1) Any ixd doing iPhone dev who needs pixel-precise templates should be able to make their own templates in Illustrator (equiv.) and print them out.  You know what’s better than spiral, lay-flat bindings?  No binding at all!

2) A physical drawing template? Is this 1980? Are we making flow charts?  A template that precise is either proof that you need to learn to draw or that you should be comping on the screen and not on paper. (If you have access to a laser cutter you could easily make your own.)

3) There are these things called “Post-it(tm) Note”s that come in various colors and sizes. They stick to things, say a whiteboard or a clipboard, so you can do things like rearrange navigation or swap out different comps for screens. You should try them, they’re really nifty.

Ok, four thoughts:

4) The reviewer writes: ” My sketching skills are teh suck, so[...]”

Yes, and they will continue to suck until you stop fussing around with templates and learn to draw freehand. I say that as someone who spent years making sucky drawings with rulers, templates, and other drawing “aids” that did nothing save prevent me from learning how to draw.

Technorati Tags: design, drawing, rant

I have been accepted as a Professional Member of the IDSA, which means I can put “, IDSA” after my name. Ok, so it’s not probably not a huge deal for people with traditional ID degrees, but it’s a nice bit of external validation from a respected organization for my unusual educational and professional work.

Now if I can just learn to throw the IDSA gang sign without breaking my Intuous stylus.

Technorati Tags: idsa

~4 years after deciding to go back to school and study design, I find myself in possession of a rather fancy diploma from Carnegie Mellon for the study of Master of Science in Tangible Interaction Design.   

Right now, I couldn’t tell you what that actually means. I need to wander off and do some “reflection on doing”, as the Eindhoven gang says. I’ll be wandering to Tokyo first, then back to the bay area to put in time for my employer that gave me an unpaid leave to get my degree, then, actually, I’m not sure what I’ll be doing.

If my employer and I can agree on something I can do for them using my newly-learned skills, then great. I’ve been there ~8 years and have a lot of wonderful relationships and memories that I’d hate to walk away from. On the other hand, maybe what I want to do isn’t something I can do for someone else, or isn’t something I can easily do at a public company smaller than Nokia or Microsoft or Apple.

Thus the “reflection on doing”. I just did ~4 years of design learning, and I need to think about what it means and where I want to go.

However, I’ve decided one thing already: I’m not a “foo designer”. I’m a “designer”. I’m not an “interaction designer” or an “user experience designer” or an “industrial designer” or a “whatever designer”. One of the most important things I learned in these recent years is that it’s all design. Architecture is design, industrial design is design, graphic design is design, typography is design, service design is design, etc.

Over the rest of my career I’ll design (and probably prototype) small, medium, and large things that I hope will make people’s lives better, even if it simply entertains them or amuses them. The last thing I want to do is silo myself and reduce the opportunities offered to me by defining myself in some narrow fashion.

Technorati Tags: cmu, design, done, mtid

Technorati Tags: design, ixd, mtid

• finish final project for Interactive Technology and Live Performance
• prepare presentation for end-of-Masters presentation
• prepare 18″x24″ presentation board for drawing class
• remove installed “Art That Learns” project from Children’s museum
• prepare for final “Art That Learns” crit
• attend crits, give presentations, etc.

Monday, 11 May 2009:

• Start catching up on 3 year backlog of comic books
• FInally watch Farscape’s last season
• Ride bicycle someplace and back
• Get brake fluid for ‘81 R80G/S, order engine gasket rebuild kit
• Order 30# of live crawfish for post-graduation boil-n-bbq.

Technorati Tags: life, school

A long but good post about “kinetic design” that everyone should read.

Technorati Tags: design, kinetics

What I’m taking away — besides a ton of knowledge and ideas and business cards from new friends — follows. I attended ixd09 hoping to learn more about interaction design as a field and I leave with more questions than I arrived with. Which is always a good thing.

Let’s get this out of the way: “defining interaction design”. I agree that arguing about it is a waste of time, but I think that not all people arguing carry equal weight and that we need something descriptive, not proscriptive, for use when talking to people outside the field. I challenge the leaders of the warring factions to agree upon a one-sentence definition I can use next time I’m in Customs. I need a simple definition that won’t get me subjected to extended questioning about what it is I really do by some well-meaning 20-something who could care less about UX vs. UE vs. IA vs. CD vs. GD.

The hallway, mealtime, and barroom conversations were truly amazing. I think I learned as much in random conversations with people I’d never met as I did in some of the talks. I’ve never before come home with such a huge stack of cards from people I want to stay in touch with. What a wonderful group of people to meet and talk with, it was a much better experience than I’ve had at something like SIGGRAPH or a con.

I went to a lot of presentations, but here are the ones that changed me and my view of the world:

John Thackara’s opening keynote was a powerful challenge to get off our (collective) ass and do something that matters. I’ve never heard Papanek speak, but I wonder if Thackara ever met Papanek and what sort of conversations they had. I heard a few people complain about the “doom and gloom” and I think that they’ missing a huge point. Collected in that room were a few hundred people who, if they worked together, could make a significant change for better in the world. That’s not hyperbole. Form teams lead by Saffer, Herasmchuk, Rettig, Kolko, et al and staff those teams with everyone who had an ixd09 badge and turn them loose with some laptops, coffee, and booze. Think of the damage that has been caused by a few hundred individuals involved in 4th gen warfare against a superpower — now think of the amount of good the same number of expert designers could create with a 4th gen “war of design” to improve our situation.

