LonelyStreets.com

Progressive Podcast

I know that when I did my first DJ mix podcast several months ago I said some nonsense about trying to put them out semi-weekly. Well that was clearly quite wrong (life of a grad student), and this time I’m not making any promises about when the next one might come. I have, however, completed a new one for your listening pleasure. For some reason I’ve been listening to a lot of progressive house and trance lately, so that’s what this is. I think it rather pretty. Enjoy!

February DJ Mix (Edit: link removed)

And the tracklist:

Colourbox - Pump Up The Volume
Duplex - Fictional Frequency version
Ananda Project - Where The Music Takes You (Pasta Boys Main)
Gabriel & Dresden - Lament
Risque - Do You Believe in Heaven (Infinite Beat Remix)
Mike Mikhjian & Mike Saint Jules - Bay Breeze
Ray Roc - Sun in My Face (Speakerbox Club Remix)
Adam Freeland - Silverlake Pills (Original)
Adam Freeland - Silverlake Pills (Anil Chawla & Dale Anderson Mix)
KiNK & Neville Watson - Inside Out
Artificial Funk - Never Alone (Seamus Haji & Emanuel Mix)
Solar Fields - Spectral Nation
Hot Chip - My Piano (DJ Kicks)

February 23rd, 2008
Posted by Paul in Music and Movies | No Comments »  

Awesome Lego Darth Vader video!

I came across the following buried in an otherwise irrelevant Gizmodo post. This is really really funny:

Lego Darth Vader Canteen Incident (on YouTube)

Go geek humor!

February 23rd, 2008
Posted by Paul in Humor | No Comments »  

Confluence

The past two days were Confluence - CMU Design’s annual recruiting event. It’s been totally crazy, but in the end I have to say that it was also a lot of fun.

Things really started for me on Wednesday when my Studio 2 group presented our work-thus-far to designers from Microsoft and Motorola (who are sponsoring our project). This was a high-stress presentation to begin with, made worse because I knew I’d be interviewing with the same people from both companies on Friday. I prepped hard, however, and it paid off - I managed to present flawlessly (if I do say so myself).

Thursday was the open job fair. Because of the University’s ridiculously bad interview scheduling system I wasn’t able to get interviews with all of the people I wanted to talk to, so I had to dive into the job fair to try to secure more spots (as well as just talk to some employers I didn’t know much about). I managed to get an on-the-spot interview with a friendly guy from Apple, which went well, and sign up for a Friday interview with IBM research. The guy from IBM Research was super cool - I later realized that he was someone rather famous around here (particularly to students of Golan Levin) - Jesse Kriss: designer/developer of ManyEyes, maxLink and Visual Scratch, among other things.

On Friday I had interviews with Motorola, Cooper Design, IBM Research, Intuit, and Microsoft, all of which went very well. I actually quite enjoyed the chance to show off and talk about my work, and the interviewers were uniformly friendly and engaging. Given the chance, I think I would be more than happy to work at any of these companies. Now I just have to wait and see who wants me for the summer!

February 23rd, 2008
Posted by Paul in CMU | Comments Off  

A Definition of (interaction) Design

The following is something I orginally wrote on my own in response to some readings I was doing, and later turned into a short paper for my seminar course. While I’m sure that many people will disagree with it (I’m still on the fence myself), you may find it thought provoking.

_______________________________________________

As a graduate student working towards a Master’s of Interaction Design I am often asked to explain what interaction design is. I have struggled greatly to find a simple, appropriate answer to this simple, appropriate question. More specifically, I have tried to design an answer that would make sense to non-designers. My classmates and I spent the majority of my first semester looking at how one might define ‘interaction’ – an incredibly deep and broad concept. With time, however, I have come to realize that my inability to define interaction design does not stem from ambiguity regarding interaction, but an ambiguity surrounding “Design”. I believe, however, that I have now formulated a useful definition of Design:

Design is finding, defining, and solving human problems pragmatically through the creation of products.

It may seem that this particular definition is too general to be meaningful, and that it will not satisfy my criteria that a definition of (interaction) design be simple and appropriate to non-designers. A little clarification of terms should help immensely, however.

Design is “finding problems” because designers are not limited to defining recognized problems. We do not work solely on problems that are already recognized as such, but oftentimes must locate product failures that are obscured. Furthermore, we do not only address problems for which we are asked and/or paid to design solutions for – we design solutions for others and ourselves because it is our passion and our way of life.

Design is “defining problems” because designers take an unsatisfied need or want (the problem) and then determine what sub-systems and related issues play a role in keeping that need or want unsatisfied. This process can be as simple as realizing that nobody has previously addressed the problem at all (hence the absence of a solution), and as involved as doing months of research in order to see exactly why a given software application is not being used as efficiently as the developer had hoped.

Design is, of course, solving problems. This is the heart of our practice. We craft solutions in the form of products.

Design is human. We are fundamentally concerned with human activity (this is, in fact, the closest design comes to having a ‘domain’). People do not call on designers to solve math problems, or issues of engineering because there are mathematicians and engineers who are better at such things. This is not to say that designers are not good with numbers – many are – rather that design specializes in solving problems with a human component. One of the designer’s great skills is the ability to work with distinctly human problems, which are (as a direct result of humans’ own incredible complexity) so tortuous that they cannot be systematically analyzed.

Designers do their work pragmatically. Pragmatic consideration necessitates that designers not limit themselves to a particular domain when working on a problem. Practitioners in other fields often ignore factors that are not within their predetermined realm of study. When I studied International Political Economy, the scholars I read prided themselves on realizing that political science and economics could not be usefully separated when analyzing the history of nations, all the while ignoring the important cultural and sociological forces that also affect states.(1) Designers cannot afford to do this because we look for real-world solutions and recognize that these are almost always trans-disciplinary. Additionally, we find solutions that address the most important parts (though never all of the parts) of a problem. Because design problems are wicked (i.e., complex)(2), there will always be issues that are left unresolved, but we make pragmatic decisions about which parts of a given problem are most important to the final solution.

