1. the idea of “moments of opening“
2. a binary system for classifying idea receptiveness in groups
3. a method for graphing said idea acceptance vs time
4. brainstorming = trivializing (ooooh, i’m conflicted about this one!)
5. ignoring as a way to engage with ideas
6. the concept of computer software possessing “openness” (still having a hard time wrapping my head around exactly what this means)
7. 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.