We installed our work in the convention center yesterday, part of a series of preparations in anticipation of the Graduate Thesis show that will open this Thursday. I set up a camera and tripod and made a couple makeshift videos of the event!

When my father pulled our new 9600bps modem out of its box in the summer of 1991, and installed it in the family computer, everything changed. We were not alone in taking that first curious step towards a more networked society, but what distinguishes my story is that my generation is one of the last to be able to remember that exact moment when the Internet entered our lives. For the generations after us, this speed and interactivity will have always been there, but for us there was a very obvious shift -- a "things will never be the same" moment -- that deeply informs the way we work, and the way we design.

I have spent my life trying to reconcile two opposing reactions to this shift. On the one hand, I react as a programmer -- the grown-up version of my twelve-year-old self, who immediately used that dial-up connection to log into Prodigy, and to teach herself html -- and find that the Internet world is a fascinating social experiment, teeming with new ideas and accumulated knowledge. On the other hand I react as a designer -- a person who values the craft and skill inherent in handmade experiences -- and feel a deep sense of loss for the more analog world that I had such a short time to inhabit. Pervading both of these responses is an awareness that technology, the web in particular, is taking over certain aspects of design with increasing speed and efficiency, but not much soul.

View the entire summary (PDF)

"We, therefore, the delegates, with plenary powers, of the people of Texas, in solemn convention assembled, appealing to a candid world for the necessities of our condition, do hereby resolve and declare, that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a free, sovereign, and independent republic, and are fully invested with all the rights and attributes which properly belong to independent nations; and, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions, we fearlessly and confidently commit the issue to the supreme Arbiter of destinies of nations."

I have often wondered at the dual histories I learned growing up. The first is the classic American creation myth - with a cast of characters like Uncle Sam and George Washington, Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. And the second you might call the Texas creation myth, with characters like Sam Houston, Stephen F Austin, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and the nefarious (and gum chewing) General Santa Anna. We have our own battles and our massacres, our songs and our Pledge of Allegience (which always comes after the US one). People joke that its like a whole other country, but in many ways they are more right than they realize.

Today is the 173rd anniversary of the Texians convening in Washington-on-the-Brazos to declare their independence from Mexico, culminating with the words above. The idea that we pass down histories of our heritage through heros and stories and songs has always fascinated me, particularly when I could lay claim to two of them growing up within the same country.

I am beginning to understand that the phrase "coded by hand" does not exist by accident. The process of writing code can be as intimate, and as handmade, as setting a line of type on a press bed. And building in this new medium, as I have come to practice it, is as much an act of design as the graphic design itself.

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:

Thinking about the weather, and what social function it serves in conversation, is informing the way I think about generating digital form with it online. As a part of my design process for Open Research, I have been trying to write down the different ways that I talk to people about the weather:

There was the woman who works at the risd:store, who remarked on how cold it was while I signed my credit card statement. There was Ethan, who talked about the weather while taking the elevator to unlock my classroom after I forgot my key. We talked about the weather for a full 10 minutes in my Web Design class, where everyone had to share their reactions to the recent cold spell. My radiators don't work, or Should I buy a hat? The guy who fills in for Nick (at the gravel parking lot near CIT) remarked on how cold it was when I was leaving the lot yesterday.

We're in the middle of a particularly cold spell, even for Rhode Island, and it seems like everyone here is talking about it!

When my grandfather Rex built the house I grew up in, he made sure there were fireplaces in every room. If 1960s fire code had allowed for fireplaces on the second floor, I'm sure he would have put them there, too, but as it was, the total count today stands at three. Never forgetting that the house was situated on the solid limestone bedrock of north Texas - a place that rarely saw sub-freezing temperatures, much less snow - he was infamous for jacking up the air conditioning on Christmas morning so that he could have all hearths blazing together when the family arrived for dinner.

In later years my parents added a chiminea in the side courtyard, which brought the active fireplace count to four on Christmas morning. To say my family has a fascination with the fireplace would be an understatement, as evidenced by this tableau on Christmas morning:



As if four weren't enough, the crisp, vibrant colors of the Yule Log in HD were on continuous loop during the festive gathering. This holiday tradition, once limited to the New York area, but broadcast across the nation in the wake of 9/11, is now something of a cultural phenomenon. InHD broadcasts the crackling fire along with two spinoffs - a snowman, and snow falling on cedars. It has its own fan website. And, for a mere $1.99, you can have the Yule Log on your iPhone.

Mostly I find it all pretty entertaining, but it also makes me think about the ways that we use our gadgetry to recreate the basic human experience of sitting in front of a fire.

What compels someone to film fire and put it on television?

"Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."
- Robert Irwin*

I've always liked the quote, and enjoy the idea of becoming as aware of the way we look at things as we are of what we're actually seeing. Its a concept that has floated to the surface many times over the course of the last semester, but this week, as my two home towns begin to overlap each other, I have seen this idea of Irwin's in a new way.

