Statistics Canada is giving us a web survey. It actually looks good, but I’m less than impressed with some aspects of it. I’ve never seen a survey with a hashed code that does not have the ability to save progress. If you try to log out (such as… you need to find out something you don’t know, or your computer is forcing you to restart, such as how Windows Update often does) you’re told “Any information entered will be lost.” Not even the hack job I did for my thesis did this. If they didn’t trust their “secure access code” enough to store progress, how much should we trust it? Sigh. And we were asked whether people can speak “well enough to conduct a conversation.” What does that even mean? “How are you? Fine, thank you”? or does that mean a real conversation? If even the short survey has an invalid question like this, how is the long survey giving us valid data that can help us plan social programs? Don’t they test their questions at Statistics Canada? Sigh.

Two days ago I received an email from the RGD which told me that while I didn’t win any award in this year’s RGD Student Awards, I was among the finalists in the “Placemaking” category. Which made me happy: I have never been trained in EGD, my experience was not exactly EGD experience, and my attempt to somehow steer my INCD studies in the direction of EGD didn’t work out; yet it was my EGD entry that got into the finalist round. So what should I do next? I wonder. Or am I daydreaming?

I actually talked about this in my study plan: my lack of knowledge about AODA’s effects on non-digital design. So I was pleasantly surprised when I was checking out the stuff that I got from RGD Ontario’s booth and found Access Ability : A Practical Handbook on Accessible Graphic Design. Obviously, three weeks ago I already found Inclusive Design : A Universal Need in the OCAD library. However, the primary focus of that book was interior design and architecture, fields that I wouldn’t be qualified to even touch. So I was definitely very happy to have found something from none other than RGD Ontario. For one, this means there is something about graphic design to talk about; and secondly, it means that this something is not some obscure, fringe thing that has no consequence—in other words, I am not crazy or wasting my time trying to steer my direction away from digital technologies…