Douglas Easterly's PhD Research

Verizon provided a large grant to the American Library Association to research learning/literacy and serious gaming. http://www.seriousgamessource.com/item.php?story=19243

 The general feedback I received today:

 some links on brain-science, decision making, problem solving

A book I want to read - Your Brain is (almost) Perfect: How we make decisions

Dr. Ginger Campbell's Brain Science Podcast

Brain Science Podcast with Read Montague

 Reading links related to children, addiction, health, house of play...

I'm trying to lay a groundwork for gaming activity/addiction/contemporary norms and abnormalities: trying to figure out what might be considered healthy relationships with video games

 My final meeting with Yusuf for this, my second trip to CCS, was a great conclusion to an intense week of research: interviews, meetings, discussions, demos, reading, writing, interaction, visits, observation, and most importantly - creative reflection. 

 On Thursday (June 26, 2008) CCS had a Games Studio meeting. Damian Hills gave a presentation on Façade (the Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas' interactive story/play/drama/game). Damian brought up a lot of good points while giving a very interesting presentation on this landmark game. Façade hold particular relationship to Damian's research, which is looking at building an experience for up to 4 people to build a collaborative narrative.

 Magic Hopscotch is an installation at the Beta_space in the Powerhouse museum in Sydney, 23 June - 30 July. It was the collaborative effort of CCS members Doreen Ee and Viveka Weilly. 

it sometimes takes other viewpoints and conversations to remember something obvious - like making sure a written or presented rhetoric always threads back to the main topic. 

It was clear from the questions and conversations that arose after my lecture on June23rd at CCS, that I had some interesting 'chunks' and hypothesis, but they were far from being streamlined into a sensible cohesion. 

 Thursday I met with Shigeki Amitami, who is a post-doctoral research assistant in the Creativity and Cognition Studios. I was very fortunate to meet with him for over an hour - and he provided me a very illuminating insight, not only to his own research, but regarding the more general area of PhD-level research.

His research question - 

How can the computer be used as a creativity support tool?

How to design such tools, and what methods to take?

 Design is the intent to compose opposition to nature. At the origin of our ability to produce designed artifacts, this is obvious in the form of stone tools and fire, etc. Today, our sophisticated and refined products are meant to conquer nature, even that of the artificial kind (the frontier of the economic landscape). The economic landscape, in fact, is the articulated pinnacle of human processing of nature.