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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 CMU, Intuit | 3 Comments »
Soniball
Still crazy busy here - have been for a while (hence the lack of posts). This week should finally mark the end however. I just wanted to throw up a quick link to a short video of my final project for Golan Levin’s Audio-Visual Systems class:
I plan to get an online version up sometime in the near future. The piece was an overwhelming success - I heard a lot of really positive comments and a number of people seemed downright addicted. I couldn’t have been happier. It was also really interesting to see how people used the piece (which was a sort of generative musical game) - a number of folk did things I hadn’t even realized you could do. It made me understand why those Europeans are so in to so-called “critical design” - it’s a lot of fun to make something cool and then watch what people do with it.
May 7th, 2008
Posted by Paul in CMU, Music and Movies, Processing | 2 Comments »