Choose something you love
September 13, 2008
Studying for your Ph.D. is the process of becoming an expert on a topic; be sure that you love it, because you’ll live with it for ten years.
Choose something you love
I have always thought of myself as a creator: one who makes things. I take joy in making things, and my past and present loves reflect that. I studied to be an engineer (although I never practiced as one). I have programmed computers for almost 25 years, lovingly engaging in the simultaneously limitless (in that one needs no raw materials, essentially, other than one’s mind, eyes, and hands) and limited (by the capabilities of the hardware and software one’s code must run on and interact with) possibilities. I was an artist, making prints for many years (does one ever stop being an artist? I stopped only because I ran out of time in my days, but does that make me no longer an artist?). I love to cook, and cook most of the meals in our home. I define myself and lose myself in the act of making.
As a researcher, I want my work to incorporate my identity as a creator, and as such, I gravitate towards design research — making artifacts, presenting those artifacts to people, and learning from the interaction.
I am interested in (probably not all, but a start):
- information visualization/data mining: Releasing the structure hidden in data in visual form, being able to explore it and learn things from it that I would not otherwise have known. Recombining data in new ways.
- art and design: making beautiful, breathtaking, meaningful visual things
- sense-making: making sense of chaotic or muddy information/knowledge, understanding it and making it available back to the community
- organizing/efficiency: organizing information so that I and others can more easily find it
- knowledge sharing, mentoring, learning: sharing what I have learned with other people to save them time, and help them organize things the way I want them; also learning from them. Getting people to work together to create and learn as a community.
- web publishing: writing and publishing things on the web, and helping more people do that more easily. This ties in with art and design.
- emergent phenomena: complex behavior/phenomena from simple systems. Generative art, sensor motes.
