Anyway, I’ve read a little on the difference between working in industry vs academia. One of the marked differences is the meeting structure. In faculty meetings, professors like to endlessly pontificate and debate. In business meetings, people will do that to some extent, but then there’s usually a well-defined action items list as a result. Because inevitably, there’s a PM cracking the whip.

I definitely saw that today. Grant it, though, our faculty meetings are only once a month. So, you know, people have a lot to say when they don’t meet very often. There will also be smaller departmental meetings in between. I find myself doing the same thing I did while working in industry: I was always trying to find ways to bring academia to industry. Now I can totally see myself trying to find ways to bring industry to academia. Like action item lists and scrum!

I think a lot about how the focus of what I’m producing as an educator is so different. In imparting my passion, knowledge, and point-of-view, the product of my work now resides inside the mind of another human being. Trippy.

As opposed to interaction products that are experienced in the head, but exist outside of it. They’re just visitors, really. Kind of interesting when you think about it.

Anyway, my first class is Wednesday afternoon. I’m finishing the syllabus and plotting out the design jam exercises we’ll be doing as icebreakers (I learned about design jams at IxD ’10 in Savannah). Should be fun! I’ll try to take pictures….

They say those who can, do and those who can’t, teach. I say that’s bullshit, based on my own experience with designers in the “real” world. Those who should be doing, but don’t. Can’t, actually. Even if they wanted to. On the contrary, the design professors I had at the University of Washington were not only great teachers (well, okay, one of them really sucked, but I’m not naming any names), but they were also amazing, practicing, award-winning, kickass designers. Because that’s the thing about academia. You have to do both. Scholarship and practice. But for some reason, not everyone sees it this way. I often detect a lot of skepticism from other designers when I express my interest in and passion for academia. I wonder why…. Americans are known for their anti-intellectualism, but I always assume that designers will be different. I know academia isn’t perfect, but it plays an important role. Imagine the world of design without it.

My first eight hours as a bonafide academic were spent in a new faculty orientation in an intimate conference room with about 20 other new faculty from varying disciplines. For example, one was a visiting modern dance professor from Bulgaria. Another was a mathematics professor. Two were psychology Ph.Ds. There were also biologists, linguists, and historians. But most exciting to me were the ones I met in computer science, information technology, mechanical engineering, and my own field, design. I’m already setting the ground for future collaborations.

One of the computer science professors was telling me about her work on wireless health monitoring technology; i.e., wearable computing devices that monitor insulin levels. So I told her about the book I recently read on Design Meets Disability. She was amazed and mentioned that they usually didn’t even know how the devices would look on people until the products were actually finished and given to the patients to wear. Say wha??? No designers? No prototyping? No usability testing? She said they’d never really considered any of these things, but hey, what great ideas!

She has my number now. We’re going to have lunch.

Anyway, here’s a peak into my empty office. I bought a desk at IKEA this weekend but couldn’t get the door unlocked.  I’m calling a Human Scale sales rep about my chair tomorrow. I need shelves but was informed today that facilities probably won’t install any. If that is in fact the case, I’m adding this task to Will’s honey-do list. If you don’t have a handyman as a husband, you should get one. Honestly. They’re great to have around.

All the baristas I’ve loved (i.e., a portrait of each barista who pulled shots for me during my last trip to Seattle, minus a couple – when watching the slideshow, make sure to click on “Show Info” to view the captions). In case you don’t know, I’m obsessed with good espresso. Living in Seattle for 10 years spoiled me like that. So, I wanted to pay a little tribute by photographing my baristas.

I always asked before taking their photos, and all of them were willing to pose for me. With the exception of the pretty blonde barista with the inverted bob who told me she was camera shy. I stopped again at Stumptown for my last shots before heading to the airport and was really bummed when she said no, being she was my last Seattle barista for a while.

The other two barista shots I have were taken with my iPhone on my first two days there, before I decided to do a bonafide series with my nice camera and lens. One was at Ladro on lower Queen Anne. The other at Vivace’s Capitol Hill location.

Anyway, Seattle baristas, I love you! Now that I don’t have several of you on every corner to pull delicious shots for me, your knowledge, skills, tattoos, hotness – I mean seriously. Look at you. You’re all fucking hot. – and expensive machines are sorely missed.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. And this is the hallway where I’ll be spending the immediate future: the Visual Arts department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. See all those posters? Student work. But my crit walls will be filled with iPad comps and wireframes. Because honestly, who designs posters anymore? Although I have to admit, they are good as tools for working out basic visual hierarchy problems.

I’m back from my 11-night love affair with Seattle (what can I say? I count that city as one of the great loves of my life) and am now diving headfirst into my life as a fulltime academic. I have a few things to help me with things like time management – have you heard of the Pomodoro technique? – and plenty in terms of research to keep me busy. I’ve been accepted to present at an undisclosed conference next year so will be researching for that, as well as delving into what it takes to start a design lab, which I’ll chronicle here. I like to think that it won’t be too much different from starting a restaurant. The culinary arts and design have a lot in common.

