Dennis Cheatham

Week 08 2023

February 26, 2023

Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the best films I have ever seen. I watched it twice this week. It made me cry both times. I can’t wait to watch it again.

The best films—especially science fiction films (that’s what people call Everything Everywhere All at Once, though it defies categorization)—are about something much more profound than they are about on the surface. I watched it with my son a few nights ago and thought he would love its quirkiness and visual artistry. He said it “made his head hurt” because it was “all over the place.” He said it reminded him of Big Trouble in Little China.

Now that I think about it, I can see why Everything feels like a jumbled mess to my 17-year-old. He hasn’t been married for over 20 years. He doesn’t have teenagers. He lacks two life experiences that are central to the film’s meaning. I mentioned it to my wife, and she agreed—you must be married and have kids (and have struggled with both) to understand the movie’s heart. You need to have lived a while and experienced the twists and turns that make you think, “what if I had chosen a different path?” for Everything’s scenes to strike your heart. It’s about things my son hasn’t yet experienced (years of taxes and laundry being two of them).

It’s a brilliant film that’s best seen through eyes that know what it looks like to love, lose, and mourn all those “wrong” choices. We each only get one path. One “go” at life. Exploring the “what if’s” of our past decisions provides enlightening insights and context. But in a multiverse of possibilities, the experiences we’ve felt firsthand produce meaning because we lived them.

Week 07 2023

February 18, 2023

Some of my favorite memories are of the Daddy-Daughter Dance. Last year’s dance was the last one for my daughter and me. Instead of dancing around the middle school gym, the elementary school gym, or the community center gym (what is it with dances and gyms?), my daughter and I went to dinner at Cheesecake Factory and strolled around IKEA. Dinner then dancing has been replaced with Dinner then design.

It’s a natural progression. One thing that hasn’t faded is my love for time with my daughter. It makes my week—my year!—to have her know I’m listening and that I earnestly want to know what is happening in her world. Sitting in the din of clinking glasses and chuckling families, I listened to her tell me about school, friends, softball, and band. We agreed that pumpernickel bread is divine when it’s warm and buttered. She exploited the closeness and asked to get Snapchat on her phone. We compared notes on our favorite roller coasters at Kings Island. The conversation was just as warming as dancing in those gyms.

I love those talks. I’ll miss them when she’s not living in our house, just down the hall. Tonight reminded me of how thankful I am to be her Dad.

Week 06 2023

February 12, 2023

Two papers in one week.

This week was one of the most chaotic weeks I’ve had in years. I packed the week so full that I got up at 3 a.m. two mornings to write. I’m not even sure if what I wrote was good.

Okay, I take it back, I think it was good.

Through the ordeal, I was reminded of how much I love to write and how writing works out ideas on-the-fly. Turning ideas in my head into words that communicate is not just an act of translation—it’s a cycle of synthesis and expansion. The ideas congeal into words, but while doing so, I often back away from an idea for a moment of “okay, what does that idea really mean, and how does it connect to other concepts?”

I submitted a paper to the Journal of Futures Studies this week, and in it, I nested processes used by Futures Studies into the five-step design thinking process. Before writing the paper, I had never written about how both worked together. I’ve used the combination in my courses before but had never articulated it in writing. By writing it, I had to know it. That’s the magic of writing—it challenges you to think critically about and know the content. When I write, my ideas and connections between them expand and then become focused on the page. Unfortunately, it also means that the expansion of thinking usually produces a lot of words—sometimes way more than the word limit.

Next reflection… I may have to write about editing.

Week 05 2023

February 5, 2023

This week was brutal, and it’s all my fault.

I packed my days full. I never stopped to breathe. I got tons done—some things I had to do (my work) and some I wanted to do (for fun), but there was no margin. So stopping. No breaks. I’m excellent at Tetris-ing my days, so no light shines between each time slot. My efficiency and productivity are unparalleled.

This is no way to live a life. Looking back on my week, I am exhausted from running the treadmill that never stops. Why can’t I learn?

Last summer, I read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. Whatever your religious belief, I found the book enlightening and a little bit damning (in a good way). The book called me out. This one quote from the book hit home:

Hurry and love are incompatible.
John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World

This week proved it. When I am hurried, I cannot stop and chat with colleagues or students. I cannot take moments to peer out the window and, by doing so, peer into myself for a gut and heart check. Hurry removes my ability to love. I think this is so because love is time. Whatever I spend my time doing is what matters to me. When I spend it talking with a student about their work, I show them love as a mentor who cares about their journey and interests. The margin in my day for meditation shows love to myself—developing calm while making sense of what’s going on around me. I guess you could say that this Weekly Reflection is a sort of meditation, so maybe I am doing better at this margin thing than I thought. (Side note… I had to hurry to get this thing written).

Next week will be just as busy as this one. But I cannot keep up this pace. I cannot live without loving others—and hurry is to blame. I am to blame.

So… I am working on reducing hurry. There may be ways I can still be productive but also less hurried. I’m committed to finding them.

Week 04 2023

January 29, 2023

I love Star Trek. There, I said it. I’m embracing my inner Trekkie at the highest level by creating a Star Trek Adventures group. This week, several of us got together one night to watch Star Trek (we watched Episode 1 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It’s so good!), and tonight we had our first game-planning session. Ten other Star Trek fans… all in my basement… willing to play a Star Trek role-playing game. And I get to be the Gamemaster. Awesome!

