Category archives: Design Theory

My talk from PyCon.ca is now up, you can watch it here:

As mentioned a long time ago in the midst of some speculation; we were able to tour the Scotland Street School while in Glasgow.  This was Mackintosh's last built work (during his life).  I've uploaded our photos from the School to a Picasa album so that people wanting a reference to what's being discussed ...

As regular readers will know, I've been working (slowly) on a rewrite of my BIS Thesis in Design Epistemology.  The original thesis was huge, covering way more material than anyone should attempt to cover in one thesis, and as a result it was rather cursory in its coverage of most of the areas on which ...

I'm going to have to find myself someone to act as reader for the thesis rewrite.  Jacinta helped enormously when I was writing the original, as she constantly demanded that I explain the details I was assuming other people understood.  Should try to find some Architecture students to review and challenge me on it.  Maybe ...

Working some of the outline points on critique into the thesis.

I've been playing idly with how to get back into academia.  Dumb thoughts that keep coming up:

• convince some design school to use my (assumed finished) thesis as an introduction for first-year students, point at that and see if some school would let ...

Human beings are playful creatures.  If we are to understand human design and intention we must understand the process of play.  The professional designer is in some way paid to retain the plasticity and playfulness of the childlike mind, to be able to play with ideas and forms in ways that most adults have long ...

I got about 4 hours of writing in today.  You'd think that would be a huge amount of material, yet it's just a few paragraphs here and there and some editing.  I've been going through the original outline looking for "lost points" that need to be covered.  Quite a few of them even in just ...

Section on Associations and Identification has now landed in Of Design.  It doesn't yet include all of the material from the original thesis, but it's most of the stand-alone material from there.

So I sat down this evening and did what I was supposed to do on Monday, namely look at my thesis and work out how to finish it in a reasonable period of time.  Very exciting.  It's been a long time since I worked on the ideas, and as I read through the work so ...

My point-form outline for my 1997 thesis was 30 pages of single-spaced 10pt text.  It's somewhat daunting going through it and picking out which pieces need to be in a document for first-year students.  For tonight I dropped in the "Play in Design" section as a fairly quick rough draft.  I figure it eventually deserves ...