Well, I haven’t been posting here because I’ve been putting all of my free time and energy into my marriage, my house, and my grad school.  My, my my… Seems a little self-centered when I put it that way (and maybe it is).

My wife is helping me clean up my office.  I might be a bit of a pack-rat especially when it comes to things that might be useful in the future (like my friend Kevin who has a collection of disassembled printer gears, rods, and other things).  Basically this means that I keep all papers (never know when you might need to refer back to that information!), all outdated technology (why throw away a perfectly good coax cable?), and anything else that might cost something to replace (I know I have 50 different stacks of half-used post-it’s… but they’re useful).  However, with my beautiful wife’s loving encouragement, I’m throwing away old papers, parting with old technology, and organizing everything I’m going to keep.  I will admit, my office is getting neater.  And that’s a good thing.  It’s more functional this way, though I’m sure (if I wanted to – not that I have) I could argue that my office was functional before the cleaning as well.

On the grad school side of things, I’m updating the blog regularly now that I’ve started to build my actual project.  My project is building a game using a certain exploratory methodology.  You can read more about it if you want to.  But basically, I have to document every day I work on the project so I have it all archived when I write my thesis paper (if you have to spend 50 pages writing about a single focused topic, it had better be something you like and you had better document all of your sources).  Some people might question why I chose to create a game for my thesis when all my background and focus is in interactive media design and development.  The short answer to that question is basically that I see an important language emerging from this current / the next generation which is heavily based on gaming.  I think there are some important issues around gaming (doing good, reward systems, critical thinking) and I think gaming and education relate to each other on multiple levels (beyond the obvious).  I am one of those who believe all games teach (thank you Raph Koster) and as a teacher, I need to study this form of teaching.  Additionally, I’m using my interactive skills (project management, Flash / AS3 Coding, design, art) in producing this game, so in that way it’s directly applicable.  My hope is that this process will make me a better, more relevant teacher in years to come.  All that said, I also enjoy games immensely and I see game design as an artform.

So that’s my update for this quarter… ha!

On a side note, Josephine Leong and SuAnne Fu (both at SCAD) are really excellent teachers.  I’ve had a couple teachers in grad school that I haven’t really understood (which makes me more empathetic to my own students) but those two are really amazing.  I respect them very much.

Here is my MFA Thesis Blog.

About to start grad school – again.  This time I’m going for an MFA.  Still at Savannah, just the deeper degree.  I’m looking forward to it.  I enjoy the structured shell within which to experiment.

In other news I’ve been doing some spring cleaning around the house.  Both physically and digitally I’ve been getting organized and throwing out the old.  It feels good to purge a bit.  I’ve been contemplating which domains and things to keep as well.  Still a bit unsure.

In the last few months I’ve done quite a lot of reading on Game Design.  I’m looking forward to writing a bit on the topic.  I really enjoy games and think they have a lot of untapped potential in our society.

Over the two weeks I listened to Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres during my commute back and forth from Dallas. The book is very interesting. Most of what I got out of the book directly was inspiration and ideas on ways to use number crunching in everyday life. Much of what the book is ultimately about is prediction – trying to look into the future to gain some advantage. I think prediction is a really interesting subject, whatever side you’re on (whether you believe in predicability or randomness).

One of the biggest points Super Crunchers trying to make is that people are computing scenarios all the time, trying to predict what will happen – this applies to betting, the movie box office, retail sales and all sorts of other things. The author basically says you can be on one of two ends. You can either be a luddite who is afraid to engage with numbers and computation, in which case you will be put at disadvantage. Or you can be enlightened and use number crunching for your benefit and take advantage of it’s uses. You will be on one end or the other – you might as well make a conscious choice. Those who embrace number crunching stand to benefit from it.

A few examples from the book:

• A wine collector uses past data to predict which wines will be good based on weather and other current data.
• Someone creates a website to predict the prices of seats on airplane flights.
• A company creates an algorithm to help predict revenues and suggest changes to improve profitability of movies.

