what. I have no idea who even reads my blog anymore, especially since I’ve become less and less consistent with my updating (which I just can’t figure out why). But to maintain with my goal to never censor based on who might read it, I guess it’s a good thing I don’t know who reads anymore.

I had a friend come to visit this past weekend which was completely awesome! I hadn’t seen him since I lived in Portland and I’ve missed him very much. I’m not going to lie, I did have some pretty intense feelings for this person while I lived there and it was pretty hard to get past after moving away. I was kind of nervous hanging out with him again and if you had asked me Friday I would have said things were going surprisingly well. It really was that easy to be friends.

Then as the weekend went on, I felt tiny, old feelings trying resurface. I was reminded of all the reasons why I liked him in the first place. Of course all this was made hugely more complicated by the little known fact that I have a crush in my new city. And so when two crushes actually face each other how does one know how to act? At least from my perspective I felt some awkward moments which were probably only felt by me. All of which involved me worrying that the new crush would be put off by the old, even though he was only visiting, and think that I had no interest in him (if he’s ever even realized that I do (guys can be so dense)). This is why I don’t date, nothing but headaches.

by Tif at October 02, 2008 12:51 AM

Erik Pukinskis:

The tipping point

In 2004 in Nevada, 418,690 votes were counted for George Bush, and 397,190 for John Kerry, a margin of 21,500 votes.

Recent figures show that Democrats have registered 79,798 voters since September of last year.  Republicans have registered 3,249.

Do the math.

by erik at October 01, 2008 11:29 PM

Marty Siegel:

reflectivedesign

It’s almost trite these days to say, “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’” By this saying people mean, when working in a team you need to drop the ego. Team work requires that everyone have “skin in the game” with equitable sharing of the labor. The McCarthy protocols we introduced in class are designed to assure that all members of the team agree on all fundamental decisions – the design mantra, product core, product features, what will be developed and in what order, how usability testing will be conducted, and so on. The voting protocol with features of thumb voting, asking “what would it take to get you in,” and not moving forward until everyone is “in” ensures that everyone is committed to the success of the project. And when presenting your result to others, you’ve been admonished to use the inclusive “we” rather than the self-centered “I” or “my” as in “I decided to…” or “my idea was to…” Who cares? It merely diminishes you in front of others. At the time of presentation, it’s all about “we.”

But there’s a subtle and perhaps more important message in this often quoted aphorism from business leadership seminars. It’s the place in the process where the “I” can make a big difference - not always an immediate difference but a long-term difference. It has to do with contributing to the team’s success by helping to empower the abilities of each of its members. It has to do with guaranteeing that each team member is skilled and productive. It has to do with helping your team members overcome a negative emotional state due to hunger, thirst, lack of exercise, or “just feeling down.” What it’s not about is you trying to overcome team deficiencies by working harder and shouldering the burden.

So what are you supposed to do if you notice that someone on your team is not performing at an acceptable level? Your team member is slacking off. She doesn’t speak up and contribute to the discussion. He can’t write a complete sentence. He doesn’t show up on time or leaves early. She’s unable to use PowerPoint to build the presentation. He wants to return to his other obligations after spending many hours on the project. And the list continues.

There is action you can take, but it’s not doing it yourself. Help your fellow team member succeed. Teach her a new skill; help him get writing help at the writing center or edit the text with your teammate sitting next to you. Ask the quiet team member to be the facilitator. Figure out how meetings can be more efficient so that the person with a family can be home with the family (broadly defined). Once you move away from the notion that it’s all on your shoulders to make the project successful, you realize that there are many things you can do to help each other. And so what if the project is not perfect? (Zen Dog laughs at perfectionists; he knows that humans don’t achieve perfection. He knows that work turned into a lover will eventually laugh back in your face. And what’s truly important is lost.)

Has your team ever gone out to lunch together or shared some drinks? Have you gone to the gym and worked out as a team? Did you take a short walk during the “check in” process? These informal times can contribute indirectly to your team’s success; it gives you an opportunity to learn about each other – your fellow member’s motivations and skills. It’s not all about you, but you can affect the outcome. Collaboration sometimes requires that some learn new skills so that they can collaborate more effectively. Whining is not an option.

(And when you figure it out, send a note to the U.S. Congress. They clearly need to be asking, “What will it take to get you in?”)

      

by Marty Siegel at October 01, 2008 08:12 PM

Erik Stolterman:

Back on Twitter

OK, after a few weeks without Twitter I decided to sign on again. It was in so many ways an interesting experience. It was fascinating how my thoughts changed over time, especially for the first week or two. I thought this would be an interesting experiment, now I know it was. I learned things about Twitter, about being in touch, and about myself. Maybe later I will write about it. If you have the courage to do the same thing :-) you should!

by noreply@blogger.com (Erik Stolterman) at October 01, 2008 06:29 PM

Kristy Streefkerk:

4 more airplanes…

Last week my vacation bubble was popped, and I was forced to come home and back to reality… have I mentioned that I dislike reality and I would prefer to spend the rest of my life picking grapes on a vineyard somewhere??

Anyway it has taken me the better part of a week to get back into the groove of things, which is all going to go down the hole in about 24 hours when I hop on two planes to head to Indiana for a short trip involving; the PDC 2008 conference, an hour long alumni game (where I could possibly drown) and a wedding (assuming that I don’t drown). Before hopping on two more planes back to Vancouver (where I plan on staying for a good two months… as far as I know).

