How many different washing programmes have I used in my life? Probably three. Or attempted to use. Often, I am not hundred percent sure of what combination of temperature, prewash or not, spin cycle etc the thing is actually going to do. Or what I actually “need”. What is the difference between “economy” and “quick”? When would I choose a ten degree difference in temperature? 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90 degrees Celsius? And what real difference does the alternative spin cycles make? “baby clothes”? “Clinical rinse”? “Normal”? “economy”? “bio”? Do I need “prewash”?

Read The Fucking Manual, I hear you say. Seriously. I think not.

In Ireland, I was confronted with washing machines that let you adjust all manner of things, but would only use cold water, regardless of temperature chosen.

Washing clothes in our cleanliness-obsessed world is not difficult. They slosh around in some water, with some soap and possibly some fabric softener. We probably wash clothes more often than necessary; no tar, oil, sap or heavy duty filth. And yet, I am given a million options.

Granted, I am not a very domesticated animal, but the endless options are way beyond the call of duty for a pretty simple appliance.

A friend of mine have a cooker, and if the power goes for a split second, the watch starts blinking the familiar 00:00. The interesting thing is that the cooker does not work until the clock is set. How does that happen, what mad set of circumstances made him figure that out? And the guy who made the thing; what was he thinking?

This is interface design. Process and product.

I am, in a way not a fan of user testing left, right and centre. I suspect a lot of pointless user harassing are being done out there, but maybe we need to employ the village idiot to ask “why is this button here?”
Someone to break what we make, so that we can fix it.

Things have happened since then, and I am very happy with the technology, to the degree that it takes up large amount of my time, contains my work, and hope for a job in the inner, deeper levels of information and data handling and meaning.

(Mount Bromo, Java, Indonesia)

Today, we travel as flashpackers. Last time in Australia, in 2005, I remember it annoyed me that I had piles of cables, electronics, discs and data in my backpack. I am getting used to it. A couple of years back, I went to Damascus, and my professor wanted me to go to the souq, find a carpet-seller, and show him the (uploaded) photo he took of him a few years before. I stared at the prof in disbelief: did he think I would bring my widescreen macbook along on my holiday!?

Anyway. I remembered back to my jaunt through South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand back way yonder. Not able to read the papers or understand the news on telly, I only got glimpses of what went on in the world when I came to a large city and could buy a Newsweek. If I bothered. Or found a crumpled copy in some dusty mountain village in Sumatra. Grand and gruesome happenings in the world passed me by.

I dawdled, wandered, splashed, spluttered, lollygagged and pottered around, unaware of riots in Europe, unaware of riots down the road. I had several poste restante, and got news from Indonesia via my family. Four weeks later.

So now, we pack the internet. And in so doing, we pack our history, connections, friends and habits. And habits is the clue here. I was, back then, cut off. And in being cut off, I was forced to take part in what went on around me. At times it was tiring, at times the cultures and the demands on me was more than I liked, as a female Scandinavian travelling alone. I imagine that if I had internet back then, my 21 year-old self would be online whingeing about the locals, the annoying invasion of my personal space, the incomprehensible customs and reactions.
As it were, there was no Net, and slowly I learned to understand why things happened, learned to avoid it, live with it or enjoy it.

This is dangerous ground for me: I do not want to glorify the “good old days”. On the other hand, you could say that if I had had internet, I would have been able to connect with locals before I left; I could have googled incomprehensible cultural differences. I would have learned from that, with my fact-hungry, analytical left brain.

At one point, I became, relatively, “an old hand”. I saw people fresh of their planes, who blundered into and stamped over local customs and sensibilities. It made me cringe. Sometimes I could not explain why, other than “you don’t do that”. Right-brain stuff.

There are loss-and-gain, obviously. But the feeling of isolation; of being basically cut off (and yet part of a society) for months.. I wouldn’t mind that again. But it is not possible.

You cannot step twice into the same river.

-b

(selling goodies, Bukittingi, Sumatra, Indonesia)

(the images are all scans from my slides from back then)

I am thinking around information architecture, interaction design, human-computer interaction, infographics. You’d think that would be reasonably easy to find. Nah.

Some classify HCI under psychology, some see infographics as either arts or engineering. Some see it as information technology, but then from a programming perspective. Some see it as art, but then with crayons and brushes. Some see infographics as library studies or mathematics. Or “informatics”. In some cases, “information” is bundled with “education”, and on top of that is classes in pedagogy. With pictures of teachers and little children..