So for me the book Super Crunchers was really interesting. I liked the audio version, but I think it would still be a worthwhile endeavor to actually read the book. I would give it a rating of 4 out of 5.

I finished my Masters degree Thursday. Feels good to be done. WooHoo!

I must confess, I have become a bit of a skeptic. I have been reading the writings of Nassim Taleb and his work makes sense to me. Let me explain.

I invested in some stock and recently sold it for a nice profit. I was invested, I am now divested, and I need to invest once again. However, not just any stock will do. I think the stock market is misvalued according to the state of our economy and I don’t trust these prices. I find it difficult to find good value. This is not a new thought for me – I do not like the idea of speculation and have not since Benjamin Graham opened my eyes. I prefer intelligent investing.

Taleb talks about risk of the unknown unknown. What we do not know, but think we know, can hurt us far more than what we know we do not know. That’s confusing I know. Jeff Hawkins would say that the neocortex works by making predictions about the future – that is it’s basic function. We all do it, there is nothing wrong with that fact. The problem comes when we make predictions about situations we know nothing about. And usually we think we know more than we actually do. Those predictions set us up for failure. We will be rocked when something completely unexpected comes along – something we did not take into account. Basically, most of us are very prideful in our predictions. This is why the housing crash, 9-11, and other events hurt us so badly. Those are the times when our pride is revealed as misguided. And that is a chance for humility to set it.

But that doesn’t happen much. Most of us never set aside our pride. Most of us continue in our misguided, prideful predictions made on limited amounts of knowledge. Taleb ultimately advocates a defensive stance, an intellectual humility, which I find intelligent.

Taleb talks about information in terms of gausssian (or normal) distribution vs fractal distribution. I do not pretend to understand all of it, but I am beginning to see it play out. For instance: Last night Ezra, our German Shepherd Dog, wanted to go outside in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. This is not uncommon. So Angie took him out then brought him back into our room. Not long after that he started whining and scratching at the door. We tried to tell him to go back to sleep.

Now, if we assume normal distribution of time between bathroom breaks compared to dog age over the lifetime of the normal dog, you would see something like a bell curve. An unpredictable, shorter time between bathroom breaks when they are a small puppy, a gradual curve up to predictable longer times between breaks around mid life, then a gentle slope back down as they age. The same could be modeled in humans.

However, this is not really true of real life. The model is flawed. The model is a broad sweeping generalization that does not take into account outliers and “random” events. There is a small chance that something is actually wrong with my dog and that he really does need to go back out. Maybe he is sick. In this case the Gaussian curve is a poor predictor of behavior. Even though the curve would say Ezra needs to go out no more often than every 5-6 hours, this might be a random event.

Usually the random events are identified post-disaster and make sense. Taleb calls these Black Swans. I do not know that Ezra’s needing to go back outside after 5 minutes is a true Black Swan, but it does illustrate the need for a fractal distribution. In order to make the correct choice (taking him back out because he is sick), I must assume that there is information I am missing. I must come to the situation with intellectual humility – otherwise I will have a mess on my bedroom floor and it will not be the dog’s fault, it will be mine.

I am not sure that makes sense. I hope you understand what I am trying to say, which is basically that we all need to make decisions and predictions from a place of intellectual humility. We need to act defensively and assume we do not know as much as we may think. If we do this, we will be much less surprised when something beyond our radar happens, and perhaps even be in a place to take advantage of such a situation. If you had bet against the stock market in 2008 you would have made a killing as a defensive, skeptical, intellectually humble, intelligent investor who knows the future is not nearly as predictable as it seems.

