I hate robots

An interesting side effect of being a user experience designer is having a hightened awareness of your own work process. I often find myself, for better or worse, thinking not only about the work that I’m doing, but how I am actually doing it. On a project-wide scale we generally think about our tasks in terms of milestones and deliverables, but I think it’s worth noting that in going through the motions of a project from conception to completion, we’re not simply creating the thing but developing, exploring, refining, or simply practicing, the framework for our creative process. I find that when most tasks are executed poorly or feel misguided or incomplete in some way, it’s a good indicator that there is some larger issue in the process or approach to the task itself, rather than some fault or defficiency of the executor. You can feel when a task isn’t going well, often before it’s completed and some times before it’s even begun. And if you have a good, supportive team, or the time to spare in assessing what went wrong, you can usually identify some dependency that was missing, some misunderstanding that was never resolved, or some flaw in communication or role distribution. I’m not in any way advocating passing your failures off onto some other influence, but I am saying that without understanding what other forces at work contributed to the problem, there is no opportunity to learn from it, or to develop a creative process that works for everyone invloved. We need to recognize that at the core of creativity there is an underlying foundation on top of which we find the ability to create, and we all, in a creative team, need to understand the roles we play in facilitating that process and the steps we can take to further and refine it.

Wether this preoccupation is some vestige of my background in classical music performance - a highly methodical, often excrutiatingly structured process in the midst of which the performer has to find the inspiration and opportunity for creativity - some tell-tale of the point I’m at in my career - where my personal creative process is still being refined - or simply the fact that this is what I do, I’m not sure. And I’m not sure that it matters because it’s something that I think should be important to everyone on a team.

10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment

So I really enjoyed this talk at SXSW, given by two of the members of Adaptive Path, and I was really glad to finally find the audio of it, which I’ve been meaning to share with anyone who will listen. The talk is about points in the creative process that teams from a variety of fields share. We all have deadlines, and how we come to a process that helps us meet those deadlines without stifling creativity is tricky business. If you don’t have time to listen, here are the 10 tips:

1. Cross Training:

I guess I’ve been pretty fortunate to work for and with multi-talented people, so I tend to take it for granted, but it’s important. On the flip side, however, I will say that there’s nothing more annoying than a person who thinks they know so much about another role that they can butt their heads in too much or at inappropriate times. Sure, sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it’s productive, but a lot of times, you’re just dealing with some jerk who thinks they need to naysay what everyone else on the project is doing. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman (yes I went there, but it’s true - many people I’ve worked with are naturally predispositioned not to believe that I have any understanding or authority over technical matters) or maybe it’s because I work in web (where everyone seems to dabble, but few really master) or maybe it’s because I’m an interaction designer (and so am forced to constantly field other peoples’ well-meaning opinions about how things should work). But I think we can all tell the difference between a person who is informed in fields outside their expertise and willing to support or assist and a show-off or a naysayer, or just a person who can’t accept their role and stick to it. I guess a lot of this speaks to point #4. I do agree that understanding other roles allows you to understand technical constraints and feel empathy for those roles. While I don’t particularly enjoy programming or technical development myself, I’m really glad to have sent so much time doing it, and will continue to do it in an effort to stay informed. I’m not going to tell my developers how to do their jobs, but I like them to know that I will understand most of the problems their facing, and that I might be available to talk about them suggest other ways of doing things that they might not have thought of themselves.

2. Rotate Creative Leadership:

I like to think that a person can feel ownership over a project that they aren’t necessarily leading as well, but I get the point here.

3. Actively Turning the Corner:

I love the way Sarah puts this. She says that in any creative process there is a period of divergence followed by a period of convergence, and like she says, there is nothing worse than having to entertain the person who doesn’t know which phase the team is in.

4. Knowing Your Roles:

See comment #1. On a more positive note, there is nothing that helps the creative process more than knowing what other people can be relied on for.

