A NEW BEGINNING

What should happen in Lavendergarage in 2010 - stupid question since the future approaches us from behind. But what if I turn around, and face the past, can I know, then? Information Architecture as the underlying, invisible structure of information, of difference, how long can I drawn lines back? Together with students I'll be looking at log-book traditions, calendar traditions and air tube system traditions to identify patterns of interaction, and patterns of underlying information structures, this way hoping to inform the information architecture of a project team collaboration system the students are going to build a concept for. We will look for what users can do, which activities are mediated, and which role is assigned to the user - and I so look forward to this. This work will, maybe, lead me on to a fruitfull understanding of the Erwoll system in police investigation, a piece of work I have left for some years, and which I want to re-assume.

FROM SERVICE DELIVERY TO ...

Yesterday I attended a seminar guided by Mark Munger, senior consultant, Valeocon, US in regi of the National task force for competence development in public service in Denmark. The approach promoted was named 'positive deviance' a combination of von Hippel's lead user thinking, appreciative inquiry, and Wenger's communities of practice thinking - organizational learning and development it is. A direction for applying this approach was given by Jacob Schjørring, Mindlab, who talked about moving from service delivery to involving citizens in forming relationships with service workers 'co-creation of new solutions for the public sector' was the term. I kept thinking of the graffiti 'hjælp politiet - tæv dig selv' (help the police - spank you yourself).
The discrepancy between Munger telling how to listen and give voice to all stakeholders, and Schjørring telling about how 'we' could get so-and-so citizens to co-create, was striking. Maybe, only if you seriously tried to walk the talk of Soren Kierkegaard and know how big you failed, you can tell the difference - I refer to his essay on authorship, chapter 1, §2, where he states what it is to be a good teacher:
‘All true helping begins with a humbling. The helper must first humble himself under the person he wants to help and thereby understand that to help is not to dominate, but to serve, that to help is not to be the most dominating, but the most patient, that to help is a willingness, for the time being, to put up with being in the wrong and not understanding what the other understands …’.

HARD DISK CRASH

What's in a hard-disk? I thought I knew, but this weekend's crash of the hard disk of my beloved MacAir has taught me that I didn't. A hard disk holds much of the functionality, structure and style of work. I know that now. Having to re-generate functionality, structure and style of one's working life is a sad good bye to habits, and a hesitating, dounting hello to a new, and hopefully more secure, way of working. A wonderful new beginning - No! well, maybe. Great if your computer developes into a functional organ of your workings, but if the organ stops functioning, you feel like organ failure also in a physical sense. Do I have a memory outside that of my computer? The good news is Yes! I do remember my husbond, children, grandchildren and friends - but I have difficult staying in contact - as for now I still need to get scype up running again - anyways: I am grateful for the support from the IT-guys at work and at home, and for almost being computerized again

TIME, TASK AND TERRITORY - the road to liberty at work

Last week I experienced a connection between the Tavistock idea of crucial boundaries of working: time, task, and territory http://akriceinstitute.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=34, and I saw a relationship between the Tavistock principles for group work, and the principles of agile software development, most celebrated today. In both cases the idea is that the freedom to work dynamically and situated, 'the journey is the destination', and what have we, depend on a clear and definitive time frame, explicit definition of goals to be achieved, and a limitid space to work within. In agile development such moments are called sprints. Working this way - this is my experience and new insight - gives so much piece of mind, that ideas and good spirit in collaboration seems to foster itself.

SUSTAINING VALUE NETWORKS IN DESIGN AND RESEARCH

This week is about communication of ideas and concepts in creative teams - of designers or researchers - I emphasize the commonalities here. In both cases my perspective is that of value network, and my point is that each and every encounter must give value to all parties: users and designers, designers and developers, actors and researchers, researchers and publishers. All these asymmetrical yet mutually dependent relationships undergo at least three phases of value-attribution: the initial trust-building, the idea development where the question what is the problem, and the conceptual phase where solutions are tried out, accepted or rejected. To sustain value networks participants must experience both autonomy and community within their zone of competence. For this to happen, sufficient information, choices and the possibility of expressing mixed feelings are crucial conditions (Ryan & Deci). Simple, but not always easy to provide.

