On Wednesday Jon gave another lecture covering the specifics of the narrative essay, an overview of concepts maps and process flow diagrams. My brain felt like it just polished off a giant "billy" at Moes and was gunna need a few days to digest. Also on Wednesday, the class did an exercise to understand the narrative essay. We had to write a short description of the room we were sitting in using the literary elements; plot, character, setting, climax and ending. It was surprisingly enjoyable. It was the first time I actually had fun writing a short essay. I think this has some to do with my growing admiration for all things educational, but mainly it was the perspective in which the writing was viewed. It was a design problem. We had to craft a solution that described the room in detail so the listener was able to understand the situation, and rather than using the typical design tools of renderings or model building, we were sketching with words. (Wow, that sounds cheesy.) But really I felt the same creativity and freedom writing that paper that I do when given a design brief. This weekend I will be designing another essay, this one on baseball. I'm not sure if I mentioned, but the goal of the "Baseball Deconstructed" assignment is to describe the game of baseball (rules, game-play, emotions) so that someone who has no experience with it, can comprehend the game. So to that end, the essay portion will be very descriptive and try to express baseball inn a way the other maps and diagrams cannot.

I should also mention that we did a short exercise experimenting with process flow diagrams in class. This is a flow chart that starts at the beginning of a task or occurrence, finishes at the end and takes in to account anything that could happen in between. (The little pic at the top is me working on a process flow diagram.) It sounds like a daunting task, and it is, but when you start to break down the process of something, the patterns and structure of it becomes apparent. This is a technique many people use when writing software. I always cringe at the thought of programming, but this exercise helped me see that it really is just another problem that requires creativity and inspiration to solve.