Travel blog

I have been taking a little break from blogging about professional/career related topics.

For the next couple of months I will be traveling across the United States, and have set up a blog to document my travels!  Please check it out at:

bzroadtrip.wordpress.com.

the tomato blight

According to the New York Times, the Boston Globe, a farmer with whom I helped harvest crops in Vermont, and my own container garden in Somerville, MA, there is an explosive outbreak of late blight on tomato plants.  The fungus, which is fairly common in soil, but erupting at an alarming rate do to the unusually wet and cold June, is destroying crops of tomato plants which exhibit unsightly symptoms such as white, powdery spores; large olive green or brown spots on leaves; and brown or open lesions on the stems.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw first hand the destruction of the late blight fungus while harvesting crops near Lebanon, Vermont.  Willing Hands is an organization started by a Dartmouth College professor that distributes wholesome and organic fruits and vegetables to needy locals in the area.  On that orange Thursday evening a handful of volunteers stood around an old pickup truck waiting for orders from the leathery tan farmhand, Will.  After a firm handshake and polite introductions Will announced, “well, the tomatoes have the blight.”  I had heard about the blight before, but it seemed like something that was only in the news, a minor nuisance reported on a slow day.  “Salvage any green tomatoes that look like they are about to turn red.  Putting them face down on a window sill will likely ripen them.”  A group approached the wilted, blackened tomato plants that bowed to the ground in submission to this horrible fungus.  “Pick as many as you can.  I’m tilling these under tomorrow.”  And with a smile, Will went on his way while the rest of us gingerly began to pick at the droopy tomato plants.

I plucked as many green tomatoes as I could.  I didn’t discriminate based on color, but did throw aside any tomatoes covered in muck or with a large split or gash.  As I got down on the ground and shoved tomatoes into my pants pockets and my t-shirt folded up at the bottom, I thought of my own tomato plants at home.  Apparently the tomato blight can be traced to a seedling wholesaler in Alabama that provided seedlings to places like Wal-Mart, Lowes and Home Depot.  I had bought one of my tomato plants from Home Depot…and the fact that it had only produced three adorable red cherry tomatoes in the past couple of months made me nervous.  Would I actually be impacted by the late blight?  Would I be a part of this news?  My other two tomato plants were gifts from a friend who had thinned them from his own garden.  I knew his tomato plants were grown locally at a garden center on the South Shore.  Would they be safe?  Would the Alabama plants ruin the others?

The mind drifts when picking tomatoes from a dying row of plants, and all of a sudden I was thinking of horrible daytime infomercials.  I find it funny–looking back–that I thought of this while volunteering on a picturesque farm on a beautiful day that ended with sweet lemonade and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.  My mind specifically drifted to the Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter (don’t click on the link unless you want to see an embarassingly ridiculous commercial).  This rebel of plant physiology is claimed to be an effective holder of tomato plants.  Rather than straining your back and knees by bending over to water your plants, you can simply dump water in from the top.  Not only can you not see how much water is being added to the planter, but the weight of holding a heavy watering can is probably more straining than a minor squat.  Put your tomato plants on a table or something.

I haven’t done the research to find out what actual users of this product think.  My guess is that there have been some issues not only with the ergonomics of the process, but also the fact that tomatoes this summer, especially in New England, are struggling.  I have wondered if Topsy Turvy might take a dive because of this untimely and rare botanical event.  Will Topsy Turvy be cruelly judged for the lack of successful urban garden tomato plants?  I sure hope not.  Although I am boggled by how the plant actually stays rooted into the soil…upside down…I do not wish it any bad tidings.

debating ethnography part II

I bet some of you (who actually read this) didn’t think that I would make this second post.  Well, here it is.  After a semester of an ethnography course, a discussion on ethnography at the Boston UPA Conference, and a poster on ethnography at the 2009 International UPA Conference, I am a little tired of the subject.  However, I will provide a brief update on these sessions, and then go into some of my new favorite things.

The ethnography discussion at the Boston UPA Conference went great.  Well, let me start around 2 hours before showtime.  Martha Kam (who was the other presenter) and I, found a place to finalize our lovely PowerPoint slides, and practice exactly what we would say.  The structure of our presentation was to present some definitions of ethnography, state why we felt discussing its use in user-centered design is important, and then presenting some debates on ethnography in the source disciplines of Anthropology and Sociology.  We made it a point never to say “I think…” rather we attempted to keep the discussion as Socratic as possible, stating from the beginning that we would be neutral in the discussion, and presenting previous debates that we feel are applicable to our field today.  For example, this question of proper training in ethnographic fieldwork.  According to Malinowski (who is considered the father of ethnography), fieldwork prior to his rigorous approaches were deemed to have been conducted by amateurs like missionaries and colonial administrators.  We presented a quote of Malinowski’s stating this, and inspired a discussion.  Some members of the audience played devil’s advocate–we are amateurs–while others found the word “pegorative” and an incorrect representation of user researchers conducting ethnography.  If you are interested in seeing our presentation, feel free to email me at zarlashtah.ludin@gmail.com.

The ethnography poster went well.  Despite being $90 poorer (and I don’t even want to remember how much I paid for the entire trip/conference), the experience was great.  Many conference attendees approached me while I stood at my poster, commenting that they liked the visual presentation as a timeline, and the lovely green colors.  Aaron Marcus approached me and complimented me on the poster, then offered me an Altoid.  Jakob Nielsen came up to me as well, I awkwardly mentioned that his face looked familiar “from the internet.”  And others who had actually conducted ethnographic fieldwork all liked my poster.  If you would like to see my poster, visit my website www.zarlaludin.com.  It’s under my updates.

