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The conversations will easily be logged and the visual spaces can be saved.

Gelman: Sort of accidental typography.

Rebecca: Right! Exactly.

Gelman: With a very limited parameters; but I’m sure it will be interesting visually.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m really excited to see what people write with it. The second project that I’m working on, I’m building a prototype for it on a Pocket PC, and it’s a watch. It’s a design for a watch interface. What happens is that wherever you are you’ve got access to 10 pieces of information about that space. It’s always the same 10 pieces of information. Things like median income, AIDS cases per 1000, social, political, economic information, carbon monoxide levels in the air, environmental data, all kinds of different information about the space that you’re currently in and what you can do is, if you set your watch to let’s say median income, as you’re walking around you’re seeing the medium income of every place you walk through.

Gelman: How do you define a place? By a street or neighborhood?

Rebecca: It’s going to be by zip code for now. It’s actually more effective by car than it is as a pedestrian although you move fairly quickly from zip code to zip code when walking around the city. Because I have census data for every zip code and US Geological survey data, what happens is wherever you are, you can scroll through these pieces of information, you can set your watch to a particular mode like median income and then you can walk around and contrast what you’re seeing and hearing and the interactions you’re having with people to what’s on your watch and the idea is to use the data set on your watch to enhance your experience of the city. But also to use your experience of the city to question the data that’s appearing on the watch. That back and forth tension is really important to me in both the visualization projects that I have been working on and some of the collection projects that I’m moving towards. It’s an attitude towards data in which where everybody has access to it.

Gelman: It seems these are your key themes: data gathering and social issues. You’re raising all kinds of questions beyond just design.

Rebecca: I feel that design is in the service of, in terms of interfaces to data. Design enables those interfaces. Design is a very powerful tool in the kind of work I’m interested in doing.

Gelman: It allows you to see and understand data that you wouldn’t be able to without it.

Rebecca: On the one hand I have the access to technical things, but not everybody’s technical. Being able to sit between people and technology means design is an opportunity to connect people with different aspects of the world. It’s a super important opportunity that I take really seriously.

Gelman: Do you see it as a bridge between technology, user and public?

Rebecca: Certainly good design is a way to express good thinking and give people access to good thinking. I’m being very general.

Gelman: Well, it’s hard to describe such loaded terms, like design.

Rebecca: I know. Actually I think the students that I work with, the ones that call themselves designers who are mostly kids who have hung up a shingle outside their door and said "designer," they make stuff and they know how to use software and they get people to pay them to use software and I think that’s great because they’ve just taken it upon themselves to just jump in and do it. But on the other hand they’re very good at walking around and they have antenna, great antenna, being young people, for what’s hot. They can look around and see particular visual styles that they think are cool, and then they can integrate that cool quality into whatever they make. But they don’t understand the depths of the references that they are making and they don’t understand the intentionality behind the decisions that they are making.

Gelman: So do you see your mission in making them understand that? In being more responsible for their decisions?

Rebecca: Yeah, at least helping them realize that design is an opportunity to put their own well-considered thoughts into the world, not just take someone else’s thought. That’s actually a huge job, but really interesting. They’re all very good thinkers and they all have these great ideas, and they all think of design as, "Oh, I’m a designer too. I make websites for these art galleries." But making them realize that the things they’re doing in their academic courses and the thinking that they’re doing all around as people who are growing up, is very, very important to integrate with their idea of design. I guess I strive to have my own... It’s either sort of a non-style or no style. I don’t try to curate anything‹any particular look. If I do, it’s just messy.

Gelman: Or clean.

Rebecca: Or clean. Depending on how you look at it.