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My Spores
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Spore Creature Creator lately. For those who don’t know, it’s basically a mini-game released a couple months ago to get people ramped up for Spore, the new Will Wright game that will be released next week. The Creature Creator is amazing in how simply it implements 3D modelling - somwthing that is usually very hard and requires immense skill. Within the (admitedly ver limited) scope of the game however, the creature creator is really amazing.
Anyway, one of the things the Creature Creator comes with is a web widget for you to show off all you creations. So here it is!
August 30th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Uncategorized, Visualizations | No Comments »
My Childhood returned (via the interweb)
As I’m sure that all of you, dear readers, are aware, more and more ends up online as the internet ages and grows. Sometimes I’m surprised by what hasn’t gotten uploaded yet (e.g., home movies from the 70’s can be hard to come by). But today I was surprised to find something of my own past that I had forgotten.
First, let me admit: I regularly Google my own name. I know it’s a bit narcissistic, but I feel that it’s important that I know what’s out there on me. I Google other people when I meet them, so why shouldn’t others do the same to me? I’m also fortunate to have an extremely rare name, and so most of the results that get returned really are about me (all of the top 10 I’m proud to say, the top two of which are my own sites).
Today there was a new link - Love is Not Abuse - a press release from 1991. I had almost entirely forgotten this, but when I was 12 years old I somehow got chosen as one of a small group of Chicago Public School kids to work with well-known childrens writer Leah Komaiko to author and illustrate a new childrens book. We had (weekly?) meetings in the as-yet-not-open-to-the-public Harold Washington Chicago Public Library (on Congress at State). One of the pictures that I drew (or more? I can’t remember),ended up in the final published book. I’m sure there’s a copy of that book hidden somewhere in my parents house, but I haven’t seen it in well over a decade.
So I guess I can say I am a published illustrator. And I didn’t even remember. I wonder what further treasures of my childhood will be uncovered by the internet in the years to come? I must admit that I’m sometimes nearly overcome with the urge to blog meaningless memories I have, simply because the information has not yet been collected in the world’s hive memory. So far I’ve resisted though…
EDIT: A little further searching uncovered a bit more online about the book. This small slideshow has a few pics. Slide 5 is everyone who participated, though I must admit I’m having a hard time identifying myself in the picture. I might be the little head popping up directly above Leah Komaiko (even at that age I almost never wore glasses, which may be what’s throwing me off). More interesting is slide 6, which is the drawing I did that made it’s way into the book. I can almost remember drawing it. Man I couldn’t draw back then (this was pre-art-school) .
August 30th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Is that a “Tangible” in your interaction design or are you just pretending?
One of my classmates forwarded a link to the rest of us yesterday for a new program in the School of Architecture at CMU called “Master of Tangible Interaction Design.” Needless to say, I was a little upset. What is happening here is, I believe, the final culmination of a long-fomented mutiny within the school of design and elsewhere at CMU, now rearing its ugly head into the sunlight for the first time. And now I can’t help but think that it is starting to have a direct impact on me (both the School or Architecture and the School of Design are within the College of Fine Arts).
When employers come to CMU to interview us, will they know or understand the difference between this new program and my own “Master of Interaction Design”? I’ll answer that right now - they won’t. And why should they, who ever heard of a single school offering to entirely different degrees with essentially the same title? And let me explain why they’re different: this new program purports to exist to teach “those with significant engineering and/or computer science knowledge who wish to master design or artistic skills, and those with significant design, art, or architecture experience who wish to master technological means of making.” All in two semesters. What? That’s right, we’ll learn you some mastery of design or artistic skills, all in eight months. Taking the same course load as people in my program who spend two years focusing exclusively on design skills.
Which leads me to the second problem with all of this: it cheapens my program. CMU’s Interaction Design program is widely respected as one of the best in the country if not world. This new program appears to be an attempt to replicate NYU’s ITP or MIT’s MediaLab programs here at CMU. That’s fine, but those programs are founded on a fundamentally different understanding of design than that taught and espoused in my program. Students in my program learn how to solve problems with user-centered principles; students in those other programs mostly make crazy-cool stuff that is largely inapplicable to the real world we live in. And yes, I know that’s a bold statement, but I’ve been to ITP and suffered many a personal lecture by Golan Levin about how designers in my program don’t spend enough time learning to make stuff (Golan, whom I have great respect for, is originally of the MediaLab and now a CMU prof and now a member of the Tangible Interaction Design faculty) . I’d like to add here that I’ve now spent some time as a designer out there in the real world, and my experience was that no one cares if I can engineer stuff - that’s what engineers are for and they’ll always be better at it than me. Will this new program have the same high admissions standards that my program adheres to? Will it’s students maintain our (in my opinion well-justified) impeccable reputation?
