Choose something you love
December 12, 2008
My love of making art has had great impact on what I’ve chosen to study.
Choose something you love
In my article on my seven rules of research, I placed “Choose something you love” at the top of the list. To show myself that I’m on the right track with my topic, I’m going to discuss my research area and why I’ve chosen to work on it.
- design and visual arts
- programming
- open source
- revealing the hidden structure of information
- power in organizations
In this and posts to follow, I’ll describe why each of these areas is important to me.
Something I love: design and visual arts
I was schooled at the University of Virginia as an electrical engineer. I studied signal processing, which, in practice, is largely computer programming with a lot of math thrown in. I’ve worked as a programmer, as a systems administrator and as a manager of programmers and systems administrators since I graduated from UVa in 1993.
What most people don’t know about me is that I was also an artist throughout that time. Does one ever really stop being an artist? I don’t think so. I still feel like an artist, just one that hasn’t been able to make art for a long time. For about seven years, I made art continuously: drawings and prints. I was a printmaker. Below is a picture of me printing monotypes at Frogaman’s Print and Paper Workshop in South Dakota, in 2003.
I was pretty good, too. My work was in shows, and I even won a prize and sold a piece. I don’t make art often anymore, except for compositing the pictures for this blog. I miss it.
My love of making art has had great impact on what I’ve chosen to study. I love interface design and information visualization because good examples of either are simply stunningly beautiful. And when I make an elegant, usable interface or make a beautiful, informative information visualization, I feel the same deep pleasure I do when I make art. I think that both interface design and information visualization merge my loves of visual art and programming, appeals to both my inner engineer and my inner artist, and that’s why I find working on such so satisfying.
Thus, I am strongly drawn towards doing work that allows me to do interface design and make information visualizations. My proposed work should involve a lot of interface design and information visualization.
Some of my work
