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.

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

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? [...]“

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

~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

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

For awhile now, I’ve been interested in physical and electronic security and the relationship they have with personal privacy. A large part of my day job for the past 8 years has involved privacy and computer security and I’ve been involved in some sort of security or hacking efforts since the 8-bit days. There are interesting areas of overlap where tradeoffs are made between security and privacy, and as I study design in a formal setting, I’m beginning to see the tradeoffs that will be made with design. While I’ve always been a proponent of security not getting in the way of usability, I didn’t worry too much about what “usability” actually meant and as a hacker, I was basically happy with with something that worked and was efficient.

In design school I’m learning design-thinking, which I’m discovering is similar to hacker-thinking (more on that in a future post). An interesting difference I’ve discovered is that as a hacker, I’m happy if it works. As a designer, I’m not happy until I’m no longer able to improve things. There’s a big leap between “it works well enough” and “it works and I can’t make it any better”, looking back at past hacking projects I can see now how much further I could have gone.

I’m also learning how to better communicate my ideas to people before I go off and act upon them. Hacking has always been about doing something, design is very much thinking about doing something and communicating the idea to people who do things. I want to do both. I want to show someone 20 variations on an idea using sketches, get useful feedback, then go off and do/make something to implement the idea.

For the Fall semester of mTID, I wanted to explore interaction design as it relates to learning about one’s physical and electronic surroundings. I didn’t want to go the AR route and wander around holding a mobile in front of my face or staring down into a tricorder; I wanted some sort of physical or tactile output device that feeds me information as an interrupt based on external triggers. Specifically, something that would let me know that I needed to be paying attention or that I should focus my attention in a specific direction but that was not always on at some idle setting or feeding me information that I have to parse as “negative/off”.

After looking at research in the field of haptic/tactile outputs, I also decided to take on the constraint of COTS technology, preferably open source hardware and software. I want other people to be able to replicate my work using free/cheap hardware and software instead of having to buy expensive mil-spec hardware or developing their own technology. There are teams of people with budgets doing some really interesting things, but I’m one person working in a self-funded studio.

Based loosely on what others have done, I ended up making a few waist-belts and arm-bands using Lilypad Vibe Boards driven by Arduino microcontrollers. The bands and belts are adjustable and can handle between 1 and 16 Vibe Boards. After getting all that up and running, I hooked it to a HM55B compass and did some basic navigation experiments and added a command-line interface to make it easy to manipulate individual Vibe Boards from outside the Arduino.

The thing that surprised me the most was the difference between what was reported in the literature and my personal experiences when it comes to using vibrators on a belt or band. Belts are a bit of a pain and have to be significantly readjusted and calibrated based on different individuals and the clothes they are wearing. For people who aren’t skinny, there are also issues with some of the vibe boards not making contact across the small of the back and for people who wear their pants at the wrong height it can often end up being a “torso band”. However, I was able to get some good practical experience with perceptual issues and concepts like the difficulty of supporting “just noticeable difference” between different wearers.

Due to the number of problems with the belt being used between different people, I started focusing on a band worn on the upper arm. My hope was that it would be easier to adjust and reconfigure, and that turned out to be the case. The arm-band also confirmed a problem that I’d first noticed during work developing the belt: vibrators are great for active feedback during a focused task or a high-priority alert but not so good for low-level alerts or the occasional nudge.

During debugging I noticed that I often startled myself by having a buzzer in my hand or resting on my skin go off, even when I was trying to figure out why it wasn’t powering up. Invariably, I’d drop the buzzer or flinch, even though I was expecting it to do something. (See also the classic “joy buzzer” prank.) My intuition is that we respond to surprise buzzing in a negative manner because of bees and other buzzing insects that can hurt us and that this is why almost every signal I’ve generated has seemed so negative if it happened unexpectedly.

However, having something seem like a surprise or creating a feeling of being startled is almost the exact opposite of what I’m trying to accomplish. My goal is to generate feedback at a less-critical level to alert a person of some information of interest, possibly including an abstract concept. I’m interested more in how to physically relate the sentence, “Hey, maybe you want to look in this direction for something suspicious that might also be hidden” and not the short imperative, “RUN! IT’S A LION!”

So now I’m looking at psych and HCI research again and considering combining vibrations with other tactile feedback. Perhaps a small solenoid that gets the wearer’s attention by “tapping them on the shoulder” then providing more information via the vibrators, or perhaps I can figure out a way to ramp up the vibrations slowly enough that someone isn’t startled.

