During my final wintersession of graduate school, I am working on two projects. One is a book documenting the story of Nancy MacIntyre through collected archives and interviews. The other is an exploration of anchoring online content to a physical place, in the form of an interface to this thesis website that responds to live weather data from where I'm located when I'm writing.

You might be noticing a pattern here. My daily life is once again focused on designing two of my favorite things: books and blogs. That I am designing these two things, at this time in my thesis, is not by accident. I wanted to see what sorts of intrigue emerged when I was forced to plan the linear narrative of a book, and the non-linear narrative of a website, concurrently.

Aside from making my brain hurt, it has thrown into sharp focus something I've never fully recognized in my own process, and that is the idea of modules.

Despite not having formal training as a software engineer, my love of modules comes from a strategy in software development called object-oriented programming. If you see acronyms that start with OO, chances are they relate to the use of discrete, re-usable modules of logic that can be copied endlessly, and then modified or extended individually to suit their intended use. Its extremely efficient, and its use has made a lot of our modern computing prowess possible.

I see elements of object-oriented programming in semiotics and visual systems, although less formal and rigid. And taking a quick look at my past work, modules are EVERYWHERE:

Reusable word molds that can be ordered and reordered in the landscape to create new meaning:

Cards, encoded with meta data, that allow you to sort and query printed matter:

An exhibit filled with hundreds of boxes in three sizes, each with a different level of information on them, that can be stacked in a million different ways:

A series of t-shirts printed with reasons people feel like outsiders, but become insiders because they're all a set of the same system: