gingerbread noms

This is a recipe I’ve used lots of times. I’ve tried the 2 Fat Ladies one, but this one is better. It’s from Vogue Entertaining Aug/Sep 1996. It’s from a special they did on ‘country cakes’, and every cake I’ve made from that collection has been really really good. I’m not very good at cakes, but this one is heavy and solid and is difficult to ruin.
Gingerbread
250g butter
1 cup sugar (I use a soft brown sugar)
1 cup treacle
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup milk
2 tsp bicarb soda
3 cups plain flour
1 tsp ground ginger (I replace this with fresh grated fresh ginger. In fact, I think the fresh ginger is the most important part. I use the youngest ginger I can find, and grate a heap of it – 2.5 big tablespoons. The amount you use should depend on the ginger’s freshness and age and your own taste. I like the cake really gingery, but not everyone does. Also, you might like to be careful about how finely you grate it. I like chunks of ginger, but it’s not for everyone)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground nutmeg (as per usual, grate it freshly yourself and the difference will be amazing)
I also add 1/2 tsp ground cloves, 1/2 tsp ground mace, but these are quite aromatic and not really to everyone’s taste
Butter and flour the sides of a 23cm square cake tin and line the base with baking powder (this is a big cake, so I use my larger loaf tin). Preheat the oven to 180*C
Melt the butter in a saucepan with the sugar and treacle and set aside to cool.
Beat the eggs and milk together in a bowl and add the bicarb of soda, which has been dissolved in a little warm water.
Pour the egg mixture into the cooled treacle mixture. Sift the flour, ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg (and other spices – but perhaps don’t sift the grated ginger, just add it) together in a large bowl.
Make a well in the centre and pour in the egg mixture.
Mix well with a wooden spoon (I usually use the electric mixer here as I always find it hard to get the lumps out otherwise. But beating can make the cake a bit too light and fluffy, and while it settles a bit as it gets older, the fluffiness doesn’t really suit the cake).
Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake on the centre shelf of the oven for 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.
Remove from the oven, let stand for 1 to 2 minutes and turn the cake out onto a wire rack to cool.
The recipe says to serve it with whipped cream. But I like it spread with butter. It gets better if you leave it in a sealed container (or tied plastic bag) as the outside softens and gets stickier.

visualising information

We’ve only spent a tiny bit of time on this in class, but I’m interested in visualising information. Being a word person, I’ve always tended to represent information in words. But working on the MLX websites and programs I’ve also had to figure out ways of representing information in other ways. Dancers during an exchange aren’t interested in lots of words (and are often too tired to figure them out), and, frankly, who wants to read a whole bunch of long, boring sentences when there’s exciting action things to be done?
There are a range of accessibility issues at play here as well, and reading problems are quite common in dancers.
So here’re a few sites I’ve found that tackle this issue of ‘visualising information’
This one is taken from Lapham’s Quarterly, which is a really nice online magazine/journal dealing with history, literature, art – all that high brow action. But the tone is cheery and a little wiggedy, and they tweet some really cool stuff.
vi.png
This American Infographic features “infographical companions to the celebrated radio show”. In other words, it is a series of images created in response to episodes of the This American Life radio show.
There is, of course Edwarde Tufte, king of visualising information. Tufte had a walk-on part in my last essay. With a line, I think.
Newsflow visualises news stories in real time, as they are published. This one is FULLY SICK.
Infosthetics is a blog capturing links to really interesting ‘info visualisation’ items.
textarc ‘visualises’ the words of books or text. This is magic.
We Feel Fine, visualising ‘I feel’ or ‘feeling’ text from blogs.
Visual Complexity is… well, lots of visual information stuff.
Edit: Something critiquing the ‘vizualisation cargo cult’.
Someone else getting cranky about dodgy info visualisation.
A tool for doing your own fancy visualisations.
Another Edit: Visual information and The Times through history.

B210K: wk2, run1

distance: 7.28 km, time: 00:57, pace: 07:50, calories: 740, effort: 5/5
Tired, now. It was a long run and I was puffing like crazy at the end.
Some arsehole in a 4wd yelled out his window at me for about a minute because I ran past him on a zebra crossing. This is the first time this has happened to me running rather than cycling.
I didn’t yell back, mostly because I was 2mins from home and puffed, but I kept thinking ‘wish he’d check his speedo for me – I bet I’m pwning this’.
Why do these sorts of arseholes think the worst insult they can yell at a woman is ‘fat cow’? Particularly when they’re _stitting_ in a car?
Motorists are fuckwits. I, however, am a running ninja. 7km _and_ I pwned the patriarchy. All in one run.

