Remember, Remember the 5th of November.

With the discussion of smart mobs, I find myself thinking about their presence in society today. From high gas prices to email/letter writing campaigns, smart mobs utilize technology to send mass communication to assemble and achieve their goals. Although they do not have a true leader, it only takes one person or action to stir the group into action and set the wheels rolling.

One of my favorite examples is in the movie V for Vendetta, where V, stirs the population of England into action a year in advance of their final mob assembly. Although he sets actions in motion, he truly does not control the group after that first initial push in the right direction.

 The citizens of London grow more and more agitated by the government and finally meet at the prearranged point a year later without any input from V himself. Although it is up for debate I think the assembly at the end of the movie is a prime example of a smart mob because people just start showing up, and then their friends catch on and their friends catch on, and before you know it, there is an enormous crowd all with white masks filling the screen.

Needless to say, they achieved their objective through forming ideas quickly, high connectivity, and mass communication and internal coordination without much if any input from the originator of the movement......

..........because he was busy blowing up parliment with a subway car.

Power to the people.

Its Not How You Say, Its What You Say It.......Or Something Like That

After reading Carolyn Miller's essay, "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing," I really began thinking about the importance of presentation and writing skills in the working world outside of the classroom.

As an engineer, presentation is everything when it comes to putting your work on the market for potential clients to buy into. It is even more important when you are presenting your preliminary design for a client's approval as I recently learned in my Capstone Design Class.

After the many hours of design and Auto CAD work, I had to put together a proposal to sell my design idea to a perspective "client" who had hired me for the job. I had to show all the features that were requested and if necessary explain why I did not include some due to technical reasons.

The most important portion of the presentation was the oral section, because when you are presenting in front of a live audience, there is no spell check, word count, or edit-undo ability you can call upon when you make a mistake like these people did......

The How to Write a How To

Currently I have been struggling with creating a set of instructions to teach  someone how to perform a specific task that they do not currently know how to do. This has been quite a challenge, first off by thinking of some function that is original, yet not too complex to perform, and secondly by putting the document together in a concise fashion so as not to have the reader spinning in circles.

 Being an engineer, I tend to lean towards the spinning in circles mode when it comes to writing technical "how to" data. I find it curious how easy it seems to follow a given set of directions without thinking about how difficult it probably was to create them in the first place.

After my first draft, I found that as hard as I tried, I still managed to fill the instructions with as much technical details to make it into a textbook. My girlfriend can attest to this as she was my first subject to not succeed in understanding the procedure, and even after 25 minutes of explaining, I dove too deep into "civil world" as she tends to call it.

This was both frustrating and positive advice, because I realized I had to address a specific audience for the task and not the entire world......simple, I wrote it for younger engineers whom my techno babble would at least make some sense in theoretical terms. To further challenge myself I also chose to address it to persons in the field who would most likely benefit having a quick summary guide to the topic.

After reducing many syllables and inserting a good many pictures, I was finially satisfied that I had the proper balance of technical background and ease of use found in the common instructions....although I doubt that anyone will ever perform a slump test in their free time or unless they are sweathing on the side of the road.

All this leaves me wondering how on earth those poor souls at LEGO design their complicated instructions to put the thousands of colored blocks together to make a suitable car, tank or airplane....for kids, using pictures only. My hat is off to them.


I mean seriously, how do you design a instructions guide for this......

Non-Instructive Instructions and Burning iPods

So my computer crashed last week, and I lost all my iTunes. Great. Even better is the fact that when I try to plug my iPod into my computer to charge it, the iTunes tries to sync my iPod, further erasing any music I had left on the device itself. Luckily I was able to pull the plug before I lost any music. After struggling for over an hour with various online "do-it-yourself" websites telling my various ways to replace my lost songs on my computer with the ones on my iPod, I realized just how true todays lecture was on the value of writing instructions.

Many of the sites I visited were for a much more technically adept person than myself, meaning they could most likely recode their iPod or hack into it. This experience gave me some insight to being a secondary audience and having to figure out what the primary audience already knows in order to complete the task. I obviously had to understand a great deal of technical computer jargon or have various programs at my disposal to complete the task, and the knowledge of how to utalize them without setting my pc on fire. Luckily for me, I finially stumbled across a site that had simple instructions at a level that I could comprehend and follow. Thank goodness someone managed to put together a set of steps with a target audience, me, in mind. Who knew a day in lecture could be related to a discombobulation of events that thankfully resulted in me getting my Satchmo back in one piece.