Two years ago, one of my professors asked us to complete this statement every year while limiting our answer to 15 words or less.

I want to be a designer because….
…designers can help people solve problems, including ones they might not be aware of yet.

In 15 words and with no qualification statements!

Thanks, Brett. This is one of best questions anyone’s ever asked me in the classroom.

Technorati Tags: design, goals, personal

Today finishes my first week in the newly formed Master of Tangible Interaction Design program at Carnegie Mellon. It’s a really interesting concept for a degree — take technologists and designers and teach them the other’s trade in the classroom, then have them spend lots of time in studio implementing what they’re learning in those classes. This isn’t a revolutionary new idea but a variation on something being done at a number of schools.

My background is in technology so almost all the classes I’m taking are design oriented: Document Design and Basic Interaction Design this semester; color theory and another design class next semester. On top of those classes, I’ll spend most of my waking hours in studio trying to implement what I’m learning in the design classes. (Thus the reason I took a leave from work: there’s just no way I could hold down a job and do this much school.)

To be honest, I wish it were a two-year program. I’d love to spend a year in design classes then follow that with another year just working on studio/thesis. Before coming to mTID, however, I did complete the first year of the undergraduate Design program at CMU. Similar to other design schools, the first year is an intensive studio focused on 2d and 3d design fundamentals that doesn’t worry about the line between industrial design and communication design. Many students come in convinced they want to do one but switch to the other by the end of the first year. Me, I realized that I wanted to study design in some way that included ID, CD, interaction design and computation. Along came mTID so here I am.

I couldn’t have gotten here on my own, so…

Thanks to the Carnegie Mellon faculty who taught me how to draw more than stick figures, how to think about form and typography from a new point of view, and that design is bigger than posters and toasters.

Thanks also to the Design Class of 2010. First year studio was insanely great and you all helped me learn something about what I want out of design and what design wants from me.

Most importantly, thanks to Drue and all of our friends who have supported (and tolerated :-) me through the messy process that got me here.

Technorati Tags: design, mtid, personal

Carnegie Mellon is launching a new graduate program, a Masters in Tangible Interaction Design. I’ve been offered a slot in the first cohort starting this fall, and I’ve accepted.

This is a huge opportunity, and I’m taking a huge leap of faith and signing on. This is also going to be a major change in my life — I’m not just cramming 2-3 classes into my spare waking hours after I get done with work, this is a full-on commitment to focus on nothing but school for two semesters. I’m taking an unpaid leave from work and will have effectively no income for almost a year (and paying for COBRA for health insurance).. I’ve been putting money back for this most of the year and filing for student loans, but I’m still going to be living very cheaply for the next year or so.

However, this is a huge, huge opportunity and I’d be an idiot to pass it up. A year to focus on embedded computing, interaction design and bleeding-edge fabrication and rapid-prototyping is probably the wet dream of more than one geek out there.

I’ve always been a believer in the advice found in the opening of the Butthole Surfers, “Sweat Loaf”:

“A funny thing about regret is that it’s better to regret something you have done than than to regret something you haven’t done.”

But Dr. Randy Pausch’s commencement speech at CMU is when it really hit me:

“It is not the things in do in life that we regret on our deathbed, it is the things we do not.”

It’s not a matter of, “wow, how can I take such a huge risk?”. It’s a matter of “wow, how could I not take advantage of such a huge opportunity.”

Stay tuned for the blow-by-blow, classes start in a few weeks.

Technorati Tags: Carnegie Mellon, design, life, regret, work

I know I’m not breaking any new ground in design theory here, just noting something that’s been on my mind for the past year or two and I feel the need to say something about it.

Ages ago when I got my first degree, one of my photography instructors laid down a hard and fast rule before the first critique:

You will not speak when your work is being discussed in a critique. You will keep your mouth shut. You cannot respond, cannot make faces, cannot argue, cannot communicate. You are there to listen to what others have to day, not to argue with them, or in any way explain or discuss your work.

From day one we were forced to live with the rule that your work must stand on its own. Once it’s out there, you will not be present to explain it, justify it, or otherwise interpret it for an observer. In other words, if your work needs explaining, then it’s not ready. Granted, this was a fine arts photography class and the focus was on making work to be displayed in public, but being forced to sit and listen really changed how I received and thought about feedback.

So here I am, part-time design student, and in crits people are responding to comments about their work and even arguing with what other people are saying during a crit. Many of the crits I’ve been in have been completely unstructured, leading to one person getting a huge amount of feedback on their work while others don’t receive any feedback at all. To be honest, I’m not sure how productive it is to challenge or argue with the feedback being given to you during a crit. Asking for clarification, counter-examples, or to take a line of reasoning further seems like a legitimate response to feedback in a crit, but going so far as to tel the other person that they’re wrong?

I haven’t personally seen anyone break down in tears or get into a yelling match, but it seems I’m the exception. I’ve heard stories of it getting to the point of tearing up drawings, destroying models, yelling matches, and so on. These aren’t third-hand stories, these are, “Yeah, like last semester when Mary’s model got thrown out the window” or “was that the crit where Bob just started crying and ran out of the room?” If you’re running a crit and people are having breakdowns, destroying work, or getting into yelling matches, what are the students actually learning?

To be clear, I’m not talking about situations of the sort where the instructor declares the work sub-par across the board and bails on the crit. I think “you as a whole didn’t work very hard and this would be a waste of everyone’s time” is a reasonable response, as long as it’s delivered in a factual manner, and not an angry rant.

Maybe it’s the “art vs. design” mentality or maybe it’s just differences between schools, but it’s something I apparently need to get used to if I’m going to continue my studies in this area. Personally, I just can’t get worked up enough about some of these things to actually be angry. If my work is bad, then I need to go work on it more, if yours is bad, you need to go back and work on it more. However, if someone yells at me during a crit or destroys my work, I think I’ll just get up and leave the room. In my opinion, there’s really no point in trying to constructively engage someone throwing a temper tantrum or being violent, especially in what should be a constructive environment.

Technorati Tags: critiques, design

… so time to start catching up on blog stuff.

The PRK went well, I’m working on a nice write-up of the entire procedure and my recovery experiences. Doc says I’m 20/20, possibly 20/15 in the right light, I have no halos or other visual artifacts. I’m still a little light sensitive, so low-light situations feel very high-constrast to me, but I’m completely fine to drive at night, etc.

I cut way back on classes this semester so I could focus more on work and art projects. Next semester I’d like to take some 2D design and color theory, but for now it’s just Intermediate Japanese 2 and a tangible computing class.

A design degree is still the goal, but my focus on ID has turned into a general inquisitiveness about design. I’ve read a bit about the Bauhaus curriculum, and I think I’m going to try and put something together for me that would be a self-directed degree in Design that includes 2D, 3D, interaction, service and maybe some d-theory to boot. I’m still really interested in things like furniture, tangible computing and nomadic technology, but I’m now interested in the fundamental design theory that’s the common ground behind all the different [Foo] Design disciplines.

And process. I’m becoming obsessed with process at a theory level — what defines process, what is common in process between different disciplines, etc.

Oh yeah, and I have a partner and a day job and a cat and friends and other things that I’d like to keep paying attention to while doing all this other stuff.

More soon.

Technorati Tags: design, personal