using thesis blog for posts of tangential interest....

A couple of days ago, Patricia Voto posted an announcement about an event at the Japan Society about urban housing in Asia. While this is not directly related to class assignments or even to product design per se, I think that these kind of posts can enrich the general discussion. But the tricky thing is to avoid shifting our attention away from thesis work. By inserting non- sequiturs that do not relate directly to the issues on which we must remain focused, there is some danger of diluting the content and shifting our attention in a counter-productive way.  For example, I read an article in the NY Times yesterday that I found amazing, and I wanted to share it with the thesis group, but there is no direct relevance to product design.  Here's a link to the article, where we learn about recipe wikis, where people tweak ingredients and procedures for cooking various dishes.  I thought that this was a fascinating offshoot of Wikipedia phenomenon. This creates an open source design process that could revolutionize cooking. Traditionally, recipes are developed by individual chefs experimenting in their kitchens. The pace of culinary change, and the reliance on existing methods and materials leads to very incremental improvements over generations.  But this new distributed approach could shift emergence of cuisine development from an evolutionary to a revolutionary process.

I think that entirely new non-local cuisines could emerge from recipe wikis, and for me that's very exciting, because I am in favor of new-ness in general. But I can see how some people might find this threatening, because it could lead to reduction in the variety of ethnic cuisines and loss of traditional ways of doing things.  So, while the recipe wiki story is not, strictly speaking, about product design, I find it interesting and worth thinking about because there might be ramifications for design in general, and how new technologies suggest radical changes in the way designers work.  I would be interested to know what others think about this, and also about the whole question of inserting extra-curricular posts on the course blog. Please comment freely, and I will raise the question at next week's class. In general, I am very excited about the way the blog is shaping up, and so I am focused now on tweaking our policies and approaches to this excellent tool for sharing information and documenting our process.

steven