Rob Richardson

I credit Dave Hodge for much of my creativity in photography and also with how I teach and explain technology. In discussions with Dave over the years, I gave him credit for my creativity. He doesn't accept the credit, but I know that he had a big impact on my creativity. I never had another art teacher, or any teacher. for that matter, who pushed us to look at things creatively like David Hodge. Most of our education in those days was to repeat, remember and write it down on tests. In technology, where I spent most of my professional career, I feel the creativity that I learned from Dave Hodge, in many ways. I started working on PC's shortly after their arrival on the market. There were no classes, so I just had to figure it out on my own and then figure out what to do with the new technology. Over the years, I worked for IBM, I designed many systems for customers and also developed some products. I was the only field person on IBM's first artificial intelligence product team. My role included testing each development version and then figuring out ways to apply it to real world problems. The challenge with completely new products is to figure out how to help people understand what the product is and how it solved a problem. That required a creative approach to come up with ways to explain what I was designing or proposing to customers. For much of my career, I traveled the US and Canada with a box of many colors of dry markers. I had to take complex technology and explain it to non-technical people in plain English, drawing the solution out on many white boards. It wasn't what would be considered art, but it was using shapes and lines to explain technical solutions. So Dave, I give you a lot of credit for my creativity in areas that I know neither of us imagined at the time I sat in your classroom at Campus School. While I can't show people what I did technically, please accept my photography as a visual expression of what I have taken through life from David Hodge.