LonelyStreets.com
Anyone here speak Asian?
OK, I know I said that my next post would be about design, but I’m on vacation here and so trying not to think too hard. Also, this was too good to pass up.
The following is from a job posting on the USAJobs.gov site (the clearinghouse website for all Federal jobs).
Look at selective factors number 1:
That’s right people! If you want this job you MUST speak read and write in FLUENT ASIAN!
And people say Federal workers are lazy - look at the demanding criteria they must meet just to get hired.
June 14th, 2009
Posted by Paul in Humor | No Comments »
Back to Blog
It has obviously been quite some time since I’ve made regular posts. Partly this was a result of the chaos that is the last semester of grad school, and partly this was intentional rhetorical silence while I quested for a job.
And now it’s all done - school is all over, my friends are all going their seperate ways. I finished my thesis, graduated, accepted a job offer.
I remember reading years ago the end-of-school post that Dan Saffer wrote when he finished the program here at CMU. I don’t remember eactly what he said, but it was something along these lines: I’ve learned more than I ever imagined, made friends I’ll keep for the rest of my life, and just generally am far happier with where I am now compared to two years ago. This is all as true for me as it was for him, perhaps more because I was not a designer when I came here, and I very much am now.
Of my colleagues, two are headed for the bay, quite a few for New York, one to Australia, several will stay in Pittsburgh, and I alone am heading off to Chicago. Funny that after all of this I find myself headed back to the city I grew up in - doing so was not in my original plans. However, I received an offer for a stellar job as a senior interaction designer at Motorola, and so am off to work in the downtown Chicago design office starting next month (I’m really excited!).
Goodbye everyone! I’ll miss all of you. It’s been a great time and you’re a wonderful bunch of designers that I’ve been honored to work with and learn from over the past two years.
In other news, I plan to start blogging more regularly again. I won’t be able to talk about and show off my work now that I’m leaving the educational world, but I can still speak abstractly about design to my heart’s content. And with that I’ll sign off on the personal notes and promise that my next post will be about design (and happen in the next couple of days).
June 8th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU | No Comments »
Interview at Designing for Service
Jeff Howard, a well-known service design thinker, blogger, and consultant has posted an interview with me at http://designforservice.wordpress.com/. In the interview we talk about the project I worked on last semester for the Mayo Clinic and Design Continuum in Shelley Evenson’s service design course. Thanks to Jeff for the opportunity to talk about my team’s work!
April 28th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Thinking | No Comments »
New Portfolio
I’ve revised my web portfolio - giving it a new and improved look and adding some work (and details about old work). I’ll probably continue to tweak it, but I’m pretty happy with what’s there now. I actually did the entire design and development (learning Javascript and jquery in the process) in three days. The final part of that was a 32 hour sprint - that’s a really long time without sleep. Take a look and let me know what you think:
February 25th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, Communication Design, Design Process, thesis | 1 Comment »
New Music
I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with Logic Studio this past week - the program really has phenomenal sound quality. I’ve thrown together a couple tracks:
City Streets and Lights in the Evening
Enjoy! Thanks for listening!
February 16th, 2009
Posted by Paul in Music and Movies | No Comments »
Goodness of Fit
For the independent study my colleagues and I are doing with Hugh Dubberly, we’ve been reading a lot of great old Design Methods movement texts. Hugh is of the position that these texts are not being taught, and he feels that there is great knowledge to be gained by looking at them, and I can’t help but agree. Interestingly, many of the movement’s leading figures were architects, such as Horst Rittel and Christopher Alexander.
Reading things written by (and for) architects, inevitably brings up some issues that we don’t often think about when designing software. Alexander talks at length about “goodness of fit” - how a design must fit the context in which it will be used. As interaction designers we certainly consider this (hence contextual inquiry and similar methods), but we tend to take a limited view of “context.” We most often talk about context of use in terms of the office, home, or culture that a design will be used within - but what if we considered context more as an architect might? That is, what if a word processor were to be designed to have greater “goodness of fit” with the city in which it will be used? Might the interface be more sunny and bright for users in perpetually grey cities such as Pittsburgh or Seattle? Should interfaces adjust their colors to be clearer in different levels of sunlight? Mac’s already automatically adjust brightness to account for this, but why not take it further and have the actual colors change responsively to provide different levels of contrast?
I’m not sure what other implications this view of context might have, but I think it’s an interesting line of reasoning, and one which I plan to explore further the next time I am designing a mass-market product that will find itself in diverse geographic locations.
February 14th, 2009
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking | 1 Comment »
Code Art
As regular readers will have noticed, I’m on a pretty big generative art kick at the moment. That said, I’ve been playing around in Processing using the ideas presented by Casey Reas and Marius Watz at the symposium last week, and have posted some shots to Flickr.
Here’s a little taste:
February 9th, 2009
Posted by Paul in Processing, illustration | No Comments »
Generative Doormat!
While I’m in the posting mood - I wanted to show off a little demo video I did for a quick assignment in Mark Gross’s Making Things Interact course. The class has been great fun so far, allowing me to finally learn how to do my own circuit-bending, build things with arduino’s, and play in Max/MSP. This assignment asked us to construct our ownswitch, so I built a generative musical doormat of course!
