LonelyStreets.com
Summer’s End
Strange to call this the end of summer, by birthday not having even arrived yet, but it is in terms of my schedule. I only have two weeks left at Intuit after which I’ll move back to Pittsburgh (in a new a bigger apartment!), and then spend a few days in New York for the Adobe Design Achievement awards (ADAA), before having about a week to get my life together and start school. Yikes. I guess I haven’t mentioned the ADAA before: I don’t really like to toot my own horn to much, but it’s a big honor. My team from Basic Interaction with Shelley Evenson last fall has been picked as a finalist for our Flirtastic! project - so I’ll be headed to New York to attend the ceremony and find out if we won the grand prize (fingers crossed! fingers crossed!).
Work has been going well - I’ve gotten involved in a bit of a blogging competition, which is why I’ve rarely had the energy left to post on this, my own blog. We received an email from my boss’ boss a couple weeks ago saying that there were only a few weeks left of the first quarterly blog competition. The Experience Design team has an internal blog, you see, and they thought it would help encourage posting if the offered up an 8 gig iPod touch to the most prolific blogger. Well, that was a challenge (and potential reward) that I just couldn’t turn down, and so I have been desperately trying to catch up with and out-pace my boss in the blogging competition (I’m not there yet, but I’ve beengetting close). The down side, however, is that I never feel like posting on my own blog (and I’ve been so full of deep design insights 
I do have a few links that I’ve been meaning to put up though, so here they are:
Illustrator Jacob Charles Dietz does some of the coolest Sci-Fi art I’ve ever seen (if he could only stick to the buildings and machines and drop the cheesy big-breasted ladies his work would be downright spectacular).
And we no longer need to worry about people picking up when we only really wanted to leave a voicemail! Genius. And terribly terribly sad.
And some awesome design humor. What would happen if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging?
And finally, the following cartoon is just about my favorite thing in the world right now. It’s from The Rut, which has many more incredibly wonderful comics.
July 24th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Humor | No Comments »
More Bunnies!
I just can’t hop! I mean stop!
I introduce to you…
CYCLOPTO-BUNNY!!!
July 18th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Communication Design | 1 Comment »
Bunnies!
So I stumbled across the Bunny Mandala the other day while looking for interesting information visualizations to inspire me at work, and ever since I just can’t stop sketching bunnies! I love ‘em! And tonight I came home and made some in Illustrator. So here they are:
July 16th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Communication Design | No Comments »
Designing Design
I’ve been reading a book called “Toothpicks and Logos: Design In Everyday Life” by John Heskett, a professor at the Institute of Design (at the time of writing - 2002). Heskett, in discussing why my field is so hard to explain, offers the following as an example of the word “design’s” semantic variegation:
“Design is to design a design to produce a design.”
Heskett then goes on to show how every use of the word in that sentence is both grammatically correct and representative of a separate definition of the word.
I don’t believe that the problem of describing Design effectively is small or irrelevant. As a summer intern at Intuit I find myself working closely with engineers for the first time, and am often at a loss as to how to explain the value of what I do because I cannot properly define design. If I cannot define designs, then I cannot express the value of Design to people who have not worked with designers before, and I can’t expect them to seek out my contributions. I once wrote a paper on this where I described design as “finding, defining, and solving human problems pragmatically through the creation of products” but that definition requires quite a bit of definition itself. I believe that the root of the problem, as stated by Richard Buchanan, is that “design has no domain.” That is, design is a way of thinking and working that can be applied to any area of business (or otherwise), but which is not specific to any product type or activity.
July 10th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking | No Comments »
The Lonely Streets of Sunnyvale
Sunnyvale California certainly has its share of lonely streets. In the 20 minute walk to the grocery store I rarely see another soul on foot. When I do, they usually look sad. The landscape is similar to mall-dra, but subtly different: rather than big-box-marts, I am surrounded by empty corporate campuses. A corporate desert if you will. Corpsert.
June 28th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Photography | No Comments »
My life is over!
That’s it, all of my dreams and aspirations have already been accomplished by another, and there’s no point in going there if you’re not the first:
Watch the videos, this is the greatest thing ever made! Everything I’ve always wanted in a box: blinky lights, generative music, motion sensors, and fog!
June 22nd, 2008
Posted by Paul in DIY, Music and Movies | No Comments »
Summer Time
Now 5 weeks into my summer in California, and things are good - I have so much that I’ve wanted to blog about, but been so lazy about actually doing so.
One of the big bits of news for me is that I built myself a new desktop from the ground up! Since I’m actually making a little money this summer, I decided I wanted a rig capable of playing the latest games at blistering speeds. I looked around a bit and saw that it was indeed true, half or more of the cost of a new computer is assembly. Thus, I decided to build my own.
I reused the case from my old desktop (a piece of junk built by CyberPower - the worst company I’ve ever dealt with in my life - never buy anything from those thieving bastards), which turned out to be the only hitch in the entire assembly. I had noticed with my old machine that PCI cards didn’t fit in quite right, well now I know why: the case Cyber Power gave me was a misfit - it was off by about 1/4″, meaning (in the end) that my new motherboard’s I/O shield won’t align properly with the mobo. So now I don’t have an I/O shield (because I don’t want to spend the additional money on a new case as well).
