Ken,
I hope that those who feel disappointment will be able to accept all of our various characters, all of those that go by our given names as well as any others.
I brought in a non-profit organization called p:ear (www.pearmentor.org) to speak to students and faculty at my school yesterday. They work with homeless youth in the local area through art, education and recreation as a basis for building healthier lives. They talked a lot about feeling like one has the right to have a home, to have a job, or food or whatever. They talked about their organization as a site where homeless youth can be the part for certain amounts of time - to be indoors, to be creative, to be apart from drug culture or whatever else they may be a part of.
They also talked about one day when a bunch of the drag queens went with them to a carnival or fair and that at the end of the day one of the kids said, "You know, today all my needs were met." I think of this because so many people have been envisioning Ken in drag this week, and maybe it's not such a *bad* or *funny* image.
For me it is often the ability to put on a character, or even caricature that allows for needs to be resolved in interesting and surprising ways. I think that design takes many forms, as does education, and I think that it’s often through characters that we are designed.
I know that by our education and responsibilities we may differentiate our debate and station from that of homeless teens, but I really believe that the same types of social negotiations can be useful for all of us. In many disciplines people refuse to post their research topics and ideas on the web, much less on an open forum to protect their precious area of expertise. I think that just by participating in the types of collaborative thinking, argument, debate and so forth that go on here we are all already in a type of internet drag that is beautiful in its form.
Anyway, I'm just reiterating what I wrote yesterday. I hope people can be lighthearted about this play and that the list will continue its hard-hitting and fast-paced debate of the more technical and theoretical aspects of design as well as these more soft or human aspects without any loss of credibility.
-Alan
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