ALEXANDER - OR NOT

I am a great admirer of Christopher Alexander's work, and as I just stumpled over a nice collection of bits and pieces which describes it http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/Chris.text.html I sank in, and read. Then I sat back and wondered: Why is it, that the whole 'synthesis-of-form and patterns' way of thinking design suddenly strikes me as a strait-jacket? Maybe there is more truth to Löwgren & Stolterman's claim that a design language must be formed anew for each project than I thought at first. Maybe.

Experiencing-by-proxy: IMAGE CLOUDS and STORY-BY-WALKING

Clouds of water molecules, or of concepts, are same-quality-objects-in-proximity except for one parameter. We take omens from cloud (weather-forecasting), and we infer that concepts written with larger font indicates more attention. Image clouds are more difficult to deal with: we can think of Warhol's Monroes, the Harvey Keitel tobacco shop-owner's corner pictures in the movie 'Smoke', or 'humping man'-positions on the Youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz4lix7hiLo&feature=player_embedded. When it comes to image clouds, the variation in one quality has difficulty to produce meaning right away. However, human kind has a strong tradition in telling stories by inviting people to follow the food steps of someone else. Numerous tourist guides follow ' in the food steps' of some famous explorer, but also the police investigator/detective can choose to walk the path of a victim in order to better make sense of traces.

From a design perspective sharing experience across cultures, across ages, across individuals is always a challenge, and there may be some gold to be digged in learning from these ways of experiencing-by-proxy.

TRICKS OF THE TRADER

It was the sociologist Georg Simmel who pointed out that the stranger to a culture has the role/work/lifestyle of a trader, who buy and sell, and brings goods from one place to the other – owing goods, but no land, belonging to none of the cultures visited – living on borders. This form of life is close to that of the designer, and a designer can learn a lot from paying attention to the tricks of the trader.

PORTFOLIO AND STORYTELLING

For two weeks now, 9th semester Information Architecture students and I have worked on their portfolio information structure: What do potential audiences want to read, and how to structure content so that readers get the desired picture at a glance + get curious for more? We have tried to get the idea of relationship under the skin: It is not the content, it is not the readers or their context of reading per se, but the relationship in between, which generates interest. One solution, yet to be tried out, it that of storytelling: Storytelling has an information structure which already Aristotle put on form, and which more recently Ricoeur has elaborated: Mimesis. My suggestion is to try out building portfolio writing on the mimesis information structure. Like yesterday, we worked with Schutz's essay 'the stranger' and how, when being on the border between two cultures, you have to get conscious about your most basic assumptions, and then open yourself to negotiation. I suggest to make this a point in the IA students' method portfolio, by describing a personal experience of estranging yourself. The thing is: it is hard work, because you can not maintain the so convenient detached on-looker position, which Schutz so vividly describes, and which we as academics so enjoy.

ITEMS OF LEARNING

This week 9th semester Information Architecture students and I have been working on the relationship between 'presentation', 'practice' and 'perception'. I introduced Bateson's thesis that '...if we inflict a series of similar learning experiments on the same subject, we shall find that in each successive experiment the subject has a somewhat steeper proto-learning gradient, that he learns somewhat more rapidly. This progressive change in rate of proto-learning, we will call 'deutero-learning'. (Steps to an ecology of mind, 1972/2000, p. 167). I added that this explains Bateson's other thesis that '...Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality' (MInd and Nature, 1979/2002, p. 7) - Why? Because the pattern which connects the items of learning (= protolearning - thanks to Majken Kjærulff for clarifying that) is the deutorolearning, it is the habit of learning, which makes it possible to connect one instance to another, and create a rule. Hence the pattern of people, places, the things we do, the way we do them, should be kept stable for a certain case of learning. Scrum is an example: the morning meeting: standing in the same place, answering the same questions, provide a framework for understanding the differences, which makes a difference between last meeting and next meeting. So: Here's to rituals in teaching!

Information architecture - the invisible infrastucture of communication

Communication travels from one thinking system to another on an infrastructure, which is invisible, because it consists of relationships =differences, which make a difference to someone in one of the thinking systems involved. I call the infrastructure of communication 'Information Architecture'.

Information Architecture - constantly an object of design - is difficult to talk about.Strangely enough, since humans have a long history of communicating about invisible things: in ancient times we talked with the spirits of nature - using our imagination. We handled problems of molecules and microorganisms before we could trace them in a microscope - using theory.