One of my primary "jobs" over the next couple of days is to gather a collection of images to put onto a digital frame, which will ultimately become a Christmas gift for my paternal grandmother, Mina, who is 87. Not only am I to gather them, put them in some sort of order, and format them for the 16:9 aspect ratio of the screen, but it is also important that I add in an easily-readable system of captions.

Captions like:
"Katy. Your granddaughter."
"Easton, your great-grandson."

My grandmother is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's Disease. For her, forgetting the name of the thing she sees is a daily occurrence, and has nothing to the perception of art, or with a willing phenomenological experience of the world around her. It frustrates her, that she can't bring the words she clearly used to know into the part of her brain where she can speak them. Memories of her childhood and early adulthood are strong and clear, but the conversation she had an hour earlier is gone forever. Her socializing instinct is still strong, but in her condition that means she initiates the same conversation again and again.

What happens to your understanding of place when you literally cannot remember it?

* I have seen this quote a few times in the last few months. Once in my friend Elana's most excellent thesis presentation, and again in some of the phenomenology reading associated with my Network Landscapes class this past semester. As an artist, Irwin is interested in the way we perceive space, and my favorites of his of work attempt to shift the way viewers are experiencing the environment around them using light and color.

I am sitting here, in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by boxes. I am staying at home for the holidays for the next two weeks, and in the few days I've been here, I have not been able to stop myself from opening up a few of them and poking around inside. One was filled with reams of sheet music, and another filled with shoe boxes neatly packed with cassette tapes. The best boxes are marked with that magic word (for me, at least): genealogy.

[Although I never met her, I know from experience that these particular boxes contain the collected work of my great-grandmother Millie, whose passion was researching the family tree and collecting stories and photographs from the generations past.]

The first one I rummaged through yielded a photo album in remarkably good shape. It turned out to be a short collection of every contribution my great-great grandfather, Frank Albert Ernst, wrote to the class letter of McCormick Theological Seminary, class of 1892. They start in 1893 when he was called to the then-new territory of Nebraska, and continue well into his eighties, just one paragraph a year describing what church he was serving, how many new members they had added, and the state of health of his immediate family. It shouldn't have been as interesting as it was, but I spent several solid hours reading it from cover to cover.

Other than that, the stuff in that box was a completely boring collection - old letters, random snapshots, and newspaper front pages from important dates like JFKs assassination or the moon walk.

Knowing that they more than likely contain piles of useless paper, what is it about these boxes that I find fascinating? And once inside, what is it that distinguishes a single meaningful piece of ephemera from a pile of old rubbish?

I am once again pondering the idea of place, and how this new set of questions fits into it. In my thesis presentation in November, I talked about my working definition of place as a set of four things:

• about people
• built out of narrative
• instills belonging
• develops a history over time
  

In my review afterwards, several critics felt that I emphasized time way more than place in my talk, and Andrew pointed me towards the very interesting concept of the time capsule. Later, in a great email from Rob, he wondered how place related to the concept of setting in theater, and how place online might be related to the setting of a stage.

Having had several weeks to ponder it, I begin to wonder how much place, for me, is becoming space with memory.

Four travel mugs filled with coffee, and four piles of music.

Road trips in my family always started with these two items, assembled in the early morning light of some crisp Saturday morning, as we piled our pillows and suitcases and books into the family car. As my father pulled out onto the highway, both the coffee and the music came out of their containers, and we would plan out what cds (and in what order) were most appropriate for that morning's mood. The groggy anticipation, the closed nature of the car, the way the music interacted with the landscape outside, and the four people experiencing it together -- these experiences were, and still are, strongly compelling to me. Even as adults, in the face of all popular wisdom, the four of us still willingly pile into the family car, music at the ready, and head off to visit family or explore new terrain.

Our music has progressed, too: as a child there were album cassettes in the VW Rabbit, mix tapes in the battered Aerostar, and up to six albums on shuffle in the cd changer of our Ford Explorer. (The introduction of CD burners and iTunes both cemented and exploded this tradition: it is now common for my dad to produce a specially-burned CD for the 30-minute drive between breakfast  grocery shopping every Saturday.) Music is such an important part of the driving experience that my memories are inextricably linked to them -- Dwight Yoakum's A Thousand Miles from Nowhere while winding up the western side of the Rockies into Telluride; alone with Alone in Kyoto, weaving through clouds of early morning fog just past Memphis, Tennessee; or the spoken interlude of Robert Earl Keen, Jr's Front Porch Song with West Texas stretching flat and endless on all sides. Memory and song combine together over time to shape this ritual of the road trip, and merge together for me into a powerful sense of place.