8track: strings and clapping for running

Image from shorpy, though I almost went with this.

I actually listen to the songs in the following order. That way they start mellow and get crazier, so I can wake up gently, then get my arse kicked a bit when I start to lag later on.

Thulandivile (Keep Quiet I’ve Heard You) Elite Swingers Natural Jazz 131 2:39

Dinah Preservation Hall Preservation Hall Hot 4 With Duke Dejan 154 2004 5:01

Eh la bas Preservation Hall Jazz Band Shake That Thing 191 2004 3:52

Baby (Darlin’) Baby Midnight Serenaders Sweet Nothin’s 243 2009 3:16

A Mug Of Ale Joe Venuti’s Blue Four All Star Jazz Quartets (disc 3) 220 1927 3:07

Coffee’s Cold/Tater Patch Uncle Earl Going to the Western Slope 254 2004 3:08

Double Check Stomp The Pasadena Roof Orchestra Rhythm Is Our Business! 228 1996 3:59

The Love Me Or Die C.W. Stoneking Jungle Blues 153 2008 3:55

El Pito (I’ll Never Go Back To Georgia) Joe Cuba Crooklyn: Vol. I 157 1966 5:33

If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight Linnzi Zaorski and Delta Royale (Charlie Fardella, Robert Snow, Matt Rhody, Seva Venet, Chaz Leary) Hotsy-Totsy 129 2004 2:36

The Clapping Song Shirley Ellis Because Of Winn-Dixie (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) 168 2005 3:11

Drinker Born Uncle Earl Waterloo, Tennessee 2007 3:22

Stay A Little Longer Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys The Tiffany Transcriptions (vol 2) 232 3:07

Some of These Days Midnight Serenaders Sweet Nothin’s 255 2009 3:29

El Panadero Cheba Massolo Coyazz 202 2008 2:32

B210k: week1, run2

distance: 6.39 km, time: 00:53, pace: 08:18, calories: 688, effort: 5/5
Man, it kicked it my arse. But it was good and I didn’t stop running in the running bits. Running later in the day to avoid the rain meant running in the heat and humidity and I SWEATED so much.
Some aches in my bad foot – makes me think I should revisit the podiatrist to have my orthotics checked (it’s been a year).
My shins were a bit achey before I started. I don’t do any warm up stretches, but lots of warm down stretches. I think I need to do proper warm ups, beyond the 5minutes walk.
sunny