So what search terms do I use? Is this my fault, for being stupid at searching, is it that the obvious cross-field master I am looking for does not exist, or is it the relatively low-level information handling that is the problem? I cannot search for “masters degree usa information” – though this would be the lowest common denominator of what I am after. I want to work with information. Visually. Adding “visual” gives me a squillion hits in art.

At one large university I was asked to fill in a questionnaire, and doing that, I got the message that they do not accept applicants from my country… somehow, I do not believe that for a moment. It is disturbing; that the basic level of information gathering is obviously faulty: what else is not correct?

Not to mention the religious aspect. It is hard for Europeans to get their heads around universities with religious connections, connotations or allegiances. What does it actually mean? Why get religion into it? I find it a little disturbing, but suspect I don’t really know how it works.

ANSA, the association of Norwegian students abroad have a desperately outdated list of subjects. The only thing there that is vaguely related to what I am looking for is “engineering” or “art”. None of which, on their own, is anywhere near being relevant.

I have found one master programme, that seems to suit me, at one of the most prestigious universities – it was difficult to find, but once I got the pages, the information is clear and straight. But surely; I cannot rely on one application to one university, and so the hunt goes on.

There are engines. There are search engines for grad studies. They have the same problem; and I end up wading through piles and piles of irrelevant stuff. Am I “Arts and architecture”?.. not quite. “Computers and technology”? .. hmm, a little, but not entirely. Those engines do not give me courses I know exist; that tells me that not all courses are represented in those engines. Then what else is missing?

All I want is to play with complex information.

Why should that be so difficult?

At the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C., they have a programme that’s been going on for a number of years; The Human Origins Program. This is to bring evolution and research out there, mainly via the exhibition Hall of Human Origins. In the US, this is considered politics. I venture to say that in Europe this is considered history. So as the americans need to do sensible research, they also to a certain extent need to step carefully. Interesting, bizarre and a wee bit disturbing to me; this tip-toeing.

Scientists argue. Scientists have specialities, and some are extremely specialised in very detailed, at times small and obscure fields. Sometimes they want to share, sometimes not. Sometimes they dislike other scientists definitions, sometimes the overlap of fields can be enriching or frustrating. They work on projects, and they create the tools they need. It seems that they, for all sorts of reasons, creates their own databases; gather their data and information in forms that suits them best there and then. Not necessarily very sustainable, but if you don’t want to share your findings, well, I suppose you could have it inscribed on scrolls under your bed.

Anyway. Working on The Human Origins Program team is Dr. Matthew Tocheri, a paleoanthropologist specialising in the evolution of the hand and foot. Part of his job is to gather data in a cross-field database. This covers several specialist fields, including paleoanthropology, archeology, vertebrae zoology, geochronology, paleoecology, paleoenvironment and of course geology. He collects data wherever he can find it, from old publications, from fellow researchers. Apparently, it has not been attempted to collect data from these related fields together in this manner before. Matthew collects, and created a database that will accept different definitions, different names and different approaches. This is an exercise in flexibility, and therefore; sustainability.
Understanding that no data is also information.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler. – Einstein –

So. In the middle of this, we landed. Two computer engineering students, and one student of digital media. What could we do, and how on earth could we handle those specialist fields?!

The idea was to make a website, that would make it possible to handle these data, show relations and scope quicky and intuitively.

We drew, scribbled, and tried to get our heads around Matthews database. This is complex data with, at times, complex relations. What a field day, for a digital media student! Deep time, deep space…

This is the prototype, as it stands at the end of the project. Google maps, five timelines, and a field for data. It seems simple; it seems obvious, but the road was hard. I like to believe that to make something complex seem effortless is an art; and is the litmus test of a system like this. If you can think “of course, that is how it must be done, it is obvious” – it is the colombus’ egg. It is art, it is magic.
In reality; lots of work.

