April already?!

I haven't posted a thing for over a month. I am scaring myself! I have been flat out crazy busy for weeks now, but barely getting a thing done on my dissertation. Other things have taken over and so I have fallen into a very bad dissertation work pattern. This term I am TAing an online course (INFO622) for Kate McCain and that is sucking up about 20 hours a week. Then I foolishly said yes to teaching a half semester course on Roman art at Rosemont. I love teaching there and the students are great fun, but what little time I have needs to go to the dissertation! This is what I get for being nice (and trying to make some money... the hole is getting deeper and deeper). One the plus side, I structured the course so the brunt of the work I had to do was early on. For the next few weeks the students will give their presentations on works in the UPenn Museum.

Beyond dealing with teaching these past few weeks, I took part in a design charrette at Drexel. Cameron Sinclair came and provided the numerous teams (13 teams of 7 members) with projects to design. The team I was on investigated an archery/community center for rural communities in Bhutan. It was a fascinating experience and I learned a great deal about how images are used in the design process. The thing that struck me as most unique was how the designers searched for images of how specific materials had been used. Bamboo was a major component to our design and so much of what we looked at revolved around this material. Another thing that figured prominently were maps and images of traditional crafts (bamboo and textile weaving). Maps were used to get a sense of the topography (flat land, elevation, rivers, etc.) and population distribution (closeness to other communities, cities, etc.). The patterns of the traditional crafts were also looked at for ideas about how they might be used in the bamboo work. Other than a simple pattern for some of the walls, the information from these images weren't incorporated into the final model or design mock-ups. I did make some contacts at CoMAD and this was a very good thing. :-) Hopefully as I go forward collecting data this will work out.

Speaking of collecting data, another thing that I did over the course of the last few weeks was revisit my plan of data gathering for the dissertation. I wasn't having any luck recruiting two of the participant groups and so I proposed to change the methods. I think at this point it is pretty stable, and so later today I will send out an email to the committee about the suggested route I should pursue. Tomorrow I suppose I will append my IRB documentation and send that off noting the changes to the protocol and crossing my fingers that they accept these.

Ok, it is just about time for little missy to get out of school and so I am off to pick her up and run some errands.