Reboot
Well, a lot has changed since my last post. I spent a little over a year at Catapult Thinking. I learned a ton as a Senior Design Researcher/Strategist. I left Catapult back in September 2005 for an opportunity I couldn't pass up. I'm now a Senior Media Analyst at Forrester Research (joining my better half, but she's on a different team). My primary coverage is the Internet's impact on the media business which includes business models for online content, Internet video, consumer search, social computing, and consumer created content. I've got a handful of reports under my belt so far, and there are plenty more to come.
It may seem like a departure from design, but one of the reasons I'm at Forrester is that I get to bring my design thinking to a business consulting organization. I'm also excited to round out my business experience and merge those skills with my design thinking. I also get to cover cool new emerging technologies and write about them. My coverage areas are also indirectly related to my thesis essay, which I also intend on covering more agressively, but more on that later.
More to come soon...
Beantown
So, I arrived in Boston 3 weeks ago and started working at Catapult Thinking. I'm a senior design strategist of sorts on the design research team. It's a small company with really cool, smart, and talented people. I know I'll learn a lot, and hopefully teach a lot as well.
I haven't settled in to a permanent residence yet. I'm staying with Kelly and Paul out in Medway which is, shall I say, a wicked commute. I don't know how Kelly does it day in and day out. This will be my home until early September. Kerry and I have dibs on an awesome loft in South End. We're just waiting on the current owners/residents to buy a new place. We're really excited about it.
Kerry's still in Pittsburgh finishing up school. She should be done in mid-late September and hopefully we'll get to take control of our new pad by then.
John Rheinfrank: The loss of a great mind, and a great man
It is with great sorrow that I write these words. John Rheinfrank, a design visionary, passed away early Sunday morning in his Pittsburgh home after a valiant fight against cancer. I met John about a year ago through his wife, Shelley Evenson. Shelly had just started teaching at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University.
Shelley became my thesis project advisor and John helped me considerably with my thesis essay. I spent many occasions at their home for social events as well as some of the most invigorating and exciting intellectual discussions with John while discussing my thesis work. The prowess of his thinking was inspiring as was his friendliness and openness.
I was looking forward to continuing the growth of our friendship until his time was cut short. His passing is a severe loss to the design community, as I am sure many of the people who have known him much longer than I already know. I will take with me all that I learned from him in such a short time and I am certain that his contributions as a visionary thinker and simply a wonderful man will linger with us for a very long time.
Goodbye, John. You will be missed.
Freedom!
Well, effective this weekend, I am a Master of Design. I realize that may seem a bit arrogant, but in reality, I just completed the graduate degree program for the Master of Design in Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Now it's time for me to find a job again.
I had a great interview with Catapult Thinking in Boston, I'm flying out to Redmond tomorrow to interview with Microsoft for a Product Designer position, and I'm still waiting to hear back after initial interviews from a few firms including Motorola, SBI Razorfish, and possibly something related to this at IDEO.
Wish me luck, those debt payments are going to kick in soon...
Responsibility without possessiveness
I've been reading Peter M. Snege's The Fifth Discipline for my Design, Management, and Organizational Behavior class taught by Dick Buchanan.
At the end of the book there is a citation of a poem written by a Lebanese poet named Kahlil Gibran that captures the idea of leaders feelings toward their vision through his story of parents and children. I just thought is was somewhat inspiring:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
They come through you, not from you.
And though they are with you, they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but strive not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and he bends you with his might that the arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so he loves the bow that is stable.
Khalil Gibran, The Prophet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 1923.
More to come
I've been super busy the past couple of weeks. Lot's of reading, writing, and project work building up for the last week before spring break. There are a number of things I want to talk about but it will have to wait a week. Some thing's I intend on talking about are some lectures that I've attended in the past couple of weeks including Natalie Jeremijenko, Wendy Kellogg of IMB Research, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and John Rheinfrank.
Hello world!
My original plan was to get this redesigned and up and running at the beginning of the new year. As with most resolutions, that simply didn't happen. But I forced my self to get it done by today--an appropriate birth day for my new site--my actual birthday. I hope to comment here often and share my thoughts, especially as today marks another year in my life and I'm not getting any younger. It is a task far larger than it seems, but I shall do my best.
