thinkfetti

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.

Although there are only a handful of posts I’ve put up on thinkfetti so far, I have been trying to implement some navigation ideas I have. After several hours searching (and trying out alternatives), I’ve decided I will have to try again later.

TagClouds are interesting and visually appealing (and can be used for intrasite navigation), but I would like to be able to display them contextually; after clicking on one tag (“design”, for example), I would like the cloud to display its results for all the other tags present besides “design.” In other words, combining the flat orginizational structure of the tag cloud with the power of hierarchical searching. One article I’ve found describes a theory of tag clusters, which may be closer to the mark. And here is another thoughtful take on how tag clouds may evolve. The same author also refers to faceted classification systems, which may well describe the underlying structure I’m looking for.

Hierarchical categories by themselves don’t solve the problem, because with them, a target document is found by digging down through the hierarchy in the one way it is set up. For example, consider “education/design/music/Beethoven_improvisation”. The “Beethoven_improvisation” page could be found by opening “education”, then selecting “design” from the available options, then selecting “music” from the new list of sub-items, and then selecting “Beethoven_improvisation”. But you wouldn’t arrive at the page by selecting “music” then “design” then “education”, because the hierarchy wasn’t set up that way. And if “education”, “design”, and “music” were regular tags, you couldn’t use them to refine a search; clicking on any one of the tags would just open up a list of all posts with at least that one tag attached.

This touches on an important point about searching: a good search tool will help you find something you want, even when you don’t know in advance how it has been categorized or labeled. This is why physically browsing at a bookstore can be so rewarding, when constructing database queries may not be…

So much to be explored. This is a humble beginning … I’ve installed Movable Type (after only a couple hours of fiddling), which I’m going to try out as a substrate. (edit: now we’re trying out WordPress – less fiddling on this install…)

This is just a placeholder until I get going in earnest…

In the meantime, please visit some interesting alternatives, such as David Weinberger’s well-trodden blog (he is the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined), an interactive guide to Bartok’s string quartets (an effort to lift us to a level of familiarity with these complex artworks), and, if you are inclined to think about how the web should be heading as far as collaborative tools (and aren’t scared by the open source learning curve), the access grid homepage.

Soon, I’ll explain what these pages and this one have to do with one another.