LonelyStreets.com
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 »
Back to Blog
It has obviously been quite some time since I’ve made regular posts. Partly this was a result of the chaos that is the last semester of grad school, and partly this was intentional rhetorical silence while I quested for a job.
And now it’s all done - school is all over, my friends are all going their seperate ways. I finished my thesis, graduated, accepted a job offer.
I remember reading years ago the end-of-school post that Dan Saffer wrote when he finished the program here at CMU. I don’t remember eactly what he said, but it was something along these lines: I’ve learned more than I ever imagined, made friends I’ll keep for the rest of my life, and just generally am far happier with where I am now compared to two years ago. This is all as true for me as it was for him, perhaps more because I was not a designer when I came here, and I very much am now.
Of my colleagues, two are headed for the bay, quite a few for New York, one to Australia, several will stay in Pittsburgh, and I alone am heading off to Chicago. Funny that after all of this I find myself headed back to the city I grew up in - doing so was not in my original plans. However, I received an offer for a stellar job as a senior interaction designer at Motorola, and so am off to work in the downtown Chicago design office starting next month (I’m really excited!).
Goodbye everyone! I’ll miss all of you. It’s been a great time and you’re a wonderful bunch of designers that I’ve been honored to work with and learn from over the past two years.
In other news, I plan to start blogging more regularly again. I won’t be able to talk about and show off my work now that I’m leaving the educational world, but I can still speak abstractly about design to my heart’s content. And with that I’ll sign off on the personal notes and promise that my next post will be about design (and happen in the next couple of days).
June 8th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU | No Comments »
Interview at Designing for Service
Jeff Howard, a well-known service design thinker, blogger, and consultant has posted an interview with me at http://designforservice.wordpress.com/. In the interview we talk about the project I worked on last semester for the Mayo Clinic and Design Continuum in Shelley Evenson’s service design course. Thanks to Jeff for the opportunity to talk about my team’s work!
April 28th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Thinking | No Comments »
New Portfolio
I’ve revised my web portfolio - giving it a new and improved look and adding some work (and details about old work). I’ll probably continue to tweak it, but I’m pretty happy with what’s there now. I actually did the entire design and development (learning Javascript and jquery in the process) in three days. The final part of that was a 32 hour sprint - that’s a really long time without sleep. Take a look and let me know what you think:
February 25th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, Communication Design, Design Process, thesis | 1 Comment »
Generative Doormat!
While I’m in the posting mood - I wanted to show off a little demo video I did for a quick assignment in Mark Gross’s Making Things Interact course. The class has been great fun so far, allowing me to finally learn how to do my own circuit-bending, build things with arduino’s, and play in Max/MSP. This assignment asked us to construct our ownswitch, so I built a generative musical doormat of course!
February 4th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, Music and Movies | No Comments »
Generative Systems
I’ve had the great fortune over the past day and a half to attend part of the Code, Form, Space symposium on “generative form and digital fabrication” put together here at CMU by Golan Levin (this is the second mini-symposium Golan has put together while I’ve been here and both have been fantastic). In particular, this symposium brings together several highly acclaimed generative artists (Casey Reas of Processing fame and Marius Watz of generatorx.no), and several well-known architects working with generative and digital fabrication techniques.
Yesterday, I attended a talk by Reas and Watz in which the two traded off giving three 10-minute monologues on each of the titular topics, while providing examples in the form of their personal works. I have always been a great fan of generative art (and music!), but I was particularly interested by how generative artists are beginning to bring their code-art into the physical world through the use of 3D printers and the like.
This morning, I also had the special treat of attending a 3 hour workshop with Reas and Watz in which they provided a blitzkrieg lesson in basic Processing and gave tips and advice on creating (and fabricating) generative works. I just have to stop here and point out that Reas and Watz are both astoundingly nice guys - I hope I get a chance to talk with them more later this week. The workshop was then followed by a luncheon at which Reas, Watz, Golan, and the three visiting architects (Ben Pell, Hilary Sample, and Michael Meredith) had a panel discussion on various related topics. Sadly I wasn’t able to see Ben Pell’s lecture this evening, but I plan on attending Sample and Meredith’s tomorrow.
All of this got me thinking more about a topic that came up recently in the independent study my colleagues and I are currently doing (an exploration of models of design advised by Hugh Dubberly and Shelley Evenson - see our as-of-yet unrefined blog here). Shelley and Liz Sanders have posited that the next step beyond user centered design is the design of tools for co-creation. Hugh has called this “the design of adaptive systems,” and I couldn’t help but think of it while listening to all this smart talk about generative systems over the past day. With the rapidly dropping cost of 3D printers, laser cutters and other rapid fabrication technologies, we may well be at the end of the era of mass-production, and be instead barreling into the time of mass-customization. Will generative systems play a role in this coming age as well? Perhaps the designers of the future will find themselves challenged to design generative systems capable of producing a near-infinite variety of forms (or interfaces!)that end-users will engage with. One can imagine sitting down and playing with a generative system to design one’s own form for their iPod, rather than the pre-designed one.
