Category archives: Design Theory

Spent the whole day at Linux Caffe (~13 hours). Putatively working on my thesis for the first 6 or 7 hours, but that broke down into conversations for about 80% of the time. After that I just gave up and talked to people, though there was a brief episode where I tried to get the ...

For those interested in discussing ideas in Philosophy, our little group meets in the Daily Express Cafe @ 6pm Wednesday (it's the cafe in the Hotel about 1/2 block West of St. George Street on Bloor). Generally interesting discussions, worth checking out.

Of course, i forgot that tomorrow is also Pearl's birthday party, so I'll ...

Okay, it's obviously way too early to be thinking about publishing drafts of the thesis rewrite, so let's do that. I'm planning to export the document after each day of writing, regardless of how messy the area I'm working on is (normally the last couple of pages). Purpose here is both to make me focus ...

Spent the whole day on the section(s) on Depth and Familiarity. Eventually realised that there should be two sections. The one on Depth and Frustration introduces the ideas from Venturi and their (mis)application, then the one on Depth and Familiarity explaining the "class split" in design. Anyway, enough caveats, here's the first section (the second ...

Editing mostly today, though I did finally force myself to sit down and write something, even if it isn't particularly well written or long. Anyway, for the rabid design theory fans, here it is...

Designers often focus primarily on one of either abundant or refined depth. You will often see discussions of “textural richness” of ...

The chapter on depth is really very long. The introduction to this section is a little to strong when read without that context, the division outlined here is one of many aspects of depth that gets discussed; you don't need to point out that there are others just as important:

For the purposes of designers, ...

This is the section just after the introduction. I've edited the introduction slightly (added a few paragraphs of clarification), but it's still basically the same. The section here deals with the question of how we perceive (detect) depth in our environment:

Human beings generally do not know everything about the environments they inhabit. We also ...

I really want to try teaching this to people. It's so difficult to judge whether I'm going way too fast, or way too slow without some idea of what people can process (and what they already know).

Anyway, on a lark, here's the introduction to the section on Depth, this is now the third rewrite ...

Been spending most of the day on thesis work. Wound up doing an hour of work-work too since the customer needed it. All through the day as I've been writing I've been having the itch to drop writing and code on OpenGL-ctypes. It's a feeling I haven't had in a long while, basically just means ...

Spent the afternoon out of the house in the hope of avoiding catching whatever flu Rosey has come down with. However, had to return to get any real work done, so by tomorrow I'll likely be out of commission for a day or two.

Was a pleasant afternoon, though honestly I'd rather have spent it ...