Which brings me to issue number three: it seems that the formation of this program was kept a secret. Certainly none of us in my program were asked our feelings on the matter while it was under development. Are graduate students so meaningless to the Carnegie Mellon community that we aren’t asked for our opinions when another part of the College of Fine Arts (which contains both Design and Architecture) decides to start up a program (which will include at least one of our own faculty members) with the same name as our own existing program? Experience tells me that secrecy in such situations is generally undertaken in order to avoid objections until it’s too late. Well, too late or not, I object!
So why now? Apparently now isn’t exactly right, rumor has it that there are already one or two “trial” students in the program. This is, however, where we get to the real meat of the problem (the proverbial “dirty-laundry” as the case may be). You see, Dick Buchanan just left CMU to go teach at Case Western. Dick founded our program, taught our introductory seminar, and was a guiding force to the program throughout its history. Dick was also not terribly popular with many of the other professors (perhaps for good reason, I do not know). What I do know, is that some professors (who I’m not going to name for fear of reprisal), have repeatedly shown a marked disdain for my program, we students in the program, and the philosophy of Design that we’ve been taught. Those professors are on the list of faculty for this new program. I also know that the school of Design just lost its Head (Dan Boyarski stepped down at the end of last year), and is currently experiencing something of a power-vacuum (we offered the job to someone else, who declined, and Steve Stadlemeier took over as interim head for the time being). I have no idea where Steve stands on these issues, but I might point out that he does not teach any Interaction Design or CPID courses. In summary, if there was ever a good time to stage a mutiny, this would be it.
I would like to point out that I have no issue with the program itself. I almost attended NYU’s ITP myself, and would gladly stay an extra year and go through this other program if it didn’t cost more money. I take a very large exception with the name, however. To call the program “Master of Tangible Interaction Design” is misleading - the program bears little relation to the existing and established program (or definition of Interaction Design), and looks to me like a cheap attempt to piggy-back upon our prestige. I am horrified (and a little confused) that the Dean of the CFA allowed this.
August 29th, 2008
Posted by Paul in CMU | 4 Comments »
The Slums of Beijing
I’ve found myself talking about China and Beijing a lot lately with the Olympics going on over there, and it seemed like an appropriate time to post this photo.
The Photo was taken out of my hotel room window in central Beijing, 8 floors up or so. I think it’s of interest because it allows you to see what the Olympic broadcasts don’t - the Beijing the exists beyond the roads. Look closesly and you’ll notice that the only roadvisible is on the right edge of the photo about half way up - all of those ramshackle slummy buildings are simply piled up on each other and invisible from the street (which was lined with slightly less slummy looking store fronts). China is poor, and Beijing is dirty and ugly. My most potent memory of the city was that there were people everywhere. Masses and masses of people. And unlike New York or Tokyo, these people weren’t going anywhere or doing anything, they would simply sit around on the streets, even in the bitter cold the area was experiencing during my visit. Don’t believe what you see on TV kids.
August 26th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Photography | 6 Comments »
Google’s got competitors?
A new search engine called cuil.com (pronounced “cool” they say - though where on earth they got that from, I can’t imagine), has gotten a lot of publicity lately. Apparently it was founded by several ex-Google masterminds, and claims to index more of the web than Google. So I thought I’d give it a shot using the most important and standard metric of all: my name!
It’s a crock though – I searched for my name and it said there were 45,000 some results, but then it only gave me 6 pages of links. It also missed a few things that Google gets, matched random pictures to links (I know they were random because the links were to my own blog, and I’ve never seen the pictures before). Oh, and it didn’t respect Boolean search terms (I put my name in quotations, but it returned things that weren’t an exact match). All rather fishy…
August 26th, 2008
Posted by Paul in CoolHunting | No Comments »