Adding to the workload is the fact that I’m a homeowner in the northeast which means I have to cram most of my home improvement work into a few summer months. In ~6 weeks, the house will be sporting an environmentally friendly rear deck and stairs made of locally sourced black locust. I want to avoid synthetic/composite decks, sealing a cedar deck every 2-3 years is a pain, and there’s no redwood to be had this far east. I was whining about all this when a friend of mine from Pittsburgh suggested black locust. It’s a regional hardwood that has evolved to deal with the local climate had has an outdoor rating of 75+ years without being painted or sealed. It isn’t as cheap as pine and cedar, but the thought of having a deck that will easily last 50+ years with no maintenance makes me quite happy.

In the past few weeks there have been a number of news articles and at least four kerjillion blog posts regarding robots and the future of humanity. Robots that power themselves with organic matter, robots that can run like an animal, and snake robots that can hump human legs are all pretty cool, but there’s also a related narrative that we, as humans, don’t know how to deal with sentient robots.

The thing is, we’ve had unstoppable, zombie-like, intelligent actors capable of taking out a single human for at least a century. They have legal status, can own property, can file lawsuits, own weapons, have security forces, and they self-replicate based on available resources.

They’re called “corporations”.

A corporation has almost all the rights of an individual human, save for voting. But in most other ways, they’re better than any single human. They can store and process data in vast quantities and faster than a single human. They can make intelligent decisions about how they interact with you based on your purchasing history, your medical history, your entertainment preferences, and your social networking activities. A corporation can not only repair itself, it can survive financial death via various forms of bankruptcy and self-replication. If a corporation gets too big, it can split into a group of more efficiently sized corporations that can coordinate efforts with one another.

I’m not worried about a future where sentient robot dogs that feed on the dead stalk the streets at night.

I’m worried about a now where corporations trick humans into paying as much for a liter of bottled tap water as they do for a liter of milk.

Technorati Tags: future, robots, 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

• 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

Technorati Tags: chi09

Twitter, however, seems to be the perfect place for those one-liners that people feel free to ignore if they’re busy.

You can follow my “look at it if you’re bored” stream at allartburns.

Technorati Tags: quickie, surfing, twitter

We’ll be there again this year, with another Iced Tea event featuring the newly resurrected Colordome.

Join us, won’t you? I promise it will be more fun than being stuck in a lift line in some random crappy sky resort.

Technorati Tags: burning man, frostburn, geodesic domes

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

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

Technorati Tags: design, haptic, school

Design has evolved (and Papanek updated the book admitting where he was wrong and right) but I think he still has a point: do you, the designer, really want to make the world a better place by finding and solving problems?   Are you doing that by skinning junk products or designing things that you know are overpriced bits of plastic that will just end up in the trash?

Even if you think have no choice but to work for some outfit that designs stuff that just ends up in the garbage dump, why not donate some of your design skills/time to those who can’t afford a designer in the first place?    My last doctor spent two weeks every year working at free clinics in poor countries, how much of your design time do you donate to people who need design but can’t afford design?   Not everyone can follow Papanek’s ideal and go live in third-world countries for months at a time, but look around your home town or neighborhood for opportunities. Could you help teach drawing and basic design skills to schoolkids?  Maybe donate some time to a local non-profit helping them redesign their cut-n-paste web site or their brochures made from InDesign templates?

Maybe you have a great idea that you’re just waiting to sell to the right investor — how about giving it away instead?  Open-source software (and now hardware) is making a huge change for the better in the world as top engineers give away their work so that others may benefit.

What work have you given away?

Technorati Tags: design, opensource, papanek

I’m the first to admit that I have a problem with constructive criticism. I’ve never been terribly good at gently nudging someone onto the right path with kind words; I’m much better at beating them with a stick when they go down the wrong path. I apologize in advance if this comes off as harsh, it’s really not my intent. I want us to be brilliant, I don’t want to score points by pointing out where people are screwing up.

I recently started reading RISD’s latest blog (yes, they have more than one), “RISD by Design” and my response was something like

“Oh yeah? Well we just updated our website design after 10 years! So there! Ok, well, we updated some of it, like the main page and a couple other things and a lot of the departments and the search engine still have the old style and there’s not much visual coherence across the campus other than.. uh… so, how about those Stillers?”

That’s not much of a response. As a matter of fact, it made me angry thinking about it.

How is it that a university doing leading-edge research in pretty much every domain including Internet technology (ex: CAPCHA) doesn’t have any sort of, “Hey, look at us!” blog or journal at the university level?

Sure, there are some people working on departmental and project blogging, but that’s a local level. Peter Lee has CSDiary that covers the activities of the CS department and Golan Levin has a personal blog where he talks about issues related to teaching and being a good student. CMU Design has a Twitter feed, which is really great for students in Design, and a couple of classes have had per-class blogs.

But where’s our flagship blog, authored by someone from the President’s Office or at least someone in PR? Why were we not one of the first universities to have a major public blog/journal?

