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.

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.

If you have the budget to buy a production-ready 3D printer, you probably shouldn’t be looking at a MakerBot. Production systems have better resolution, support contracts, schmancy STL conversion software and all sorts of other niceties. The MakerBot Cupcake is not a Stratasys, you’re not just going to plug it in and be cranking out pretty models a few hours later.

However, if you don’t have a huge budget and you’re willing to spend time debugging, tweaking, and generally getting your hands dirty; if you’re ok with the smell of ABS fumes, the stepper motor “songs“, and tending to an occasionally fussy machine that will botch a part for no obvious reason; and if you enjoy hacking and iterative exploration of technology, then maybe you’re the right sort of person to put together a MakerBot Cupcake or other reprap-based 3D printer.

Home scale fabrication is the domain of garage-carpenters and basement-machinists, the MakerBot doesn’t replace either. To some extent, building and running a MakerBot requires some of these related skills. Do you have a feel for how tight you can turn a bolt holding two pieces of wood together before it snaps the wood? Do you know how to shorten a screw with a hacksaw and keep the threads clean? You already own a multimeter, do you have a thermistor probe as well? How are you at diagnosing a wiring problem in a stepper motor?

Of the various reprap-related projects, MakerBot Cupcake is pretty clearly the easiest to put together. I got mine up and running without much fuss, but I’ve been building things from kits or fabbing things from raw materials for many years. I still needed help from the MakerBot mailing list to sort out a couple of minor problems and I’ve been able to help a couple of other people with their problems.

If you’re primarily a designer, there’s a reason you should consider taking the plunge even if you think you aren’t the sort of person who is ready to build their own 3D printer: self-education.

I’ve learned a lot about fabrication working in the opensource 3D printing world that I was never exposed to using commercial systems. Learning how to use Blender to create models has been painful at times, but I find myself liking it more than Solidworks for simple projects. I’ve learned about bad STL code, the relationships between temperature and speed when laying down plastic, and more about the physical properties of ABS than I ever thought I would need to know. Assembling the MakerBot from parts exposed me to a few neat tricks you can use to make 3D objects out of sheets of acrylic, and some new joining techniques for thin surfaces.

This new knowledge is also helping my ongoing education as a designer. Now that I know some of the printing capabilities, I can change my sketching and ideation process to work around limitations or integrate limitations of the printer. I’ve also rediscovered the old metalworking path of designing a mold to create a basic shape that is finished on machine tools, but instead I’m printing 3D plastic that I can finish using hand tools or machine tools.

It hasn’t been the easiest tool I’ve learned to use, but building and using the MakerBot might be the “funnest” tool I’ve learned to use in recent years.

Technorati Tags: hacking, makerbot, reprap

On the download page is the usual demographic survey, which includes this gem:

Industry:

• Architecture
• Cabinetry
• City Planning
• Civil Engineering
• Computer Consulting
• Construction
• Contractor
• Entertainment
• Facilities Management
• Gaming
• GIS
• Graphic Design
• Hobbyist
• Home Building
• Interior Design
• Landscape Architect
• Marketing
• Mechanical Engineering
• Software
• Survey

First, note the lack of “other”. You are going to tell Google exactly what it is you do or you cannot download the software. How can you have data-driven decision-making when people can weasel out and choose “other”?

Now, note the horrid inconsistency in the hierarchies of the various industries listed and the amount of overlap in some of the categories.. We go from the extremely broad categories of “Entertainment” and “Software” to the very specific discipline of “Cabinetry”. I guess if you’re a furniture designer who doesn’t specialize in “Cabinetry” you’re just an “Interior Design” person. Or maybe “Entertainment”, because people sit on your furniture while being entertained. Isn’t “Gaming” a form of “Entertainment” and “GIS” a type of “Software”?

Of course, the only design disciplines mentioned are “Interior” and “Graphic”, I guess Industrial and Interaction Designers aren’t really designers, they’re “Mechanical engineering” or “Software”. It’s also interesting that the only two design disciplines called out are also the ones commonly (and incorrectly) associated with women designers: interior and graphic.