It is not easy. But it is simple. – House –

We had amazing days in Washington D.C., working with Matthew and the others in the Human Origins Program. (plenty of pictures here) It was relief, and an extreme privilege to work with solid data and talented, smart and dedicated people. The wonderful, beautiful feeling of working with real, sensible content, and not trying to sell sand in Sahara; creating designs and frameworks without content. It was mad, fab and hard work. We spend about six weeks all in all in D.C., and with the exception of one day and a hospitalisation, we worked at the museum every day. Not much sightseeing, not much fresh air. Back in Norway, we did pretty much the same…

There is a million small things to consider, building something like this. Personally, I am primarily interested in the overall structure, the architecture, the interface and the graphic design. To display scope is very important: if you’re looking for information, and you know nothing of the source, it must pretty easily show you that it might contain what you’re looking for or not. This is – as of yet – a site for students and scientists of the fields, and I think I can assume that they have a little more than a two-second attention-span. Still. Scope is absolutely essential.

This is in many ways infographics. I do obsess, though, over tiny, tiny details. The amazing privilege of being allowed to do both: play with ideas, overall structures, grand plans and gestures, and at the same time dig into tiny pixels.

An example of the detail-obsession, would be the angled text above the timeline icons. I really, really wanted them angled, and the amount of hassle and fiddling to make them, place them, and allow them to be clickable and roll-overs was unreal. Of course, as we kept inventing uses for them, I had to adjust, but it is just one example of obsessive fiddling that would easily have drowned in another project…

..and that brings me to the boys. Lars and Audun handled the programming and database part, while I obsessed with html, css, graphics, interface and structures. Bless them. Not only was it an enormous privilege to work with the anthropologists, but my team was the best. Of course they were, I hand-picked them myself ;-)

Confidence in nonsense is a requirement for the creative process. – M. C. Escher –

That I could fiddle, learn, dig and struggle with things I like, and at the same time important progress was made in other parts, was wonderful. I suspect the boys feel the same. We became a tightly knit team, and we had to talk through definitions and find a common language. We shared the dedication for the project, and nearly worked ourselves into collapse. It was hard, we all had to learn new things ourselves, we all banged fists on the table in frustration at times, but I’d do it all over again. There was plenty of compromises. And plenty of laughs. Ah, the giggles… I will miss that.

But out of the other end, came a prototype we are proud of, that others like and admire, that several people might be interested in, and I believe Matthew is happy with. We got top grades on the project, that I for one feel was the only option. It was not by far the most important thing, but feels good anyway, and the good people at the museum expected nothing less.

At the time of writing, the prototype is hosted on our servers, and only contains some of the data from the database. We hope, though, that it will go live from Smithsonian before x-mas. I am hoping they will continue to develop it; I hope we have been part of pointing out a direction.

Now, as I have finished my bachelor, new adventures beckons. If all goes well, there might be another project for the museum. I keep my fingers crossed, and take a few weeks well deserved holiday. It is summer, and I still have that indoor skin colour that I always thought was the trademark of geeks only…

And so three years ended. Higher education. Just as I got good at playing the game, it is over. It was a mixed kettle; these three years. Most of the courses seemed exciting on paper, and a good handful of them turned out to be dreadful. Pointless. Insulting. Yes, digital media production is a new-ish branch, and my university college a small one, but dmPro is clearly the stepchild of the IT department. A good deal of the lecturers there would rather not have us meddling in their pure, proper information technology. The sign of small minds.

I have learned though. Mainly because I wanted to. It seems, you could get through a bachelor without learning much; without much ability. The system is made to get as many as possible through, degrading the meaning of a bachelor, and offending the ones who actually work their asses off. At the end of the day, it is a yes or no question whether you have a degree, not always the grades, attitude or accomplishments. We are considered sheep; bachelor students.

They say the world becomes beautiful and exciting at master level. I will find out, in about a year.

I realise the system is not made for me, though. I am fifteen years too old. Of course, there are kids that are way smarter than me, but I have experience in spotting gobshait. I suspect some lecturers get used to having 18-20 years olds that tend to accept whatever bullshit they say. Not so easy, then, with that old hag in the front row being difficult.

I’ve had fun too. The last year was hard, hard work, close to breaking point. But I found a small handful of good people, and you can do anything, if you have good people. Talent, hard work and nonsense is essential.

Pictures from those years  here

So now I am unemployed, soon to be homeless, and the world of wonderful uncertainties unfold. New adventures.

Best of all. I can get out of this place.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

D.C. is a strange city; it feels like a bubble. It is a smallish, administrative city in a very very large and powerful country. It is rather anonymous. It seems, in this city of administration, power and museums, people live here for a few years, and it gives the city a neutral feel. I am sure the masses of security forces helps too. The city have some lovely, quirky neighbourhoods; places I could live. A little outside the centre, there is life. The city centre is over-dimensioned with bizarre architecture. A mish-mash of styles and taste. Sometimes it works, sometimes it is awful. A new nation cherry-picking world history.

