16. November 2009 by justdanika.

Design is a very open ended field…it is not like engineering.

One does not have a right or a wrong answer but an endless set of choices that need to be justified and supported. Everything one does is a decision and it will affect the future of that object. Its materials (acrylic or masonite), realism (working or looks-like), texure (inviting or passive). All these decisions weighing in on the end our our tongue, hopeing we are making the correct one.

Decision paralysis has hit me hard today:

Racquetball…do i go right and give it a backhand or left and go for the forehand…WAM it hits me in the stomach.

If I can’t decide that…how can I decide something I want to make for personal statement? Do I go left, right, up, down, through the tunnel, do I warp to another level or do I just try and avoid the koopas?

no wonder I was never any good at video games…

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13. November 2009 by justdanika.

I can’t keep ignoring it…I have to think about what I want to do come June.

Maybe a better question is what am I qualified to do? What job title can I have? What value add does my background have to a potential employee? What values do I have as a designer have around what I want to do?

Is potential enough?

I want to be Genevieve Bell .

My criteria:

• I do not want to spend 8 hours a day behind a desk doing CAD, but I wouldn’t mind doing it once in a while.
• I want to work somewhere that I can have impact.
• I want to help the customers as well as the employees I work along side to have better days.
• I want to work for a company that recognizes my talents, actually see them as talents, and then utilize them.
• I want to work alongside people I can learn from.

What do I want to do?

I want to work with organizations to improve process, help companies see the customer at the end of the tunnel, and give employees the power and respect they deserve… A company can only be as great as it’s employees and I want those people to go home as satisfied and proud as the customers should when they take home their products.

It is holistic but it is important to design, innovation and creation.

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3. November 2009 by justdanika.

Reading through a chapter of “Mistakes Were Made” a really interesting area came up that I recently had a conversation about. It was regarding the idea that doctors are balancing their patient’s needs against their own financial concern. This dichotomy is interesting because it seems contradictory that either is more important than the other and in the heat of the ongoing debate over health care in the US right now it is extremely relevant. Looking at the players, seeing their interests, understanding their blind spots we might be able to start understanding how to negotiate this.

First lets understand the different player’s interests. Doctor’s have a set of interests that need to be met, they need to pay back loans from 7 years in school, insurance for their risky job, deal with a lot high stress and other wonderful/agonizing things they go through daily to make other’s healthy. Patients want good, clean, safe, affordable healthcare efficiently. The government is supposed to keep the needs of their citizens at the forefront of their mind, trying to get doctors paid while also directly giving the patients lower costs. Lastly, the Insurance Companies are for profit organizations that provide people with financial help when they get sick but rarely engage in the actual dealings between the doctors and the patients. Not one of these players overlap on what they want from their experience, their number 1 interests are individual.

This is a large, and complex negotiation between lots of players about something very important, people’s well being. All of these people have a role that is important though, and their needs have to be met in order to keep the system working. It is a constant push-pull and ethics plays in a lot. Are doctor’s trying to take too much from the insurance companies, are insurance companies attempting to hide things from their clients, are patients not caring about where they get medical care since the insurance company will pay it anyway. All of these questions, though perhaps not thought of in this way, are probably an issue behind the scenes.

This is where the blind spots come in that were mentioned in “Mistakes Were Made”. I think all of these people think they are doing what is best for the patient and themselves. They can certainly justify their actions to themselves and state openly that their number one priority is the patient but it wouldn’t be such a large issue in government today if everyone was truly acting ethically.

“Blind spots enhance our pride and activate our prejudices.”

Whenever a doctor, or insurance worker or patient justifies that what they are doing is ethically ok, they are activating their prejudices of the other players. They are stating that the others are acting just as they expect them too. These prejudices create a sort of negative feedback loop which results in higher justified prices, more fights between patients and insurance companies and in the end the government picking up more and more health care bills and other patients having to subsidize those that can’t afford the healthcare they need.

These blind spots within this highly ethical debate allow our healthcare system to slowly spin out of control.

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