A Chain of Thoughts
I received another signed permission form today, this one from Jodi Forlizzi at CMU. Jodi was one of my professors the last year I was at Carnegie, and she’s also one of the few people actively writing about and thinking about the linguistic connections between design and interaction (and the relationships between these and experiences). I quote in the book from the paper Taxonomy for Extracting Design Knowledge from Research Conducted During Design Cases, written by Jodi, Shelly Evenson and John Zimmerman; the paper does an excellent job of articulating the design process in core phases with a cohesive mapping of deliverables, or output, from each phase.
I think it is interesting to see how specific schools shape large bodies of knowledge over time; CMU is creating a world of Interaction Design knowledge that investigates process, experience, and language. You can see the ripples of this world – starting with Richard Buchanan’s work, which is obviously inspired by the thoughts of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - extend outwards as people like Uday Gajendar, Dan Saffer, Jodi and myself write and think about the intersection of these issues. This seems to be a parallel to the sort of form-language-discussion that went on at Pratt with Rowena Reed Kostello, inspired by Peter Behrens and passed on to Craig Vogel; and similar also to the innovation-society-design world of Jay Doblin and Buckminster Fuller, which so clearly impacts the work of Larry Keeley.
I like the idea of contributing an idea, even if it turns out to be a bad or incomplete idea – to a larger force of knowledge. This seems to articulate the essence of all I’ve learned from the few mentors I had growing up; working isn’t about ego, or lack of ego – work is about creating something and forever adding to the forward force of progress.