We had the unbelievable privilege of working next to and with extremely dedicated, knowledgeable and kind people. Specialists in their fields, comfortable, sometimes eccentric, always friendly. We pretty much gatecrashed one guys office, and after our stay got extended, seemingly never left. Everyone either thought it perfectly fine, or did an excellent job of convincing us it was. I choose to believe it was genuine: all those anthropologists cannot be first rate actors as well. We kept the coffee brewing, and that seemed to be all that was required.

Our little contribution is not directly related; and us not being in their respective field was refreshing: to be able to ask stupid questions, to play with ideas. Form and content. Information technology calling human origins. We create what their knowledge and science is/will be channeled through. The aim is to make accessible something that is rather complex. I have been thinking hard for the last weeks, exhausting processes of twisting my brain into a knot, solving problems, keeping the main goal in sight while untying tiny problems, avoiding creating bigger ones. Being bugged by large problems while solving small ones. And sometimes the large problems presents solutions, if you don’t bother them too much for a while.

Thinking until it hurts, indeed. I bemoaned the lack of that in a previous post. Now I have created it for myself, and I get to taste my own medicine every day. It is inspiring and challenging. It hurts, and I love it. I find it hard to work on other things. This project have, on many levels, my full attention. It comes down to good people. If you have good people, you can do anything. Being rather misanthropic, good people are crucial.  I have had the luck of finding good team members, and the unbelievable luck of landing a project run by the best. To be a tiny, tiny little part of this. Is awesome.

There are plenty of walls to bang my head against. But it is learning and adventure all in one: it does not get any better than that.

Last pic on the roll, so to speak. The exhibition opens in six days… Good thing it is permanent, because it feels very wrong to miss out on it. One day we will have all the time in the world to dawdle, dilly-dally, saunter and meander.

Au revoir, D.C. ‘Till we meet again.

Took us 18 hours to get home this time. Not bad. AND my car started without a hitch, after three weeks in a swedish snowdrift.

We have this medium: it is free, it is flexible, it is far reaching. It is relatively new.
We should play with it. We should make things that are broken, we should break things that works. And then fix them. And then develop them. Then throw them in the bin, and go play with something else. Then build something out of broken parts and see what happens. Duct tape and superglue.

Soon, I will have finished my bachelor in digital media production. At this point, in the last semester, I am working on information architecture, information design, interaction design. Important stuff, absolutely. Very interesting. But after these three years, I feel restless and unfulfilled. Yes, you need to know the rules to be able to break them intelligently, but I was hoping for more play. More silliness in the name of education.

Myself and two guys are at the moment working on our bachelor thesis. The amount of project-controlling tools are distracting. There is a forest of tools and requirements, supposedly helpful, to get us to where we want to go. But the process of administrating these tools, setting them up, using them regularly, recording time sheets, short term goals, long term goals, documentation, deadlines, tracking documents, personal diaries, group diary, exchanging ideas, recording ideas, classifying ideas, meta, meta, meta…
This is supposedly the world of sensible engineers and how they work. But it is not. Out there in the real world, things work in mysterious, accidental and random ways. Sometimes dictated by company history and culture, sometimes dictated by what would be the most efficient here and now. Sometimes it is dictated by one wacky individual.

The world – and the internet – is full of information. Pin-point information and accuracy. Minuscule details.
Maybe this is because computers works on 0 and 1; count, for each, or, this, and, else, if. Precision. Computers are not canvasses; there are no buckets of paint, no waking up to files stored randomly, no organic parts, no decay, no stacks of papers falling down, requiring re-sorting and re-thinking. Computers are stupid. They do as they are told. It is difficult to see with new eyes; especially if your brain is trained in programming. This, and, or, else, if.

Maybe we should stop taking it so seriously. We don’t really need all this accuracy, all this information that tells me exactly, precisely some tiny detail, that I do not have the knowledge or wisdom to put into context. Fragments that do not make up a whole, tiny pieces of information, numbers, simplistic headlines.

We should make web pages with less information. Content, yes. Intelligently, certainly.
Transient, changeable, nomadic. Spanning aeons, making up connections. Compare, discard, ditch. Deliberate misalignment. Play. Arse around.