To talk about the invisible infrastructure of communication itself, however, we need both imagination, a theory - and a mirror, because of the inherent reflexivity of communication: talking with the environment is always also talking with ourselves.

This week I am preparing a crash-course in Information Architecture for 9th semester Information Architecture students - where I invoke imagination, theory, and hopefully also introduce a mirror, in order for the coming information architects to get to grips with form elements and functional elements and make them able to create (new) information architectures.

All we need is - sensemaking?

After a week of planning of teaching and research, and the anniversary of an old colleague, I wonder: What - in the relationship between humans, work and technology - has, really, changed over the past 25 years?

Fear and hope seem stable, compassion and vanity as well, and nothing moves without the sense making activity of humans.
- But technology has changed - good to know, and very consoling for us who make a living out of designing and studying technology: because of the change in technology sensemaking is needed, anew, every day. There is the challenge, right at hand.

Casablanca moods

This Monday I re-assumed working at e-Learning Lab at Aalborg University, with focus on teaching design theory and methodology. I have learnt a lot from being part of IT-product Design at the Mads Clausen Institute for a year - I miss the colleagues there, yet I also enjoy being together with my colleagues in eLL - so in sum I have gained a lot, and I am grateful.

DESIGN OF INTERFACES TO METERING IN THE HOME

Is it important that home metering devices comply with basic psychological needs for autonomy and relatedness? Usually designers focus on cognition, technical feasibility and style, and design of interfaces typically comes rather late in the process. But if metering is to benefit energy conservation and a more frugal lifestyle in general, cognitive and ecological approaches alone, may - despite their obvious importance - not do the trick.

Currently I am reading up on Deci & Ryan's so-called 'organismic' approach, which is about humans' need to feel autonomy as well as community. The empirical material Anne Marie Kanstrup and I have collected on user reactions to electricity metering in the home holds so many puzzling details, that it deserves more analysis, and a stronger theoretical underpinning of the analytical model.

Ideas relating to smart metering and smart grid technology are flowing abundantly at the moment, but little attention is given to socio-psychological and cultural-historical aspects: Humans have metered nature and resources like forever, and apart from the obvious reason of trying to predict and preserve living conditions, it is likely that this activity contributes to human development of both autonomy and community. Just as Gibson's concept of affordances offer designers conceptual guidance regarding how artifact can become a tool in the hands of humans, a better conceptualization of the role of the experience of household metering may improve chances that these systems can serve as regulating 'traffic lights.'

WITTGENSTEIN

YouTube provides us with a quick version of what Wittgenstein is about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0cN_bpLrxk and the following. Ben Mathews has provided me with a deeper entry, for which I am most grateful: Norman Malcolm's Wittgenstein-book: 'A religious point of view' with a response by Peter Winch, Cornell University Press, 1995. Pelle Ehn, Ingela Josefson, Bo Göranzon and Hans Siggaard Jensen all introduced Wittgenstein to me in the early 1980ies - and I stayed faithfull to the little I understood, I should say. But Malcolm's book makes an important point, which I did not get back then: The limitations of analytical thought, and it is just SO important these days, where all design knowledge and all design competence is seeked codified - there are at the moment more than a million entries on 'design thinking' - give that a thought!

PENNSYLVANIA

Been to Pennsylvania for the first time - traveling the back roads for five days. Most puzzling so far was last nights dinner at an Amish culture house. Somehow energy conservation is on the forefront all the time: the ancient cableing, the enormous stand by consumption, the air cons, the freezers, the proportions of meals and drinks, the cornfields meant for making bioethanol, the cars and cars and cars - being part of all this silences me in a strange way - and then the nature: Pennsylvania Grand Canyon so overwhelmingly beautiful, and in the mountains, all of a sudden an area of the forrest that brought us back from summer to spring, with smell and all, and a grizzle bear was seen in the village where we slept last night - on a trail we walked just two hours earlier .. :-)

TALENT MANAGEMENT

Today I attended the 5th international conference on energy efficiency in domestic appliances EEDAL 2009 http://www.eedal.eu/

I presented on behalf of myself and Anne Marie Kanstrup and the FEEDBACK project, http://feedback.noe.dk/projektbeskrivelse/pdf/engprojbesk.pdf, a paper on consumer narratives about received feedback about electricity consumption via e-mail or SMS for a year. In itself interesting stuff. But the experience of the day, for me however, was when Mr. John R. Mollet, Vice President, Corporate Development of the International Copper Association, Ltd. (ICA) in New York presented his and his associates' work on bringing better supply of electricity to the urban poor of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

John Mollet's responsibility is to travel the world to build partnerships with governments, multilateral agencies, non-governmental organizations, public and private foundations, and industry to coordinate optimally their activities with ICA's Sustainable Energy, Environment / Health and in Technology programs.
- What is GREEN PEACE saying, I ask myself. I am sure ( and I am a donor) that Green Peace will have some stories about the International Copper Association, Ltd. (ICA).