5. Practice:

This was a general theme for me at this year’s SXSW - practice was a major point in this year’s Kathy Sierra talk as well (no audio on this one yet), and it just made me pine for my music school days. As grueling as it is to sit in a practice room for 6 hours a day, I’ve had few other experiences in my life so rewarding as actually feeling myself getting progressively better at something, to the point of a sort of level of mastery. In other fields, it’s not so easy to justify or make time for a practice period, and Sarah addresses this point in the Q&A at the end. I try to make sure that in every task I perform, I am either introducing or practicing some new tool or technique. Also, an iterative approach to design could be considered a form of practice.

6. Make your mission explicate to the whole team:

Ah, yes. So important! This is one of those things that makes me happy that my job exists mostly at the beginning of a project, during the requirements gathering phase. I don’t think there’s anything more integral to the success of a project as identifying clear goals! Almost any moment of doubt or internal dispute can be resolved simply by revisiting those goals. Unfortunately it’s often the case that not everyone on the project gets to be in on this phase, so it’s equally as important that these goals are properly communicated - to everyone! This reminds me also of the talk that Tony Hsieh of Zappos gave at SXSW. He was mostly speaking to the idea of cross-training - apparently new employees spend their first 6 weeks at Zappos doing everything BUT what they were hired to do. Most importantly, as a company whose almost single-minded mission is “great customer service,” every new employee spent about two weeks taking customer service calls. His point here was that this training meant that every person in the company was made extremely aware of the company’s goals, and so could be trusted to make independent decisions later on their careers with those goals in mind.

7.Killing your Darlings:

I don’t know what the actual term for this was in the talk, but the point here is to have a system in place that allows the team to essentially veto any material that doesn’t further the goals of the company or project. We often end up calling this a “Phase 2,” especially when you’re dealing with features that take development time. I think that can be really misleading to clients who might actually believe that there actually is a Phase 2, so there must be some better way to refer to these ideas internally without any delusion or false hope. I do, however, really like their point here in that it’s often important not to discuss what gets tossed out in too much detail.

8. Leadership is a service:

Leadership is about support and facilitation of the member of the group. If everyone in the group doesn’t feel enfranchised then they are going to be miserbale. Totes agree!

9. Generate projects around the groups creative interests:

Again, yes! We all know how miserable a project can be when it’s not actually interesting to you, or how suddenly fun it can be to do work on a topic you find new or exciting. I’d like to also add, to people who aren’t managers but workers, that a lot of this is your responsible too. If you’re interests aren’t shared with the company you are working for, then you already know you are doomed. It’s important to communicate these interests up the chain as well or no one will ever know.

10. Remember Your Audience:

Like they say, this is an obvious one for us UX peeps

11. Bonus Point! Celebrate Failure:

Red Burns would be all about this one. She gets an almost sadistic pleasure in seeing her students fail. Not because she’s mean, just because she doesn’t like to think of the fear of failure as something that will hold people back from trying something new and exciting. I think it’s a great point to live by.

I’ve become seriously obsessed with Mint.com. I spend the kind of time on this thing that you’d expect a college student to spend on Facebook. I’ve recommended it to more people than Netflix. Okay, so maybe it’s one of those things like Religion in times of desperation, but still! There is a lot to be said for their beautifully designed UI that’s really responsive, which, as opposed to my online Bank of America account, I actually ENJOY using. Can you believe that I look forward to sorting through my receipts every week and seeing where all of my money goes?

Predictably, it’s mostly rent, student loans and food. But if you’re really diligent like me you can get into the nasty details. What percentage of your food money is spent on restaurants vs actual groceries? What of that is spent at the wine store? How much are you spending on that crappy deli food every week just because it’s the most acceptable choice near your midtown office? If you live in New York, these numbers are probably pretty high (according to Mint, I’m spending about $100 less on restaurants every month than the average New Yorker - go me!). Unfortunately though, the categories here are NOT very NYC-centric, otherwise there would most definitely be a restaurant sub-category for delivery and takeaway.