reading and thinking about design in cultural context

I tend to tweet my thoughts as I do my reading for these classes. This ends up cluttering up my twitter feed with random comments. I don’t have time to write full blog entries while I’m reading (and I shouldn’t). As I read and tweet, I’m also taking notes and making comments on readings in a word processing document.
About every five minutes:
I will try to note some of my comments here as I go, instead of cluttering up my twitter feed and annoying people.
I haven’t been to the library once this semester. But I’ve done all the readings and written three assignments. Uni has changed in 17 years.
Challenging the pseudoscience of these design articles is getting tiresome.
I tired of your bullshit, design theory.
your fully justified article is blowing up my eyeballs, design article. Also, your content is desperate flummery.
Gotta remind myself: guiding motivation behind most design isn’t equity or social justice but financial gain. This is important difference.
…………………………………….
Oh man, my brains are blowing up. This article is just so… it’s like they’re trying to reinvent the wheel. It drives me crazy.
I give up.
I’ll probably return to this article later, once I’ve been to the lecture. I’ll definitely return to it if I need it for an assignment. This way I have an idea of what it’s about, and can come back later. There’s no discussion of readings in the tutorial or lecture, so I don’t need to be ‘on’. I’m also finding that the readings have no reference to the material covered in lectures.
I’ve just come across an article about the India Report. This caught my eye because the report was written by the Eames – mega famous American designers – who went to India to have a look at Indian design. I’m not sure if they were invited specifically, but I do think it was a response to the Indian government asking for suggestions about improving design and industry in India. The Eames’ report was sponsored by the Ford Foundation.
The Eames recommended a National Institute of Design be established, and it was. This is just fascinating stuff. I’d be really interested to see how the report (and institute) accommodate:
– regional differences in design
– cultural differences in design within the massive and culturally and ethnically diverse Indian continent
– gender/class/etc in (then) existing design practices, particularly as they relate to rural communities and gendered design and manufacturing processes.
I’d also be be fascinated to see how and if and even whether the Institute and Report worked in a context of cultural imperialism and India-as-British-Colony. I’d be curious about value systems and evaluation of design in this context, as this is something we do in my design subject – we ‘evaluate’ designs. I’m immediately wary of the term ‘evaluate’ – to engage with an item and to assess it according to a set of design values. I smell cultural specificity, but then, the part of me that’s learning about design pragmatics, understands that you do actually have to assess designs. This is especially important if you’re working to create accessible designs, or designs which improve accessibility, particularly for less powerful or marginalised groups and individuals.
I keep stumbling over the relationship between postmodernism and…. that other thing. I think of it in terms of feminism – women are all very different, with different needs and interests, but we also share common needs and interests, and so can work as groups. I always think of these groupings as contextually and temporally dependent, and also as mobile (agile?), changing all the time.
So usability design should:
– recognise the limitations of one designer designing for a group from whom he or she differs. In other words, remember who you are, how your ideas about the world are specific to you and your experiences, and design self-reflexively
– develop useful design personas for developing objects.
I’m not entirely sure about this point as design personas are just new to me. Basically, you develop an imaginary user with very convincing attributes – age, class, etc. The best personas are the product of extensive empirical research and a designer’s long experience. I suspect, though, that it might simply be more useful to work with the intended users directly with a sort of design-centred action research approach. This is complicated, though, by the fact that designers are actually working for clients (retailers, government bodies, etc) who are requesting a design to serve a particular user or customer. So you have to accommodate not only the users’ needs and interests, but also those of the client who’s paying you. Economic factors shape commercial (and government) work, policy issues shape government work, individual notions of the product from your liason affect the design….. and so on.
I’ve just been reading about scientific approaches to design. Or using principles of scientific research (cognitive psychology in particular) in the design process. While I’m interested in one way, I’m also very sceptical in another. Though it seems like a nice approach to user centredness and usability, I think that the power and ideas remain with the designer and client, and so the process still doesn’t actually produce user-centred designs. We are still filtering ideas through the brain of a designer.
This is, of course, quite practical in one sense. A designer understands how manufacturing processes work. They understand how design processes – actually getting things done work. But they do not – despite their best imagining and empirical research – actually know what it is to balance a child on one hip while you use a washing machine. Not once, but hundreds and hundreds of times. And then, of course, we have to talk about gender and class and the luxuries (and perceptions of) time and so on.
I think of this sometimes in terms of colour blindness or perceptions of colour. We each ‘know’ what blue is. And while we can use various tools to ‘show’ us how other people perceive blue, physically, we cannot ever ignore or leave behind our ‘knowledge’ of blue from our own, everyday lived experience. So the way we use blue, though it might in some sense respond to those alternative uses or perceptions of ‘blue’, will, ultimately, be shaped and informed and structured by our understanding of blue and blueness.
….I’m wondering if design-by-colaboration is useful here? Or how to go about involving users in the design process? Or whether design needs to get out of offices and out into other people’s everyday spaces?
As I read and write about this stuff, I keep thinking about how we do audience research in media and cultural studies. How the notion of positivism – that we can somehow objectively ‘collect’ data – is anathema to solid audience studies research. Design research, though, seems absolutely founded on this notion of ‘collecting’ data. When I am absolutely sure that data isn’t found but made.
Well, we’ll see how we go. I’m a bit sorry I only have two semesters of learn during this course. I’d like to learn a whole lot more. But there’s nothing to stop me getting my independent learn on later, after I’m finished. I’m also very interested in seeing how my experiences working in a job shape the way I think about this stuff. And the new ideas I’ll come up with. It’s all very exciting.

B210k: wk1, run1

distance: 6.35 km, time: 00:53, pace: 08:20, calories: 688, effort: 5/5
Good! Something strange happened to the ipod app partway through so I think I ended up running further than I planned. I didn’t hear the halfway tone, and when I checked I was over the halfway point. Then the ipod reset itself. Bah.
But I just ran and ran and it wasn’t hard. Though allergies made breathing difficult.
Running an hour later in the day was crap, though – the sun was hotter and made it less pleasant, even in the cooler morning.
cloudy, sunny