IxD viewpoint

I've just spent my spring break distilling a portfolio out of a collection of my work over the past 2.5 years at the institute of design. I've got a clear story:

After growing up as an artist, I came to ID to apply my skill in creating compelling stories and visuals to the problem of creating communities. After learning about the basic practice of doing user research, analyzing it for design implications, and then communicating the solutions, I've found that new technologies are a powerful vector to support communities, transparency, and meaningful experiences.


Here's one page, demonstrating that "analyzing" part - feel free to
download the whole thing and give me your comments.

But I still have a lot of work to figure out how to demonstrate a more poignant vision I've been having wherein interaction design is a vector for self-expression. Inspired by McLuhan's assertions about the continuity of the place of media in relation to human society, this vision puts computer networks and interfaces in the same bucket with clay, canvas, and paper in terms of how people want to use it. Once their basic needs are met (which isn't the case in much of the world, but that's a separate discussion), people spend a great deal of energy instantiating and embodying their own culture and beliefs.
Now that legions of programmers and web designers can draw on vast libraries of patterns and guidebooks to reproduce some basic web strategies like distributing business processes and centralizing decisionmaking, companies and governments (is there still a meaningful distinction for us who hold high positions in neither?) find it valuable to make the technology available to every man, woman, and child. The effect of this is parallel with the development of printing with cheap moveable type and paper: it's now the most widely distributed carrier of meaning. To find out what's going on - whether in the past or the future, with the rich or the poor, in sports or in fashion, or (this is the new part) in small communities or in countries as wholes - one simply has to log on.
And because everyone is now going to the 'net to find out what's going on, anyone who wants to be part of that conversation has to go to the next to contribute. Thus, the limitations of web technologies are the limitations of cultural expression.

And now for something completely different:
Well, tangentially related really - watched a video podcast from the Santa Fe Institute where Lee Smolin asserts that emergence - in contrast to top-down definition - is The Paradigm of the 20th century. (was, at this point?)
For example:
Law - examining what makes sense to communities and individuals has replaced interpreting rules that took their authority from precedent and, ultimately, from God.
Literature & Art - examining the properties of the materials or words and understanding what can be built up from them has replaced a search for the infinite/eternal Beauty.
Physics - understanding the implications of the world we observe and how local rules can add up to global ones has replaced a search for the single overarching perspective (the Grand Unified Theory).

Before 1920, the success of Newton's and Einsteins theories, and of science and math in general, were so great that everyone conflated them with reality itself. In my reading on the philosophy of science and mathematics, I've seen that the basic trend for the last 60 years (actually sparked by Kurt Godel in 1931, but nobody believed/understood the implications until later) has been to understand the limitations of mathematics and logic. Basically: physical phenomena are a smallish part of what is important for humans.

Today, at the tail end of the public's awakening to this fact, there is a huge need for something new. What we need is not just an explanation of how science/math/econ is limited (this is done well by Morris Kline in 'Mathematics: the end of certainty', Nicholas Tassim Taleb, everyone who writes about chaos, and others), but about how they fit - alongside art, exploration, and intuition - into the actual and supremely effective social, biological, and cognitive processes that science can't/won't/hasn't developed a place for.

(this could also be connected to the burgeoning debate about the inadequacies of the academic system)

neuroimaging as the new alchemy

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-06/mf_neurohacks

This article presents a refreshingly skeptical view of recent brain imaging science, but I think it doesn't go far enough to indict much of what's called "science" in our culture today.

While all sciences were little more than vague insights and philosophical speculation at one point, it's clear that mathematics, chemistry, and physics, have moved beyond con-games and become realities in their own right - dogmas shared by large groups of people who may well never realize that other people don't see the world the way they do. (Did you know some people neither know about nor believe in integrals, quazars, valence bonds, or heaven?)

Never the less, I support the softer sciences, like social sciences and economics, brain sciences, psychology. They have the potential to traverse the same path as the hard sciences by eventually achieving some amazing, powerful, and mysterious description of the world. When they can suck in believers by the thousands with a brief, intense flash of epiphany, they will be productive outlets for some of the insanity and eccentricity that the process of evolution has bred into us.