Finally, Design offers its solutions in the form of “products.” It is important to note that product does not only refer to physical artifacts. Services are products, organizations are products, and even methods thinking can be products. Basically, a product is any human invention with a purpose (tangible or not).

Thus we have a formal definition of design. But don’t many people do this? Lots of folk find, define, and solve human problems pragmatically. Some people who do not identify as designers are highly skilled at doing just that–witness the successful entrepreneur who invents, manufactures, and sells a successful product without the help of any “designers.” The answer is yes, many people practice design on some level, and some are even very good at it. This is not to devalue the profession of design, however. I do believe that ‘designers’ are special and unique in their own right, and so we require a better definition of designer than “one who practices design.”

Designers are ‘team-savants.’ That is, designers are people highly skilled (and often trained) in working in concert to harness their collective abilities to practice design in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Designers work together to craft products representing solutions that are unequivocally better than any we would have found working alone. We have developed a smorgasbord of tools, methods, and values that we regularly employ, but these are not what make us designers.(3) It is the fact that we employ these methods together and recognize the ultimate utility of doing so that defines us as designers. Our collective thinking acts as a savant that cannot exist in any of us singly, but which we are skilled at incarnating as a group – and we use this to create products. This is what makes a designer.

The problem with this definition of a designer is that it excludes such well-recognized professionals as Paul Rand, who is known to have been downright reclusive while working.(4) To this point I argue that the field of design is highly dynamic and is not the same practice that it was fifty years ago. As a result, my definition is placed in time and appropriate to the field in its current state, but not necessarily to the practice as it was in the past (or will be in the future). My definition may relegate some professionals who identify as designers to the ranks of ‘graphic artist’ and ‘web developer,’ but I believe this is a necessary sacrifice to arriving at a useful denotation.

Given this definition of design and designer, what then is interaction design? It is my belief that there is no such thing. The definition provided encompasses the many definitions of interaction design, even if it lacks their specificity. Such specificity, however, often takes the form of a list of methods along the lines of “interaction designers utilize personas, contextual inquiry and this and that to design interactive something-or-anothers.” As mentioned earlier, interaction is a concept-word that cannot be given a simple definition upon which everyone will agree. If we cannot agree on the definition, then using the term will only confuse those with whom we work. Moreover, a list of design methods is opaque to anyone not trained in design, and so is functionally inappropriate. I believe that the term has come into favor because the word ‘design’ too often conjures images of furniture and magazine covers. Designers who do not focus their work on graphics or static objects thus use the term because, to the average person, it connotes technology (which is preferable to being thought of as ‘someone who makes stuff look pretty’). While I understand and empathize with this stance, I believe that we do ourselves a disservice in adopting it. If we can more clearly communicate what Design is, and what we as designers do, then we will change the connotations that the word holds and be better able to express the essence of our profession.

Footnotes:
(1) For an example of such thinking see the introduction to International Political Economy: Perspectives on Global Power and Wealth, Fourth Edition, ed. Jeffry A. Frieden and David A. Lake, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2000), 1-9.
(2) For a discussion of wicked problems see Richard Buchanan’s Wicked Problems in Design Thinking in The Idea of Design: A Design Issues Reader, ed. Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 6-11.
(3) For convincing arguments to the contrary, see Forlizzi and Reimann Interaction Designers: What we are, what we do, & what we need to know (slide presentation) and Clement Mok Time for Change available at: http://www.clementmok.com/musings/detail.asp?ItemID=12
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rand

February 17th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking | 1 Comment »  

Visualizing Sound and Sonifying Image

I’ve been meaning to post a couple of small projects I did for Golan Levin’s Audio-Visual Systems course. And hey! I’m finally getting around to it.

In this first assignment, we were asked to create a visualization of a short electronic piece by Scott Gibbons. I tried quite a few different things (none of which worked out) before settling on this format for my image. In this image, the skyline you see is actually a very accurate representation of the piece’s spectral make-up. The lines below the photograph represent my reaction to the timbre (in white) and panning (in blue).

Here’s the original spectrum:

And here’s my image:

For another assignment, we were asked to compose something interpreting a fragment of the visual score to Four Seasons by Robert Moran (1963).

To interpret the score, I decided to apply rules to the image, and then produce music that followed those rules. Broadly, I interpreted left to right as time, and top to bottom as panning from left (top) to right (bottom). I then set rules for each type of shape and visual aspect. Circles are percussion, lines show evolution (of rhythm or tones), solid shapes are full sounds, outlines are more hollow sounds. Triangles were violins and pads, rectangles represented bass and lead sounds, etc. Finally, I took my rules and scripted out what each shape in the score should sound like before sitting down and synthesizing/sampling my sounds and composing them to fit the score. I worked on this piece for days, and was really disappointed when we didn’t listen to it in class. So if you listen to it here, please leave me a comment and let me know what you think. Though it’s not the style of music that I usually make, it was a rewarding experience for me to work on something so ‘composed.’

Here is the score:

and here is my composition: Rhythm is Destroyed

February 13th, 2008
Posted by Paul in CMU, Music and Movies, Visualizations | No Comments »  

Portfolio Up

I redesigned my web portfolio for the third time on Sunday, and it’s finally in some kind of shape that I’m happy with.  Roll on over to PaulRobare.com and check it out!  It even has all of the videos that I never got around to putting up on this here blog (stupid WordPress can’t integrate Flash smoothly…).

February 5th, 2008
Posted by Paul in CMU | No Comments »