In fact, my only real complaints about the app come down to semantics like that - takeaway vs restaurants, for example - for me there is a HUGE difference between the two, especially when it comes down to price. Sure, I have access to a lot of great restaurants in my neighborhood that all happen to deliver, but I still would put a much higher premium on having a restaurant experience, where I am probably on a date or out with friends, than having some food and plastic utensils dumped at my door so I can stuff my face while watching the 6th season of Buffy for the umpteenth time. (Looking back on my expenses for the month, I don’t begrudge the $40 I spent eating a tiny serving of noodles at Momofuku with an out-of-town friend, but I do start to wonder just how much of Dumont’s rent I’m paying with my weekly burger deliveries.) I almost wish there was a category for “shit I should not be spending money on.” Ditto goes for their semantics on shopping, which is also a very experiential past time on which most people would put a higher premium on the expense. Why? Because it’s not just something we do just to get what we need, we do it for it’s own entertainment value as well! At least, that’s the idea…

As more and more of my work has been leading me to design ecommerce websites, I’ve had a lot of opportunity to explore what makes for a “fun” shopping experience vs what makes for a miserable chore. And scrutinizing my monthly finances in more detail has really forced me to bring the issue home. While UI and usability are always going to be important, more and more I think that designing a good shopping experience starts with understanding what is supposed to be fun about shopping in the first place, and why we should put a premium on the experience itself. Shopping should be a somewhat intellectually stimulating pursuit, as we think about and compare things like price, quality, and increasingly, social responsibility. It should spark our imaginations, as we think about what life will be like once we’ve procured the thing that we’re looking for. It can be social, if you’re one of those people who likes to shop with a friend, or get recommendations on where to go and what to buy. And in the end, it’s a bit of a game, from which you walk away not just with a sense of reward and accomplishment, but, if you did it right, with an actual feeling of victory. In the case of gifting, it’s a feeling of pride.

Which brings me to a book I’ve been meaning to read, called Shopportunity. Never having considered myself a part of the business startegy and marketing crowd before, I don’t know if I would have heard about it, except that the author, Kate Newlin, helped lead the first phase of research for a new client over at WWD&S. Her argument is that places like Walmart and other large discount stores have manipulated how we feel about shopping as an experience, changing it from a pursuit enjoyable in and of itself to an exhausting search and scavenge mission for discount crap.

When I was in college my roommate used to LOVE spending her Saturday afternoons bargain shopping. She would drive to one end of town to shop at Ross (Dress for Less) only to hop back in the car and then drive clear to the OTHER end of town to burrow through discount clothing at the TJ Maxx (Lalalalalalalala TJ Maxx). The flourescent lighting, the angry women and their rambunctious children, the piles and piles of last season’s wrinkled, unwanted department store clothing…none of these things seemed to phase her. The goal was more clothing at a lower cost, all other factors - be it the hostile shopping environment, the relative cheapness of the products themselves out in the real world, or the totally un-premeditated nature of the purchases that seemed to imply their own sense of worthlessness - all these things be damned!

I can’t judge her for this, as it does seem to have become indemic in our society. But I can say that she helped me first understand why I can permit myself the time to be patient and only buy the things that I know I want, from the places that I know I will enjoy patronizing. To bring Don Norman into it, who talks about visceral, behavioral, and reflective design, a shopping experience should encompass things desirable (beauty), should be itself enjoyable and navigable (usability), and leave the user with a sense of accomplishment (pride of ownership). If you’re store is nice, people will want to go there. If your website is good people will want to shop from it. In the case of Mint, where I’m not actually spending money, but managing where the little I have of it gets spent, a great UI has helped me assess the sense of reward vs regret from one purchase to another. It’s astounding, and, surprisingly, not always about the bottom line.

I’ve been so busy scouring the internets and whoring out our new site for posts that I almost forgot to post about it myself! The site is for IRO Cycle, and we just launched last week. First the back story….

IRO makes fixed gear bikes, which, if you lived in Williamsburg (like I do), the Lower East Side, or the Mission District in SF, you would already know have worked their way up the urban cycling chic food chain from exercise track bike geekiness to messenger bike craziness up to hipster status symbol. I’ve developed an eye for them while working on this site and can safely say that there are between 1 and 3 brakeless fixed gear bikes parked on every block of Bedford from S2nd up to N11th.

Now. Even among this already elite crowd, there is a coolness pecking order. Lots of guys will buy old bikes and modify them. Some people will buy a trak bike, or whatever. BUT if you are really in the know, then you’ve already bought an Angus or a Mark V from Tony.

And that brings us to the other part of IRO…for being such a well-known company, it is really just a small family-owned and operated business. (Although, I guess it’s smallness sort of adds to its hipness.) Like a lot of guys into fixed gears at the time, Tony started putzing around with designing his own frames while he was living out on Staten Island a few years ago. Unlike all those other guys, however, he seemed to hit some magic numbers, and really make some waves in the community. Ask anyone today why they ride an IRO, and they will tell you “because of the geometry.” Other companies try to emulate the sizes and angles of Tony’s frames, a few with some success.

Enter Woods Witt Dealy & Sons, the creative agency I’ve been working with as an IA and IxD consultant since last Fall. The mission was to make Tony an awesome website that makes his company look bigger than it is, but one that really shows off the bikes and his custom build approach to making them. These guys are dudes. Dudes that are into bikes. So of course the other mission was to do it up dude style and to really appeal to the lust for gadgetry and workmanship that only a dude can feel.

The response so far has been overwhelming. Tony can’t build fast enough, and the orders starting to roll in are from a whole new demographic of guys (and girls - now that Tony’s selling the Heidi) who are just starting to get into fixed gear bikes. Everyone here is really proud. I’m so glad to have had a chance to work on this.

I know, I know, just post the link already!

After Amsterdam, where our only tv channel choices (in English, that is) were either MTV or BBC World, I got pretty used to the dry Brits and their exposes on Islamic architecture and exploring the arctic, of which there seem to be several which they just string together throughout the day. When I was living in London years ago, I loved listening to BBC radio. It was as soothing as NPR, but more focused on world affairs, and somehow left me feeling more well-rounded and informed, especially regarding the Middle East.

Now, there is BBC America, a new channel which I came home to my roommate watching arund 8:00 last night. While the clip I’m posting is an obvious joke intended for its harrrd-rrrr’ed American audience, I assure you that the “news” program I watched last night, was a much more underhanded one.

For starters, the two brit newscasters were talking politics — the republican primary, going through the candidates — with a 17 year debate team captain. I don’t know who this ass-kisser was, but I immediately wanted to beat him up. Not only did he reak of obnoxious, too-smart-for-his-own-good kid, I really couldn’t understand why they were talking to him.

But what’s worse, they were discussing the election, without ever really talking about anything important. It was THE WORST display of vacant media coverage that I’ve seen in this election cycle so far. They talked about money, image, reactions, feelings — all of this really abstract shit when you consider that what’s going on here is that we are finally putting a new chief executive in the white house. I’m sure there’s some term for this that I just don’t know, but it’s when these talking heads types make such ridiculous speculations, that the speculations become news? And it’s not even important news?

But I guess this isn’t really anything new, it’s just much worse coverage than I would’ve expected from the BBC. No. What REALLY took the cake was there mid-program word-on-the-street poll —

Is terrorism a threat to democracy?

– I don’t even know where to start. First of all, this is the most ridiculous question I’ve ever heard. I’m not even really sure I know what it MEANS. And while you might expect most proud-loving Americans would say “No, there is no threat to demcracy. Democracy is right and strong…” the fact that “terrorism” has become such a concrete and fearful term (I think the definition in this day and age might actually be Muslim religious fanatics who hate America and everything we stand for) that it trumps peoples’ perceptions of what democracy means (er, it’s like capitalism, right?) is not only telling of the state of our country, it’s a shame on those media journalists who perpetuate this kind of bullshit thinking by doing polls like this.

It was at this point that I realized BBC America is just the BBC’s way of making fun of Americans. I’d love to see their “Comedy Saturday.” Forget Monty Python, The Office (the original version seriously outshines the Steve Carrell show) League of Gentlemen or Faulty Towers…I’ll bet it’s something more resembling “When the Whistle Blows,” the fake, but so spot on it makes you want to cry BBC sitcom on “Extras.” Are they having a laugh?

Seriously. One of the nicest, simplest UI’s I”ve seen in awhile. For your updates on all things Christin visit xinroman.tumblr.com. If that’s more than you can handle then just stick with me here

The tumblr UI has also led me to rethink my feelings on the “lifestreaming” trend (a trend that, like most internet phenomena among the super geeky, seems to have lost it’s spark twice as quickly as it got it). I dunno, there’s just something so pretentious and self-indulgent about “lifestreaming.” Like it’s just a more streamlined manifestation of that fascination we all have about ourselves as we “exist” on the internet.

