Day 2: A Picture from The Past

January 10, 2023

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m renting an AirBnB in Wilkinsburg, a part of Pittsburgh about 15 minutes east from campus. It’s in what’s called the “East End”—perhaps in some kind of homage to London. I have no idea what the boundaries of the East End are. Or if there’s a West End.

I’m on the third floor of an old brick building. Pittsburgh has a lot of those. What makes this one unique is the attic has been ripped out to create vaulted ceilings covered with corrugated metal sheets. It must be hot as hell during the summer, but it’s pretty cozy now in early January.

Until today, I hadn’t spent any time walking around the neighborhood because yesterday I was on campus all day and before that I wasn’t here yet. But today was Zoom calls and pre-class reading and an Onboarding session that I never got an invite for because I don’t yet have a CMU ID (if you don’t have an “Andrew ID” you basically don’t exist) and ergo didn’t attend, so I could take a walk to a pharmacy. Which was good because I was still coughing and wondering if I had Covid.

My current neighborhood is, like many Pittsburgh neighborhoods, a set of brick row houses, some of which are beautiful and restored, some of which are in serious disrepair. This varies house by house and block by block in this neighborhood. There are also some 70s apartments and ranch houses occasionally tossed in at random, probably where the original houses fell into total disrepair and were bulldozed. Inexplicably, there is also a store that only sells bow ties.

My dog Pixel and I walked the few blocks to the pharmacy in the bright cold. She trotted across an icy puddle, but didn’t seem to notice or mind. She’s an elderly, half-blind California dog who has never experienced low temperatures and weighs 17 pounds, so I’ve been concerned about how she’s going to adjust but thus far, she’s doing great.

We arrive after a few blocks at the local Rite Aid. The pharmacy shelves were so bare, it felt like the store had been ransacked. But I found a Covid test, brought it back to my apartment, and took it. Negative. Whew.

Relieved, I settled in to work through the readings for the courses I’m helping teach this semester, which are Service Design and Design of AI Products and Services. HCII has an interesting model in which every class is co-taught, which helps in case one of the professors is sick or attending a conference. It also lightens the workload in that you’re not on the hook for every lecture every class session and there are multiple faculty to help grade and do in-class critiques. Classes in the HCII tend to be large—studio classes of 40 people aren’t uncommon. Design of AI Products and Services has 72 students and almost 300 on the waitlist.

So I’m plowing through some 500 pages of readings, spotting some old favorites, and I’m seeing friends in there. Steve Portigal, Alan Cooper, Rachel Hinman, Shelley Evenson. It’s funny to think of your friends as canonical, but here we are. Steve was helping me move boxes two weeks ago and I’m teaching him in class next week. Wild.

I’m reading one of Shelley’s articles that I don’t recognize and I’m like heyyyy wait a minute. That’s me!

Me on the right. Ian Hargraves on the left.

It’s a picture of me practicing the Directed Storytelling technique (the subject of her paper) in graduate school. So not only will I be teaching my friends’ work, I’ll be teaching me learning the technique. While learning how to teach it.

It’s making my head spin.