As frustrating as this semester has been in terms of slow progress, setbacks, and dead-end tangents, I still feel like I’m learning a huge amount in a very short time. Once summer is here, I’m looking forward to some reflection time to sort out what I’ve really learned and how I can use it in the future.

Technorati Tags: arduino, design, haptic, ixd, lilypad, mTID

A “time machine” radio that allows you tune into a year instead of a radio frequency.

Technorati Tags: arduino, design, interaction, sketching

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

Except that now, RISD is leapfrogging.

For those of you too lazy to go read wikipedia, “leapfrogging” is when you go from being way behind everyone else to being way ahead by skipping everything between “behind” and “ahead”. As an example, instead of ~30 years of desktop PCs and crappy software in schools, kids around the world are going directly from chalk and slate to OLPCs and mobile phones .

RISD is going to do the same thing.

Why?

RISD has Maeda.

There’s a 19th century-like hall of wonders called the “Nature Lab” at RISD, where students can look at something like 80,000 specimens from around the world. Which is a really useful thing to have when you need to study the physical structure of some random animal — why look at a book when you can look at an actual skeleton or taxidermy? Problem being, you need good light to study an object, and the Nature Lab is in a building, not outdoors in, well, nature.

Thanks to Maeda, the Nature Lab has artificial daylight and color adjusting lamps from Zumtobel.

That’s rethinking the education process in action. RISD doesn’t need a fancy computerized database with 3D holographs of everything, they just needed some state-of-the-art lighting in their historic building.

Technorati Tags: design, leapfrogging, Maeda, RISD

The problem is that most (ok, almost all) mashups suck or are at best novelties. You might listen to them once and think, ‘how clever, they made something using “16 Tons” and “Material Girl”’, but you’ll never voluntarily listen to it again or wander around singing it in your head. Simply finding two songs in a similar key/tempo and blending them does not guarantee it’s actually good music.

However, there are a few artists that take songs that sound good, mash them all together, and make a better song than any of the originals. “Gosh, if only this song had a better bridge and this one had a better drumline, hey, I know…” Better still are the artists that don’t stop at two songs, the ones that take three songs, mash them up, and filter/mix them so it sounds like it’s one big band. And then there are the really good ones that make videos to go along with their remix/mashups.

I recently discovered this collective in Japan that works under the name “Orcrec” that does almost everything perfectly. They have a blog filled with work , but it’s on the other side of the pond and the connection is iffy. Lucky for us there’s the Youtube.

First, there’s their Starry Sky YEAH! Remix, which is based on three other songs:

• Beastie Boys, Ch-Check It Out, an ok rap song but the beats just don’t work for me.
• Capsule, Starry Sky, shibuya-k pop with really long stretches of barely audible lyrics. (I have the CD this is from and it’s actually pretty good electronica/pop music.)
• Daft Punk, Technologic,minimalist electro with almost dada lyrics about technology.

But you put them together properly and “holy fuck this is a great song!” Note that they also mixed three videos together as well and also filtered the audio tracks for better transitions.

The second amazing Orcrec track, Gamegirl Master, is based on Underworld’s “Rez/Cowgirl”, Fatboy Slim’s “Renegade Master (Wildchild)”, and Perfume’s “Game”.

I happen to like two of these songs to begin with, and while Orcrec didn’t put as much effort into the mixing as they did with “Starry Sky YEAH!”, they made an all new video for the mix using footage from TRON. Even without the snazzy new video, the mashup they made is still better than the sum of the parts and arguably better than two of the three songs. (Rez/Cowgirl is arguably one of the best 10 electro songs of all time.)

The thing is, you can waste all day on youtube looking at stuff like this. At least %90 of it is crap made by kids who didn’t change the music, they just made a new video (aka AMV) for one of their favorite songs using stuff from anime and movies or video of themselves dancing and lipsyncing. But if you’re lucky, you’ll stumble along someone with the skills of Orcrec and rethink what the limits of your medium are.

Technorati Tags: design, inspiration, mashup, orcrec

“Everyone asks me, ‘Are you bringing technology to RISD?’ I tell them, no, I’m bringing RISD to technology.”

I wonder how many design schools could benefit from that way of thinking.

Technorati Tags: design, Maeda, RISD

Technorati Tags: physical computing