Ellen Beldner

I contributed an article to the food issue of Ambidextrous, the design magazine of Stanford University. The assignment was to write an article about the intersection of food and design. I've always thought about throwing dinner parties as a design task, so I explained planning a dinner party in terms of the way you plan the design of a product.

Over the years, I’ve learned the following heuristics about my typical user base. With 14 dinner guests, only 11 will require chicken-of-doom. In Northern California, one person ends up vegan, and two vegetarian. Two are Jewish (no shellfish or pork), and one, despite mild alcoholism, is nominally Muslim and doesn’t eat pork either, so that rules out the bacon wrapping on the steaks. Once in a while, I have a guest who is severely allergic to eggs, gluten, and/or nuts, just to keep life interesting. Killing your guests is the opposite of entertaining, unless you happen to be Hannibal Lecter, so when in doubt about allergens, stick to tofu. Oh wait! people can be allergic to soy, too...

The Dinner Program: Throwing a dinner party with one knife, 11 militant chickens, and your design degree [PDF]. Ambidextrous, Summer 2007.

Jon Kolko, who I met at CMU, just published his book Thoughts on Interaction Design. I'm a guest author and wrote a chapter called "Getting Design Done".

The book's website is http://www.thoughtsoninteraction.com/.

Undergraduate honors thesis, Carnegie Mellon Univ., 2000.

PDF of the full paper: http://ellenbeldner.info/portfolio/beldner.RhetoricOfPrivacy.pdf

Modern Americans have three primary understandings of privacy or private. First, we have the notion that privacy indicates civic status: a private home is a building not open to general members of the community. Second, we understand privacy to mean secrecy: what a person seeks to preserve as private is something that she sequesters from others’ view. Finally, we use privacy to indicate some level of personal autonomy, as with our notion that the “right to privacy” protects our ability to choose particular types of medical care without interference from political authorities.

The second and third senses of privacy today represent very powerful cultural notions. For this reason each is rhetorically appropriated in unusual situations; additionally, the rise of the computer culture in the 1990s has made the notion of privacy-as-secrecy almost compete with the notion of a “right to privacy.” Both of these stages of discourse compete for use of the word privacy, and as a result, both discourses are clouded. Referring to the “right to privacy” as the “right to self-determination” is a more precise way to discuss that right and thereby clarify both debates.

Blue, red, purple, white -- the lights of the Masquerade flashed, again, again, over and over. Hired dancers turned up on the display pillars; a couple of hundred die-hards moved on the floor; and crowds of other people milled about the perimeter of the dance floor-pit, socializing at the bar and tables, trying to hear each other over the techno backbeat, glittering under the disco ball and strobe lights.

Eva and I were in the center of the floor. My hands were on her hips, now off, now on again, and we were both covered in sweat. I looked at her.

I stopped dancing. Right there, in the middle of the floor. And she stopped too.