Archive for April, 2009
Went to Yakima a week and a half ago to taste wine. For those who don’t know, it’s a wine region in south central Washington. We were in Zillah, a bit south of Yakima proper, where we visited six different wineries and tasted about 30 wines. Grape hyacinths are the closest I got to [ READ MORE ]
Following on from last week’s post on wicked problems, I got to thinking about the general sorts of challenges that occur in design, whether it be design of software, bridges, posters, web sites, or even social policy. It seems there’s three main types of challenge: Problem definition – exploring a problem space, identifying a particular problem [ READ MORE ]
This quarter, I’m taking a design studio class focusing on the dissemination of video interviews of members of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. You might not be familiar with the Rwandan genocide and the ICTR, so here’s some background: Over three months, starting in April 1994, about 800,000 Rwandans were killed, mostly with machetes, mostly [ READ MORE ]
Today I read a paper from 1971 by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber about “wicked problems” – problems that are intrinsically difficult or impossible to solve in the sense that one can solve a crossword or mathematical proof, or win a game of chess. Wicked problems abound in policy questions and design, and it’s interesting [ READ MORE ]
This week, I decided to make sure that Sunday was a day where I wouldn’t have to do any work so that I could actually relax. Normally, I’m really bad at relaxing. I’ll spend most days stressing about work, and this saps my motivation such that I get less work done. In turn, I stress [ READ MORE ]
Over the last few years, I’ve become strongly affected by the seasons. I suspect it probably correlates with the time at which I started keeping a garden, something I’ve yet to start doing here in the US. Anyway, as winter’s slowly turned into spring, I’ve been taking quite a few photos. Here’s three sets of [ READ MORE ]
In my last post, I talked about the meaningless of taste as a way of describing our preferences. In this post, I’m going to sketch out a scheme that I tend to use in describing preferences. There are many ways in which a given piece of music might be appreciated. Examples include virtuosity, technical characteristics, [ READ MORE ]
I’ve been thinking a lot about music appreciation. It’s much more complicated than I think the words and concepts we use to talk about it really let on, and I think part of the confusion is that it’s not so much that each of us likes different things so much as that each of us [ READ MORE ]