seven unwritten rules of the locker room
- no eye contact
- no looking around for a shower; commit to one and go there without browsing around
- you may not stand idly at any point. you must always be doing something.
- no talking
- no acknowledging the existence of others
- you must be covered at all times unless you are standing under a running stream of water
- you must stay at least 10 feet away from any other human being
what a strange morning. i much prefer it when the locker room is empty in the morning. there are all these strange dynamics that evolve when you put 4 or 5 people in the locker room together… so much awkwardness! delicious!
seven pleasant things
- long, super awesome email from my friend who’s traveling through southeast asia
- surprisingly delicious pancakes, even without buttermilk (curses!)
- friends showing up for brunch this morning
- all three letters of recommendation accounted for
- excellent genius playlist
- no one drank my ginger ale in the d.school fridge
- absolutely perfect weather
seven things that were unusual about yesterday
- woke up and found repairmen in our house. we have a mold problem in our bathroom and – gasp – people were actually sent out to fix it! eureka!
- i left a meeting on time. just got up and left. it felt good.
- left work before 6pm. whoa. (seriously!)
- went to an open gallery show in SF. never done that type of thing before! interesting folks there.
- had the most vibrant back-and-forth with a potential etsy customer. the number of messages we exchanged back and forth was, well, impressive!
- the most lively late-night caltrain ride EVER. some kid was getting kicked off and was making QUITE a scene. our entire car was cheering when the kid finally got booted at millbrae. nothing like caltrain camaraderie.
- the strangest bragging point ever — the caltrain employee who was instrumental in booting the kid off the train told us proudly as we got off the train that he’d gained 55 pounds in the past year. uhmm…. huh?
seven things i need to get done this weekend
- literature review about the use of prototyping as a communication tool
- literature review about cross-disciplinary innovation
- portfolio of work for my advisor
- first drafts of my research proposal and previous research essay
- second draft of my personal statement
- solicit third letter of recommendation
- laundry
sounds like fun! yay!! seriously though, i will be glad when this is all over…
seven things i heard yesterday evening at design-x that piqued my curiosity
- the idea of “moments of opening“
- a binary system for classifying idea receptiveness in groups
- a method for graphing said idea acceptance vs time
- brainstorming = trivializing (ooooh, i’m conflicted about this one!)
- ignoring as a way to engage with ideas
- the concept of computer software possessing “openness” (still having a hard time wrapping my head around exactly what this means)
- the possibility of a correlation between “openness” and idea half-life
but perhaps what interested me most were larry leifer’s closing comments. he declared that this research, studying the interactions (specifically, the level of engagement) of designers given an innovation challenge, seemed on the surface to be more in the social sciences field than in that of engineering. i’ve been feeling the same way lately while trying to formulate my own research plan for NSF, so in that moment i experienced exactly what had been discussed all evening — a “moment of opening,” where a switch flips and a participant transitions from feeling disengaged to feeling engaged in a split second. i found it particularly fitting to end the night with such an experience. larry addressed the group and proclaimed that designers engage in ways specific to design challenges, that any other field will have its own nuances and that engineering design is in a league of its own, so to speak. he’s been studying this his whole life, so i have to trust his judgment to a certain degree, but i did find some relief in that a figure of academic prominence believes forcefully that studying interactions is a legitimate field of engineering.
let’s hope NSF agrees.
seven things i like about being a short-order brunch chef
- i kick off every week being really productive. nothing revs your engines quite like cooking for 80 on a sunday morning.
- free food every sunday morning… food that i know is good… because i made it!
- keep in touch with folks i wouldn’t normally see. i love keeping tabs on all my favorite swimmer + runner folks.
- who doesn’t like making some extra cash?
- i make people really happy. direct quote from yesterday: “oh my GOD, i’m so glad you’re here… you saved my life.” a little dramatic, perhaps, but definitely makes me feel appreciated.
- practice improv skills. nothing like realizing you don’t have buttermilk 10 minutes before showtime and you need to make buttermilk pancakes for 80.
- develop grace under pressure. there’s more of a parallel than i might have imagined between managing a backlog of 30 breakfast orders and managing a complex project with tight deadlines at work.
so this makes any sense at all, a little context: i’ve been cooking for two undergraduate dining halls (they’re actually mini dining halls, we call them “eating clubs“) since my junior year of college. i invite you to do the math with me: spring quarter of junior year, all of senior year, all of grad school (2 years), and now the beginning of… whatever it is i’m doing now. this is year #4, folks! anyway, the way it works is that meals are provided to the students M-F by a professional chef, they fend for themselves on saturdays, and then sundays are student-run. there’s a student who cooks brunch on sunday (short-order) and then a student who cooks dinner (most certainly NOT short-order!)… but more frequently they just order pizza or something. i started just cooking for one of the four clubs, but now i cook for two of them. i’ve developed quite a loyal following, in part because of my fabulous breakfast quesadillas (to which there is a facebook group dedicated) and in part because of my ability to make things really quickly. every year there is always a large contingent of swimmers and runners who live in the residences that i cook for, and it’s nice for me to stay in touch with them, since i wouldn’t get to normally.
probably irresponsible... but mighty tasty.
seven reasons i started this blog
- i like to write but don’t do it enough
- seven as a quantity is enough to be interesting but not so much as to be overwhelming
- to force myself to be more observant in my daily activities
- to give myself a creative outlet besides my work at the d.school
- for my parents + friends i’m not in touch with nearly enough to keep tabs on what i’m up to
- to create a habit that’s just, well, fun
- to feel productive – without having to go totally overboard…
i guess an introduction is in order. i’m carly, and i’m currently a student/teacher at stanford university. more specifically, i’m the designer in residence at the d.school this year before launching into phd research at stanford. i used to keep a blog a long time ago, but i haven’t updated regularly since my junior year of college. the site is still up here if you’re interested. i think i wrestled with the fact that i really liked updating but started feeling conflicted about what sort of content was appropriate to post to the web. i couldn’t write about everything that was going on in my life anymore – just some (probably less interesting) things – and that made it stressful. i also have this way of constantly trying to outdo myself, so eventually i raised the proverbial bar pretty high with my posts… and felt bad when i didn’t have the time to post updates of acceptable quality + length.
enter the seven things blog! seven things – that’s all i have to post every day. maybe some context, too, maybe not. who knows. maybe they’ll be totally superficial, like seven things i saw on my way to work today, or maybe it’ll be the result of many weeks of work, hours of pondering and reflection. above all, i want to keep this fun to read and fun to update.
sound good? i’ll see you back here tomorrow 