What does it mean, though, to evoke a sense of place? In trying to seek answers to this question, I turned to the introductory chapters of "Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience" by Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan is a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, which posits that everything we know about the world around us is knowledge gained from personal experience. We experience through our perceptions of sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste, and construct our knowledge of the world using a composite of all of these sensory experiences -- we see the window in our room, or hear the echoes off our walls, or smell the exhaust from the traffic on the street outside. The result is knowledge of the space we occupy in our environment.

Perception of the space is a basic form of knowledge. Most animal species claim some form of it, and this ability to sense space can persist despite deep injury to the brain and even the loss of some sensory organs. It is the objective, impersonal, abstract, and functional kind of knowledge. We move through space, in and out of it, over it, and around it. On the opposite end of this spectrum is the notion of place. If space is impersonal, place is uniquely personal. Place has a layered history of physical, social, and emotional connotations that have accumulated over time. Place is space that has acquired meaning to us as individuals, or as a society, or both. If space is the house, place is the home. Place can have a yesterday and a tomorrow, a good and an evil, a happy and a sad.

This space-place distinction is a fundamental idea in architecture, where Christopher Alexander observes that "[t]hose of us who are concerned with buildings tend to forget too easily that all the life and soul of a place, all of our experiences there, depend not simply on the physical environment, but on the pattern of events which we experience there." As our interaction has moved into the virtual realm, this space-place dialectic has also become a core issue in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), where Paul Dourish and Steve Harrison define place as "a space with something added -- social meaning, convention, cultural understandings about role, function, nature, and so on."

When presented with this distinction, my immediate response as a designer is to wonder: where do pieces of graphic design fall into this continuum? Phenomenology makes room in its definition of the world for "construed space," which means space that the mind "extrapolates beyond sensory evidence." We have the ability to imagine, to draw conclusions, to extend out our lines of perception into the area of imagination. William James wrote, "[...] the symbol will often give us the emotional effect of the perception. Such expressions as the abysmal vault of heaven, the endless expanse of ocean, etc., summarize many computations of the imagination, and give the sense of enormous horizon."

The tools we use to represent spatial experience can, Tuan suggests, be just as valid as actually experiencing the space. Where Tuan stops short, however, is in making the case for the most interesting part of this whole construction: construed place. If we can create the experience of space through verbal or visual symbol, then we can also create place.
Graphic designers understand the space-place continuum intuitively, if not in those exact words. A popular debate among RISD students and faculty is over the concept of duende, a vague term loosely translated from Spanish as spirit or magic. In slang terms you might call it the something something, the soul, the mojo, the special sauce -- that thing that elevates a piece of design work from functional to exceptional. Its highly subjective and rarely quantifiable, and yet so important to our profession. It is the intersection of graphic design and place -- where we as viewers enter into those accumulations of physical, social, and emotional so completely that the result is magical.

I believe that we don't have enough emphasis on place in graphic design, particularly as our social and professional lives are increasingly bisected into the so-called "real" world and the online world. We interact with people, have conversations, share meals, and go to work, but we also use cell phones, Facebook, Twitter and text messaging to interact with people halfway across the world. Graphic design is abnormally suspended between these two worlds, spanning everything from bookbinding and setting type to data visualization and web design. Balancing between these two extremes is a uniquely personal challenge for each individual designer, particularly as many of our traditional forms of production are rendered functionally obsolete. My thesis is an investigation of this unique blend of the digital and analog within graphic design, and an attempt to reconcile the two through the notion of place.

This collection of ten songs is an exploration of place, not only in the mood the pieces evoke, but in the way they combine digital and analog instrumentation. I began the process of compiling this soundtrack to my thesis by gathering tracks that I already knew. The most influential of these was the soundtrack to Lost in Translation, which is comprised of several contemplative pieces by the band Air. I then turned to a music mapping project called Pandora, and created a radio station based off of the characteristics of Alone in Kyoto, one of the prominent melodic themes of the movie. Over and over again, the following characteristics showed up in my stream: electronica influences, mellow rock instrumentation, extensive use of vocal harmonies, and jazz and folk influences. Even the songs that I had on my own exhibited the same qualities. If you listen to the songs without knowing these phrases, though, you might not know that these songs were considered "electronica" at all. Instead, they manage to find a blend of electronic and acoustic without losing sight of the voices or the melody. They evoke a sense of atmosphere, and of place, but you can still sing along to them.

Playlist:
Wass -- F.S. Blumm
Ikebana -- Kevin Shields
Jynwythek Ylow -- Aphex Twin
Mike Mills -- AIR
Alberto Balsalm -- Aphex Twin
Shibuya -- Brian Reitzell & Roger J. Manning Jr.
On The Subway -- Brian Reitzell & Roger J. Manning Jr.
Esther's Vice -- Bexar Bexar
Outro -- Kevin Shields
Alone in Kyoto -- AIR