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.