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Orientation

Orientation was swell. Just one day - a little odd as many of the other schools have week-long orientations, but we were fine with that. We got our new MacBook Pro’s - which are a fantastic leap forward compared with the junky notebooks we had all summer. I’ve already put my music software on the new computer so I can make beats on the fly.

We have 4 new students who have joined us for the semester - all women actually, including a German, a Chinese, and a visiting-scholar kiwi (who will only be with us for 6 months). The weekend was spent going out and being merry with our new classmates and some of the second years (who also seem like nice people). Personally, I can’t wait to start class - I’ve been a bit bored these two weeks off, doing little besides learning some more Flash and playing computer games. Campus (and Shadyside, my neighborhood) are quite a bit busier now that all the students are back, but I’ve been meeting lots of interesting people in all sorts of departments. Lots of orientations meant lots of chances for free food as well.

One of my summer classmates has been diagnosed with an irregular heart beat. We are all extremely worried about her and wish her nothing but the best. I don’t really know what to say when someone suffers from a condition that can be treated but never reversed. I think the best one can do is to be there if needed.

August 26th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU | No Comments »

Days 22 Onward

As you, my dear readers, will have noticed, I’ve been a bit lazy regarding the blog this last few weeks. Continuing that trend, I will now proceed to sum up the rest of the summer course in a single post. And don’t expect me to get any better in the future - everyone keeps warning us that time will have an all new premium starting tomorrow (the first day of our first fall semester).

Starting The last day of July we had 3D interaction design with Steve Stadelmier, a well respected industrial designer. Steve was a real hoot - one of those profs who is just incredible relaxed, interested, and funny. Steve’s project for us was - get this - candle holders! Apparently (according to Steve) Eric stole the project from him, and so we did it again. The focus was different this time around though - concentrating much more on the interaction, and avoiding drawing almost entirely (yay!). Steve was full of great quotes, most of which I no longer have the impetus to type up, but here are a few favorites:

“I believe that we live in a bifurcated world. We demand much greater richness in play and our personal life than in our work.” This is obviously something to be lamented, and hopefully something that we designers can avoid and/or change.

“When we design, we must accept 10,000 years of human history and still design for new technology.” Our existence is full of already learned activiteis and ‘trained’ metaphors. As interaction designers we must take advantage of these things and use them to bring the New within the human experience, thus creating artifacts and experiences that can be learned easily and enjoyed thoroughly. That’s what I think he meant anyway.

And my favorite: “Pimp My Ride is actually another one of those resources that you shouldn’t let go by.” I have absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but it’s a helluva sound bite!

I decided to again focus on the quality of light as the aspect of a candle holder that would best facilitate interaction between diners at a dinner table, and finished with a nice little prototype that I can no longer find the photo of. Oh well.

After our time with Steve the final portion of our summer class was with Stacy again, who assigned us our final project: to pick a single word and create an interactive Flash piece and an After Effects movie which would express the meaning of the word using nothing but text. I developed the following two pieces, of which the movie is certainly the better. The Flash piece was, however, a triumph of coding for me, as I had never previously built anything so advanced. (If you die in the flash game, simply close it and re-open it to start over. If it’s a bit slow I apologize, it was not optimized for web delivery. Also a hint: don’t fall on the A’s). The movie is a pretty large file, so I haven’t put it up yet, thought I plan to later.

Daft Game

August 26th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Flash, Typography | No Comments »

Days 16-21, July 24th to 30th

We spent the week working with Bob Swinehart, an information designer by trade. Bob assigned us the task of redesigning the US Post Office’s Change of Address form, a paid project he had personally worked on several years ago.

We spent our first day in small groups wandering around campus with the current form, accosting strangers and asking them to fill out the form while we watched them. It was immediately apparent that there are indeed many problems with the current form. None of the subjects we tested filled out the form completely (there’s a secret, yet entirely necessary, couple of lines on the back of the form that everyone missed, myself included). The current form is also too small and dense, and badly organized, resulting in people filling out parts they shouldn’t, and skipping entries that they should have filled.

We also spent a great deal of time listening to Bob retell the slightly garbled story of how he and his team went about redesigning the form, and what constraints were placed upon them. Our assignment is thus to redesign the form while working within the same constraints that Bob had when his team redesigned it (a design which the post office later decided not to use for somewhat complex reasons). I spent a great deal of time familiarizing myself with the current hierarchy of the form and then moved to sketching by hand and then sketching within InDesign.

Unfortunately, Bob spent very little time actually talking to us about how to design a form, and so we were largely left to our own devices (though he spent each class day critiquing what we had done). Overall, I think that the most interesting thing I learned was that designing something that should be treated flippantly too well, can result in that artifact not being used for its intended purpose. To elucidate, on our last day, Bob showed us the final designs that he and his team had developed. Apparently the new form was nice enough that users, when tested, did not want to put it through the mail system open faced (as with the current card). The form apparently led users to feel that the information they were inserting onto it was more important, and thus needed to be protected for privacy reasons, though they didn’t feel the same way about the same information when writing it on the older, trashy looking form. I think that this dilemma really exemplifies why it is important to design with context in mind - if you design a trashy post office form to look like an expensive brochure from the bank, people will treat it more like the latter, regardless of the information contained therein.

Here’s my final redesign:

August 1st, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Typography | No Comments »

Day 15 - July 23rd

We all brought in our final Posters/Books/Websites today for a final look-see and critique. I was unable to do as much on mine as I had anticipated due to a little snafu on Saturday. Kyle called me up (thank God) to let me know that Kinko’s, where I had planned to get my poster printed on Sunday night, wanted $10 per square foot to print our posters - which means I would have had to shell out $150 to get a single black and white poster printed. Fortunately a place on the south side called Copies at Carsons was doing the same thing for $0.65 per square foot. The down side was that Carsons isn’t open on Sundays. So off I ran to get my poster printed early, even though I would have like to work on it quite a bit more. Oh well, it saved me over $140.

Everyone made a nice showing with their final designs. Kyle did a great job with his poster, but the cake was stolen by Phil, who designed his entire book using a modular grid system that placed the content beautifully. I realized a mistake in my own piece when Stacy asked me where the author’s name was. I responded with “oops.” I think she thought I did a reasonably good job regardless, which I believe as well. If I had only had Sunday to work too it would have been great. Tonight, another night with no homework. So, of course, I went to the studio and spent hours beginning my process book, which involved lots of scanning. However, these scans allow me to now present the following images from our section on drawing which I couldn’t put up earlier:

Perspective Drawing 1
Perspective Drawing 2
Perspective Drawing 3
Perspective Drawing 4
Perspective Drawing 5

Candle Holder Thumbnails
Finished Candle Holder Design