So I have spent the past two nights out with Greg on our bikes, I have been running a bunch and taking classes at work… BUT, I haven’t swam in over a year… and I am pretty sure that it has been about 4.5 years since I have touched a water polo ball… hence why I am convinced that a bunch of 18 year-olds are going to drown me Saturday morning at the pool which used to be my home. Stay tuned for some entertaining commentary.

On the running note - Laura convinced me to sign up for The Rubber Ducky run in 3 weeks… she attempted to get me to do the Rubber Ducky half marathon, and I do plan on doing one…someday, but I am pretty sure I should work on running more than 5km first. So, I caved in and signed up for the 7 mile run instead… double the amount that I have ever ran in my life… ha, ha, ha. So yeah, if water polo doesn’t kill me and I make it through Thanksgiving dinner at my parent’s house in two weeks… I am pretty sure this run will finish me off!

by kristy at September 30, 2008 05:25 AM

Kristy Streefkerk:

Oh Brother!

My favourite brother got a new blog

Now he just has to post on a regular basis….

by kristy at September 29, 2008 08:42 PM

BlogSchmog:

Touching Evil

When Bad Horse comes calling, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Even little men. Little evil men.

The long-awaited application process for induction into the Evil League of Evil surfaced last week. The Makices responded with a Sunday afternoon video project at the Informatics Design House.

Selected Applications to the Evil League of Evil

Evil never rests, and neither will I after sporking my writing schedule right before a televised Bears game. But then, the hammer is my penis.

by Kevin Makice at September 28, 2008 08:54 PM

Erik Pukinskis:

Fox News re-posts anti-Palin report?

I saw a funny thing on Google News today:

If you look quickly you’ll see it’s still up in the Election section of Google News.

A headline from Fox News claiming “Conservatives Begin Questioning Palin’s Heft”?  A little surprising for a network that basically only reports the news that’s good for republican candidates.  The url in question is http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/28/conservatives-begin-questioning-palins-heft/, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to exist any more.  If you click on that link, Fox tells you “The request page doesn’t exist. Please double check to make sure you have the correct URL.”

But if you look at the text quoted on Google News, you’ll notice it’s the first line from this Politico post.  And if you go to this link, you’ll see a mirror someone made of the story off of foxnews.mobi, the mobile version of foxnews.

So it seems someone at Fox News not only re-posted the Politico article (a Google search shows it was listed as a “top story”), they gave it a fresh new headline.  Oops!

More screenshots: incriminating Google search, mirror on swiftmob

by erik at September 28, 2008 04:42 PM

Erik Pukinskis:

Are you *sure*?

Are you registered to vote?

Are you sure?

There’s a great web site where you can put in your information and it will tell you whether everything is good to go with your ability to vote.  Unfortunately, many people have issues on election day voting, often in discriminatory ways.

Protect yourself by checking your registration at VoteForChange.com.  The site is paid for by Barack Obama, but it works whether you are registered democrat, republican or whatever.

SmartVoter.org is another great site that can tell you where your polling place is and also show you all the ballot measures that you’ll be voting on so you can prepare yourself.

by erik at September 27, 2008 11:11 PM

BlogSchmog:

No one else could eat 50 eggs

We knew this day would come. Everyone dies, even legendary actors responsible for many of the movies in my top 10 list. When I saw the tweet that Paul Newman had died at age 83, however, my entire life jumped to the next generation.

Twitter told me first: Paul Newman is dead.

Like many, my first exposure to Paul Newman’s talent was as the wise-cracking dreamer in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a landmark film that forever paired the actor with Robert Redford. He was also the father figure in Nobody’s Fool, which also happens to be one of the few Melanie Griffith movies I can stand. The pinnacle of movies for me, however, was a movie Newman made a year before I was born.

“Nobody can eat 50 eggs.”

Cool Hand Luke is the epitome of movie making, taking a cast of character actors who would be seen in bit roles for a couple decades of television and film and putting them around one of the greatest actors who ever lived. Although in the end, Luke meets an inevitable fate, the way in which he lived is inspirational. I attribute that not to the great script filled with religious allegory or the magic of the big screen, but to the effortlessness by which Newman shared the full spectrum of humanity. His disarming smile. His anger in isolation. The way he dragged himself back to his feet. The sense of the impossible becoming tangible, no better illustrated than in the miracle consumption of fifty eggs.

Newman always held a special place for me among celebrities. Not only was he a role model for his long-time relationship with Joanne Woodward and the philanthropic enterprise he conducted with their daughter. He also has roots in my hometown of Woodstock, Illinois. Newman spent summers acting with Tom Bosley, Geraldine Page and the rest of a troupe known as the Woodstock Players, performing 16 plays at the historic Opera House in 1949-50. He enjoyed a full life beyond the stage and screen, as evidenced by the trail of great quotes he leave in his wake.

As long as Paul Newman was alive, I was securely in the early and midpoint of my life. Now that he has departed, it feels like losing a parent, a buffer against death. I aged 20 years today.

The sad news dominated Twitscoop’s tag cloud

I suspect that someone somewhere is going to wake up Monday morning, put on their suit, and start typing up copyright infringement letters to YouTube. In the meantime, enjoy these bits of Newman’s portfolio (or watch all of Nobody’s Fool on YouKu). He will be missed.

“The Jump” (from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)

We’ll miss you, Paul Newman

by Kevin Makice at September 27, 2008 03:57 PM