Modulo some technical difficulties, Fiona Raby gave an excellent presentation on conceptual design and challenged the idea of what is possible in design. She showed some excellent work by her students, including a video sketch of life with a desk based on reconfigurable nanotechnology, that I hope really got people to thinking about the lack of limits in what we will do in the next ten years. Designers are taught to push themselves, ask questions, and explore possibilities, I hope that Raby’s talk moved the “creative goal line” for many people in the room. Her work (along with Dunne) makes what I do possible and I hope that other designers and designers to be follow up by reading her work and the work of her students.

Mikkel Michelsen had only 25 minutes to talk about mission critical design when he should have been given hours, if not his own track. Kolko (I think) made a comment at a panel to the effect of “if [we] fuck up, nobody dies.” True, if you have a bad user experience at a ticket kiosk or downloading a movie it’s not the end of the world. But (IMHO) design needs to focus on harder problems than social networking sites for tweens and efficient porn searches. There’s a real challenge in designing systems for people involved in life or death situations, whether they be patients, doctors, first responders, or soldiers. Perhaps it’s not popular or comfortable to talk about interaction design for the military, or maybe it’s too application specific, but isn’t it worth more than a 25 minute “lightning talk”?

I won’t lie. I’m going to rip off Andrei Herasimchuk’s “Building a Digital Concept Car” as soon as the podcast is up. I’ve spent what feels like ages trying to convince people of the value of prototyping as part of software design and engineering, but Andrei’s case study really makes it blindingly obvious. I went in not needing to be convinced, but needing help figuring out how to convince others it’s a worthwhile proposition, and I think I’m now on the right track.

Camille Moussette gave another “why didn’t this get a full hour?” presentation. I’m a huge fan of hardware sketching in general, Camille makes an excellent case for interaction designers getting their hands dirty while they’re sketching ideas on paper. I look forward to seeing more of this — perhaps a workshop — at Interaction ‘10.

Due to time constraints, Marc Rettig’s keynote was the last presentation for me. Every time I talk to Marc, I end up feeling like I’m not as smart as I thought I was but that I walked away smarter than I arrived. His recent work on not just designing things, but designing ways to change things for the greater good gave me huge hope for my newly adopted field of design. Thackara’s talk was the setup and Rettig’s talk slammed it home — we have to get off our asses and do something. If you didn’t “get it” after hearing Marc speak, go farm goats or something. Seriously.

Finally, in his thoughts on ixd09, Kolko writes, “this field is screaming for a unified theory that relates cognition, aesthetics, and culture.”   Perhaps it’s naive of me, but isn’t that the Greater Discipline of Capital-D Design? How could a unified theory of interaction design exclude the design of tools and shelter? Or is the real answer to his request the research we’ll do trying to answer an unanswerable question?

As I get on the plane for home, I am overwhelmed with gratitude towards those who took the time to share and help the rest of us become better designers. Thank you all for your kindness, advice, and friendship.

Technorati Tags: design, ixd09, #ixd09

Art That Learns, a class on machine learning and art installations taught by Osman Khan and Carlos Guestrin

Interactive Technologies and Live Performance, a class on technology and performance taught by Golan Levin and Matt Grey.

mTID research, wherein I reveal the invisible.

My fourth studio is an independent study on drawing, I’ll probably scan/post some stuff from that here.

More soon.

Technorati Tags: design, mtid, school

The short of it is I’d picked an output for haptic feedback that for me was really problematic outside of research/experiment conditions. I read a lot of papers saying, “I did this and it worked” but none of them mentioned the negative problems/cases for this type of output. Ok, great, so you’ve shown how to use a fubar to relate concrete data, but you fail to mention that the fubar weighs a ton, sucks power like a mofo, and is not the cheapest toy in the store.

This week I’ll re-do my literature review and make a website for my project then post links here…

Technorati Tags: design, haptic, school

• 4,000 character essay in Japanese on the history of japanese youth culture and fashion
• video sketch of a new product in Interaction Design
• brochure for a client project in Document Design
• that thing I’m working on for my Master’s studio that I’ll post about when it’s finished

I basically don’t have free time. Twice in the past couple of weeks I’ve gone out with friends and had fun, but the next morning I find myself thinking, “I probably could have used that time more wisely”. On the other hand, I need the occasional break so I can catch my breath and think about something other than sketching, storyboarding, and writing code.

Other students are looking forward to winter break so they can go home and spend time with their families and travel, I’m thinking about mine in terms of simply catching up on day-to-day life, seeing my friends, updating my portfolio, making some art, and generally doing things of my own choosing.

Technorati Tags: design, school

Today I was talking to a undergrad who is disillusioned with what he’s studying in industrial design studio.  While we were talking, I was reminded of something Papanek wrote that helped me figure out What I Want to do With My Life.

