Lorelei Kelly

today I made...

It's easy for me to forget just how much stuff I do, or if I remember, to discount it. So I think I'm going to try a little blog series where I just list things I made that day, for generous values of "things" and "made." And here's the first one...

Today I wanted to add a former professor to my LinkedIn network, but LinkedIn does not offer any relationship options that cover professor/student relations. I could have chosen “other,” but it wanted me to put in my professor’s email address. We still correspond, but not through email. I would have just put in his Grinnell email address, but he has two, and I was feeling obstinate and didn’t want to play guessing games in order to prove to LinkedIn I have a legitimate reason to add a former professor to my network. So then I got annoyed.

Johnny Holland recently posted an interview called Drawing Ideas and Communicating Interaction, about why good sketching skills are important for interaction designers to have. It's an interesting talk, but it makes me a little nervous. You see, I can't draw. I've long considered myself "not a visual person." That doesn't mean I never work something out visually on a piece of paper, or that I don't like images or diagrams or whatever. On the contrary, I depend on external visual artifacts to do what I can't in my head -- visualize things. When people say "picture this in your mind," I can't do it. I only "see" things in my mind with a very great effort, and even then not very vividly. By contrast, I "hear" things in my mind practically involuntarily, and have very clear and long-lasting auditory memories...

My goodness, two posts in as many days. Well, here's the one I started out intending to post last night. I know I'm a nerd when I read a couple of negative reviews of a movie I just watched (The Man From Earth, for the curious), because any time I have trouble deciding what to make of a piece of art I look first for opinions which are critical of it, and suddenly I am ready to write a paper on reality-violating genre conventions of "realistic" film. Which is what I get for going to Netflix and IMDB reviews for my opinions rather than reading educated critics who don't take the idea of "realism" in fiction at face value. Which is not to say that people are not entitled to their theory-naive opinions of pop culture, I think aggregating many opinions the way IMDB or Netflix reviews do is one of the truly great offerings of the internet, and it wouldn't work if people weren't willing and able to judge just about everything they see. It's just that when I am looking for an analysis of a work that will help me clarify my own thoughts, comments like "this was boring and stupid" and "real people would spend a lot more time talking about themselves" do not help me achieve my goals...

There is this website, Grinnell Plans, that I use a lot. It is a difficult website to explain. It is at heart a social networking site, but it is also the opposite of nearly every other social networking site that exists. Rather than a slick new technology that people talk about using words like "web 2.0 and "platforms" and "leverage," it grew out of very simple, decades-old network conventions, the finger protocol and the .plan file...

As a general life practice, I try to cultivate reflection, and patience, and understanding. Especially when it comes to other people's works and actions...

I joke sometimes that I ought to stay in academia just so I can live up to my potential for fulfilling the stereotype of an absent-minded professor. I walk into a room without any idea what my purpose there was (or the digital equivalent - opening a new program or browser tab only to forget my task), I am perpetually scrambling to find my keys, I set objects down only to lose track of them moments later, I get caught up in work and forget about important things. I cannot tell you how many times in the last week I have caught myself just in time to realize I'm about to put a box of cereal in the refrigerator. And of course, I procrastinate. Sleep deprivation makes all of it worse. It also makes me restless and unable to sit still through any number of mundane tasks I can normally handle...

I'm reading The Design Way by Harold G. Nelson and Erik Stolterman for my Interaction Design Theory class, not-coincidentally being taught by Erik Stolterman himself. It is giving me a lot of food for thought, along with yet more reasons to resent the continuing influence of Greek philosophers on Western intellectual traditions...