Technorati Tags: design, google, rant

In the 1980s the average person didn’t own a home computer. Those who did were likely to be gamers, hackers, tinkerers, or someone else interested in owning a computer as a hobby, not as an everyday tool. ~30 years later, computers are a part of everyday life, used for paying bills, keeping up with friends, publishing photos, and a whole host of other uses we could never have predicted back in the days of the SE and AT. We knew that home computers would change things, but we couldn’t predict how, no matter how many episodes of Star Trek or Max Headroom we watched on multi-generation VHS tapes copied from friends.

Today, 25 years after the Great Pagemaker Massacre of 1985, we’re on the verge of another massive change in how our world works. I have no idea how that change will manifest itself, but I’d like to be one of the first to find out.

I just built a MakerBot Cupcake 3D printer, which is itself based on the reprap project printers. Since the first question most people ask me is “how much did it cost?”, I’m going to start off this series of notes talking about the economics of 3D printing.

In raw dollars, the Cupcake cost a little less than my first computer, a Commodore C64 with monitor, printer, and omfg, floppy drive instead of cassette recorder, all of which set my parents back a bit over a grand. While a grand or so in the early 80s bought a fair bit more than it does now, like other home computers, you couldn’t just buy the computer. We probably spent another few hundred dollars on software, joysticks, blank floppies, that weird “computer-paper” that the printer used and so on. Most of those things came from third parties, so there was competition to keep the prices down — you weren’t locked into buying blank floppies only from Commodore.

Like the C64, one of the selling points for the Cupcake is that it’s a cheap, no-frills device. Part of the fun in having a Cupcake is the DIY aesthetic of figuring out how it works, why it works, and how to keep it working. Another not so obvious selling point, is that the Cupcake is based on opensource software and hardware. If you’re not familiar with the 3D printer market, you’re probably thinking “so? I bought a cheap PC built from parts and run linux? What’s the big deal about an opensourced 3D printer?”

Commercial 3D printer companies, like most 2D printer companies, operate by selling you the “razor for cheap then making it up on the blades”. The profit isn’t in the printer, it’s in the supplies the printer uses and the support contract to keep it running. Next time you see a really inexpensive inkjet printer for sale, research the cost of a set of replacement ink cartridges. Compare the volume of ink in the cartridges and their price and compare that with the price of refill ink, or look at the effort some manufacturers put into forcing you to only buy new cartridges by using DRM. (There’s an excellent eBay scam that takes advantage of the pricing disparities: buy a printer, pull the ink cartridges, then sell the printer “like new” for near what you paid for it to someone who doesn’t know how much the replacement cost of the cartridges.)

Two things you usually have to buy from the manufacturer if you own a commercial, closed-source 3D printer are the material to print with and the base that you print on. The printing material is probably a spool of ABS plastic in a vendor-specific housing and the printing base is also ABS and also vendor specific. There’s a nice article over at Time Compression that goes into cost details to be considered when buying a commercial 3D printer, but we’ll skip to the chase and say we’re talking about US$ 1-2 per cubic inch on the proprietary systems vs. USD $10 per pound of raw ABS from MakerBot. Oh, and instead of those $5 one-use print surfaces only available from the vendor, the Cupcake prints on a variety of surfaces available at any art supply store, some of them reusable for dozens of prints. (I’ve used a small piece of acrylic for ~20 prints on the Cupcake with no signs of wear and tear.)

This is opposite to how 2D printing has worked going back to the earliest days of printing. Once someone had the idea to cut blocks of wood or cast lead as type, the printer could control costs by simply buying raw materials for the best price they could negotiate and recycling them when possible. Cast some metal into type, then melt it down when you no longer need it. Screw up a print run? No problem, we can recycle that paper. Wore out your wooden printing block? Have someone carve another and get back to printing.

When I learned to type (“yes, grandpa, on a typewrier, we know”) it was on an IBM Selectric that used a ribbon and “typewriter” paper. The ribbon was sold by IBM, but replacements were available from third parties. Likewise, I didn’t have to buy my paper from IBM, I could buy it from any office supply store. I could even buy paper that IBM didn’t approve of (as if such a thing existed). If my typewriter needed repair, I didn’t have to call the IBM tech, I could go to any typewriter repair shop I choose.   

