Some technologies just have an "attraction." They're well designed enough to empower users to look smart and produce well. While many people seem to like to Microsoft-bash, they keep turning out technologies that are highly usable, fun, and that really help people to think. They make capturing digital contents easy. As a person who works in a tech office, I am beginning to learn how much design and thought and expertise goes into the back-end in terms of the creation of technology. From this perch, I would guess that plenty goes into the software functions.

Scratchiness and Articulation Strategies

I was thinking about this recently while digitalling doodling using MS Visio (not even the professional version but the basic one). Working with roughs and draft ideas has always been a good way for me to start and evolve concepts. Rapid prototyping has resulted in some creative research ideas.

My cubicle and workplace have plenty of sharpened pencils, gel pens and scratch pads. Even better, my computer has plenty of technologies able to capture a variety of experimental concepts. Scrunching ideas and tossing them into the digital "Recycle Bin" can be every bit as satisfying as shredding doodled concepts on scratch paper. And every so often, as the creative process goes, a confluence of ideas comes together in an image, and these are backed up by technologies that help one to hone the ideas and go forward powerfully.

Building Artist-Technologists

A recent article about Northwestern's Animate Arts program talks about their endeavors to evolve an artist technologist who can manage both the art and design aspect as well as the computer technology one. Their new adjunct major is a multi-disciplinary one that pulls in the overlapping principles from the various fields. For example, they compare programming with composition. "Becoming a mature programmer involves developing an awareness of the long-range implications of design choices," write I. Horswill and M. Novak. Students then get a taste of these various fields that may combine in game design or some other fields.

The idea is that this is a kind of piggyback area of study to add to full baccalaureate degrees, so this kind of sampling doesn't take away from the deeper learning needed to acquire professional expertise and jobs. While their program in the first year (2005 - 2006) had high attrition, it was still interesting to hear of their well-designed endeavors to put a kind of digital doodling on a more serious level of study