Beer tastings are awesome. We will definitely be doing another one soon. Here are Will’s notes from our menu planning session. And for a great book on beer, check out this one. Oh, and there are also great pairing guidelines from Wegman’s.

One of the things I really love about cooking is the design of culinary tools. In my honest opinion, the Kitchen Aid stand mixer deserves a place at MoMA. It’s a design classic, an icon of American design and mechanical engineering. Consequently, I find excuses to spend money at Williams-Sonoma or Sur La Table any chance I get.

Speaking of Williams-Sonoma, there’s one just a few miles from our house. I stopped there today because I’ve been eyeing this lemon juicer in their catalog. It’s designed by Chef’n, a product design company based in Seattle whose philosophy toward kitchen gadgets is a lot like OXO’s; i.e., ergonomically and user friendly. How apropos, given that Seattle is a design-centered city obsessed with food. Seattle, as the French would say, est une vrai gourmande!

Anyway, I have this brussels sprouts recipe that I make on a regular basis, maybe a few times a month. It calls for half a squeezed lemon. For the longest time, I’ve been using the top half of a metal citrus squeezer that I bought at IKEA long ago. It’s the kind where you twist the lemon around the metal cone. But I’ve long since lost the bottom part of this juicer, so squeezing lemons can be a pain. I use a small plate to catch the juice, but the metal cone part slips around and … yeah, it’s lame.

But buying this juicer and using it tonight made me so appreciative of good design and especially, the engineering that great design can’t exist without. And I thought about how good design and great cooking are similar in oh…let me count the ways:

Rhythm + balance.

In food, rhythm and balance exist not only in the preparation of food, but in the delicate and nuanced balance of flavors and chemical reactions that can mean the difference between a great meal and a failed attempt.

Texture.

Wow. Texture, of course! Think of all the wonderful, amazing textures that different foods embody, and consider a meal without it. As in a designed object, texture in food adds richness and complexity. And pleasure. Masticulation is an interaction between humans and food that provides an intense satisifaction. Imagine if, for the rest of your life, you were resigned to eating every meal pureed or liquefied. Go on, picture it. Sad, no?

Color.

Color is such an amazing thing in food. It’s basically food’s way of talking to us. An indicator of the nutritional value of food. As in design, color gives meaning. Lots of meaning. It also provides an emotional aspect to food that would be otherwise missing if everything we ate were black and white or shades of gray. I can handle Mies and Le Corbusier in small doses when it comes to architecture and urban planning, but when I’m eating, I want Jane Jacobs, all the way!

Unity + variety.

Consider tomatoes, for example. Or cheese or wine or breads or chocolate. These are all unified in their base chemical/genetic structure, but infinitely varied in the expression of these chemicals and/or genes.

Scale + contrast.

Scale in food could range from size: watermelons compared to cherries, for example. Or taste, perhaps. The mildness of milk compared to the spiciness of a jalapeño pepper. With contrast leveraged in preparing and serving food. Pairing crunchy with soft. Sweet with salt. Fresh with aged. Contrast in cooking and design, like texture, enriches the user experience.

Iteration.

This has to be where design and cooking are the most alike. In cooking like design, fail and fail fast, right? I’ve made many a recipe more than once and iterated as I went along. I also do lots and lots of user testing. Seriously, isn’t licking the batter the quintessential usability study?

Which brings me to the last design element I’ll use in this analogy: interaction. Cooking and good food are things that bring people together. Like good product design, they inspire relationships; people interacting and emoting and conversing and laughing and arguing and crying and smiling and nourishing and … living. That’s probably the best part about it.

On that note, good night. I’m off to have some of that salted caramel ice cream I made last week before I go to bed….

Disclaimer: This is my blog and I’ll bitch and whine if I want to.

I watched the new iPhone video last for the first time last week and paused for a moment after it ended, wondering if there were any women on the team that built it. “Where are the girls?,” I wondered. Based on the proliferation of white males in that video, the girls were one step up from barefoot and pregnant; i.e., at home, watching babies.

While in grad school, I took several seminars from design critic Natalia Ilyin. For one entire semester, we looked at the semiotics of stock photography and how stock photo houses like Getty and Corbis shape societal perceptions by controlling the images we see. We talked about imagery – of course – and about power and politics and stereotypes. About the signifier and the signified.

I learned many things from Natalia’s guided inquiries. One was to never take anything at face value. Another was that in imagery, what you don’t show can have as much effect on meaning as what you do. I wondered what she would say if this video were something brought to her class for discussion.

