Tuesday, February 18

In the morning I had a Social Gaming session in which groups presented the games they had created for their assignment. The first one, which involved nothing morning than imagined animals and curated assignments, was a huge hit. Everyone played it, and I was completely surprised by the mechanics of the game and its success. I went on to explain the main project and people began to work on that.

After a quick lunch I met with the cultural producer students who are involved in Omtänk. I explained to them what Liisa and I had talked about and their reactions were not exactly positive. Rightly or wrongly (and personally I think rightly and wrongly is more accurate) they feel the project has been changed from under their feet and they have been made to waste time in a way that they find irritating and confusing. I put the best spin on everything that I could, beginning with being completely honest about how I feel about the process, which is subtly different from how they feel but not that different. I told them that we will be meeting with the rest of the steering committee on Thursday and a final resolution of all the issues will happen then. I promised that that meeting will finish with a definitive road map for the project.

Now I am staring out of the window feeling exhausted. It is snowing heavily although nothing is settling.

In three minutes time I will meet with Riita who will be a spark of positivity. We will talk about the possibility of her taking a lead role in our Project Leadership course next year. I will suggest that you could do a Garret Kremer, and generalise everything she knows about sports psychology and apply it to design teams. She will agreed, and fun will be had.

In the evening I will attempt to rekindle the flames in the process of writing my thesis, with some minor success. I will read and make notes, but in the end I will fall back into simple organisational work: relabelling files, updating booklists and so on. I will see what I am doing but decide the best thing to do is just sit back and give myself permission to do it. Or not do it, as the case may be.

Forward movement is forward movement. Why get stressed about the speed?