In 2001, I quit my 50k job* working as an interface designer for Canada’s 1st interactive tv provider — iMagic TV in Saint John, New Brunswick — to start a grad degree at the University of Alberta. My boyfriend and…
+5 for a useless critique
Criticism, or critique, is a well accepted practice in design*: designers cycle (or iterate) through making-thinking-remaking, until they become reasonably satisfied with the emergent result, or they run out of time and energy (hopefully the former). At key intervals within…
stretch quests: searching for discomfort, as design practice
I’m on stage. I’m nude, and I’m reading the first chapter of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. This naked reading is my 40th birthday present to myself. I’m uncomfortable, keenly aware I am at least 15 years senior to all the other…
happy students, reading on lawns
In 2001, I was an MDes student at the University of Alberta. Having worked as a web designer previous to my switch to Academia, and thanks to the digital bewilderment of my professors, I got the gig of redesigning the University…
questioning design: a strategy for the 21c
In his 1973 edition of Design for the Real World, Victor Papanek calls out advertising designers for persuading “people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have”, and industrial designers for creating unsafe, unnecessary, “tawdry idiocies” to be…
but first, what is design?
2014, Susan G. Komen partnered with Baker Hughes, a leader in hydraulic fracturing equipment, to raise breast cancer awareness among (mostly male) oil field workers. Baker Hughes donated $100,000 to the Foundation, then painted 1000 drill bits used in fracking…