Or maybe I’m just not putting it in the right context — I don’t know if googling yourself has the same social stigma that it used to. It’s more about keeping tabs on your digital life and connecting with others. I can name a number of times that “vanity googling” or, rather, just checking up on my inbound links has lead to new friendships (facilitated by a few pseudo-anonymous emails, of course). This is not to say that we’re not still somehow fascinated with ourselves, but being able to chart this stuff is becoming increasingly important.

On that note, there was a great project at Picnic last week, called iTea. Everyone who had a badge at the festival also had an RFID keychain type thingy, and there were various hacking stations and projects setup to do cool things with the tags. (And please do take the use of the word “cool” here with a grain of salt. In reality some of the workshops were bordering on corporate and scary.)

So, iTea is a tea cup that tells all about you, sort of like having your tea leaves read. What it’s really doing though, is searching the internet for your name (kind of like that game we’ve all played where you google the phrase “Christin Roman is” and laugh at what comes up). The results were mixed, but what I found most interesting, in my case, was that I knew exactly where each reference was coming from, and wether or not it was really about me, or about some other Christin Roman (of which there are very few, but one of them is some sort of German folk songstress of sorts, so her stuff tends to come up a bit high).

I can’t say that I’m embarrassed that I know all of this just from googling my own name (in fact, I think that this process is what really should be streamlined, more so than just subscribing to a feed of search results for your own name) but I do know that at one time it was considered a little tacky. Now take “lifestreaming,” which, is just the opposite (instead of getting a feed of what other people are saying about me, I’m assuming that all of my friends want to know at all times what I have to say about, well, everything, as it’s related to me) and think about how tacky that is. Have we all just finally accepted the fact that we are obsessed with ourselves? Is this what web 2.0 really means?

So I’m in Amsterdam at this festival called Picnic. It is very corporate and very heavily-sponsored…but also incredibily well-organized and just, well, beautiful! As far as conferences go. There was definitely some extra effort put into making sure the food is good, the setting is lovely, the tech is there…all the extras. Here I am sounding like a petty American wondering how much money they put into this thing and why, then, is it so damned expensive to go. (About 1,000 Euros for the whole 4 days!) Of course it doesn’t matter…it’s lovely nonetheless. And, while one of the stipulations of tagging along with Josh for free is that I only had an attendees pass for one day, I still got to see a few things. Here they are, and then I’m off to attend the rest of the Come Out and Play Festival, where Josh is presenting his phone-to-screen video game.

It was a slow morning, and we got here late, meaning that I didn’t so much “see” the first two presentations as I “overheard” them while doing my first email check of about two days (the internet has been flaking out in our apartment, and Amsterdam coffeeshops aren’t exactly known for their WIFI). But I did find myself perking up a bit for Christian Nold’s presentation on participatory mapping, a concept that I find pretty interesting, Nold’s emotion maps of Stockport were not so much about mapping physical structures as they were about mapping emotional responses to given locations, something that, he seems to hold forth, should be taken into consideration when building new architecture. As you can imagine, it’s not anything terribly scientific, but it is telling. I really enjoyed the pictures that his subjects, mostly teenagers, drew of their surroundings - they aren’t great art or anything, but you can’t help but imagine that they are genuine. My first criticism of the project was determining wether asking someone to become hyper-aware of their surroundings doesn’t totally skew their opinions. Typical Christin, I know. But, looking at the actual maps, it occurred to me that these kids had been living in these towns all their lives, and that these reactions were not just a result of being asked for them. They were solid and pre-meditated, and I had to wonder how validating it must feel to be asked to put onto paper the random thoughts about a place that enter your mind involuntarily when you walk through it everyday. These are thoughts that one generally keeps to onself. The whole thing brought back to mind a project I was considering once, which involved meta-mapping personal experiences onto a real-world map, sort of creating a map out of your own experiences, your own names for things - all fantasy but also rooted in fact and totally navigable in the real world. I love the idea of your own personal world floating above a real city, and being able to share that world with others.