However, I am sitting at the new machine as I speak, and it’s a beaut. I’ve been blasting through Crysis at 1920 x 1200 resolution with barely a hitch (did I mention that I also picked up a 24″ wide screen monitor? Oh yeah). So what are the specs? Intel Core 2 Quag 9450 2.66 Ghz, XFX nForce 780i SLI mainboard, 2 x EVGA 8800 GT 512 mb, 4 gigs of Ram running at 800 Mhz, and a few of my own add-ons I had in the old rig (an E-Mu 0404 pro sound card, a couple of optical drives, and more hard drives than you can shake a stick at). I love this thing.
Sadly, this new computer is draining my creative impulses and replacing them with the urge to shoot stuff during all of my free time (hence the lack of blogging).
June 22nd, 2008
Posted by Paul in DIY | No Comments »
Doodles and Hiroshi Ishii at Intuit
In case anyone isn’t feeling patient enough to see what those doodles in the last post turn into over time, here’s a few screen caps taken after about 5 minutes.
Personally I recommend putting on some nice minimal techno and just zoning out watching it. It’s better than your typical visualizer because you get to watch it build up over time. Personally I’m grooving to the awesome Richie Hawtin mix available free at Resident Advisor.
In other news, Hiroshi Ishii, second in command at the MIT Media Lab came and spoke to a crowd of about 30 at Intuit today. Professor Ishii does really cool stuff with what he calls “tangible interfaces.” Basically, the idea is that computers and other digital devices are black boxes that provide no affordances to the user (obvious ways of creating predictable effects through physical manipulation), and so Ishii works to design digital things that have such affordances. Or are at least really really cool. I wanted to go tell him that I’m a student of Golan Levin (who I believe was a student of Ishii), but I had to run to another meeting immediately after the talk. It was great to see lots of videos of Media Lab projects though, which never fail to wow. It turns out that Intuit is actually a sponsor of the Media Lab, so with a little luck there will be more of these talks…
May 28th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Intuit, Processing | No Comments »
Computer Doodle
I’ve been enjoying my summer and using it to play with Processing at my leisure. And thus, I bring you a new computer doodle (left click to add elements, right click to pause it - and give it a minute or two to develop, I can promise some very pretty colors).
May 28th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Processing | No Comments »
A Break on the horizon? Nah.
It has obviously been a very long time since I’ve put up any substantive posts - things have been and remain incredibly busy for me. However, I tend to end up stressed out about not posting, and so I’ve decided to finally just sit down and write a bit (incidentally, this is how I can claim that writing a blog is cathartic: once you have one you get stressed if you don’t write, and so writing relieves stress).
The semester finally ended - I’m not going to do five classes again next year, that’s for sure. All of my projects came out well: Jodi Forlizzi has suggested that my seminar paper may be publishable, Soniball was a hit, my Mixer Map for Karen Moyer’s Mapping and Diagramming class came out quite well, and my Studio group managed to relegate months of vitriol to a substrate in order to put together a sterling final design and presentation. Simultaneously, Emily and I managed to find a new and better apartment just blocks from the previous one and even get a 10 month lease on it. I also finalized all plans to head to Intuit for the summer.
Following finals week I had one week to pack up my entire apartment, move it all to storage with only the help of Kyle Vice (I have to throw a dig in here at the rest of my classmates - Kyle’s getting married next week and yet he was still the only one who could find the time to help up - I know who’s getting help from me next year), clean and vacate my apartment, and then fly off to sunny California.
And damn is it sunny here.
I mean, seriously people, how could anyone not want to live here?! The weather is _perfect_. So far it’s been in the 70’s and sunny everyday and cool at night. Meanwhile, it’s been raining the entire time in Pittsburgh.
The apartment is decent - let’s say cozy. There’s no A/C, but from what the locals tell me, they don’t seem to do air conditioning in apartments around here, though no one knows why (I’m told I’ll be wanting it bad later in the summer). But hey, I’m not paying rent (came with the internship). Or utilities. And so far I’ve only paid for lunch once.
Intuit absolutely rocks. In my first week I’ve been given a cube bigger than my old office with a 22″ monitor and my own laptop, drank massive amounts of high-quality free coffee, met with two product managers, seen the CEO speak, talked to the VP of marketing on three separate occasions (the first time was when I had no idea who he was and he showed me how to brew coffee in the break room), began getting up to speed on at least two different projects I’ll be working on, spent an entire day freeform innovating with a random team of cool people as part of a day long ‘Idea Jam,’ been given a senior designer as a buddy to help me through the summer, seen Ben Schneiderman talk about data viz at Stanford, and been generally just treated well. Did I mention that it’s only Thursday? I didn’t know too much about Intuit when I decided to interview with them, but boy is it looking like I made the right choice.
Anyway, the verdict is that things are looking good. I’ll try to actually post some of my work from the semester sometime soon, but I wanted to make sure I wrote a bit before I lost my momentum.
May 23rd, 2008
Posted by Paul in Intuit, CMU | 3 Comments »