'You can never hold back Spring'

I quote Tom Waits here, because this week will be much about planning for teaching in the spring term. Seasoning is one of the beauties of the teaching profession - it is like your body knows, just like a farmer's body knows: now is the time for cultivating the soil, getting ready for sowing the seeds. But - to stay in the farmer metaphor - also we are close to harvesting the fruits of our work in the autumn semester, so in sum: teaching and planning for teaching is the headline of this week.

INNOVATION PRACTICE WEEK, WITH AN EMPHASIS ON THE USE OF VIDEO

Innovation and conservation behavior: methods for engaging actors in restraining themselves – I’ll sit in on a project presentation, followed by two days of SPIRE partner seminar, where my focus will be research on how to move inventions through business case to realization, concluding with Kyle Kilbourn defending his PhD thesis on patients as skilled practitioners. Running through these activities will be a specific methodological question: In what way are video-clips of skilled practice productive? For an invention to stand the ‘business trial’, it must invoke the imagination of managers and CEOs within seconds, and here video-snippets are effective in their capability to display situations as a. understandable sequences of movements, inviting storytelling, inviting identification with happy moments of flow, media of communicating before/after differences. Two questions arise: what characterizes busimess-case decision-situations that are receptive to video-snippets, and what characterizes video-snippets that communicates well in these situations. A convincing argumentation, theoretically as well as by examples, needs to be worked out.

Performance week

On Tuesday I give a workshop on methods and techniques supporting user-driven innovation at a Network of E-Learning seminar at Aalborg University. 

On Wednesday we have our IT-visions class at UCD dealing with the IT-visions in Alan Kay's Dynabook and Nigropontes One Laptop pr child, discussed in the light of positions about democracy of education of Dewey and Barber.

Thursday is DHRS symposium at Aalborg University - I so look forward especially to the 1 years presentation of videowall-tool and recycling skills videos. My own contribution is about listening as an important skill in design education - hope I can make myself understood.

The red thread running through these activities? This is what the thinking week was supposed to make out, and well: it is all about listening; why listening is so difficult and how to learn this skill - and I do not have any answers yet

Thinking week

Yesterday, Torben Vestergaard, director of Cathrinesminde Brickfield Museum, http://www.museum-sonderjylland.dk/ told me about the industrial history of Sønderjylland - exiting, and so much (in the small scale) like the industrial history of Silicon Valley - food for thought, when we think about 'the soil of innovation'. Thinking should be this week's headline, since the Feedback II report draft MUST be completed, and preparation for two presentations next week MUST be done. I should think about the pattern which connects the items of innovation - that was the subject of Elisabeth Vestergaard, head of institute for border region studies here at University of Southern Denmark, Torben Vestergaard and my conversation last night: Why does some regions flourish at a certain point? Is it when manifacturing, education and some sort of spiritual Geist come in sync? We talked about Bateson, of course, about anthropology, and about the importance of emphasizing the comparative aspect - comparison as a precondition for telling the difference, which makes a difference.

Utility discourses

This week, Nov. 3-7, writing has priority - I am on the brink on having several things almost ready - the DHRS paper on design skills to be submitted Monday, the Feedback II evaluation report together with Anne Marie Kanstrup no later than Thursday, a journal paper also together with Anne Marie Kanstrup on user engagement also Thursday - and abaove all this there is this question hovering: what is the pattern which connects the items of learning frugality, when it comes to how electricity and heating and water - can less be more, when it comes to utilities?

Graduate studies in IT Product Design

This week, from Monday Oct.27 to Thursday Oct. 30 is devoted to presentations, planning and meetings regarding the graduate course program on IT Products Design http://www.ug.dk/internationalt.aspx?article_id=english-techitproductdevelop . The program is wonderful and deserves a lot of attention. It positions itself vis a vis ‘innovation management’ and ‘design’ study programs, and programs on Interaction Design. Its profile is engineering meaning planning, designing, constructing, operating, and maintaining activities, which transform resources of labor, capital (money, materials, & equipment), and knowledge into the physical facilities required to meet a broad range of social and economic needs. Its pedagogy is case- and problem based, with focus on innovation, through value-adding participation of all relevant stakeholders, by means of tangible interaction.
On Friday Anne Marie Kanstrup og jeg work out the draft of the FEEDBACK2 report.

To do-s of Oct. 20-24

Monday is dedicated to analyzing 22 interviews with customers from SydEnergi , who have received SMS and/or e-mail about their electricity consumption as part of the experiments conducted by the FEEDBACKproject. On Tuesday administrative work will take up most of the time, while on Wednesday Klaus Kaasgaard. Kaasgaard is invited by SPIRE , and he will talk about business strategies and user driven innovation. On Thursday Dr. Aleksandr Tsypin, Danfoss Russia, Dr. Victor F. Kuzishcin, Docent at Moscow Power Engineering Institute and Dr. Alexander V. Andryushin, Senior Lecturer of Moscow Aviation Institute visit SPIRE and I'll replace the director Jacob Buur in presenting SPIRE and UCD activities. On Friday the department of border region studies has a big event, which I'll attend.