I have grown to care less and less for the technology as such, and I yearn more for what would push my imagination, make my brain hurt from thinking. Design is where science and art break even. Of course it hurts.

I study digital media. I was born in the early 70′. I am a dinosaur. My fellow students are 15+ years younger than me – born in another era, on a different planet. We learn roughly the same things from opposite directions; we each hold an end of the stick, so to speak. But we see everything in different shades. Some things comes naturally to me; they are lost. Sometimes the shoe is on the other foot.

New technology, new gadgets, new software, I need to instantly see a use for it, a purpose. I have no patience with gizmos that have no intrinsic value – a justification for existence, a value unto itself. Things that rests comfortably in their own existence. I would argue the same about art.

A few weeks back, I was up in the mountains, sans plan, direction, meaning; sans electricity, sans internet – and it struck me how much easier it would have been, could I look up accommodation, interesting places along the way, approximate time & distances, weather forecasts, trekking routes.
I discovered that my phone in fact have navigation. I’ve had it for over a year. I fiddled with it for two minutes, and then lost interest. And bought a map. I couldn’t be bothered. I will go, the weather will be what it will be, the sights surprising or boring, the accommodation, well, worse case, I’ll sleep in a ditch or in the car. Legends and stories do not come from trips that are minutely planned and goes accordingly. Nor surprises.

Sometimes the technology gets in the way, keeping me away from goals or desired direction. If I got lost in thick fog in the mountains, I would be happy to have a GPS to help me find my way, but if the weather is reasonable, the fiddling with buttons and gadgets would be annoying, invasive. People with their noses constantly stuck in a  phone, iPod or GPS annoys me no end. Beside, the worry that you might run out of batteries at some critical point. And you will. Trust me, I have some experience with that.

My learning curve is to learn technology. For my fellow students, the most educational would be to go without.
They are born with reasonable graphic user interfaces and applied technology, I am more or less born in medieval times. Developing a sense of direction; a feeling for maps. Gadgets comes naturally to them, I use few and discard most.

And that brings me to the tech stuff that actually works. Being a bookbinder in restoration, you’d be excused to think I would be a complete nazi regarding books. But I have been given an e-book reader, and it is simply brilliant! It works, it travels well. It rests in it’s own existence.
I wish I could.

Go oooon – guess!

“If you’re looking for a daily dose of anything, boblet’s wonderful blog isn’t for you.  This woman gives warning at the very top of her homepage: “If I have nothing to say, I won’t say it.”  And sometimes she doesn’t say anything, for weeks at a time.  But I check regularly to see if there might be something new, because the new invariably is quirky, fun, dense with meaning, and absolutely guaranteed to keep me thinking, until the next post.  She has written my single favorite blog entry of the last year, and when I get around to writing my response to her post, you’ll know which one it is.  In the meantime, where else can you find the adventures of Zapf Dingbats?”

Ah, Linda, the adventures of Zapf Dingbats and Comic Sans have been widely distributed – among the probably narrow bunch of font-freaks…

But she is right, I don’t write for the sake of hits, I write for… well. Myself, some people I wish read my stuff (maybe they do), and the few that I know do. This blog is a little like firing pottery: the end result will last for longer than I care to think about, and to publish should not be a race (nothing should be a race, come to think of it). There is no winning on the net. I like to think of the award as an award for silence. The rubbish I have not posted hopefully places the few things I have written in a better light.

Linda herself writes some of the best stuff I have come across; she writes beautiful prose, intelligently on anything you care to think of, and then some. Part of the award is to nominate another five blogs of outstanding quality, and I can only say it is a shame it would be bad form to give the award back to her. The world if full of so much rubbish, it is balm to find coherence, intelligence, sense and acute observation.

And that brings me over to the reason why it has taken me so long to publish this piece. I am not really a blogger, I am not a blog-reader, so to find five recipients was not such a simple task, yet one that deserved careful consideration. I have not been able to come up with five, so the magic number is three, and I shall count on being forgiven. Rather three excellent ones, than five not so. I shall maybe go a little outside the Arte Y Picos scope, but I will argue that writing is art, observation is true talent. To Linda, and to you three: thank you. Don’t stop.

Here you go – my three thinkers. In no particular order. I leave it to you to explore.

Drink design

Stonehead

Illusive joy