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Interactions Article and Service Design Project

The new issue of Interactions magazine is now available online.  Check out my article on the history of sound in computing here (note that you’ll need ACM digital library access to get the full text).

Also, I’ve added my team’s final service design -LiveWell- to my online portfolio.  Check out the video sketch and presentation here.

December 31st, 2008
Posted by Paul in CMU | No Comments »  

Another Semester Gone

Wow!  I can’t believe it’s been a month since I last posted.  That was probably the last time I had a day off, but now sweet winter break has finally arrived.

It’s also a little hard to believe that I’m now three quarters of the way through grad school.  Looking back, it’s hard to describe just how much my experience at CMU has changed me - I now completely self identify as a designer, and feel happier and more satisfied for it.  In the last 18 months my mind has been opened to the great depths of knowledge there is to discover in philosophy (thanks largely to Dick Buchanan), I’ve developed a proper designerly sense of perfectionism and learned to love struggling with huge ambiguities (thanks largely to Shelley Evenson), and I’ve found that I am capable of writing publishable articles and defining and wrestling with wicked design problems with very little outside direction (thanks largely to Jodi Forlizzi, Sugur Ishizaki, and Dave Kaufer).  And this is not to say that I haven’t learned much from my other professors - Dan Boyarski, Karen Moyer, Kristin Hughes, and Frank Armstrong all taught me to understand, recognize, and occasionally even produce strong visual design pieces, and Golan Levin taught me to appreciate art again (something I had almost forgotten since my long ago days at the Chicago Academy for the Arts).Perhaps most importantly, I’ve learned more than I could ever describe from the phenomenal classmates I’ve been lucky enough to work with these past three semesters.  Thank you to all of you - I could not have gotten anywhere without all of you, and I’m deeply saddened that we all have only one more semester together.

This semester wrapped up nicely.  My teammates and I nearly killed ourselves finishing up our Service Design project for the Mayo Clinic - but somehow we got it done, and we’re all very proud of our work (I’ll be adding it to the portfolio soon).  This past week my teammate Karl Nieberding and I flew out to Rochester Minnesota to present our design, and were pleasantly surprised to find a supportive and interested audience that responded quite well to our and the other teams’ presentations.  Of course, no trip goes too smoothly, and we did all get snowed into Chicago for a night, but fortunately Shelley traveled with us and personally handled all of the problems we encountered with flights and lodgings, leaving us to enjoy ourselves (thanks Shelley!).

My fellow second-years and I also presented our thesis research at a poster session last week.  The session went very well, and I received a lot of good feedback from various professors and other visitors.  I am really looking forward to finally going full steam with my project next semester, as my thesis paper is essentially done.  I was really impressed with the work that all of my classmates are doing, I only wish I’d had more time to go around and look at their posters (I spent most of the session glued to my own, giving a little speech about my research).  The thesis work should also make it into my portfolio in the next couple of weeks, so I’ll forgo describing it here.

At any rate, I’ll try to write something less personal and more interesting to people who don’t know me personally in the near future, as I should have significantly more time on my hands in the next couple of weeks.  Mostly I just wanted to give a brief (?) update and say thank you again to all of the wonderful people I’ve learned from these past 18 months!

December 21st, 2008
Posted by Paul in CMU, thesis | No Comments »