As documented earlier, complete this statement every year while limiting your answer to 15 words or less,

“I want to be a designer because …”

…I like finding and solving wicked problems, and design is full of them.

I’ve got a backlog of stuff to write about, including this really great book by Graham Pullin, “design meets disability”. Things have been hectic at The Job That Does Not Pay Me To Blog so it’s been hard finding the mental energy to be smart about non-work stuff.

Until yesterday, that is, when my partner tripped and broke several foot bones that are needed for things like walking and driving and the like. So not only are crutches involved, but we live in a two-story house with the bath upstairs, kitchen on the first floor, and laundry and storage in the basement.

We knew our 1950s house was nowhere close to ADA when we bought it, and we often joke about how ADA-hostile Pittsburgh is in general.

I guess now we’ll get some first-hand experience as to just how bad it is and what we — as designers — can do to help fix things.

There’s a reason I haven’t been updating this journal and it’s not because I got sucked into twitter/facebook. There’s just not been much to say about what I’m doing right now — it’s either portfolio work in progress or stuff I can’t talk about due to NDA.

Adding to the workload is the fact that I’m a homeowner in the northeast which means I have to cram most of my home improvement work into a few summer months. In ~6 weeks, the house will be sporting an environmentally friendly rear deck and stairs made of locally sourced black locust. I want to avoid synthetic/composite decks, sealing a cedar deck every 2-3 years is a pain, and there’s no redwood to be had this far east. I was whining about all this when a friend of mine from Pittsburgh suggested black locust. It’s a regional hardwood that has evolved to deal with the local climate had has an outdoor rating of 75+ years without being painted or sealed. It isn’t as cheap as pine and cedar, but the thought of having a deck that will easily last 50+ years with no maintenance makes me quite happy.

On my recent trip to Japan I took my hand-me-down-but-new-to-me DSLR with the intent of documenting my trip and stuffing my swipe file to the brim. I didn’t take my video camera because it was too bulky and required too much attention: tapes that have to be managed, batteries to be charged and swapped, etc. Once I got there I quickly regretted not bringing the video camera and picked up a pocket-sized HD video camera, a Sony HDR-TGV5.

The DSLR is a great tool for documenting 2d and 3d design, but for 4d design you really need something that can capture video. (It’s true that some DSLRs now capture stunning video, but only for short durations and quantities and you’re still lugging around a full-size camera.) My “should have brought the video camera” regret kicked in as soon as I started experiencing how differently Japanese people interact with technology and their environment. Sure, I could take lots of photos and copious notes, but those aren’t nearly as good as 10-15 seconds of video.

It’s not just recording video that’s important, it’s being able to record video conveniently, in high quality, then easily move the video off the camera. With my full-size, miniDV video camera it’s pretty much impossible to take quick snippets of video given the overhead of getting it in/out of the case, turning it on, etc. On the other hand, the TGV5 is small and light enough that I can carry it in my pocket and within a few seconds have it out and recording video. (It’s even faster than getting my Droid out and recording.) Cheap/free software makes it trivial to take a 10-20 second clip, trim it if needed, then “Save As” for Flickr or Vimeo.

As an experiment I’m starting to document design — especially 4d design — using only short video clips. I’ve posted a couple of short clips to a new flickr set, “Japan + Design” which I’ll be filling with video and still clips as I get around to processing the backlog of photos.

There’s no chance of my getting rid of the DSLR any time soon as there’s no substitute for huge glass when it comes to taking good photos. However, I have stopped lugging it around unless I’m intentionally on a trip to take hiqh quality photos as the TGV5 is becoming my “go to” camera for documentation and swipe files.

“Before I tell you that story, I have to tell you this one.” — Howard Waldrop

A million or so Internet years ago, I scored an AT&T 3B1 in lieu of back pay and set up a UUCP node by the name of “flatline”. I handed out a few shell accounts to friends who not only owned a computer but a modem as well. In doing this, I had joined a tiny group of people who would soon write an “@” sign on their name tags when attending a convention and coordinated “@-parties” to get together and exchange email addresses and UUCP connection information.

We were not mainstream computer science types nor were we socially incompetent basement-bound computer geeks. We were people who believed that electronic communication was the future. We thought it was great that we could send email for free from the US to other countries and that we could have an international messaging system that transcended operating systems and (most) human languages. We didn’t just think it was a good idea, we went out there and made it happen.

I had found, in a way, my tribe. It was a great feeling to hook up with a crowd that was both diverse in source population but of a similar mind when it came to goals and activities. We were libertarians, democrats, dead-heads, skate punks and full-on computer nerds, we argued about damn near everything, except we all agreed that electronic communication was the future.

When I moved to the Bay Area to work at startups I had a similar feeling, but the crowd was too big and the connections too many to have that real feeling of “my tribe”. There were so many of us that we belonged to something larger than a tribe but smaller than a nation. It was good, but not as good as the small tribe.

“Now that I told you that story, I can tell you this one.”

For the second year in a row I’ve attended the IXDA “Interaction” conference. It’s a small, focused conference of people who are interested in interaction design in all its forms.

Last year I was still in design school and went completely fanboy after the event. Now I’m not ashamed of that because the thing I love about going fanboy (or seeing one of my friends go fanboy/fangirl) is the honesty of the emotion. The self defense drops away, the unfiltered gushing cranks up, and while everyone is a little embarrassed afterwards there’s no doubt that the emotions and feelings expressed were honest if not a bit poorly worded.

This year I still “feel the design love” as we say at Carnegie Mellon, but I feel something different as well. I feel like I’ve found a new tribe of people from diverse backgrounds but with similar goals. Whether or not I’ll end up being a member remains to be seen but I’m looking for ways to prove myself.

For three days we’ve talked about all sorts of little-d and big-d design over meals and at bars. We’ve sat in boring talks and talks we wish would have went on for hours. We’ve traded business cards, scribbled notes on napkins and yelled ourselves raw over DJs playing dance music. We’ve drank too much, ate too much, and probably pissed off all of our twitter followers with a seemingly endless stream of #ixd10 tagged messages.

And I’d do it all over in a minute.

Ok, maybe a week or two. I need some time to work off some of the shrimp-grits and pulled pork and sweet tea.

Here’s hoping we see one other before IXD11 in Boulder, CO.