New England Design Symposium 2013 — Save the Date!

If you teach at a New England middle school, and you’re interested in this thing called Design Thinking that we’re doing at my school, save the date! On April 6, 2013, from 9 am to 3pm, we’re going to be doing it again.  You can register for further information on this year’s symposium, which will be about “Food and Landscape”, and I’ll be sending out further information as details are developed.  The core elements are:

1. A team is 3 to 7 students in middle school;
2. ‘middle school’ is defined as 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades
3. They need an adult advisor who is somehow connected with the school
4. The ‘school’ is actually any sponsoring organization, such as a Boy Scout or Girl Scout troop, that we can contact;
5. There will be a participation fee, probably under $75 per team, for materials and judges;
6. Each team will develop a portfolio of a problem they notice in their community connected to food;
7. At the Symposium, they will attempt to develop a solution to some other team’s portfolio problem.

In the meantime, you can see Julia Child ‘singing’ the joys of good cooking (happy 100th Birthday!) as a reminder that food is at the heart of what we do as human beings:

Julia has some great advice for designers at the start of this video, because chefs are a kind of designer, too. What makes a great designer?

1. Training and technique
2. a great love of good design
3. a generous personality, and…
4. the ability to invent!

This coming year, with record-breaking droughts in the American midwest, an incredible rise in the number of obese students and persons, and Middle Eastern riots over food helping to drive the Arab Spring earlier this past year, it makes sense to build on last year’s program on “landscape” to consider the role of Food and Landscape this year.

 

More news to follow.  Keep your eyes and ears open.

Taiji Day 164: thyroid

I’m reading this book about health, diet and exercise, and I’ve gotten to the section about sleep.  It asserts (unfortunately without references) that the thyroid regulates a lot of the body’s hormonal systems, and that a good night’s sleep recalibrates the thyroid so that it raises your metabolism.  It further asserts that if you pop out of bed in the morning, your thyroid is functioning properly. I don’t know whether this is so or not, but I do know that I pop out of bed in the morning eager for the tai chi routine most mornings now. Starting next week I’ll be doing it an hour earlier, so I hope that trend continues.

This morning I was doing a mixture of hard and soft style movements. The hard, fast movements create a snapping noise in my joints and muscles that I recall from karate lessons so long ago.  The slow, “soft” movements are more difficult because there is a tendency to rush, to move faster… One almost trembles from going slowly enough — the body, my body, isn’t used to having to exert this much control over movement.

On the other side of the mountain, there is another mountain.