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I’ll be the teaching assistant for this guy in the course Research Methods. Wow! Will try to get hold of his book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, so I’ll be more prepared. Sounds like a good read! Just have to juggle the reading with the hunt for apartment, bank account, social security number, an American phone number, etcetera, etcetera. But New Yorkers are really good at reading on the subway – and I am taking the subway A LOT. So. Sounds like I have a plan!

The day is finally here. I leave for New York City this morning to start my 2 year Master’s degree in interaction design. I bring a ton of stuff even though I really have been trying to restrain myself. But my globe will stay here in Oslo – looking out on the rainy weather. And yay for the rain! Much easier to leave my hometown when it’s all grayish and wet. Which reminds me of the last decision I need to make: should I bring my fancy yellow Hunter boots? I think they will love New York.

My Mom is worried that I will get fat in the US. So she decided to teach me how to make some healthy crisp bread the other day. The first thing I suggested was to put some honey in the dough to make it yummier. I am definitely getting fat over there. However, these initially surprisingly-easy-to-make crisp breads end up being not-so-easy-to-separate-from-the-baking-sheet if you add the honey. My advice – DO NOT EXPERIMENT. Do as Tone (my Mom’s colleague) says. If you understand Norwegian, that is. I am lazy today, so I simply won’t bother translating all these seeds and weird flour types into English. I won’t even type the recipe. I think my photos will do. Now go make these crispy delights:

I have been accepted to the MFA in Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Even though this program started up last year, I guess attending a Master’s degree in this field has been my dream ever since I first learned that one could become such a thing as an interaction designer at a seminar at the University of Bergen in 2005.

Back then I thought I would need this degree to get into the field professionally. When I signed the contract with Logica’s UX department a year later, I understood that this was not the case – and I have been calling myself an interaction designer since that very day.

I am moving from my beloved garden city house to live with my parents now. Renting out my apartment is one of many necessary steps to remove the red numbers from my “Student in New York budget”… I am trying really hard to put stuff in boxes tonight, but stumbled upon these colorful notes I made when taking a class at the University called ‘User Interface’, and got all nostalgic:

I put the word interaction design in the middle, and tried my best to get a better understanding of principles, processes, methods, tools and approaches to the field – just by reading this boring book about it. I guess I’ve got the hang of many of the things at this sheet now. It’s in my guts. But I am ready to explore interaction design in another way than you get to as a consultant. I want to both get inspired, and to inspire through design. I want to read long articles without feeling guilty. I want to write, write, write. I want to be able to blog about anything again – to be open. With a brain focused on things that I am not allowed to tell anyone, the blog has almost died a sloooowly death.

I can’t wait to be student again, to get to know my fellow students, to get to know New York, a new neighborhood and a new home! In September it’s getting real.

PS! I have no idea where this new home will be yet. Let me know if you have any tips on living in New York, know of a room that will be available from September, want to go apartment hunting with me, or can let me stay a couple of nights at your place while I find my future home :)

PPS! If you want to live in my beautiful house with garden and parking lot and furnitures and everything at Valle in Oslo for NOK 10500 a month, say so. To me.

And I made an excuse
You found another way to tell the truth
I put no one else above us
We’ll still be best friends when all turns to dust
Excuses by The Morning Benders

A quote from the song I keep on repeat at the moment, Excuses by The Morning Benders. It’s so nice walking around in the sunny spring weather humming to the tune. Check out the video from the recording of the song below, where one big happy San Fran-family sing and play in the studio. You can download the mp3 of Excuses for free from the band site, www.themorningsbenders.com, and you can purchase their wonderful album Bic Echo there too :)

Tonight I am going to a live album recording concert session here in Oslo with Heartfelt & The Music Population Orchestra. Hopefully it will be just as magical!

What a movie! Dark, funny gangster movie from my gray neighborhood in Oslo. Made me laugh out loud several times, and gave me a good handful of quotes that simply must go into the Norwegian film history books. It is almost painful to watch the characters and their miserable lives, but we always believe that our “hero” – the somewhat gentle man (Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd) that just got out of prison, will do the right thing in the end.

A Prophet (FR) is also an excellent gangster movie – but this time we get a story from within the prison walls. The film is not dark and funny. It’s just daaaark. No laughing out loud, but I was close to vomiting once. Just 2.5 hours plain tragedy including the worst scene ever. Keywords: razor blade, battle, blood, blood, blood. Ugh. What I learned from the movie? Take a language course. Do not look other people in the eye. And STAY AWAY FROM PRISON.

Wow! Just stumbled upon the work of Stefanie Posavec. She has made literature into beautiful art by counting words, sentences, paragraphs and categorizing the content in different classic novels. She represents her findings visually in a a project called Writing Without Words, and has explored On the Road by Jack Kerouac in great detail. Below you see a portion of the novel visualized by the length of each sentence, and the color based on what the sentence is about.

