ALL ART BURNS

[Have to make this a brief review, as it’s not required for school nor work.]

In _designing for interaction_, Dan Saffer gives a concise and well-written introduction to the relatively new discipline of interaction design. This is the sort of book I’d love to see on a first-year design class reading list or in the careers section of a high school library. It’s also the sort of book that I’d give to any boss of mine that questioned the need to hire an outside designer for a project. (“Here, read this, then tell me if you still want to let engineering do everything on their own.”)

Saffer uses modern, popular technology (TiVo DVRs, mobile phones, web sites) as examples for interaction design or to illustrate his ideas. There are also a number of brief interviews with notables in the field giving their take on different design issues and concepts. These examples and interviews make the book more friendly and the reading experience is more enjoyable than the typical academic text.

Content is not sacrificed for accessibility nor is it dumbed-down for the non-designer. The basic framework and terminology of interaction design (and even design in general) are laid out in an easy to understand way. Terms or practices that might be unfamiliar to someone outside of design are clearly defined using plain English instead of design speak or computer jargon. Someone couldn’t go out and become a designer the day after reading this book but they would learn enough to lead them to further investigate interaction design as a career or to be able to make better decisions when hiring a designer or design firm.

designing for interaction, web site
O Danny Boy, Dan Saffer’s design blog

Technorati Tags: dan saffer, design, interaction design, review

Something one can read either as science fiction or a twisted user scenario:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google

Los Angeles, 2026

Ted got busted because we do graffiti. Losing Ted was a big setback, as Ted was the only guy in our gang who knew how to steal aerosol spray cans. As potent instruments of teenage social networking, aerosol spray cans have “high abuse potential”. So spray cans are among the many things us teenagers can’t buy, like handguns, birth control, alcohol, cigarettes and music with curse words.

I tried hard to buy us another spray can. I’m a street poet, so really, I tried. I walked up to the mall-store register, disguised in my Dad’s business jacket, with cash in hand. They’re cheap, aerosol spray cans. Beautiful colours of paint, just screaming to get sprayed someplace public where everybody has to see what’s on our minds. The store wouldn’t sell me the can. The e-commerce system simply would not allow that transaction. The screen just went gray and stayed gray.

That creepy “differential permissioning” sure saves a lot of trouble for grown-ups. Increasing chunks of the world are just… magically off limits. It’s a weird new regime where every mall and every school and every bus and train and jet is tagged and tracked and ambient and pervasive and ubiquitous and geolocative… Jesus, I love those words… Where was I?

Full story at http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg19125691.800

Technorati Tags: design, spimes, sterling, ubicomp

Three weeks into school and my routine is well established:

• leave the house at 0710, catch the 0730 bus, get on campus at 0800
• dump all my crap in studio, go find some tea, head back to studio to do any last minute tweaking
• start studio (design or drawing) at 0830
• break for lunch, take one of my required, non-studio classes (Human Experience in Design or Japanese I)
• head back to studio to do work or head home to do for-pay work
• in bed by 2200 if I’m lucky, but usually it’s more like 2300

One morning last week, as I was returning to studio with my morning tea, I paused in the outdoor rotunda of Margaret Morrison and it hits me: I’m here. I’m actually here, in school at one of the top design schools in the world, and I’ve manage to survive the first three weeks of school. Ok, so there are approximately 125 weeks left before I graduate, and when I hang my work alongside that of my peers I begin to question the competence of whomever decided to let me in, but I for now I’m here. The classes aren’t as difficult as I feared they would be, but the amount of work to be done is pretty overwhelming. I can do this. Ok, I can do this semester, we’ll see if I can do the entire year.

While I was standing there kinda giddy and overwhelmed I finally read the entire inscription that runs around the inner frieze of the rotunda:

“To make and inspire the home; To lessen suffering and increase happiness; To aid mankind in its upward struggles; To ennoble and adorn life’s work, however humble; These are women’s high perogatives.”

If I substitute “design” for “women”, I think it’s one valid way to think about design — to make the world a better place starting with the most humble of objects.

(And yes, the inscription is sexist, then again our building used to house the Margaret Morrison Carnegie College where women could earn a degree in anything from Home Economics to Secretarial Science or Nursing.)

Technorati Tags: Carnegie Mellon, design, Margaret Morrison

On the first day of one of my classes (“Human Experience in Design”), the instructor asked us to complete this sentence in 15 words or less:

“I want to be a designer because …”

He read aloud some of the answers people gave and he challenged us to answer the question every year and see how our answers changed during school and during our careers. I think this is a useful excercise no matter what your discipline, you should try answering this yourself and checking back every year.

In keeping with the original spirit, I’m going to keep my answer down to 15 words or less. I’m going to append five rules for acheiving the answer to my question and see how those change over time as well as the answer to the question.

I want to be a designer because I want to make things that people can use to improve their lives.

Five personal rules for acheiving that goal:

• Always remember that improving a person’s life is easy.
• Every project I work on should improve at least one person’s life, even if it simply entertains them.
• Never work on a product that a person will have to send to a landfill.
• Never attempt to convince someone to buy a product they do not actually need.
• Leave the world in a better place than it was in when I entered.

Technorati Tags: design, personal goals

After some 15-odd years in the tech industry doing everything from programming parallel supercomputers to developing secure applications for consumer electronics I decided to go back to school for a BFA in Industrial Design. This journal, “ALL ART BURNS”, is as a public design journal and sketchbook. It might turn into my pro designer blog after I graduate or it might continue to be a journal and sketchbook. Either way, I hope this will be of use to other people interested in design or who are also on the path to becoming a designer. The name comes from one of the fire/art themed stickers I made back in 2002 for Burning Man.

The long version of how this came about is in the earlier journal entries. The short version is that I miss what got me sucked into computers and technology in the first place: making tools people can use to improve their lives. When I started developing software eons ago, I often did every phase of delivering a product: determine requirements, design both the architecture and what we now call the user interface, procure hardware, develop the software, build and run tests, write end-user documentation, and install and maintain the product.

Somewhere in the mid-90s, the technology world went through a sea-change. My IT projects turned into installing vendor-provided solutions so I moved into engineering. Engineering in the dot-com boom in the valley was not terribly fun: I had a choice of being either a minor cog in a machine or an ego-driven uber-geek. Neither suits me well and I’ve been a mediocre engineer as a result, with only my passions for hacking, security and privacy keeping me motivated (and employable).

A few years ago I started going to Burning Man and quickly adopted their philosophy of “no spectators”. I started making art for the playa; that quickly evolved into learning to work metal; and soon after the discovery that I really enjoy making physical things that people can interact with. Working over the summer on a project for Burning Man wasn’t enough, I wanted to make physical things year around. I considered going back to school for a degree in mechanical engineering or robotics but both of those felt rather sterile. One day I discovered what it is that industrial designers do, and realized that industrial design was what I’ve been wanting to do for a long, long time.

I still like technology and I’ll always be a hacker of some sort but I have little desire to write software as a full-time job for the rest of my life. I want to make physical things that people manipulate and understand how people interact with those physical things. It’s one thing to develop a new authentication mechanism, it’s another for that mechanism to be usable. Odds are that anything I make will contain some sort of technology and it’s likely that I’ll help design and implement some of that technology.

Technorati Tags: college, industrial design, personal