This is pretty much exactly opposite to how 3D printers work now. If you own a FooCorp X1000 you are pretty much locked into buying everything from FooCorp. Having problems with your X1000? Is your support contract paid up? Are you allowed to even open it and try and fix it yourself without violating your contract?

While the Cupcake is opensource, and one is not locked into buying ABS from MakerBot, it isn’t a completely self-sustaining ecology just yet. The first problem is that there’s no way to convert ABS models and scrap back into spools of ABS for printing . The technology to melt and extrude ABS plastic is there, it’s just a matter of someone building a melter/extruder that’s safe for home use. Safety might end up being the real problem as ABS fumes aren’t something you want to breath on a regular basis. Instead of recycling ABS on the individual level, perhaps the local door-to-door ABS recycling firm comes by and trades your scrap for fresh rolls of ABS, similar to the newspapers for toilet paper biz in Japan. One step further would be the ability to take broken ABS items and recycle them into replacement parts. If a knob or some other small part breaks, bring it over to my place, I’ll print you a new one then give the old one to the recycler in trade for more plastic.

So there you have the costs — under a grand and a dozen or two hours of your time to assemble it, adjust it, and get it running. Some of the money you’re “saving” by buying a DIY printer is going to be translated into hours of your time assembling, adjusting, and generally tweaking your Cupcake to get a decent print.   

Next we’ll look at who the real customer is and whether you should buy a Cupcake or just ship your STL to RedEye.

Technorati Tags: cupcake, diy, makerbot, reprap

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

“Complete this statement every year while limiting your answer to 15 words or less.”

I want to be a designer because….
… practicing design helps me understand the world and how I can improve it.

(Thanks to Brett for putting this bug in my head.)

Technorati Tags: design, goals, personal

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

Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World, revised ed, p293 :

[...]

A more durable kind of design thinking entails seeing the product (or tool, or transportation device, or building, or city) as a meaningful link between man and environment. We must see man, his tools, environment, and ways of thinking and planning, as a nonlinear, simultaneous, integrated, comprehensive whole.

This approach is integrated design. It deals with the specialized extensions of man that make it possible for him to remain a generalist. All man’s functions — breathing, balancing, walking, perceiving, consuming, symbol-making, society-generating — are interrelated and interdependent. If we wish to relate the human environment to the psychophysical wholeness of the human being, our goal will be to replan and redesign both function and structure of all the tools, products, shelters, and settlements of man into an integrated living environment, an environment capable of growth, change, mutation, adaptation, regeneration, in response to man’s needs.

Integrated design will concern itself, for the first time since the Late Paleolithic, with unity. This must include locally autonomous planning, as well as regional and city planning, architecture (both interior and exterior), industrial design (including systems analysis, transportation, and bionic research), product design (including clothing), packaging, and all the graphic, video and film-making skills that can be generally subsumed under the phrase visual design. Dividing lines exist between these areas at present, but the lunacy of these divisions is apparent even on the most basic level. To use one example: what is architecture? Assuredly it is more than the skill of building arches. Consider today’s mix of civil engineering, speculative building, contracting, interior decoration, federally subsidized mass housing, landscaping, regional planning, rural and urban sociology, sculpture, and industrial design: what is left?

Architecture can hardly still be considered an area of its own (it lacks definition), and it overlaps with dozens of different fields. In view of all this, what is architecture? Could this be the reason so many architects have moved toward research, self-indulgent paper fantasies, heroic but ecologically unsound monumentalism, planning, and industrial design during the last decade? And during that same time, industrial designers have concerned themselves increasingly with the development of prefabricated houses and building components. Interior designers have developed furniture and tools and got caught up in such fads as supergraphics, nostalgia, brutalism, and so forth, while visual designers develop products and make films.

[...]

If we speak of integrated design, of design-as-a-whole, of unity, we need designers able to deal with the design process comprehensively. Lamentably, designers so equipped are not yet turned out by any school. Their education would need to be less specialized and include many disciplines now considered to be only distantly related to design, if related at all.

