Category: writing
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On Critical Thinking Skills
I saw a Tweet the other day that said something along the lines of “If only people had critical thinking skills, we wouldn’t be in this situation.” I disagree. Critical thinking skills interact with other things like world views, personal philosophies, religious beliefs, etc., and all of these things influence…
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Extracurricular Reading
I have a great extracurricular reading list for the summer. It’s not one that I established at the end of the semester or anything. It’s something that will evolve as my outside interests shift in response to whatever it is they respond to. Right now I’m reading the following: I’m just about…
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Questions Designers Ask
We can probably all agree that questions matter in designing. I’m a firm believer (along with many others) that ambiguity is a key characteristic of design problems, which means that posing good questions to clients isn’t just important. It’s essential. It’s these good questions that will bring clarity to the…
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curiosity and diverse interests
One of the challenges that I find myself coming up against every now and again has to do with which interests to pursue and which to abandon. Looking up at the whiteboard near my desk I see the following list of papers that are in various stages of completion: quals scientific…
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Writing Personal, Authentic Text
I help lots of folks write personal statements, research statements, grant proposals, letters of intent, etc. I enjoy it quite a lot. But more often than not, the first draft that’s brought to me lacks personality and authenticity. If 500 submissions come in, this one is going to sound like 479 of ’em. There…
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Summer Research Projects
The academic year is over, and after having taken a few days off, today is the day I launch into several really exciting and interesting projects. Following are summaries of each major project. Hopefully, writing about each of them on the blog throughout the summer will provide (1) a modicum…
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Stranger Doppelgänger
Today was day one of my narrative theory and inquiry class, and it looks like it’s going to be a winning semester. One of the in-class activities had us writing a brief narrative about a stranger we’d encountered. Recent encounters were preferable, and after an abbreviated memory search I wrote the following:…
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Writing | Quality as a Function of Utility
Everybody writes. Emails, blogs, papers, journal articles, book chapters, theses, dissertations, books… So at the draft stage of writing, how do you know enough is enough? This question popped into my head today as I was sending a draft of a section of a paper to my co-author. I wrote…
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Understanding Designing
How can we achieve a deeper understanding of designing? There are many ways to answer that question. We can achieve a deeper understanding by engaging in a design process, by reading about design, by critiquing designs (or designing)… all roads of inquiry lead hopefully to one thing: deeper understanding. Achieving…
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Normativity and Design
Story: During a debate about the future importance of design–but not Designers–an audience member raised her hand. She was a designer from Peru. “I have to interrupt,” she said, “because I sense that you’re ignoring the degree to which design is already happening in a substantive, vibrant way in, for…
jordan beck, phd 