Tim: The more things change…

At least three people said to me today “Tim, when you’re gone, we’re going to be totally screwed,” which was frankly sort of alarming (guys they’re going to lock me in the basement and make me do their mail merges) but I guess at least I’m appreciated! I’m a little afraid that the other interns are getting sick of hearing about how awesome I apparently am, particularly since I’m more or less the only one of them who a) isn’t 21 and b) doesn’t have a fake ID, and so c) doesn’t hang out at happy hours with them. Timing is important! Allllllso if you’re at Olin and you want an internship with the HRC, particularly in the policy & strategy group, they will way consider you.

Anyway holy crap it has been a crazy few weeks where do I even BEGIN. Let’s start at the present and work backwards.

Virginia has legislative elections this year, and there’s a chance that we could tip the Senate towards the Democrats. The HRC is understandably thrilled about having the chance to install a fair-minded majority in the Virginia Senate. So, the upshot is that most of the field team & I are going to be working for the Democratic Combined Campaign full-time between now and the elections, and I’m kind of super-excited! I’m at the HRC office on Thursdays and I get Friday and Monday off, and I’m in Tysons for the rest of the week. We started yesterday and did a loooot of phonebanking, which is never my favorite thing to do but it went pretty well. I’m really looking forward to seeing how a real GOTV campaign works.

Meanwhile, my primary project for the last week and a half or so has been writing our first-ever Facebook application. So far I’ve learned:

• PHP isn’t as horrible as its syntax documentation suggests.
• MySQL is a beautiful thing.
• The Facebook application platform is actually quite elegant!

Clearly, I must have come to Washington to learn about software development! Again! But that’s okay, because this is super-fun. Right now, the application is in “soft launch” – it’s on my profile and “in the wild” but it has pretty minimal capabilities and we haven’t started announcing it to anyone. I do have 44 users now without ever mentioning it to anybody outside the intern pod, though. I think we’re all going to start inviting our friends sometime in the next week or so. Go ahead and add it if you support us! Let me know how to make it not suck! I haven’t had a chance to do a proper user-centered design focus (shame on me, I know) — it’s in the works.

Fun Olin Fact: Sean Munson ’06 does research on electronic social networks, and gave me some awesome-looking documents that I have not even started to read yet but which ought to give me a fun framework to use while figuring out where to take this next. ❤ alumni!

And before that was the board meeting and the National Gala Dinner. I escorted board members from Kansas and Missouri around the Hill and learned actually quite a lot about Kansas City, which was more interesting than it sounds. And the next evening, I was in a tuxedo, waving a long blue phallic object around and collecting seriously lots of money from people. It was sweet! but boy was I tired when that week ended.

This is way too long! In conclusion: this semester is rocking hard, and there aren’t many places I’d rather be. 😀 Good-night!

George: Design

One of my biggest difficulties with design is its fuzziness. While going through the design process in UOCD it was hard to get a clear picture of what the hell was going on. Why do we care about what the user’s dreams and aspirations? What’s the deal with the deliverables – are they supposed to be pretty or not? Why is Ben making us do these silly things? Most of it just didn’t come together in a way that, at the time, felt right.

It turns out that the only way to learn design is to do it. It’s not something you can define as a whole and slowly work your way into; the question ‘what is design?’ doesn’t seem to have any instructive answers outside of the context of design. While do-learn is the way we like to do things at Olin, most subjects involve small spurts of doing and learning in quick succession. This is do-learn pushed to the limit, where you have to go through the entire process without any real understanding of what’s happening and then, once you’re done, look back and learn from it. From that perspective I realize that everything we did, no matter how fuzzy, had a useful purpose and that it all came together to form something that, in the context of our user group, simply worked. Both the elegance of the solution and the problem itself could not have come about without the fuzziness implicit in the design process and our resulting understanding of our users.

At the highest level design is, to me, a way of thinking. It is an approach to a problem that is open to anything and everything yet deeply analytical of any inputs, always looking for connections and explanations within context; a way of starting with nothing and getting to something valuable. It is always asking questions about what you are doing and why you are doing it. There is, however, no judgement, as often it is the seemingly stupid or impossible ideas that bring about the most creative and sensible ones.

It is because of its fuzziness that I love design.