Next up was a guy from Blast Theory who talked about urban gaming, specifically, his game “Can You See Me Now” which is currently being played in the CO&P tent just across the park from the cafe where I’m sitting. I zoned in and out of his talk a lot (so many RSS feeds gone unread these past few days!) but a couple of things caught me which I know I’ll be thinking about for the rest of the weekend. 1) Do all games have to be fun? and 2) Is it right for urban games to incorporate innocent bystanders? A comment about how the Dutch are culturally united against closing their curtains, even at night, sparked this one, and I could understand his temptation to use this social feature in his game design, even while I found it totally indecent and irresponsible. Regardless, there is a danger in saying that all urban games SHOULD incorporate some aspect(s) of their cultural surroundings. It goes without saying that in doing so, a game designer severely limits the portability of his game. And I suppose that this was his point - that big game designers are having to make these kinds of trade-offs and decisions while they attempt to discover where there art (or design, or technology, or whatever you want to call it) fits into our historical, cultural perspectives on play. (After watching a dozen twenty somethings roll around in the mud dressed like bunnies and tigers, I can’t help but think that it’s all just some fad of the Wes Anderson/Peter Pan generation we gen-Xers have turned out to be. What ever happened to “being cool?”)

Ben Cerveny gave an excellent talk which I don’t feel entirely licensed to summarize here. There was just too much to think about! But the crux of it was something we’ve been hearing more and more about recently — how to use gaming elements to improve user interface experience in computing. “Games,” he said (and I’m totally paraphrasing here) “are how we learn to test the limits between ourselves and the physical world around us” his enduring example of this being kittens at play. (Awww…) But more than just pose the same question that all interaction designers have already been thinking about, he got beyond the general postulating about games and interactivity, mentioning the Dutch architect Van Ijk, whose preoccupation with the spaces between physical nodes (very Jane Jacobs when she talks about the importance of sidewalks) could be compared to the way an interactive designer has to think about not just what the user sees when a task has been completed, but what they experience along the way. It’s about designing those spaces which were earlier seen as undesigned, to create a total experience. (I’m suddenly reminded of my music mentor’s analogies of music to architecture, calling musical phrases the arches and their resolutions the pillars. You need the pillars to keep the damn thing up, but that’s hardly the most interesting part.)

Last, I was disappointed to see that Stefana Broadbent, whose research (what little of it I could find, anyway) was pivotal to the early stages of my thesis project last year, didn’t make it to the conference for her scheduled talk. Actually, I’m not sure what the story on this is except that her name was in the program, yet she did not present. Maybe I will catch her some other time! (Upadte: Damn! It looks like she did present afterall.)

Well, that’s a whole lot of post for so little conference! Amsterdam has been absolutely wonderful, our apartment in De Pijp is gorgeous (right on Albert Cuyp market), we finally got to experience real, old-fashioned Dutch food (thanks to Josh’s friend Marc, a Delft student who he met at the Microsoft Design Expo competition last year), and I am so lucky to have had the chance to come here for the first time! (Pictures coming soon…)

PS: Dutch men are very nice. The cheese is sharp and crunchy and amazing. Everyone here speaks perfect English. The weather sucks. There’s nothing good on tv. Ever.

PPS: Untranslatable English phrases that pop up in Dutch conversations include: “Fuck it” and “Google it.”

PPPS: Hamsterdam. Huh.

…And I only bring up 9/11 at all because a) I coincidentally happened to just finish re-reading David Foster Wallace’s “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s” today. b) I am extrememly disappointed in how The Events Of are still hanging over this country as we are determined to allow the most ridiculous security measures be taken against our most basic freedoms to feed some strange sense of patriotism we all feel that earned the hard way 6 years ago. (In other words, I’m leaving for Amsterdam in two days and I’m very upset that I have to decide wether to pack the hair product OR the facial cleansing system, seeing as I can’t very well squeeze BOTH into a quart-sized ziploc bag). Lastly, c) I feel strangely guilty for having entirely skimmed over the whole anniversary thing two weeks ago while I was vacationing in FLA. Don’t ask me why.

