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Thesis Project Documentation
I’ve finally updated my portfolio site a bit, and have put up my thesis project presentation and documentation for anyone who’s interested. You can download them here. Thanks for looking, and if anyone has feedback, or questions please don’t hesitate to post it or email me directly (paulrobare{at } gmail[dot] com)!
August 16th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design, Design Thinking, thesis | No Comments »
New Mix
I picked up a nice little Behringer audio interface/Midi controller for DJ mixing a couple months ago, and have been steadily re-learning how to DJ using nothing more than my laptop, Native Intruments’ Traktor LE DJ software, and the new controller. It’s a lot of fun because for the first time in years I can come home at night and simply sit down and DJ with whatever music I’ve been listening to lately (the whole setup works with mp3’s).
Here’s a 2 hour mix I did last night - it’s a mostly new progressive set with a few old favorites mixed in.
Thinking about how I’ve learned this new ‘interface’ for DJing has me wondering about the implications for designing other interfaces. Very often, we try to build interfaces using known paradigms - we believe that users don’t want to learn new ways of doing things. This is often true - there’s a delicate balance that needs to be achieved between the amount of effort needed to learn something new and the benefit gained by doing so.
But when the user truly enjoys the learning process, as I did with my new DJ equipment, the learning is it’s own reward, shifting the balance quite a bit. How do we make new interfaces on other devices, say a portable mp3 player, a joy to learn? In the world of DJing, I think there’s a good argument that the new ways of doing quite directly enable new means of self-expression. Maybe gadgets need to do a better job of allowing users to express themselves? I’ve mentioned before that I believe the future of interaction design is deeply involved with the idea of “designing tools to allow people to design.” More and more, I think that a central tenet of any interaction design project should be: how can we enable personal self-expression with this design? Therein lies the successful product.
August 16th, 2009
Posted by Paul in Design, Music and Movies | 1 Comment »