Considering this week’s deliverable, I wanted to share with you an “emergency LEGO kit” that I designed to easily fit into your pocket. This particular set includes a Gunstar fighter, a Ko-Dan fighter, and two asteroids from the film The Last Starfighter.

For this week’s class:

• Weekly Reading Report Exercise
• Perform Peer Review on last week’s deliverable
• Save readings discussion for next week
• Introduce this week’s deliverable and complete in-class exercises
  • LEGO Instructions
  • Example LEGO Instructions
• Review syllabus about next week’s readings and work
• Next week: user testing reports!

The above is a device for providing compact technical information using an illuminated display. It is a microfiche or flat sheet microform reader. Pages of text, diagrams, and images are photographed and reduced to microscopic size. This machine takes the flat sheet of these microscopic images and enlarges them on the screen so that the information that they contain may be read. In the past, microfiche and other kinds of microform provided a compact way to store lots of information that would otherwise require lots of physical space. This consideration of how to store, present, and access technical information is part of the larger equation you all might participate in solving in the workplace, but instead of the space being physical, the space might involve computer storage space and maximizing its savings, efficiency to read/write, etc. Some things to look at in class: microfiche and microfilm reader.

For this week’s class:

• Weekly Reading Report Exercise
• Perform Peer Review on last week’s deliverable
• Discuss last week’s and this week’s readings
  • Life After Death by Powerpoint
  • Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene (origin of memes concept)
  • OMNI, July 1982, page 106: “the street finds its own use for things”
• Introduce this week’s deliverable
  • Encyclopedias and Dictionaries–Library
• Review syllabus about next week’s readings and work
• Next week: LEGOs!

While many things we buy and use in our contemporary world come with guides and instruction manuals, not many include guides warn against mixing, ingesting, or inhaling things that you might create with the product. However, one such product like that are the once seemingly ubiquitious chemistry experimenter sets, which were more dangerous and interesting than the fewer number of ones that you might find for sale today. In the example above from mid-century included nuclear experimentation with uranium ore.

For this week’s class:

• Weekly Reading Report Exercise
• Did anyone attend the Google UX Presentation? It was standing room only when I got there.
• My Professional Work, Our Sandbox–student and alumni survey
• Perform Peer Review on last week’s deliverable
• Discuss this week’s readings
  • Up Goer Five on xkcd
  • Duty Calls
  • Scientific American Blog about Up Goer Five
  • ExplainXKCD
• Introduce this week’s deliverable
• Review syllabus about next week’s readings and work