So.

Does it show some lack of judgement to walk into an airport with a circuit board strapped to your sweatshirt? To be sure.

But is that any excuse for law enforcers in this country to take the “better safe than sorry” approach? It’s disgusting the way they’re touting their handling of the situation, as though they did this girl some favor by not overreacting from the onset. I mean really, what could she have possibly said or done, apart from running away, or throwing her ball of play-do at their faces, that would have caused them *justly* to use deadly force?

And I feel the same way about that UF student at the John Kerry lecture last week. Sure, he was an asshole, but really, how much physical power are we willing to let law enforcers exert over an obviously harmless person? All because of what…”we’re in the orange!?”

Fuck this shit, dudes. Fuck. This. Shit.

Honestly though, unlike CNN, I don’t think that MIT student is an idiot, and I do think it’s kind of sad that we live in a world where her self expression, be it badly implemented wearable art or a “hoax bomb” or whatever, seems so obviously “stupid” to the rest of us (where are your balls, MIT students?!), although I do agree with Mr. Major that this young woman was “fortunate” to have “followed directions” as “required.” At worst maybe she was trying to embarass her local airport rent-a-cops, and at best, impress her inbound friend with her new MIT engineering degree.

But to the media, and to the police who probably harassed the shit out of this poor girl, none of that matters. They were certainly not impressed, and the big clue to their total LACK of embarassment is the fact that headlines read “Bomb Hoax” when they probably should’ve said something more along the lines of “Boston Police Totally Overreact to Perfectlly Harmless LEDs Again.”

Is Boston, like, totally jealous that 9/11 didn’t happen to their crappy city or what?

I touched an iPhone.

I presented my thesis project to ITP, my mom, and the world on Monday evening, two days following the semi-final round of the Stern Business Plan Competition, where we learned that, while we have a kick-ass business plan, an excellent presentation, and a damn good team of founders who know what the fuck they’re doing, we just don’t make rich white colonialist VCs’ hearts long for hip, sustainable consumerism the way they do for poor, exploitable rural Indian villagers. I’m not bitter, just increasingly disturbed at the way these people measure Social Impact without any concept of the difference between helping and meddling. There’s just something about going into other peoples’ countries and telling them how to solve their problems, especially if the solution invloves targeted ads from unilever or low-level data entry in middle-America type office complexes, that really gives me the creeps. “How is this business supposed to solve poverty?” Red leaned over and asked me during one of the winning teams’ presentations. “It’s technology,” I said, “It solves everything.” I made her laugh a little, which made me happy. That woman is scarily clairvoyant, and just pretty amazing. She’s sat through every thesis presentation so far, and has said very little. I can’t imagine what it must be like to go through 20+ years of that. I’m going to miss ITP.

Anyway, in the post-thesis, post business plan lull, I’ve managed to reorganize my desktop, icons, and Adium themes, install a cracked version of CS3 (almost successfully), eat a lot of fried foods and red meat products, catch up on my blog reading, and rack up about 6 hours of Rabid Rabbits on Josh’s Wii. I still have a paper to write, a final project to finish, and two submissions in the Spring show in various stages of broke-assedness, but I’m not worried. The break has been really nice, and I’m pretty sure that just one more morning of sore arms will get me over my rabbit-plunging fascination.

Hey sis -
Thank you for this! I’ve been sitting around the coffee shop, recovering from SXSW, and thinking about thesis stuff all day, to which this letter is actually quite relevant. (I also had one of the most amazing dinners of my life last night, on the birthday tip, but I’ll tell you about that some other time. It included, among other strange and beautiful things, a sake shot that involved a quail egg and a sea urchin, which tasted a lot like oysters.) I don’t remember if I told you what I’m doing (on the thesis tip) exactly, but I would love to talk and get your thoughts on it one of these days when you’re back in town and we both have time. I’m writing letters for people- you type and submit a letter online, including some instructions for how you want the letter to be written, and then I personally write and post it (as in, send it by post). It’s time to start putting together the actual site (it’s pretty barebones right now) so I’m thinking a lot about the interface and how I want everything to work and look, and I’d love to get your opinion on some early prototypes.

Much love,
Xin