_Design for the Real World_, a book that got Papanek kicked out of the IDSA, really made me wake up and think about what it is I am doing and why.  The revised edition of _Design for the Real World_ is much better than the original, but the first paragraph stays the same:

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second. Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered shoe horns, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. Before (in the “good old days”), if a person liked killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal mine, or else study nuclear physics. Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breath, designers have become a dangerous breed. And the skills needed in these activities are carefully taught to young people.

Technorati Tags: design, life, papanek

This wraps up week 5 of my 32 week adventure in getting a one-year master’s. Intensive programs are, well, intensive. I’m taking four studios + an elective (the somewhat non-trivial Advanced Japanese) and that accounts for most of my waking hours.

Because mTID is still a new program, the courses I’m taking are relevant to my degree but offered from other departments. This semester, one of my design studios is in the English department and another is in HCI so I’m getting to interact with a lot of people from other graduate programs. The other two studios are basically a single massive studio under mTID where I’m doing a self-directed research project. (If you know the Carnegie Mellon unit system, I’m taking 51 units, 42 of those are studios.)

My research project is going really well so far. I’ll post more details when I’ve got a rigged demo, but I’m basically looking at ways to visualize Hertzian space using tactile and haptic outputs. Like many of my grand schemes, I give it a 50/50 chance of actually working instead of being an example of what not to do. There’s a fair amount of research in haptics for manipulators and engaging virtual worlds, however I’m personally leaning towards personal-level implementations that transmit abstract information. Instead of trying to provide realistic physical feedback to someone teleoperating a waldo I’m trying to provide physical encodings of data/information about an invisible environment.

At the end of week 5 I’m where I should be at the end of week 8 and I have 11 weeks until the end of the semester. I’d really like to have something to show at the CHI ‘09 vignettes or alt.chi in April and the application deadlines are during winter break. I’m feeling pretty good about the progress I’m making, especially if I can work on this after the semester is over and have a really good submission for CHI.

Technorati Tags: carnegie mellon, design, haptics, hertzian space, mtid, school

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

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

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

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

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

I want to be a designer because…
… I want to make things that will improve people’s physical and emotional lives.

There’s another answer, but it’s more than 15 words:
… I am unable to stop asking the “why” and “how” questions about the world and I think studying design will help me find some answers.

Those are related statements, but one is a process that will never end, the other is an action I want to be able to perform.

When I started down this road a few years ago, I was convinced I wanted to study ID and move into the ID job world. The more I learn about capital-D design, the more I start looking for commonalities between design and other knowledge domains. When I started learning to draw objects I started seeing things differently and laying out diagrams on whiteboards differently. Learning about the American System of production in the 18th and 19th century has started me thinking about how desktop fabrication will change business models of global corporations. Looking at how color and typography are used, I am beginning to understand why I hate the default text coloring in most source code editors and starting to think about ways to improve the text display.

The more I learn about design the more questions I have and the less sure I am of my previous answers to questions.

But that’s a good thing, in my opinion.

(Oh, and here’s my answer from a year ago when I first answered this question.)

Technorati Tags: design, future

I took a couple of weeks to decompress for school but I need to get back into the study groove. I have a lot of real work (the stuff that pays) to do, but I’m going to try and stick to a self-study schedule for design, security and Japanese in my free time.

My books on the “In” pile so far fall into two piles, design and security.

In the design pile:

• Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
• Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
• What Things Do — I haven’t read much design theory, so I might spread this out over several weeks so that it can soak in
• The Complete Japanese Joinery
  
• Industrial Strength Design ("What do you mean it’s not about EBM and stompy boots?")
• Universal Principles of Design
  

The stack of security books is big enough that I might end up skimming many of them:

• Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization
• Physical Device Security
• Reversing
  
• Building Secure Software
  
• Silence on the Wire
  
• Security Warrior (could they have come up with more leet title?)

I’m also considering re-reading some of the classics that I read in school the first time around: Alexander’s design books, Foucault’s History of Science, that sort of thing. It’ll be interesting to see how much my worldly experience changes what I get out of the canon.

Technorati Tags: books, design, school, security, summer

I’ve learned a lot in the past nine months, some of it what they wanted me to learn, some of it that could only be learned by someone my age spending a semester or two with a bunch of 18-19 year olds fresh out of high school.

If I could only remember one thing I learned this year, it would be the value of process. As an engineer (and before that, a journalist) I was never trained to keep, much less value, the things I created while working towards a solution. Different solutions to technical problems? Erased. Countless whiteboard diagrams? All gone. Meeting notes? Only those that contain the actual solution we derived during a meeting. Drafts of writings? Tossed out as soon as I turned in the final copy.

The trick for me is going to be learning how to translate design process to engineering process. We have process in engineering, we just don’t think of it as process. We consider it waste: bad ideas, wasted time trying to implement various solutions that don’t work, etc. At best we save all our email and can go back to find out what we might have been thinking when we decided to do XYZ or why we didn’t do XYZ’ or why we wanted to do XYZ in the first place.

I probably learned a lot of other stuff, but right now I just want to lie down and sleep for a month or so.

Technorati Tags: design, process, school