Through this filter, I critique the iPhone video. As a female who has spent the last 10 years in the design + technology industry, the omission of my gender in this video hits a nerve. Why this video, I’m not sure. It’s not like white male domination in Apple’s upper management is new. Or any other tech company, for that matter. Every tech company I worked for in Seattle was the same; guys who dominated the tech conversation every chance they got. Nice guys who weren’t guilty of sexism via commission, but via oblivious, status quo omission instead. When I worked in the product design studio at Teague, I was the only female designer. The rest were short Asian guys or Brits. Needless to say, I felt out of place and grossly underrepresented.

When I worked at another Seattle firm, one of the first questions they asked me during the interview was, “Can you make things look wet and shiny?” Excuse me? Wet and shiny?? Like what? Like a 20-something pin-up’s baby-oiled ass in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? Like Angelina Jolie’s juicy, gloss-dripping, fallatio-prepped lips? Or maybe a Playboy centerfold’s lubricated vagina in a porn spread? Don’t even get me started on this whole “wet and shiny” UI style that’s been every male designer’s wet dream since who-knows-when. It warrants a feisty discussion all by itself.

Anyway, just look at this video. And notice what isn’t there. No women, except for the beautiful brunette who, based on my western stereotypes and assumptions, is a housewife. Just note the lighting. She’s portrayed in mid-daylight playing with a baby and then filming a toddler; i.e., a stay-at-home mom. And look at the guy we’re led to assume is her husband. Most likely in a hotel on a business trip. While she’s a kept woman, taking care of the beautiful white babies –his perfect little contributions to the gene pool– he’s off somewhere else, taking care of more important things. Like wet and shiny interfaces. And all of this is narrated to us by…white guys. Reverse discrimination, you say? Stop picking on white guys.

Whatever. I’m sick of it.

I write this post out of frustration, knowing there must be other female designers in the tech industry who share my feelings. Don’t get me wrong, I like guys. Really, I do. The two other product designers on my team at NPR are both male and they’re awesome. I value their expertise, critique, and collaboration. They’re both younger, too, and aren’t as guilty of some of this bullshit as older guys are. And my husband is an amazing man whom I’m very lucky to love and be loved by in return.

But really, I’m just tired. I’m tired of being ignored in meetings, tired of not being tapped for my technical knowledge or perspective because I don’t have a penis, tired of being talked over and looked through. Tired of wishing my breasts weren’t so close to my face because then maybe some of the guys at work wouldn’t have such a hard time looking me in the eye.

And I would love to know the make-up of the Apple design teams. What percentage are women? What role do women play in the design of these life-changing products we use? Why were there none featured in this video?

Hopefully, women at Apple mean more than beautiful kept things and making things “wet and shiny”.

But criticisms of G.D.P. go deeper than just its use, or misuse, by politicians. For years, economists critical of the measure have enjoyed spinning narratives to illustrate its logical flaws and limitations. Consider, for example, the lives of two people — let’s call them High-G.D.P. Man and Low-G.D.P. Man. High-G.D.P. Man has a long commute to work and drives an automobile that gets poor gas mileage, forcing him to spend a lot on fuel. The morning traffic and its stresses aren’t too good for his car (which he replaces every few years) or his cardiovascular health (which he treats with expensive pharmaceuticals and medical procedures). High-G.D.P. Man works hard, spends hard. He loves going to bars and restaurants, likes his flat-screen televisions and adores his big house, which he keeps at 71 degrees year round and protects with a state-of-the-art security system. High-G.D.P. Man and his wife pay for a sitter (for their kids) and a nursing home (for their aging parents). They don’t have time for housework, so they employ a full-time housekeeper. They don’t have time to cook much, so they usually order in. They’re too busy to take long vacations.

As it happens, all those things — cooking, cleaning, home care, three-week vacations and so forth — are the kind of activity that keep Low-G.D.P. Man and his wife busy. High-G.D.P. Man likes his washer and dryer; Low-G.D.P. Man doesn’t mind hanging his laundry on the clothesline. High-G.D.P. Man buys bags of prewashed salad at the grocery store; Low-G.D.P. Man grows vegetables in his garden. When High-G.D.P. Man wants a book, he buys it; Low-G.D.P. Man checks it out of the library. When High-G.D.P. Man wants to get in shape, he joins a gym; Low-G.D.P. Man digs out an old pair of Nikes and runs through the neighborhood. On his morning commute, High-G.D.P. Man drives past Low-G.D.P. Man, who is walking to work in wrinkled khakis.

How about you? Are you Low-G.D.P. Man or High-G.D.P. Man?

Anyway….

I’m thinking about design labs, lately. I’ll tell you why later. But here’s a list I’ve started:

• The Bauhaus
• Basel
• Rural Studio
• Project M
• Project H
• Stanford’s d:School (they just moved in to a new building, by the way)
• MIT Design Lab
• PieLab

I’m really interested in the effects of design labs on the communities in which they’re functioning and how they tie in to the writings of my favorite urbanist, Richard Florida. To be explored….