Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Wanderers 2009.1.14

ISEPP Guest
Dr. Terence Love is a semi-public figure, in terms of hitting the radar in design science circles. Our tiny venue (Linus Pauling House) was packed, bursting, so introductions took time, which we're glad about, as Terry needed to fight with his projector. My intro: working on a talk for Chicago about why "Portland rocks" (except we say "hacks" sometimes).

Dr. Love is from Manchester and looks a bit like Brian Sharp (both handsome blokes). He's always loved engineering, wants to include more people in its process. How to share the magic? The word "social" is problematic for him, as it is for me. Like don't we mean business? Are we talking R&R? I don't think so. What is "socialism" outside of Anglophone cultures?

"How do we do the human stuff? If I'm right, you should be able to test what I'm saying by going inside your own heads." Milt thought "in your gut" might be better. "Patience" said Terence.

On a related front, we have programmed and unprogrammed Friends in our Quaker namespace, but of course unprogrammed Friends program, set the facts of experience in order somehow, believe, do math, engineer. We're not completely clueless now are we? Don't we know "bleep"?

Comment: I wouldn't call these "theories about what's inside" (emotionally) so much as simply "designs" (not "of" not "representational") -- the persona (aka mask) partakes of collaboratively developed institutions in some Greek idea of a democratic utopia. Buddha's "no self" is the "morphic self", the existential responsibility to define yourself (a full time job).

We're still on the opening slide, our group is hard to control I'm afraid. I'm doing more work on my upcoming Chicago talk, challenging our conventional chatter about "programming" as overly self-limiting. Remember "television programming" even if that means forgetting all about computers for a few seconds.