As I explained the game to everyone, I was reminded why I love Trek. The Star Trek universe creates a place where the world I desire is real. In the United Federation of Planets, poverty and hunger have been eradicated. The Federation consists of many species—all unique and working together. Starfleet exists to explore and seek out new civilizations. Not to conquer them but to learn from them as partners. The Prime Directive states that respect for other cultures and the development of societies should be protected (kinda like what we hope for National Parks!). It’s a future I want to happen.

Now, yes, it’s not all hope and flowers and smooth sailing. There’s plenty of adventure that happens when species collide. But Star Trek (and most good sci-fi) is a place to explore the “what-ifs” in many different ways. I’m excited to take those what-if’s to the next level as my friends play out different scenarios. As Gamemaster, I will learn a lot about designing experiences through gameplay. As a person, I look forward to learning about my friends who play the game.

Engage!

Week 03 2023

January 21, 2023

Prejudice came to mind this week—not sure where from. Maybe I read a headline or something. But the idea that people pre-judge others is asinine. I get why humans do it, though. Our brains are cognitive misers—they want to reduce as much energy spent as possible. They’re also wired to preserve our species and ourselves (think… keep us from being eaten by a saber tooth tiger or mugged by a robber). Our brains want to keep us alive and safe, and they want to continue the species.

But pre-judging others removes the chance of knowing them for who they are. When I was in 6th grade, a neighbor once said that stereotypes exist because they are usually true. That didn’t sit well with me in 1986, and it still doesn’t play. People are more than their race, age, hair color, sexual orientation, body type, love of sci-fi, you name it. These qualities shouldn’t be ignored, and they are important qualities, but they are never the basis for pre-judging someone. This week I thought a lot about how I may have pre-judged others and how I can reduce the chance it would happen. I grappled with the idea… “how can I be better at taking people for who they are—letting them reveal themselves through our time together?”.

Once, someone told me that, though I got an MFA degree in design from the University of North Texas, I was actually a strong researcher and teacher. As if a degree from UNT was inferior to other places. They pre-judged me based on my degree. It felt awful (and I recognize that many are prejudged for far more stupid reasons like their race or wearing a hoodie or a Taqiyah, my experience is superficial compared with those scenarios).

How can we, as a society, give people a chance to show us who they are? To let others have the chance to change and grow? How can we disconnect our brain’s snap judgments? I’m working on that. I hope to find ways to help others do the same so we can know one another in all our richness.

Week 02 2023

January 14, 2023

Course preparation is in full swing. I will be teaching two courses this Spring—a 200-level interaction design course and a graduate-level Experience Design Studio whose focus is on contextual factors that affect experiences. Of course, I am rebuilding my Canvas LMS templates again—for the fourth time. I spent much of the week preparing those templates and developing the beta for ScrippsAVID, a web app that brings ScrippsOMA to anyone via video chat. I lived in code land this week.

I’m rebuilding my Canvas templates because last semester, a student raised an issue that my previous templates did not work in dark mode on mobile devices or when students used a plugin to force Canvas into dark mode. In these cases, ay typography in my old templates turned white—often on a white background. I teach courses on designing accessible products, services, and systems—it would be horrible to ignore the accessibility of my Canvas assignment templates! All my fancy HTML and CSS wizardry is useless if the templates I make cannot be used by everyone—even in dark mode. So… I spent the better part of a week redesigning every template. It’ll be worth it, I know. Gotta “practice what I preach.” A lesson I learned to live by this week.

I learned the same lessons from the ScrippsAVID project. A member of our team is an excellent usability tester—specifically for older adults. I’m pretty good at designing responsive type sizes, color contrast, alt tags… etc. This is the first time I paid close attention to tab order—the ability to navigate a website with only a keyboard. My prototype design flat-out failed on several pages. It was humbling. After some serious JavaScript hacking and WordPress retooling, I got the site to work so anyone with a keyboard can navigate it smoothly. +1 for learning.

Week 01 2023

January 7, 2023

The first week of the year puts my feet in two worlds—one foot in the winter break and a flexible schedule, and the other in work ahead. I’m struck by what happens when my calendar is not peppered with meetings and work. I wind up scheduling things to do with friends and family. Many productivity and calendar self-help gurus claim that we should plan what we want to do first, then fill in what we must do. What does that look like for me? I’d block off time to see a movie with my family (by the way, I saw Avatar: The Way of Water this week. It’s impressive in IMAX 3D. You should see it if you liked the first Avatar film. I still don’t love the Papyrus typeface in the titles.) I’d block off time to go to dinner with my wife. I’d set aside time for writing, research, and developing my teaching first before the week’s work crowded them out.

Soon, I will set up my calendar for the semester. I know when I will be teaching, and some weekly, semester-long meetings have already been set. This year, I will block off time or the things I want to do—the stuff that, if I do them, I can grow and develop (and, in turn, better help others). My week’s calendar included an Eagle Scout ceremony, a movie, two dinners with friends, workouts at the gym, and lots of web development for a research project. The work got done, and I had moments with the people I value in my life. They both can co-exist. I just have to set my priorities so they co-exist with a better me among them.