Sentence drawing for On the Road by Kerouac.

The “doodle” above explained.

Various authors’ writing styles emerge from these weird abstract doodles when she visualize the first chapters of their books.

Another kind of visualization of On the Road using a tree structure. The tree divides Part One into chapters, then into paragraphs, then into sentences, and finally sentences are divided into words.

Some of the hard work Posavec did in On the Road by Kerouac to structure the content.

By Posavecs’ systematic approach, she has made a lot of different visualizations, and I admire both the idea and the excellent design work. Luckily, I can put a poster on my wall to remind me of what great ideas and hard work can lead to. Check out Stefanie Posavec’s Writing Without Words project:

• on her own site
• on NotCot where the images are in higher resolution
• put a poster on your wall

I celebrated my 25th birthday this weekend. Happy, smiling, lovely friends – they all came to an Italian three course meal at my parent’s place. With 14 guests, a functional toilet and general space is essential.

The menu:
- Salmon carpaccio
- Pasta with pumpkin or amatriciana (tomato, bacon, chili++) sauce
- Panna cotta with raspberries

Some of my friends came early to help out (thankyouthankyou!!). But I made the dessert all by myself the night before. A nervous dessert-making session. I am not good at baking or making desserts – probably because I generally prefer eating a starter rather than digging in to this sweet stuff. But panna cotta is the exception that proves the rule. Not when it comes to the making of it, but when it comes to the eating. I simply LOVE panna cotta, and figured that I just had to try to make my favorite dish although my last attempt did not work out at all. After all, every recipe I looked up would mark this as an “Easy” dish to make. And this time it actually was!

PANNA COTTA WITH YOGURT
3 sheets of gelatine
3 dl whipping cream
2 dl plain yogurt
1 dl sugar
1 vanilla beam

RASPBERRY SAUCE
5 tablespoons of sugar
1 dl water
250 g rasberries
1 vanilla beam
Limejuice

Split the vanilla beam lengthwise, Scrape out the seeds with a knife. Put both beam and seeds in a pan with the cream and sugar. Heat it while stirring, but do not bring to boil. Remove from heat for 20 minutes. Put sheets of gelatin in cold water for about 3 minutes. Put the pan back on the stove on medium heat. Remove the vanilla beam. Take the sheets of gelatin out of the water, and squeeze them gently to remove any water before adding them to the pan. Stir until the gelatin is completely dissolved. Turn off the heat, and add the yogurt gently while stirring. Pour the panna cotta mixture into 4 glasses. Put in fridge for about 4 hours.

The raspberry sauce is just one of many ways to add flavor to the panna cotta. But rasberry sauce – how to: put water and sugar in a pan, stir while bringing to boil. Remove the pan from the heat, add a split vanilla beam, the seeds, the berries and some drops of lime juice to enhance the taste. Let the mixture rest for an hour before removing the vanilla beam and put the whole berrysaucethingy in a blender or something. Add some tablespoons of sauce to the panna cotta before serving – just to cover it. Too much sauce will ruin the delicious yogurt/vanilla flavour of the panna cotta. So. Less than on the crappy iphone photo above, then :)

Yummy!

I finally got around to get this classic design book by Don Norman. I attended his presentation at the From Business to Buttons conference in Malmö in 2008. He’s an inspiring speaker, and I recognize his enthusiasm through the book pages as well. Even though the book was written way back in 1988 (my edition is from 2002), it’s still a relevant book today. It reveals the battle of man vs. machine in everyday life by great examples, explains why design-thinking matters, and gives us the mindset to help us prevent design mistakes in the future. The book stresses that when things don’t work the way you thought they were supposed to, it’s generally not your fault. Most times you can blame the unfriendly design instead. This is quite obvious (to me anyway), but it’s still nice to get a reminder with models and brilliant examples to back it up.

I watch movies at a much faster pace than I blog about them. Which means that I will make a little list here. But this list isn’t just a list of movies. This is a list of the movies I have watched the last Sundays at Galgeberg Kino (Cinema Galgeberg). This is a very private cinema in the flat of my friend and former colleague Kjartan B. Michaelsen. And although we watch serious movies with a following debate and everything, it’s the atmosphere in Galgeberg Kino that makes me return every Sunday. Good friends catching up while voting for what movie to see, recovering from a slight hangover in a deep couch with a hot cup of tea and some delicious cupcakes. This is simply the perfect Sunday evening for me. The yummy cupcakes above were made by Kjartan’s lovely girlfriend Thea.

The latest screenings at Galgeberg Kino:

• Law-Obiding Citizen
• The Informant
• Up In The Air
• Creation

Oh, and this little thing just to make us laugh: