I was talking to a few classmates the other day about the applications process to ITP. We were all curious to hear about each other’s approaches– What did everyone write about? What did they focus on as the reason they wanted to be here? What did their portfolios look like? Had their work changed since they’d applied? Did they still agree with what they’d written? A few of us offered to share our admissions essays. I’m pasting mine below:

Personal Statement for Admission to ITP
January 8, 2008

As a librarian at the Pratt Institute, I teach a research and information skills course called Beyond Google. My first semester, I walked into the lab confident that I could convey to students how engrossing the world of library research is. After all, I had taught similar skills to students at UC Santa Cruz for several years. What a shock, then, to realize a few weeks into the semester that these art and design students were not engaged at all by the tools and methods I was offering them. I was failing to ignite their imaginations, and it felt like I was wasting their time. What was the problem? Why were these students so different from the students I had worked with before?

It wasn’t until one afternoon when I asked the students to break into groups and draw representations of their research processes that I began to understand where we weren’t connecting. The students became animated and exuberant as they hunched over huge sheets of colored paper, scrambling for markers and excitedly chattering about what sources they use and how they use them while they drew out their ideas. Suddenly, they were excited and engaged, and they were consequently learning far more than they had been during earlier exercises. Where typing text into search boxes and skimming over subject headings had failed to stimulate, the visual and physical activity of creating large drawings had succeeded far better than I had planned or anticipated.

The students I had worked with at UC Santa Cruz, mostly social sciences and humanities majors, had been excited about information tools because they had learned as they searched. Database subject headings and thesauri had provided them with context, so they delved deeper into their disciplines before they ever even began to read abstracts from their results lists. The Beyond Google students, on the other hand, were clearly a group of visual and kinesthetic learners, and they gleaned very little serendipitous learning from text interfaces.

Teaching these young artists and designers to cope with tools that don’t inspire them frustrates and saddens me, but watching them struggle to access information has ignited a desire in me to create genuinely rewarding ways for them to do so. I’m not interested in simply producing visual displays for search results or slightly tweaking a mouse in order to replicate workflows dictated by older technologies; nor am I interested in focusing on tools strictly for art and design. Instead, I want to develop projects that deeply engage the ways in which people access, organize, manipulate, and feel about information, regardless of their learning styles or literacy levels.

Peter Morville subtitled his book, Ambient Findability, “What We Find Changes Who We Become.” He’s right that we change a little with every bit of knowledge we acquire, but I also believe that how we find changes who we become. It’s not just the content of our research that affects us, but the thinking processes we go through to find the material we need that cause us to grow. Whether we’re searching for some piece of music trivia to settle a friendly dispute or navigating labyrinthine hospital corridors in a time of crisis, our responses to information seeking are emotional as well as intellectual.

With these ideas in mind, I want to create tools that not only make access to information easier for users with diverse ways of learning, but that also inspire people to think critically and investigate their own relationships to the information they seek. Information is what gives us agency—without it we can’t act—but current information technology privileges specific ways of acquiring knowledge and disregards the needs of kinesthetic and visual learners.

I have some ideas about how I might begin addressing what I see as this major lack in information technologies. But in order to pursue my vision, I need guidance, instruction, and a community in which I can ask challenging questions about the ways in which we relate to information. I work best within a collaborative group, where people are feeding off of others’ ideas and are inspired by others’ work. From my few visits to ITP—last year’s Spring Show, an Arduino workshop with Tom Igoe during NIME, and an orientation for prospective applicants—I can see that ITP is exactly the sort of community I want to participate in. What I hope to learn while there is not concrete or quantifiable. While specific courses in designing tangible interfaces or working with specific types of media are useful and important, they are skills I could learn independently. What I really want to learn from the ITP community is how to frame the questions I have about the ways we interact with technology and how to actually begin making a difference in pursuing solutions.

I’m a librarian—it’s not unusual for my toes to tap with delight at a change to the interface of a Cambridge Scientific Abstracts database. I know not all information seekers are as enamored with the tools available to them, though. My hope is that whatever I create will incite a similar reaction in users to that of the art and design students drawing their research processes: their curiosity will spark, they’ll delight in their own skill, they’ll be driven to share, they’ll want to take the time to slow down and savor the experience of discovery.