If my worst days are like today, then I think I’m doing just fine. The two effectors: Flat tire on the car & getting locked out of the house. The latter was my fault, the former a freak accident…

Went for a run this early afternoon. I had planned my day perfectly…my run was to be 45 minutes long, giving me just enough time to shower, eat, and make it to school right on time for my 1:30 meeting. I was on my way, about 1/4 mile away from home when all of a sudden my right ankle started giving out. “Crap” was all I could think. I’ve been working so hard not to injure my knee, then all of a sudden my ankle is in major pain. I walked back to the house, convinced that my pain was due to the fact that I was wearing ankle socks, causing major coldness. As I walked past my car, I realized that the rear passenger tire was completely flat. Upon inspection, I noticed that there was a big metal slab jammed into the top of the tire (foul play?). I went in, put on some longer socks, and headed back out to change the tire, mad that I wouldn’t get my full run. I changed the tire (all by myself, there’s a first time for everything 🙂 and headed back out for my run. It was an ok run…though shorter than I would have liked. I’ll make up for it tomorrow. Longer socks totally did the trick, still injury free.

When I got back from the run, I turned the door knob only to realize that I was locked out with no cell phone and no one inside. Luckily, I was able to find a way to break in to the house. It was much easier than I would have expected, which is *really really* scary. I was able to shower and eat and get to school only 5 minutes late, which is good considering all the mishaps.

So now I’ll have to buy a new spare tire. Big woop. Hopefully it won’t be too expensive. I guess it’s better to have a tire pop in your driveway than when you’re driving on it. The funny thing is that I just filled my tires with air yesterday…could I have messed it up somehow? Who knows…

I think my most recent project is going well. We finished the bulk of our 3-5 page single spaced paper today. From here on it will be rewording and reworking, just to make things sound good (and right).

I’ve really been thinking about the Contextual Design process lately…it’s what I have been bred on. It’s in my roots. It just feels right. In every other project I have worked on, I have gone in to the idea generation phase with a relatively blank slate. My designs are creative, but I just have not been at all comfortable with them. After doing Contextual Inquiry and modeling, I feel really comfortable in generating ideas. I feel like I’ve deserved the right to create human-centered designs. I think it comes down to the fact that I’m a really visual person. If I can look at human behavior, then strip it down into its smallest pieces by way of external representations, then I am more likely to understand the real problems at hand. But maybe I’m just not thinking deeply enough. Perhaps I’m not opening myself up to other lines of thought.

Is it really true that one should play their weaknesses in school? Should I drop the things I know and head blindly into the unknown? Or maybe I can play my strengths and burrow further into the intricacies of cognition and design. Do I go for breadth or depth? I need to answer these questions for myself. All I’m saying is that I never truly realized exactly what it meant to be an HCI/Designer with a Cognitive Science background until I gave my Distributed/External Cognition talk last week. It didn’t go well for a few reasons:

1. I had not thoroughly prepared the material. This was due in large part to the fact that I decided to change my topic at the last minute.
2. I did not convincingly make my point. Probably because I’m a bit inexperienced at making presentations.
3. And finally, I think most of the members of the class do not think of design from the angle I do. This is due to the fact that they don’t have backgrounds similar to mine. I could have set up the presentation so that it would have been easier for a general audience to decipher…but failed to do so

I’ll have to figure out a way to have my cake and eat it too. There must be a way. There’s no reason that I shouldn’t be able to focus on aspects of cognition while acquiring the breadth of knowledge that I would like to have. I can do it, because “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog gone it…people like me.”

Ah…Graduate School…