Designer Insights and the Roma blog

Today I completed two of our assigned missions. The first is called designer insights. We have all been on the lookout for particularly innovative or different ways that design problems are tackled over here. If you have ever traveled overseas then you know what I'm talking about, maybe it is the little/big flush mechanism on the toilet, or the tiny cars designed to squeeze down streets that were built before automobiles, anything, here are thousands of little things in daily life that are different over here, some better, some worse and some just plain old different. I spotted my subject today on our walk to Trastavere. Check out the entry here on our official UW Design Program in Rome website. The other assignment is similar to what I do on this webpage, each of us was assigned two days of the trip to document in the form of journal entries and photos, the 25th and 26th were my days and should be posted here soon, in the meantime, check out the entries from my fellow students......

Rocky's out for the count...

After a long weekend of playing in the surf, running the beach and galloping next to a bike. Our camping trip out to Twin Harbors was really fun. It was chilly much of the weekend, but the sky cleared up enough on Saturday for us to have a really good beach day. We played frisbee, flew a kite, Rachel beat me at Risk again(my favorite board game, I have NEVER beat Rachel, she is ruthless) and I got to swim in the ocean, though briefly because the water is so damn frigid this far north. Friday when we arrived, Rocky was so excited that he was positively twitching with energy, so Rach took him out for a good, long bike ride to wear him out a bit:

It makes me so happy to get the dog out to a place where he can run as fast and as far as he wants. We spent the afternoon playing cribbage and eating chips and salsa until the haze burned off. Then we went down to the beach for some fun! The beaches in Washington are really interesting. They stretch for miles and miles and cars are allowed to drive onto them. There are some areas that cars are not allowed to go and that is where you can really get away from everybody since they don't want to venture far from their vehicles. So Rach and I had a nice 1/2 mile of beach mostly all to ourselves. I wrestled with Rocky a bit, but the water was way too cold for him, so he was very concerned when I decided to jump in...check out these photos, have you ever seen a happier dog?