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…<\/p>\n
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 \ud83d\ude42 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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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…<\/p>\n
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). <\/p>\n
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<\/i> problems at hand. But maybe I’m just not thinking deeply enough. Perhaps I’m not opening myself up to other lines of thought. <\/p>\n
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: <\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
Ah…Graduate School…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hci-topic"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}