February 4th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, Music and Movies | No Comments »
Generative Systems
I’ve had the great fortune over the past day and a half to attend part of the Code, Form, Space symposium on “generative form and digital fabrication” put together here at CMU by Golan Levin (this is the second mini-symposium Golan has put together while I’ve been here and both have been fantastic). In particular, this symposium brings together several highly acclaimed generative artists (Casey Reas of Processing fame and Marius Watz of generatorx.no), and several well-known architects working with generative and digital fabrication techniques.
Yesterday, I attended a talk by Reas and Watz in which the two traded off giving three 10-minute monologues on each of the titular topics, while providing examples in the form of their personal works. I have always been a great fan of generative art (and music!), but I was particularly interested by how generative artists are beginning to bring their code-art into the physical world through the use of 3D printers and the like.
This morning, I also had the special treat of attending a 3 hour workshop with Reas and Watz in which they provided a blitzkrieg lesson in basic Processing and gave tips and advice on creating (and fabricating) generative works. I just have to stop here and point out that Reas and Watz are both astoundingly nice guys - I hope I get a chance to talk with them more later this week. The workshop was then followed by a luncheon at which Reas, Watz, Golan, and the three visiting architects (Ben Pell, Hilary Sample, and Michael Meredith) had a panel discussion on various related topics. Sadly I wasn’t able to see Ben Pell’s lecture this evening, but I plan on attending Sample and Meredith’s tomorrow.
All of this got me thinking more about a topic that came up recently in the independent study my colleagues and I are currently doing (an exploration of models of design advised by Hugh Dubberly and Shelley Evenson - see our as-of-yet unrefined blog here). Shelley and Liz Sanders have posited that the next step beyond user centered design is the design of tools for co-creation. Hugh has called this “the design of adaptive systems,” and I couldn’t help but think of it while listening to all this smart talk about generative systems over the past day. With the rapidly dropping cost of 3D printers, laser cutters and other rapid fabrication technologies, we may well be at the end of the era of mass-production, and be instead barreling into the time of mass-customization. Will generative systems play a role in this coming age as well? Perhaps the designers of the future will find themselves challenged to design generative systems capable of producing a near-infinite variety of forms (or interfaces!)that end-users will engage with. One can imagine sitting down and playing with a generative system to design one’s own form for their iPod, rather than the pre-designed one.
I brought these ideas up to my friend and colleague Kyle Vice, pointing out that the advent of loop-based music sequencing brought computer music to the masses. With cheap, simple loop-based sequencers anyone can sit down and knock out a decent sounding piece of music within half an hour. I wondered aloud whether the same could happen for drawing programs - far too many people don’t draw because they feel they can’t; what if they could draw something beautiful and totally unique using a generative system? Kyle pointed out that a spirograph might be a better example than loop-based sequencers (which still smack of a “Mr. Potato Head approach” - Kyle’s words). We can all remember being amazed and proud of the formal beauty we produced with spirographs (which are essentially mechanical generative drawing tools).
I believe that generative systems may have a significant role to play in the age of mass-customization and co-creation, and that we as designers must begin to look at these systems with an eye for how they can be integrated into the digital products of the future.
February 4th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, CoolHunting, Design Thinking | 2 Comments »
Designing History
History is one of those things that most folk take for granted, but which most folk also realize is largely subjective (even if they may not think about it much). I remember that in my own primary education, the Viet Nam war was never mentioned. There was usually a chapter devoted to it towards the end of my textbooks, but we somehow never got that far. As an undergraduate student, I once took a class on the history of US diplomacy with a great visiting professor at Grinnell named T. Mills Kelly. Prof. Kelly assigned us a paper taking a stance on whether or not the US’s decision to drop The Bomb on Japan in WWII was correct. I no longer remember what I argued, but I do remember that the question led me to exploring the “wicked problem” that was “how the heck do we end this war?”
Wicked problems are, in fact, what writing history is really all about. Time mists things in ambiguity, and written accounts can never be objective because they were written by people. When I write a historical account, then, I am designing a perception of the past so that I can communicate it to others. This is not to say that one should fail to be entirely thorough when researching a history, but the form of language means that ambiguity will always exist in text. If I leave one thing out, but include another, I have made a design decision. Hopefully, I have done my research and, as with any design, am making an appropriate and defensible choice, but it is a subjective choice nonetheless.
I find this interesting, in part, because of the implications it has for modeling the domain of design (something I’ll be doing in an independent study this semester). Can I argue that all of the social sciences are within the domain of design because they focus on communicating ideas, which is a big part of what design is about? I have often struggled with these sorts of questions because they sound arrogant to me - I don’t like to believe that designers have the right to strut around saying that they can jump right into any other field and improve the way things are done. On the other hand, I feel passionately that design and design thinking have much to offer other fields. Most realms of study and activity can only benefit from cross-pollinating with other areas of inquiry.
I’ve been thinking about all this because of the negative reactions my article for Interactions has gleaned. I have yet to write a formal response (though I will do so soon), but in the meanwhile I can’t help but say “I told you so” to myself. Writing a short history for a magazine meant leaving a lot of things out, and I have unsurprisingly angered a few folk who felt that I made the wrong design decisions with my history. In a way, this makes me happy though - any dialog around the history of sound in computing is better than none because we have so much to learn from those that have come before us.
January 7th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, Communication Design, Design Thinking | 1 Comment »