Category Archives: History

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 »

Red vs Blue

By | February 10, 2009

I’ve heard of colour affecting mood, but not performance. Interesting paper in last week’s Science on several studies examining performance and creativity in various tasks when using a computer with different background colours. It seems surprising to me that they were able to get significant differences simply by changing the background colour, not the content,… Read More »