Thinking about past organizations I’ve been in, some possible answers that come to mind:

• We don’t have to. Admission to Carnegie Mellon is highly competitive, anyone we want as a student or donor already knows who we are. There’s simply nothing to be gained from investing in some sort of Maeda-like showcase blog.
• It’s not a high enough priority. Various senior people think it’s important, but we have limited resources and can’t do everything we want to do.
• It’s a bad idea. For whatever reason, enough people at senior levels are simply opposed to the idea of having a presence in blog-space that they can block anyone else who wants to make progress in this area.
• We don’t think the contemporary online world is relevant to the education process.

I’d like to think it’s the first reason (“we’re so great we don’t need to advertise”) but on my grumpy days I suspect that it’s one of the latter.

Here’s why.

Last semester I helped with a class called Making Things Interactive. If you go look at the class blog, you might notice that it’s hosted at wordpress.com, not at cmu.edu.

Why? Well, we don’t have any blogging infrastructure at CMU. Nada. Zip.

Individual people have individual accounts on the campus network and some folk have installed blogging software on their accounts. However, the bandwidth limitations are pretty tight as my fellow student Jennifer Gooch found out the hard way. When her project One Cold Hand got national press, her site got hammered and was quickly shut down by IT because it was using too much bandwidth. It took several days to convince people within the system to change her bandwidth limits, during which she ended up moving her site to another hosting facility.

Think about that a second or two: We were getting really good PR on a national level for a student’s work and that student’s account got locked down because too many people found her work interesting.

Of course, many groups/departments have their own computing resources and self-host their servers, but by doing this they’re duplicating effort and wasting resources. In my program there’s a tiny little *nix box sitting in someone’s office running yet-another install of gentoo/apache and some custom CMS software. Why can’t we just fill out some sort of web requisition form and get a wordpress install up and running on a hosted campus facility? I host several sites (including this one) at dreamhost, so I can honestly say that it’s pretty trivial to set up a domain and get blogging software up and running if the basic infrastructure is in place.

In the short term, what we need is a blogfarm running Wordpress. We don’t need CS to go into NIH mode and create yet another parallel-but-different-solution, we just need a bunch of blades in racks running wordpress and some support from IT in the keeping-it-running-and-updated department. Even if the Powers That Be don’t get blogging, at least give those of us who do the infrastructure we need to set up and run blogs on local, supported servers.

Once the infrastructure is up and running and people are using it and we start getting attention, we can more easily convince the Powers That Be why blogging/journaling is so important to the future success of our university. If a mere art school like RISD (sorry, cheap shot, I know :-) has a public face in the online world, why doesn’t a cutting edge, interdisciplinary research university like Carnegie Mellon have a public face that’s an order of magnitude better?

I have negative free time to help with this sort of thing, but my program could really use a locally hosted blog/website where we could show off all of our work. Right now I’m looking at setting up something on ning to promote our program and asking my advisor to spend a few $ to make the ads go away; I’m more than happy to help someone who has the time/energy to lead this charge.

So. Time to “shut up and skate”, as we said back in the day. I don’t have time to help build a ramp, but I’m happy to help sweep leaves out of an empty pool.

Technorati Tags: blogs, cmu, 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

No pressure, nope, not one bit.

On the up side, I probably wont’ be T/A’ing or co-teaching this semester, so I’ll be able to write more for this journal and finish some school-related projects I started last semester.

Some guy built one:

Technorati Tags: DIY, gun turret, grim meathook future

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

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

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

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

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

More soon.

Technorati Tags: design, personal

However, the good news / bad news thing is that I’m finally getting PRK surgery to correct my vision after finals are over. I probably won’t be able to use a computer for a week or so after that, so there’s half the vacation burned. I suspect that after a week of being laid up on the couch listening to audio books I will be ready to do some serious blog-catching-up, so maybe I’ll pull a marathon in the two weeks before school starts.

Technorati Tags: excuses excuses, personal

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is …”.

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

*You can leave them exactly as is.

*You can delete any one question.

*You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…:, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

*You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the “parent” blog you got them from, e.g. All Art Burns to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My grandparent is Sentient Developments.
My parent is Open the Future.

1. The best Post-Singularity Novel in SF/Fantasy is…
The Player of Games by Iain Banks

2. The best sexy song in rock is…
Car Song by Elastica

3. The best cult novel in serialized graphic storytelling (comic books) is…
White Out, by Greg Rucka, Steve Lieber, and Jamie Rich

4. The best first-series for Americans in Japanese anime is…
Cowboy Bebop, by Shinichiro Watanabe and Keiko Nobumoto.

Technorati Tags: anime, meme, singularity

But this, this I simply cannot forgive. There’s a review of it with less than flattering photos.

You’ll have to follow those links, I’m not sure I can handle the anguish of having photos of that bike in this journal.

One thing good I can say about it — I sleep easier knowing that if I ever needed the perfect motorcycle to ride while I was wearing a superhero costume, that motorcycle now exists.