Nevertheless, Mr. Mollet presents a convincing case of making a positive difference for illegal residents in the urban area of Sao Paulo, by way of making electricity available on a legal and safe basis.

Mr. Mollet has worked at ICA since 1998, most recently as Vice President, Sustainable Electrical Energy.
Before joining ICA, Mollet held several senior management positions in the metals industry, first as Project Director at the Bekaert Corporation and then as a Senior Product Manager at Tetko, Inc. (now Sefar America, Inc.). His career covers responsibilities in purchasing, sales, marketing, technical services, project and business management. Besides the electrical and electronic markets, his experiences include electromagnetic compatibility; steel reinforcement of radial tires and rubber products; precision filter media in synthetic and metallic materials for a wide variety of applications such as medical, aerospace, automotive, food, beverage, water. Mr. Mollet is a graduate electrical engineer from the University of Ghent, Belgium.

And here it is that I have to leave Mr. Mollet's CV, and think about the parable of the talents trusted (Mat. 25: 14-30 for those who have access to a Christian bible). The thing in this parable is: What do you do with the talents invested in you.
Mr. Mollet choose to travel the world telling about a way to electrify the poor in ways that also make them citizens -agents of society.

What do I do with the talents invested in me, I ask myself.

ON THE BUSINESS BORDER BETWEEN AID AND EXPLOITATION

Yesterday I learnt about the existence of a Danish organization www.iug.dk which organizes help from Engineers to Médecins Sans Frontières - such a wonderful idea. In the coming week I attend a big international conference 'joint action on climate change' http://www.jaocc.net/ where Anne Marie Kanstrup will present our paper on the difference between perceived affordance and perceived annoyance when it comes to mundane housekeeping activities such as using electricity and reducing the consumption of electricity. We worked with eight families on the issue of designing motivating feedback, and through the design activities they formulated the position, that the effect of feedback depends on when, where, and how much information is given. This they agreed on, regardless of difference in values and attitudes towards electricity consumption in general.
At the same conference I'll be chairing a session on the' Bottom of the Pyramid' business approach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_of_the_pyramid, where the line between exploitation and help is up for debate.
On Friday, June 12, I, ,representing SPIRE, participate in a conference at Alsion 'Cradle to Cradle' and conduct a workshop together with Michael Braungart on how to map out the process of designing a cradle to cradle product (SPIRE is a strategic
research centre at the University of Southern Denmark with a unique approach to user-driven innovation
– participatory innovation).
From all of this I will take some questions and maybe even answers regarding the designer's role on the business border between aid and exploitation.

HARVEST MOON

is astronomically speaking not here yet, but exams are, and for the teacher it means harvest of feedback - about teaching and learning. In the twilight silver shine of the moon the teacher meets him or herself in a personal experience of the shortcomings of reason: so much for planning, so much for benchmarking and careful selection of literature, and yet: the joy of seeing students grow and take charge is such a gift! Being able to manage oneself in new and challenging situations is after all the testbed of theoretical accomplishments.

And afterwards, I will read to the moon about patterns, which connects the items of learning, and mirror neurons as a possible way of grounding this otherwise ephemeral notion.

MEANWHILE ...

I re-read Gregory Bateson's paper 'Social planning and the concept of deutero-learning (Steps pp 159-176), especially the concluding paragraph: " All we need to be sure of is that, at any moment, achievement may be just around the corner, and, true or false, this can never be tested. We have got to be like those few artists and scientists who work with this urgent sort of inspiration, the urgency that comes from feeling that great discovery, the answer to all our problems, or great creation, the perfect sonnet, is always only just beyond our reach, or like the mother of a child who feels that, provided she pay constant enough attention, there is real hope that her child may be that infinately rare phenomenon, a great and happy person'

- Nordahl Grieg's poem' Kringsatt av fiender' comes to mind 'som om du bar et barn, varsomt på armen'

CRADLE TO ......

Cradle to cradle is a design concept coined by Michel Braungart- see http://www.epea.com/index.php - and highly relevant to the idea of design being everything from God's creation to the forming of garbage bins.

Just like with the concepts of Access2Innovation (http://www.access2innovation.com/) and base of the pyramide (http://www.bop-protocol.org/ ), cradle-to-cradle has sustainability written all over, with the noble goal of saving humanity from the monumental catastrophies of human behavior as its mission.

Does Gaia care about design? Is Gaia a concept designers can work with? How about love and design? Hate and design? What is it about design anyway? Deep questions, and no answers. Chris Heape suggests I read Noel G. Charlton's 2008 attemtpt to link Bateson's concept of 'mind' to the Gaia concept of sustainability "Understanding Gregory Bateson - mind, beauty and the sacred earth'.

INTERACTION DESIGN

This week will be about wrapping up teachings in aspects of interaction design: what are the key elements, what are the germ cell components from which this activity, this profession, this discipline involves, what can NOT be taken away in case we are talking about Interaction Design? Two conference papers about interaction design of feedback on electricity consumption to private households written together with Anne Marie Kanstrup are due: one for the EEDAL 2009 in Berlin 'Energy efficiency in domestic appliances and lightening' conference http://www.eedal.eu/ , and one for the JAOCC conference in Aalborg 'Joint action for climate change http://www.jaocc.net/ - both are about outcomes of the FEEDACK project http://feedback.noe.dk/ user driven innovation research. Also this research is about interaction design, and brings a lot to bear on key interaction design questions.

INNOVATION LITERACY

This week's primary task is to explain to a number of different audiences the added value of teaching innovation - this is an old hobby horse of mine - that for democracy in innovation to be real, it has to be taught in primary school - and on Thursday schoolchildren will actually visit Alsion to hear - among other things - why I became a researcher of innovation. We can all improve the technology we surround us with - humans have done that always, sometimes to the benefit of the few, sometimes to the benefit of the many - in all cases imperfection is the home of invention, and innovation is the destination. It all begins with being able to tell the difference between perfect and imperfect, between good and bad, between right and wrong - that is innovation literacy, and there is no conclusion, just a constant negotiation of criteria, conditions and conceptualizations - that is the democratic part, not the technology per se.

HORIZONS ...

In the 'Horizon Report 2009' http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/chapters/trends/ we can read that because companies like Apple has opened for third party development to their mobile technology 'educational content grow at a fantastic pace' and further that 'Collective intelligence may give rise to multiple answers, all equally correct, to problems. The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are redefining scholarship as we grapple with issues of top-down control and grassroots scholarship. Today’s learners want to be active participants in the learning process – not mere listeners; they have a need to control their environments, and they are used to easy access to the staggering amount of content and knowledge available at their fingertips'

In chapter 7 of 'Angles fear' Gregory Bateson claims that rule-following in acts of knowing mainly serves the purpose of protect the fragile boundaries and make people able to tell the difference - between the sacred and the profane, the aethetic and the coveted, the intentional and the unconscious, and between thinking and feeling. These boundaries, the tacit rules, are continually under pressure, Bateson claims, and gives examples of what he sees as violatio.

To me, claiming that finding content on a webpage by a mobile device and discussing it with friends in a coffeeshop should give rise to 'collective intelligence' is a violation of the notion of knowledge. I want, once again, to return the wisdom of the Little Prins in Saint Exupery's novel: 'It is the time you waste on your rose that makes it so precious'. There is no way a round it: the high road to knowledge is hard work: blood, sweat and tears - it is experience that counts: always mobile, seldom intelligent, travelling from the collective realm to the personal ditto, and then back for verification.

Paul Ricoeuer said it so clearly in 'Time and Narrative': SPACE OF EXPERIENCE, HORIZON OF EXPECTATION or think of the WABI SABI aesthetics - thanks Jo, for the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00j8bkc

CATCHING UP

This week - easter week - will be about catching up: with family, friends, work, sport, and culture, so is my plan, which is actually not a plan. Today commenting on thesis-work has priority together with a visit in the Berlin TV tower. The rest must follow as sun shines and trees come out.