Anthony Phillips pressed me on developing an application vs a mobile-ready site. I like the way he’s thinking. So I went to the handy resource A List Apart and searched for the keyword “mobile” thinking they might have some good information about mobile computing and html, etc. Turns out they do. Beginning with the article “Apps vs the Web” and going out from there, they detail the pitfalls and perks of apps and websites, and a bit about developing both (though more heavy on the web side). I like the idea of developing a mobile web version, though I think it will limit the interactivity. But specifically for the voting process, which is the biggest piece that needs to be mobile, it looks like a mobile web version is just the thing I should use because it should allow for wider participation, which is what I want. The learning curve should also be shorter, which will help with scheduling. It was a great suggestion by Anthony and this resource is helping me get a grasp on what that looks like.

AI Techniques for Game Programming is the book that got me interested in Genetic algorithms. I was originally interested in Neural Networks and went to the public library looking for anything involving that subject. In this book it also talks about Genetic algorithms as they are applied to games. I started experimenting with Genetic algorithms after that, but have never really implemented them into a real life situation.

My project does not involve Genetic algorithms as they appear int his book, but the idea of genetics and how it is applied is what is relevant to me. The nice thing about this resource is that it’s written in a way that’s easy to understand. The bad thing would be that the code is in C and the design/readability is awful. But this was a very helpful resources (and continues to be) as I’ve tried to understand genetic algorithms.

Graphic design is, according to Princeton University, “visual communication by a skillful combination of text and pictures in advertisements, magazines, books, etc.”¹ But the term needs to be tossed. Graphic Design, and the definition it carries, is far too limiting in terms of context, application, and focus for this current day.

A designer must take into account the context of their designs. Meredith Davis highlights this idea in Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. She states that a designer must account for, and design within, complex systems. No piece truly stands alone. Not only is the context social, political, and geographic, but the context is also the pieces produced before, and the pieces still to come after the current design. In fact, a design may be the only advertisement to run for a certain brand, but the context also has to do with the look and demeanor by which the company carries itself, it’s physical presence, and many other factors. Graphic Design simply, to a fault, concerns itself only with combining media, for the sake of communication, in a skillful way. This is not enough.

John Maeda, in Design by Numbers calls much of his programming work “computational design.”² Some artists might refer to his work as “generative art,” but he makes an important distinction. He has a design background and his creations are applied to a design problem – his programmatic approach is computation applied to design. One could argue that Maeda is skillfully programming the computer, but one could also argue that the computer is combining the images and text itself. Especially when some form of randomness is applied to process, the line between designer and computer blurs. This blurring breaks the bounds of what is typically defined as “Graphic Design.” This is also seen in Joshua Davis’ work. He designs and programs a computer to generate a page of shape, line and texture based on a combination of designer-set parameters and computer generated randomness. For Davis, his main skill is the process of selecting from generated artifacts the best one to use.³ There is no room in the definition of “Graphic Design” for randomness, or mere selection as Davis or Maeda would have it. Design as a whole must include computational design and selection – it cannot be limited to “skillful combinations” only.

Designers must focus not only on visual communication, but on problem solving, however it may be solved. IDEO has made a living in this arena. They view this process and methodology as “Design Thinking.”⁴ Design Thinking means approaching a problem with an open end of solutions. Perhaps the solution is a printed brochure, but perhaps instead it is a physical process or interactive experience. Perhaps it is simply restructuring what already exists. Graphic Design is too focused on the visual medium and the “combination” of things, and misses other solutions because of that focus.

Graphic Design must die and Designers must be born. A Designer is a personwho uses any tool to address any problem at hand. They are not afraid to cross lines of media and application. A Designer accounts for context and keeps the past, present and future in mind. Designers have a place in the next 40 years. Graphic Designers, with their limited focus, do not.

It’s official – I am/was a finalist in the Adobe Design Achievement Awards this year.  I tossed in one of my grad school projects and it actually did alright.  I feel a little like Eeyore right now though – disappointed about a good thing.  But it’s ok, I’ll come back with something better next year.  I’m working on an installation piece for my final Masters project and already have another application to submit in 2011.  It’s fun.  I want to enter more contests like this.