thinkfetti

It’s been a busy time at Chez Fetti, not that this is a good enough excuse for the posting lacuna. Conducting concerts in New Mexico and California, teaching a distance-education course in problem solving, moving to the big (bigger) city, arranging my leave of absence from my institution…all of these will provide plenty of material for the upcoming posts.

Welcome to spring 2008!

As a way to reintroduce myself to my own blog (work has gotten in the way the last several weeks), I’ve just updated to the latest blog software. Please let me know if you notice any funny business, and I’ll investigate.

David Weinberger, in his blog, has just posted about a new patent related to faceted navigation (see my earlier post for my initial wishlist). I’m curious to see if/when this trickles down to a publicly available tool.

Choice complicates the decision-making process (that’s pretty close to tautological on one hand, but it’s not so cut-and-dried as it first seems: some constraints lead to more efficient progress to an “end,” but when there are too many constraints, the “end” might be in the wrong spot), but choice is also empowering (if also effort- and time-consuming). I would imagine the “optimal” amount of choice for efficient - and effective - navigation of solution space is going to turn out to be context-sensitive both locally and globally.

I’m sorry for writing on such an abstract level (fleshing this out in writing with concrete examples will have to wait until I have more time available), but I’ve just finished reading Duncan Watt’s Six Degrees, a primer on network science, and as a result, I’m seeing evidence of networks everywhere.

Socorro, in addition to being the town where I live, is the Spanish word for “help!” as all my friends in other places know by now.

I’m back in Socorro from my holiday travels and preparing for the new semester, which means, among other things, that I’m digging out from the piles of emails and next-actions waiting for me.

I’m feeling pleased with the Getting Things Done system I got going in December - I have it to thank for the fact I’m only feeling that I have many, many things to do, instead of feeling overwhelmed with the many, many things I have to do.

I expect to have a more active posting schedule soon, with news of networks, probability, music history, conducting, and creativity/art/design - well, lots.

In the spring, I’ll be teaching (or at least facilitating) a course called “Creativity and Innovation and Interdisciplinary Problem Solving.” It’s a “pilot” course, meaning an experimental course, but I’ll be drawing on materials I’ve used in several other courses I’ve taught.

I’ve just set up the (first try at a) blog for the course at http://nmtdesign.blogspot.com/ because I read on slashdot that Google has released Blogger from beta testing, and I figured this is as good a place to start as any.

The point of the blog is to see if a bunch of networked students in a class about networking can or will initiate some interesting (to me and to them) communication behavior and get some great work done.

What follows is the gist of the course, excerpted from a document I presented several weeks ago to the chairs of the engineering departments:

Intended target audience:

Advanced undergraduate students currently involved in junior or senior design courses or working on other research projects at NMT.

Texts:

V. Fey and E. Rivin, Innovation on Demand: New Product Development Using TRIZ. Cambridge University Press, 2005. (Required.)

S. Savransky, Engineering of Creativity. CRC Press, 2000.

Description for students:

This course will introduce you to the TRIZ framework, an outstanding tool that will enable you to analyze design problems effectively and develop innovative design solutions. TRIZ (a Russian acronym that stands for Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadach, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) was initially developed in the 1940’s but only began being used outside of the former Soviet Union in the 1980’s.

TRIZ is helpful in avoiding design compromises. For example, if we wanted an object to be stronger without being too heavy, a compromise solution might suggest settling for some added strength and some added weight. A TRIZ-generated solution, by contrast, might allow for substantial improvement in strength with no additional weight.

TRIZ can also help an analyst forecast technological development of a product. Insights into what kinds of qualitative changes a system will undergo as it evolves can help engineers and other leaders make strategic decisions about where R&D efforts will be focussed. The tools TRIZ brings to bear on this problem were developed by studying tens of thousands of patents and distilling trends of technological evolution of systems.

During this course we will also examine the more abstract design problem of how to facilitate effective communication between individuals and groups who have differing specialties and who may model problems completely differently from each other. With the many technologies now coming online for realtime communications, there should in principle be many opportunities for engineers, scientists, and other scholars and entrepreneurs to collaborate in spite of their geographical separation. A current NSF-funded project will begin to explore the possibilities and emergent problems of using the cyberinfrastructure (CI) as a collaborative tool for scientists. As part of the NSF program, a seminar entitled “CI in Science” will be attended remotely by graduate students and scientists at several universities in the Southwest including New Mexico Tech. In this course, we will use the “CI in Science” seminar as a case study to study the technical, organizational, and communication-related problems of a complex system.