Integrated design is not a set of skills, techniques, or rules but should be thought of as a series of functions occurring simultaneously rather than in a linear sequence. These simultaneous “events” can be thought of (in biological terms) as initial fertilization, developmental growth, production (or mimesis), and evaluation, the latter leading to reinitiation or regeneration or both, thus forming a closed feedback loop. Integrated design (a general unified design system) demands that we establish at what level of complexity the problem belongs. Are we, for instance, dealing with a tool that must be redesigned, or are we dealing with a manufacturing method in which this tool has been used, or should we rethink the product itself in relation to its ultimate purpose? [...]“

Last week, we bought yet-another-cordless-phone after the GE died and the replacement handset would never sync properly with the base station. This time, I decided to go with a Panasonic, as some similar models had received good ratings in Consumer Reports and Costco had them for cheap.

Setting them up, I was happy to discover that instead of some cordless phone specific battery, they use regular NiMH AAA batteries. Plentiful and cheap when the time comes to replace them.

Now if I could just get a set of schematics and a parts list so we’d have a chance of repairing the phone itself, maybe I’d have a phone that I could maintain over the long run…

Technorati Tags: batteries, design, sustainability

Here’s one example: luggage. In the states, luggage is all about ease of movement through airports or accessories that make your luggage clip to other luggage and so on. The problem is, “how do I move a bunch of bags from my house to the airport to the hotel and back again?” and the answer is the latest and greatest products from Victorinox, Samsonite, and their ilk.

In Japan, this problem is solved with an actual service, not better luggage. It’s trivial to drop your luggage off at the airport and have it delivered to your hotel, or delivered from your hotel to another hotel or back to the airport. Within Japan, we travelled only with overnight bags, our massive luggage were dropped off at the front desk of one hotel and delivered to our room at the next.

I don’t think that someone actually said, “how can we solve the luggage problem” as much as someone saw a business opportunity. Yamato Transport doesn’t just move luggage, they move pretty much anything from one point to another. Services instead of consumable products were everywhere. Instead of a stack of napkins at the restaurant, we were given steamed hand-towels. Instead of a bunch of signs at a construction site warning passersby of danger, a real, live human apologized for the inconvenience and directed traffic as needed.

When we checked in to our hotel — jetlagged and confused — we discovered a few other little touches that made a huge difference in our stay and how we thought about our environment. After finding our room and dumping our luggage, we were confused by the fact that the power was out. It took us a few minutes to find the slot by the door where you store your (RFID enabled) room key. When you’re in the room, you put your key in the slot, and the power is turned on for your room. When you leave and take the key with you, everything except the fridge and the washer/dryer are automatically powered down. Not only do you always know where you room key is, but you get a daily reminder of how much energy is wasted by standby power or lights that were accidentally left on.

We were also happy to find that our hotel had a “washlet“, and by the end of our stay we were trying to figure out how to smuggle one home. And also wondering if, perhaps, the Japanese think we’re a bunch of dirty savages when it comes to bathroom hygiene. I’m sure the toilet paper industry would not be happy about the mass adoption of washlets in the States, but I think it’s something that’d probably be better for us (and the environment) in the long run. Washlets are another case of the “service instead of commodity” thinking — instead of buying the best/nicest toilet paper you can afford by the pallet at Costco, why not have a toilet that does most of the cleaning for you?

I’ll end on a question that popped into my head while trying to find a trashcan on the streets of Tokyo,

“Can you design a solution that doesn’t create new consumption patterns?”

[0] For the purposes of simplicity, I’m not going to try and guess whether it was a service designer, interaction designer, UE designer, industrial designer, or whatever designer that designed things that I used.

Technorati Tags: design, japan

This time when I visited the Apple store, there was no mention of repair — the only option presented to me was that if I recycle it, I could get %10 off of a new iPod. So, what’s changed? Why is Apple more interested in selling me a new iPod that only holds marginally more media instead of charging me a fair chunk of change to replace the battery in the old one. The rumor is they don’t make profit on the iPod and that it’s subsidized by iTunes sales. Is the hope that in selling me a larger iPod, they increase the amount of sales, and does adding half-again as much space really make that much profit?

