Category archives: Design Theory

Discussions of Design Epistemology or more generally thoughts about design.

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BarCamp this weekend ("Hacking perception, the core perceptual cycle")


Been trying to think of what would be the most interesting thing to present to a group of people with wide-ranging interests. I've considered all the technical stuff, but really, yawn. Instead I'm thinking of offering a short talk on human perception and cognition from a hacker's perspective; how do you approach an understanding ...

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Fried Mikey (Don't put on jeans and go for long walks when you're sun-fried)


Went out to Woodbine beaches on Saturday. Spent the whole afternoon out in the sun and wound up lobster-red across my whole front (including my feet) and back. Walked down to Sacha's barbecue when we got home. The jeans I wore down rubbed the sunburn into a nasty glowing red patch.

Also went to Sacha's ...

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First few pages on "Play" drafted (Nowhere near as much as I should have written these past two days...)


I've begun work on the "Play" section of the thesis rewrite. Its a fairly large section, covering 8 or 9 distinct types of play that are important to designers. In two days I only managed to write up two pages of text, along with a lot of false starts and deletions.

Anyway, here's a sample ...

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Of Design finally checked into SVN (And the section on depth is finished (well first draft of it)...)


Productive afternoon at Linux Caffe. Have finished off the first draft of the section on Depth and Complexity. The last few sections are too brief still, but the basic message is there. Next section in the original outline is the one on play, but I've skipped the "discussions courtyard" (keeping in mind that the original ...

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Epistemology the 10,000m overview (With way too many isms...)

Since Tim asked whether I believe philosophy is a linear march of ideas maybe some of you will get a kick out of this obviously over-linearised set of notes (linked below) for tomorrow's talk at the Toronto Western Philosophy Club. The linearity is mostly a side-effect of planning a talk, no need to shout ...

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New draft of "Of Design" up (Oh what a creative title...)


Got a couple of hours work done on the thesis rewrite this afternoon. Basically cleaning up and finishing the first draft of the section on consistency and subtlety in depth. Also quite a bit of editing/review of the depth section in general. Some day soon I'm going to figure out why OpenOffice refuses to spell ...

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Long term carreer goals (Pleasant little talk at U of T)


The Knowledge Media Design Institute is the group that Suzanne and others at the Philosophy department suggested as a good match for my continuing studies. Their lecture series happened to show up on the Toronto Philosophy discussion board, so off I trundled to check out the program.

The talk was by Rodney Hoinkes and Stacey ...

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Okay, finished with the already-published stuff (Garn that took longer than I would have thought...)


I think I've pretty much got all of the currently-published projects in the portfolio now. There were quite a few nice pieces that just fell through the cracks, also a few projects I'd completely overlooked because they weren't in the previous version (such as the PIM environment). I really should have statistics and introductions on ...

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Finally getting the portfolio cleaned up (Years and years later...)


This isn't really a theory item, but oh well :) . I decided (on looking through Michelle's portfolio this evening) that I really needed to get my own ship in order. First step was to get rid of the cheesy hard-coded pages and move to an actual application to generate pages for individual projects and ...

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