DESIGN ANTHROPOLOGY

This week will be mostly about DAIM, http://chokobar.wordpress.com/ , the research project on design anthropology where designers - practictioners and academics and students from DKDS and IT product Design work on ways of letting everyday practices inspire design. Phase I , the recycling case, is coming to end, and phase 2 'golden projects' is about to begin. My research question in this is to what extent, and why, collaborative development of design languages is the solution to the problem of representing and transforming user-experiences of need and opportunity into new products, and in specific how the mechanism of projective identification relates to learning in the moment-to-moment encounters where such design languages are born.

WabiSabi and User Centred Design

Wabi Sabi can not be grasped or defined. However, Leonard Koren makes an attempt in his book: 'Wabi-Sabi'. There are stories of tea, which opens for the understanding, and today I received a picture of an unfolded tea sprout - which I Wednesday evening enjoyed as tea, and which on Thursday morning opened as portrayed here at the bottom of the empty cup. Somehow the picture tells what I in three consecutive lectures am going to talk aboutl this week: a systemic aesthetics: 'The whole is always in a metarelationships with its parts. As in logic the propositions can never determine the metaproposition, so also in matters of control, the smaller context can never determine the larger (Bateson in Steps, p 267) The meta-relationship which connects contexts is what Bateson understood as aesthetics: the need for double description/relational information, which is the source of innovations such as metaphors, art, science, religion, and poetry - designers should be sensitive to such patterns. If you look at the drawings on sustainbility you get the drift of what is NOT communicating about relationships http://computingforsustainability.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/visualising-sustainability/

IS RECESSION THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

Marketing consultant Martin Lindström (‘Buyology’) says in NYTimes March 14: ‘Two concepts apply. First don’t ask consumers what they want; figure out what they need. (No one knew they wanted an airbag, but they knew they wanted safer cars.) In recessions, affordable, small luxuries, like chocolate and perfume, hold their own, as do cheap entertainments like movies. Second, practical features give consumers a reason to make a purchase. Wellington boots sell because they’re useful — and have clever designs. Products that protect our assets and homes also do well, like anti-virus software. Shopping doesn’t stop in recessions, but consumers need a reason beyond just impulse. ‘ To me this sends a strong message to design anthropology: anthropologist should know how to get to understand user needs I think – but my dear colleague Wendy Gunn and I have been over it many times – she resists to talk a bout need. As I take it she – and many others - resists the ontological part. Frankly I do not understand their argument, but maybe this recession will be a dawn, not only of inventions, but also of a renewed epistemological debate beyond social constructivism? Bateson’s ‘Mind & Nature’ would be a point of departure as pointed out by Jesper Hoffmeyer in his Introduction to ‘A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics’, Springer 2008, where he quotes Bateson in Mind & Nature, p. 14 ‘ … a story is a little knot or complex of that species of connectedness which we call relevance.’

VISUALIZATION

I want to add Grove to my awareness list, because every time I go there I feel good about possibilities of visualization. These days we live through visual communication and storytelling, and somehow this fact should  pervade the way we plan and communicate about design projects. On the other hand - plans are also made to nail down contracts about who is doing what when, hence un-equivocal clarity across different experiences, practices and languages is a must. Sounds like a contraction in terms as well as in practice, hence a compelling design challenge :-) Tinkering may be a stepping stone on the way, staged performance another, but at some point the articulation process must land - and I would like to land it in a form of pictorial design brief. At the moment I just do not know how. But in the DAIM project as well as in teaching User Centered Design I try out all possible ways ...

BODY, BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR

This week's agenda is tangible interaction, and we will begin tomorrow with Bødker & Bøgh Andersens excellent model of mediation. As for now I just returned from owl-spotting, tree-hugging and dog-padding in the Schloss Park Charlottenburg, where birds were singing, the sun shining, and thick and thin, tall and small people of all ages were welcoming spring on its first day. If those ancient trees could talk ... Tree-hugging is tangible interaction with - with what? The sub-liminal part of me coming out of human history? The tree and I are branches on the same trunk of life as Jesper Hoffmeyer would put it in his bio-semiotics - and hurrah for that.