So here’s the design issue — why isn’t the iPod designed to be easily repaired by someone at the Genius bar? It’s trivial to swap out the battery in my state of the art Android G1 and it’s been trivial to swap out the battery in almost every mobile phone or mobile HT I’ve owned. I’m trying to remember the last bit of consumer electronics I owned that didn’t allow me to swap out the battery and I’m drawing a blank.

So what’s up, Apple? As a socially responsible company, why aren’t you designing products that can be maintained by the customer instead of designing products that have to be replaced?

Technorati Tags: apple, design, sustainability

omfg.

I’ve always liked Japanese design, but I don’t think I could understand why until a few years of design school and a couple of weeks in Tokyo. Design is a part of everyday life here, in a way the west doesn’t get just yet. For one example, do a search for “tenegui” and check out the complex history of a simple piece of cloth.

Over the next few weeks I’ll try and summarize what I’ve learned/discovered during two weeks in Japan.

Technorati Tags: design, japan

~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

Towards the end of last semester, I sat through a number of 10 minute presentations by designers, engineers, and artists. I wrote this in my sketchbook about half-way through:

Graphic design is the ability to focus on multiple compositional elements at once in a 2d space, taking into account typography, color, grid, graphics, etc. It follows that capital-d Design is the ability to focus on multiple compositional elements at once, independent of the medium. Background, typeface, color and grid (2d) are as important as shape, texture, temperature, and other tactile elements (3d). All of the elements have to be considered simultaneously as foreground and background, content and context, instead of focusing on them as individual elements.

I wrote that in response to slides that all had a similar problem: individually-good-but-conflicting elements. Perhaps a nice background and a good typeface, but they have nothing to do with one another at best, clash horribly at worse. A text-heavy set of slides about office workers that quickly became boring due to lack of illustrations of what office life is like, only page after page of fully justified text. Or an in-depth look at music in two different cultures that had no audio examples, only transcriptions of lyrics. Another was a image-heavy slideshow about youth culture with the images sort of randomly placed against various stock background images. All the presentations had excellent content, were clearly researched well, and the conclusions were all supported with lots of data — but because of the design choices made, the presentations were not very effective.

It seems that there is a gestalt people need to be able to comprehend if they want to be a designer, be it of images or things or processes. Maybe that’s how type, color, grid, and whitespace work on a piece of paper; how form and color work on a tool; or how space and light work as an architect. In design classes, we learn to “see the grid” or “learn what gives a thing the quality of thing-ness” but we also learn to look at things within their greater context. If need be, we keep popping contexts off the stack, until we’ve backed out far enough to get a full view and understanding of what it is we’re doing.   

So what does that have to do with tangible interaction design?

If the elements of communication design are in a plane and those of industrial design are in a volume, where do the elements of interaction design lie? For web sites and most software, within the plane, but what about interaction design applied to form? Are the elements shape, weight and texture? What if the form can change itself as part of the interaction? What if the form can change its characteristics in ways previously impossible, much less conceivable? How do we sketch these tangible interactions and what language do we use to discuss our sketches?

If the elements of tangible interaction design are the ability to manipulate the elements of texture, temperature, shape, stiffness, etc; what is the context that these elements live in? What is the “grid” of tangible interaction? What is a “form study” in tangible interaction? What will become the traditional exercises performed by students of tangible interaction?

Technorati Tags: design, interaction, ixd, tangible

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

Technorati Tags: design, kinetics

[...]

Researchers should soon know whether they can confirm those calorie-burning and scholastic benefits. Two studies under way at the University of Minnesota are using data collected from Ms. Brown’s classroom and others in Minnesota and Wisconsin that are using the new desks. The pupils being studied are monitored while using traditional desks as well, and the researchers are looking for differences in physical activity and academic achievement.

“We can’t say for sure that this has an impact on those two things, but we’re hypothesizing that they may,” said Beth A. Lewis of the School of Kinesiology, or movement science, at the University of Minnesota. “I think we’re so used to the traditional classroom it’s taken a while for people to start thinking outside the box. I think it’s just a matter of breaking the mold.”

[...]

I think this really great news on a variety of levels. Kids can burn off energy without being labeled disruptive or ADD and they also will have a mindset less accepting of poor ergonomics when they get to college or the workplace.

Technorati Tags: chairs, design, ergonomics, perching, sitting

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