Colleagues
Tom Linehan has recently died. https://news.utdallas.edu/faculty-staff/dr-tom-linehan-computer-animation-visionary-joins-utd/
He is the only reason our ArtSciLab exists today. I was due to retire at the University of Aix-Marseille 15 years ago. I had known Tom for decades, meeting at the SIGGRAPH meetings among others. He joined the Editorial Board of Leonardo Journal at MIT Press where I served as Executive Editor. When he was at CRSS architects making architecture virtual he arranged for his company to make a philanthropic donation to the Leonardo Publications where I served as Executive Editor. He had been President of the Ringling School of Art. Pretty strange.
He happened to visit our family in the south of France and he invited my wife and I to migrate to Dallas.
It was a hard sell, given the Texas reputation. However my father had been born in Brenham, Texas so my life took a turn on the Tour of Life.
When I arrived , Tom introduced me to a real college life. We met regularly with Rick Bretell and Bonnie Pitman both former directors of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dean Dennis Kratz , Andy Blanchard and others were regular discussants. Tom reminded me that university is not an extension of secondary school education, but rather a platform to do original work that impacts others through collaboration with faculty, students and staff including Tara Lewis and Charlotte Mason and…
Tom was an amazing open social engineer. I was given a nice office in the building of ATEC (Arts Technology and Emerging Communication) right under the TAGER tower where our university pioneered last century the practice of open online education.
But one day Cassini Nazir moved into my office at Tom’s suggestion. Yes, I was a tenured professor sharing an office, but Tom insisted. This led to the ArtSciLab practice of being an open lab, where you can steal a cookie as long as you leave an idea. Cassini and I co-founded the artscilab.
Cassini Nazir was a professor in the blooming transdisciplinary area of ‘design”, and a member of the Design Council of Dallas, Texas. He is from the Caribbean and had been a classics major; go figure. He was a hybrid with sparks of ingenuity before hybridity became a desirable professional trajectory (not on -line hybrid but a hybrid who changes careers several times during their life or has two resumes at once, as I used to do. Tom seaded a collaboration that is still ongoing even though we are no longer in the same siloed institution.
This afternoon I meet with Cassini, first to discuss Curiosity. When I worked with the COGNOVO center for cognitive innovation I learned that neither gut instinct or curiosity are unchangeable if you draw on design methodologies. Sundar Sarukkai awoke me to the scientist’s blindness to the ethics of curiosity. Cassini’s latest work is “Beyond Empathy: how curiosity promotes greater care”. This refers to the design practice of UX/UI where the designer tries to “put themselves in another’s shoes”. I am working with Antonia Moran on the moment on her topic of Compassion medicine. In his article Cassini describes Compassion, Empathy, Sympathy and other ways of being. These terms overlap blobbily as colleague Laura Kim emphasizes in her discipline of blobbology. And as Jueh Jung Lee, a researcher in the ArtScilab, points out that sometimes interaction less interaction is crucial , but most designers don’t really understand ‘pattern language” a la Chris Alexander, a high school colleague of mine.
Tom you were desirably strange ( https://groundworks.io/journal/commentaries/10 ) Tom Linehan engaged in interactionless interactive empathy during the last few years as his health declined and Arnold Duenes became his compassionate amplifier. Thank you Tom and and and and….