Monthly Archives: April 2009

Wine trip – Yakima / Zillah

By | April 30, 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 taking… Read More »

Some concepts in design

By | April 27, 2009

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… Read More »

Design Course – Voices of the Rwandan Tribunal

By | April 26, 2009

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,… Read More »

Wicked Problems & Decision Making

By | April 18, 2009

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 »

Spring photography

By | April 8, 2009

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 »

On Music Appreciation – I – Taste

By | April 3, 2009

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 »