OK, no more ethnography for now.  On to my favorite things:

1.  www.moo.com. Christina Wallace (JSTOR) gave an interesting talk at the UPA Conference on how to get the user-centered design process going using some effective design approaches.  My favorite was her approach of creating a mock-up, but omitting one major aspect of the functionality, and asking designers to critique the mock-up.  Leaving out this one important aspect, she found, would get the ball rolling on critiquing the entire design.  At the end of the day, I approached her and thanked her for her talk, as well as the great poster she made (which might one day hang up in my cubicle), and she gave me her mini-card.  I told her how Jakob Nielsen had chided me for not having a business card at a professional conference and she suggested I check out moo.com.  For around $20 I got 100 mini cards with my own custom images and text on the back.  I thought it was a great alternative to a large business card.  Being unemployed, it seemed to self-important to have a large card, so these mini cards are great.  Google discount codes for this site too…I got $4 off my order!

2.  Home remedy to get rid of aphids. In an attempt to have an organic vegetable containter garden, I was chagrined to come home from Oregon to find aphids on my white eggplant!!  After some Google searches, I found a home remedy that is 2 parts water, 1 part vegetable oil, and a couple drops of Murphy’s Oil.  After only 2 days of some light spraying on affected areas, I am seeing these little bugs shrivel up and die.  I can’t wait for some white eggplant.  The other stuff in my garden is going strong; used some basil last night in my pasta, and some green tomatoes are sprouting!

3.  Usability Rockstar t-shirt. Thank you Ovo Studios for sponsoring my conference admission fee to last year’s UPA Conference.  I have been wearing your t-shirt since then.

debating ethnography part I

This is my second post related to ethnography–the first one being on ethics in ethnography.  I feel strongly about the subject because of my understanding of ethnography’s origins, history, and evolution.  I studied anthropology as an undergrad, having dabbled in the cultural subset, but focusing in the physical/biological world.  Although I love this field, and feel that anthropology is such an important science, I realize that all subsets of anthropology are wrought with controversy.  I learned that physical anthropology started as a science to simply assert the superiority of white men, and I also learned that ethnography–the core of cultural anthropology–is full of controversy and debate.

Recently, my colleauge Martha Kam and I have been doing research on ethnography’s major debates and controversies for a presentation we will be giving at the 2009 Boston UPA Conference.  We hope to spark a lively debate on the applied use of ethnography in our professional field of user-centered design.  We feel that in order to use a term such as ethnography–that has so much baggage to it–UCD practitioners need to know about ethnography’s “dark side” or rather the major aspects of it that have been disputed, debated, and settled.

We are not aiming to argue that ethnography is NOT good for UCD, rather, we want to spark a debate on it much like Alan Blackwell’s discussion on the reification of the term metaphor as a design tool.

As I was researching debates in ethnography, I came across an anecdotal example of how problematic ethnography is even within the field of anthropology (from which is originates).  Despite decades of debates and controversies, ethnography’s baggage is no more lighter than it was 40 years ago.  Because of this, I question why a field such as UCD would adopt such a concept.  I believe that UCD should reconsider their adoption of ethnography, understand the core concepts behind ethnography, and then question whether this is what is being practiced or if the name is simply being used because it is a recognized term in qualitative research.

Because I don’t feel it’s my right to name names on a blog, I am going to keep this anecdotal example very vague.

Someone who I am very close with is studying in another country, and recently went to see a venerable professor of anthropology speak on his latest ethnography.  This anthropologist is reputed as the most famous anthropologist in this country, has studied around the world, and is just all around a champion of this concept.  The ethnography he was presenting was on field work he had conducted over the past nine years on a group of immigrants to this country.  The final product of the field work was this ethnography, which outlined the anthropologist’s experience having lived among the male group of this population.  In addition to this narrative/diary/autobiography of the anthropologist’s experience with the male group of this population, he included a document analysis of primary documents written by the women of the population, which were not assembled for the purposes of the ethnography.  Essentially, the representation of the female population was simply the ethnographer’s analysis of these documents, and later I found out he did not even offer back the manuscript of this analysis to the women of this population.

I am curious what people think of this?  I would love to get some responses on where the major pitfalls are in this ethnographer’s work, or if anyone has critiques on the methods used to create this ethnography.

If I don’t get feedback, I will be posting part II later.

lessons learned

1.  Recruiting people who use correction tape is not an easy task.  I remember a time when I used to hand write assignments and turn them in on lined paper.  I remember typing assignments, printing them off at the campus library and turning them into professors.  Now, printing paper seems like a superfluous task, one reserved for making corrections to drafts, or sparing my eyes from the icy glare of my laptop monitor to read journal articles.  If you use correction tape, please contact me…please.

2.  Conferences are expensive, and are so because organizers know that I will go.  My proposal got accepted (a poster on a brief history of ethnography in anthropology and user research).  I now have less than two weeks to decided if I want to shell out around $900 to fly out to Portland and present my poster.  If I don’t, I will be throwing away a huge opportunity.  If I do, I am out $900 and am potentially exposing myself to major criticism for presenting an amateur concept at a massive international conference.  Networking is a plus.

3.  Baggage claim never takes 15 minutes.  And taxis are the most ruthless at the airport.  None of this looking at their side view mirrors for them.  What are they there for?  Clearly decoration and symmetry.