FACEBOOK feeling

Tomorrow SPIRE people have a seminar, and members of the SPIRE facebook group will know what it is about :-) 

A couple of weeks ago I was washing the dishes while having my computer open on Facebook, and I felt like writing in the field 'Ellen is ..' but not about dishwashing. The snow had been falling all evening, and I got an urge to write 'Ellen is walking in the snow with bare feet' - just to realize that I could not write that without actually having done so - Hence, for the first time in my life I went out on the lawn barefooted in the dark. It felt not nice, not bad, vaguely strange, though, and I returned quickly, but taken on my woolen socks afterwards felt SO good.

To those who think facebook is too virtual - NO!

TO KNOW WHERE YOU WANT TO GO DOES NOT PREVENT YOU FROM ENDING UP SOMEWHERE ELSE

Driving from Berlin to Sønderborg without map/tomtom/phone/ brought me to a village called Zabel, and three nice citizens  cheered me and lead me back on track - Hannes Wader's  'Wieder Unterwegs'-epos came to mind.

Monday the UCD-students start their work on usability-evaluating the SparOmeter, and I look forward to the information and the ideas, we can give back to SYDenergi and project Zero.

Wednesday is the official enauguration of the SPIRE Center - the program is great with DACAPO theater and Base of the Pyramid-seminar in the morning, and in the end the studio-housewarming presentations, all under the auxspicies of participatory innovation.

GETTING READY TO MOVE

The spring semester starts out next week, which implies all sorts of last minute check ups and corrections + the thrill of beginning something new. For me the new is the mix of engineering, business and design students and the case – redesign of the SparOmeter, which the providers and governmental agencies still promote as a tool in the service of household electricity saving.
Also this week I’ll attend an exciting 2-day seminar on ‘Intangibles of Everyday Living – Designing for Air, Energy, Waste and Money‘, which I’m sure will inspire upcoming paper writing to the EEDAL conference in Berlin this summer on ‘End-use metering and informative billing – customer positions’, where Anne Marie Kanstrup and I will promote the insight that customers want metering to become a social object.
And speaking of Berlin, this weekend I’ll move into a flat in Charlottenburg, where I expect to spend quite a number of weekends this spring.

TAKE IT EASY AND BE AWARE OF GLASS WALLS, THEY HIT YOU WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT THEM TO

Thursday last week I splashed into a glass wall because I was in a hurry and my mind had run ahead of my body. My nose still hurts and my head aches, so this week I am going to take it really easy: mind and body should enjoy the pleassure of being together for a while. Luckily, lots of adventures are to be explored, still. On Monday night design anthropology studio people will work on our prestentation of the studio for the SPIRE opening af February 4 2009. There are lots of ideas on the table. Tuesday and Wednesday the SPIRE people are on retreat at Sandbjerg working out the content of the first SPIRE Book, and Thursday the students will present the outcome of their January design work.
And before all that to happen I have critical reflection papers to read and grade, and a longstanding promise to myself and the 1years students to fullfill: a summ up of the autumn's IT-visions course to help the memory of the students, especially those writing papers for the SIder 2009 conference 'Flirting with the furture' in Eindhoven April 15-17, where paper submission deadline is February 1.

PEDAGOGICAL TWEAKING

The overall planning of the courses is now in place, and I go back and forth over the mix of lectures, workshops and checkpoints, that may at best bring students to engage and learn. It is a creative process, and relaxed also, in the sense that experience has over and over taught me the difference between planning and situated action, so - although indispensable - for good and for bad planning does not account for the actual outcome. Sources of inspiration is this week plenty: Mette Mark Larsen gives highlights from her stay down under on Tuesday, all of Wednesday is about the DAIM project at the Design School in Copenhagen, and Thursday we have a work space design workshop all day, Friday I am censoring Information Architecture projects in Aalborg, and also Judith Gregory and Anne Marie Kanstrup will come visit for dinner, so it will probably be weekend before I am done with my pedagogical tweaking – ☺

Welcome 2009!

Sun is shining, its is freezing cold, and our pond is ready for iceskating. 2009 has arrived with an edge. Plain and simple - lets go working. My mind is on an attempt to theorize over user driven innovation as an activity arrizing from a need, mediated by ability, and realized though opportunities as hand, the implications of which being to conceptualize need in a Maslowian sense, ability as skill beheld by acting individuals, and opportunities being affordances of the environment in a Barker-Gibsonian sense - summing up to seeing user driven innovation as social- and environmental psychological phenomenon. Hope to be able to work this out.