With students from my Creativity and Technical Design course, I presented all weekend at our MakerFaire. We had lots of great conversations about how and why wrong theory works. We brought some simple design challenges for people to try:

• Design a key management tool to help you organize your keys
• Design a green chile peeler so you don't get burned
• Design an earbud/cord tangle-prevention system
• Design an assistive device to make opening doors easier

The idea of the green chile peeler resonated with many of our New Mexico locals.  

We brought lots of materials for people to prototype with. And mostly, they ignored the design challenges and just had some fascinating material conversations. 

A few insights, that I will carry with me as I work on my CAREER project:

• The value of mess. When the table looked tidy, people were less willing to get started. On Saturday, things were pretty neat at the beginning, and it took time for people to get going, and they seemed pretty constrained even when they did. On Sunday, I deliberately messed things up a bit before people arrived. People got right into it. 
• Quality versus quantity engagement. In 2014, we brought design challenges and 3D printers to the MakerFaire. We had MANY visitors, but they stayed for 5-10 minutes. Mostly we gave a quick overview of how different printers work, then answered questions. Shallow engagement. This time, we had fewer visitors total, but they spent much longer—4 stayed for over 2 hours, and 20 for over 1 hour. We always had a small crowd around the tables, working quietly and steadily. 
• Framing expectations. "What am I supposed to make?" "Do you have an example?" Some people expected that there was a right answer or a specific thing they were supposed to create. When invited to make whatever they wanted, to mess about, some people looked intimidated and others excited. This tells me (1) that people—especially adults—don't get many opportunities to mess about, and (2) that we need to better frame such experiences to invite people in. I wonder what was behind that sense of intimidation, and what was tied to it. I suspect some thought that I secretly did know the "right answer" but was just being mean and withholding it. Or that there was a rubric ready to judge the quality of their work. On the whole, adults were much more editorial and planful than kids. Younger kids dove right in and had vision for the materials quickly.  In both cases, some of the creations became at least briefly cherished objects, displayed for others proudly, and others were abandoned. 
• Material conversations. I introduced the idea of design as material conversations with a number of people. Kids and adults alike took to this idea, announcing that particular materials spoke to them, and that they were "listening" to what they wanted to become. Very little was treated as "being" materials. One of my favorite creations was made by a young girl who repurposed a yellow measuring tape, attaching it to a cup-like lid and adding copper tape accents. This inspired other makers, including several adults who were impressed by her aesthetic. Below, the top three photos of things kids made, and the bottom three are things adults made. 

Speaking of the NSF CAREER award, and the idea that research is somehow different from the rest of our work...

Word has begun to spread that I have been the recipient of two significant early career awards. In 2014, I was the first person at my university to be awarded the National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. And each time I attended the Spencer reception at AERA, other attendees accused me of crashing it. Framed as an imposter. But this year, all that changed. Three different people introduced me to others as a role model. Reframed as a success. And so I want to take that framing—role model—and do it justice.

In talking to senior scholars, I see some of them making some attribution errors about their success in getting grants. Just like in banking, it takes money to make money, the rich get richer. When I hear someone senior talk about getting most of the grants they submit, I am happy for them, especially when they are putting junior scholars on as co-PIs, getting them started. It's a bit like parents who start a bank account for their kids. 

As a junior scholar who was going it alone for the most part, or with a band of other unknowns, I think it is important to say this: my success stands atop a huge pile of fail. I have been involved with 12 successful external grants in which I had some sort of framing agency; of those, I have served as a co-PI five times and PI only twice. And I have had 24 proposals declined, mostly by NSF. In an annual review letter, someone called me "tenacious."  So you can see what a huge pile of fail looks like, here is the list of declined proposals in my NSF proposal status window. After a number of years flailing about, I found an established scholar—the chair of Chemical Engineering at UNM—who put me on as co-PI. And my success rate has definitely increased since then.

So if you ask me for a copy of a grant proposal, I will happily give it to you. I am open access like that. And as I climb, I commit to helping others up. I'll take that framing of role model, thank you very much. 

The best thing about being at AERA is that the R really stands for reunion, not research. In my CAREER proposal, I included "peer thought partners" and this is one of my favorite things I did. These are the people who know my work, who think with me, who push me, who inspire me. Michelle Jordan is one of them, and we had a great, late-night conversation about strategies for a successful sabbatical—on shifting from being productive to being progressive. And that takes some major framing agency to do. We spend a lot of time saying "yes" to things. That comes at a cost, in terms of being able to think deeply and make good progress on things we care about.

Another peer thought partner is Brian Gravel. I snapped this conference selfie just before our talk, which drew more attention than I'd hoped it would. I got way too much of the screen and cut his face in half, but it is so joyful, and it captures how I feel about working on our paper together. 

In trying to understand framing agency, we bumped up against other forces in design.

​First, and most obvious, but not exactly the focus of the talk we gave today, is that sometimes designers display low agency to invite others into a design problem space. ​

I really like where these ideas of framing agency are taking me, and that they are taking me places with others.