design blogs

The Times of London recently released their list of the top 50 design blogs. I've been reading over half of them for about a year now...a terrible addiction that began over winter break after the realization that my education at IWU had been filled with a lot of qualitative design principles, while MIT...um...let's just say we like numbers here. I am not judged on my ability to draw a sea cucumber's internal organs to scale, nor am I pressed to talk about different linings of body cavities in reference to each other, nor do I have to think about why different bird egg samples are different colors. Instead, I do lots of math-y things. Or experiments with lots of clear liquids, where you can't even see what you're working with...which, I gotta tell you, is really boring sometimes. Here I go, adding 15 µL of this clear liquid to 20 µL of this clear liquid. Then I put them on a heat block for three minutes, and then the experiment is "done." Yikes!

So--last December, I really started missing the visual component of science that was so important to me, so I decided to bring that back into my life by my living space (hence contacting Apartment Therapy for help and being a more careful thrift-store shopper, and trying to figure out what would make me happy in my own space). That said, I'd still love to get back to what the "real" engineers here call "fake" science. I very much believe that the education I received prepared me for a lot of things (reasoning, yes...programming, no), and if I am ever in the capacity to influence educational strategies for teaching science, they'd include a bit of everything in order to provide a broad background in how to think and how to describe what is actually happening. You can't see protein interactions, so you have to go with some sort of proxy for it, which will end up looking like this:

from here

Not nearly as satisfying or pretty as this:

from here

But there is a reason that I'm doing what I'm doing...this sort of science is where the "big" things are happening right now. I'm bummed that I can't really talk much about this project, because it does have some really neat applications (if it works) but it is also completely a "let's add clear liquids together" sort of project. And so, to make up for the lack of nudibranchs in my life, I drool over this:

from here

and this:

from here


and this:

from here:

A girl can dream, right?