Bobulate

When yesterday I got an email signed “rgds,” a trite valediction closing an email to a group of professionals, I stopped. Rgds? Really? Was the email author intending to communicate a familiarity with his audience by dropping the vowels, or simply just a level of tired sophistication with the keyboard—too familiar with typing that vowels were an interference and, therefore, a waste of time between us. Or was it simply that everything is now bound by constraints even when we are constraintless?

No matter the reason, vowels are the victims, and it seemed fitting to compose a quick ode in response. More…

When it’s clear summer has officially dethroned spring to become the sole proprietor of the season, my thoughts immediately turn to tradition. Tradition, as a condition of summer integrity, is crucial as it begets the connections between idleness and frenzy, between new and old, and between intellectual stimulation and lazy creativity. But no matter what the parameters, one thing is consistent from summer to summer — the critical nature of the prefix “re.”

You see, the prefix “re,” borrowed from Latin meaning “again” or even “again and again,” signals the critical cadence of summer, as summer is perhaps the underdog season of tradition itself. As footloose as we imagine ourselves in summer — barefoot and lightly clothed (apologies, San Francisco) — it’s actually replete with rituals as rigorous as the December shopping season. “Re” is affixed to just about every activity, signaling a return to familiarity, a reset, and our revelry in it. More…

Inbox Zero. To get to the unimaginable, unattainable place only reserved for the likes of those disciplined enough or courageous enough to manage it, one has to be comfortable with “delete.” Delete as a colloquial term is fairly recent, but as part of our language and social structure, the concept of deleting is clearly not. We’ve been promptly disposing of items that others have prepared for us for centuries.

Why then, does one feel like an utter failure when one must delete an email without having taken action on it? Are there precedents for these defeatist feelings in other aspects of our lives that we can draw upon? More…

I’m only doing a few conferences this spring and summer, as I’m focusing most of my attention on building the new master’s program. But starting tomorrow morning, I’ll be heading to the SXSW Interactive Festival, the not-to-be-missed get-together, where I’ll be attending for the fourth time. More…

January marks a fresh start for many, but for the MFA Interaction Design program, it marks a milestone in our development. We’re receiving our first round of applications January 15 — just under two weeks away. I’m delighted at the prospect of reviewing the first candidates for the MFA in Interaction Design program’s inagural class this fall. In the meantime, the department is busy with some upcoming events. More…

Salutations have three simple purposes in email. They are the greeting, the email handshake. They set the tone and tempo for the communication that follows. And they establish a hierarchy, depending on whether the writer attaches a title (e.g., “Professor,” “Miss”), thereby creating a formal separation, or a lack thereof.

We know this; many of us have been writing some form of email now for nearly two decades.

But what we may not realize is that when an individual offers a salutation, he or she is not going through some formal motions. He or she is engaged in an activity of relationship-building. A variety of salutations will likely be used over the course of an email correspondence, and their evolution reveals something about the developing relationship (or the perceived one) between the correspondents. Just as you wouldn’t ignore body language that indicates whether someone is intending to shake your hand or high-five you, nor should you ignore email-greeting intentions — no matter how well you know someone. More…