Technorati Tags: design, motorcycles

She has a better/different smartphone than my xv6700, but I think we’re looking at this the same way. I have a solution that while not fancy or sleek or imbued with the Essence of Steve, works pretty well, so it’s hard to get all worked up about the iPhone.

More importantly, the Apple hype machine is in high gear showing all sorts of promos everywhere they can, and that makes me a wee bit nervous. Historically, when Apple has had something that’s really good they tend to blindside people with it. They’re not doing this with the iPhone, they’re talking about it everywhere they can, they’re loaning pre-release units to the media, etc etc. Newsweek calls it “the most anticipated gizmo ever”, but buried down in Levy’s review is the gem that it took him a couple of days before he could use it with a single finger and that after two weeks he’s only beginning to get the hang of two-thumb typing. Days to just get single touch to work? Two weeks to learn double-thumb typing?

Oh yeah, and no GPS, no high speed data, and no goodlink support announced.

For $500 and a two year contract.

Nope, not for me.

Technorati Tags: hype, iPhone, Laura Lemay

The short of it is:
– dreamhost stores login passwords in the clear
– someone obtained a partial list of these passwords and use them to deface sites hosted at dreamhost.

You’ll see mention of “ftp account passwords” or “ftp passwords”, but dreamhost uses your webpanel login as your unix shell/ftp login. That means anyone can log into your shell and do anything they like or use an ftp program to do anything they like. In my case, the only thing that happened was all of my index.html/index.php files got trashed, so I should consider myself lucky or something.

One other thing: Don’t use your dreamhost login password anywhere else. Consider it compromised since it’s stored in the clear. (I’ll write more on password security at some point.)

In the meanwhile, I’m using the default style for the journal until I can restore everything from backups…

EDIT: I think I’ve restored everything, let me know if anything seems broken or is missing.

Technorati Tags: dreamhost, hacked, security

We hit the ground running in my studios with projects on showing the evolution of form using only images and relating information about a sightseeing trip using a limited selection of typefaces for the names of the places, lines, and two colors. Cardboard shoes this is not, this is getting into what makes design go. These aren’t “Easy A Art Classes” as a friend of mine calls them, these are “work your ass off and still get it wrong” classes.

You can argue that there is no “right” and “wrong” in the creative space, but in design, there are clearly “rights” and “wrongs”. You’ve used well-designed objects and never noticed they exist and been frustrated with poorly designed objects that you’ve wanted to destroy with a hammer.

So how do you tell “right” from “wrong”? One way Carnegie Mellon’s Design program really does its students a favor is by forcing us to depend on each other for continual feedback during the design process. If I think I’m drawing blue squares and you tell me they look a little too purple and round to be squares, that isn’t saying that blue squares are wrong but that I’m doing a poor job of communicating “blue” and “square”. We go so far as to work on each other’s drawings with tracing paper and explain how to fix each other’s projects.

In my comp sci classes, this level of helping one another would probably have been referred to as “cheating” and we’d have been disciplined. In a design studio, if you walk by someone’s table and see that their perspective is off or that their blue cube looks a bit too green and triangular, you tell them then instead of waiting until they hang the work during a crit or turn it in for grading. Helping each other during the process and being honest with feedback and criticism really improves everyone’s work and their final results. That’s an important lesson — even an Important Life Lesson — that I’d never been exposed to in a classroom.

In the corporate world, even in the semi-egalitarian world of software engineering, this does not happen nearly enough. I’ve close enough working relationships with many of my peers that we can say, “that’s not going to work” or ask for help without worrying about looking ignorant or even incompetent. If I’m in a meeting with someone from product marketing, I can’t say anything remotely like that, even if I put it as politely as possible. Why? Because it’s seen as questioning their competence, and that’s not something one is supposed to do in the workplace. If, as engineers, we can question each other’s work, at what point is not unreasonable for us to question the work of others in our organization?

I’m not suggesting we say, “you suck and your ideas suck” to random people from other departments, but I am suggesting that we start questioning the facts presented by people in other organizations and challenging them to demonstrate the chain of logic that led them to their conclusions. If “%50 of customers think this is an important feature to add”, what do the other %50 think? Are they opposed to the feature? Do they want a different feature? Will it make them like the product any more or any less? How did you determine that %50 of the customers want the feature and whether or not they will want it if it slows down the product? (You did mention to them that this would slow down the product, didn’t you?)

If you’re going to show me a bar graph, be prepared to show me the process that went into generating that bar graph. If I’m going to tell you the new feature you want is going to take N weeks to implement, I need to be able to tell you how I came up with “N”, or at least be willing to honestly admit I picked it at random or padded it with enough time to figure out exactly what it is you’re really asking me to do.

I often get asked exactly what I’m learning, and I often have trouble describing it in simple words. For now, I think I would say that it is the development of “process” as an explicit skill that can be documented and discussed as a component of product development alongside explicit skills like “project management” or “software engineering”.

(And yes, this entry might well have the single most misleading title in this entire journal. )

Technorati Tags: design, process