today i cleaned the kitchen, started tidying the living room, bought some flowers for the table, and talked with my mom about my capstone.
i have had a few really good conversations this week about my ideas, but i’m still having a really hard time boiling them down to the key points when i sit down to write, and it’s frustrating. i start in on one thing and then it makes me think about seventy-five other things and i get all tangled up in myself and can’t figure out how to tie things together.
i told my mom this and she said i should just write a sentence or two for each of the key pieces and build from there, which is what everyone says (including me), but i have even been struggling with that because it’s hard for me to figure out where one idea ends and another begins, so what starts out as one sentence turns into a paragraph and a half and i eventually just throw my hands in the air and give up. i have been slowly making progress anyway by forcing myself to focus, but it still feels a lot like sludging through thick mud.
my mom said that i had done a good job of articulating the points while we were talking, and i said thanks, but the problem is that the talkie brain doesn’t always cooperate with the writey brain, so i was still worried about what would happen when i sat down before the page or screen. she offered to mirror what she heard back to me, which i thought was a great idea, but i had to go to the commencement dinner ceremony, and i was worried about running up my daytime minutes on my phone.
so i asked her if she would write the points up in an email and send them to me, and she said sure thing.
then when i got home from dinner, there was this wonderful summary of the conversation in my inbox, and suddenly the day feels really productive.
it’s not exActly right, but i have to do Something to earn my degree, right? ;)

it is really cool to have a mom who’s so willing to go the extra mile to help me figure out what i’m figuring out, and so i just thought i’d say so.
also, she’s shy about starting to blog herself, so i figure i’ll give her a little head start by adding her contribution to the public record of my capstone thinking.
hopefully, she won’t mind my sneakiness too much. :)

before you read any more, though, look at my pretty graduation flowers!

thanks, momma.
:)

From: Pallas Stanford

Date: May 5, 2006 6:44 PM
Subject: Ten or so things
To: Kynthia Brunette

I love talking with you about your work.

1. You are focusing on e-mail because it is a place where people are overwhelmed with information, where designers are offering and exploring a variety of tools, and where people aren’t fully utilizing the tools being offered. It is a data-dense environment perfect for testing your ideas. You are focusing on gmail in particular because it has a sizeable and accessible user group already familar with some of the basic tools you are building around and there is the Firefox extension that makes it possible to make a prototype that has validity with your test group of users.

2. The basic metaphor for organizing information is one of location. Putting something where it can later be found. Traditionally this has been a particular location – a file or folder- which exists as part of a hierarchical tree. A key and ongoing challenge for informational managers has been the fact that human cognition never quite follows this tidy example. We can’t decide where to file things because, in our cognitive experience, the same information is ofen stored in multiple locations.

3. Digital technology makes possible the pioneering of new organizational metaphors in which the multi-locational nature of human cognition is more fully represented. One thing i hear you doing is transforming the location metaphor by emphasising the acts of looking and finding rather than the act of depositing in space.

4. Tagging is a tool that transforms the metaphor of simple location into one of multi-locational. Tagging allows users to idiosyncratically annotate a dataset. Tagging has its own problems . . .

5. Some folks are working to improve tagging by integrating it with the hierachical tree model.

6. Your work is in line with this. The halo is a holarchy of tags or at least the possbility of one.

7. The halo seeks to do, at least, these things.

First, to identify certain fundamental tags. A good place to start looking is at the various ways designers are organizing new tools – that is around time, around social relationships, etc. etc. I love making connections to Ken’s work and this is a good one. He says that you start by assuming that anyone who has really studied some question has at least a piece of an answer. It is not about finding the one right way but about honoring as much as possible of all the ways that serious practitioners have offered.

Second, to find to `what extent can these tages be automated. Time and date are two examples. [In fact, digital technology allows us incorporate time as a fundamental dimension of information management in new and exciting ways. A person should be able to construct a chronological representation of any category that exists in her dataset. I loved your image of being able to rewind and see what an idea or a project looked like at some earlier time.

Another huge part of the automating question comes from recognizing that users annotate through their use. One example is keeping track of the users search terms.

Third, to give users greater fluency in tagging so they can make better use of the tool. One example is organizing the tag tools consistently on the screen. Another is making them available inside e-mail e.g. highlighting tag words.

I know there were more things and I’m distracted now because I just found out that Lloyd does not feel like taking Morgan for a walk and that means I have to and soon because it is cold.

One more thing I wanted to share about holarchy is that it is organized in levels such that the more outer circle you are in the more significant and the more inner circle you are in the more fundamental. You measure these by asking the question, what will be left if I take this away. So atoms are more fundamental than molecules because if you take atoms away there can be no molecules Molecules build on atoms and are more significant (have more meaning) but you can take molecules away and still have atoms.

My coaching is that you give yourself 15 minutes maybe twice a day to write five-ten sentences that speak to the heart of what you are doing. Write them and let yourself be inspired by them to produce the capstone. Give yourself room and the resources you need to work. Do you need poster board? A pad and easel? Get yourself what you need. Move into a motel if you need to. Give yourself permission to focus like you have never focued before. Not in seriousness but because it is fun, because what you are doing is out of your love for people, and the combination of intelligence and caring that your bring to your work is priceless.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxomom

—
When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist. Dom Helder Camara

editor’s note: “the halo” is a tentative name that i have been using for a while to refer to the idea behind my capstone. it’s the sphere of stuff that is related to whatever you happen to be looking at at the moment, and it is this sphere of relatedness that i am interested in finding ways to help reveal.
“ken” is ken wilber, “an American Buddhist philosopher and psychological theorist” whom my mom really likes.
“holarchy” is a term he uses a lot, but i hadn’t thought of applying it to my capstone until my mom brought it up, which is why it’s good to talk to people about your ideas even when you don’t really know what they are.
the term was originally coined by arthur koestler in his 1967 book “The Ghost in the Machine.”
the police named an album after the book.

and in case you didn’t know it already, wikipedia is an awesome, awesome thing.

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