I brought these ideas up to my friend and colleague Kyle Vice, pointing out that the advent of loop-based music sequencing brought computer music to the masses. With cheap, simple loop-based sequencers anyone can sit down and knock out a decent sounding piece of music within half an hour. I wondered aloud whether the same could happen for drawing programs - far too many people don’t draw because they feel they can’t; what if they could draw something beautiful and totally unique using a generative system? Kyle pointed out that a spirograph might be a better example than loop-based sequencers (which still smack of a “Mr. Potato Head approach” - Kyle’s words). We can all remember being amazed and proud of the formal beauty we produced with spirographs (which are essentially mechanical generative drawing tools).
I believe that generative systems may have a significant role to play in the age of mass-customization and co-creation, and that we as designers must begin to look at these systems with an eye for how they can be integrated into the digital products of the future.
February 4th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, CoolHunting, Design Thinking | 2 Comments »
Designing History
History is one of those things that most folk take for granted, but which most folk also realize is largely subjective (even if they may not think about it much). I remember that in my own primary education, the Viet Nam war was never mentioned. There was usually a chapter devoted to it towards the end of my textbooks, but we somehow never got that far. As an undergraduate student, I once took a class on the history of US diplomacy with a great visiting professor at Grinnell named T. Mills Kelly. Prof. Kelly assigned us a paper taking a stance on whether or not the US’s decision to drop The Bomb on Japan in WWII was correct. I no longer remember what I argued, but I do remember that the question led me to exploring the “wicked problem” that was “how the heck do we end this war?”
Wicked problems are, in fact, what writing history is really all about. Time mists things in ambiguity, and written accounts can never be objective because they were written by people. When I write a historical account, then, I am designing a perception of the past so that I can communicate it to others. This is not to say that one should fail to be entirely thorough when researching a history, but the form of language means that ambiguity will always exist in text. If I leave one thing out, but include another, I have made a design decision. Hopefully, I have done my research and, as with any design, am making an appropriate and defensible choice, but it is a subjective choice nonetheless.
I find this interesting, in part, because of the implications it has for modeling the domain of design (something I’ll be doing in an independent study this semester). Can I argue that all of the social sciences are within the domain of design because they focus on communicating ideas, which is a big part of what design is about? I have often struggled with these sorts of questions because they sound arrogant to me - I don’t like to believe that designers have the right to strut around saying that they can jump right into any other field and improve the way things are done. On the other hand, I feel passionately that design and design thinking have much to offer other fields. Most realms of study and activity can only benefit from cross-pollinating with other areas of inquiry.
I’ve been thinking about all this because of the negative reactions my article for Interactions has gleaned. I have yet to write a formal response (though I will do so soon), but in the meanwhile I can’t help but say “I told you so” to myself. Writing a short history for a magazine meant leaving a lot of things out, and I have unsurprisingly angered a few folk who felt that I made the wrong design decisions with my history. In a way, this makes me happy though - any dialog around the history of sound in computing is better than none because we have so much to learn from those that have come before us.
January 7th, 2009
Posted by Paul in CMU, Communication Design, Design Thinking | 1 Comment »
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 »
The Rising Sun
Walking onto campus this morning, I was surprised to see a pimply-faced white kid marching along with a Japanese Rising Sun flag draped around him like a cloak. So surprised that I didn’t think to say anything to him until a minute later, by which time he was gone.
What I should have done, was to point out to him that the flag he was wearing was the East-Asian equivalent of a Nazi Swastika, and that the large community of Chinese and Koreans at CMU were unlikely to appreciate it. I feel sure that the poor kid had no idea - he looked like he was probably an anime fan that had picked up the symbology from cartoons and personalized it without ever realizing what it represents.
Which got me thinking about semiotics in general. Personally, though I considered myself well-educated even before coming to graduate school, I had never really heard of the study of signs and symbols before I began studying Design. It’s interesting how completely iconic images can come to mean completely different things in a shared physical context because of differing cultural contexts. The rising sun no doubt symbolized membership in an anime-loving otaku-idolizing subculture to the kid with the flag, while it can represent the slaughter of millions to East Asians (and could alternatively have represented Japan’s days of military power to the animators who have been reviving the symbol in modern Anime).
I know that some of my classmates (particularly those in the Communication, Planning, and Information Design program) are interested in cross-cultural design, and I think this vignette is representative of the difficulties of designs that play a role in the lives of people who have differing cultural understandings. Do anime producers consider that including a rising sun in an adult-oriented cartoon about samurai may lead to that same iconography being displayed by teenagers in Pittsburgh? Should they? I am tempted to say that yes, they should; but then, where should they draw the line?
I once made a similar mistake while living in Japan. During my free periods there, I would occasionally draw large complex pictures on the whiteboard in my classroom. One time I too used the iconography of the rising sun. When one of my Japanese co-workers walked in and saw it she froze and began asking me about the picture in an extremely stilted manner. Before long I realized my error and quickly erased the picture. Certainly in that case the fault for my ignorance was entirely my own (I was living in Japan after all).
As interaction designers, should we consider that the products we design my be offensive in cultural contexts that they weren’t designed for? I’m not sure, but I plan to keep it in mind regardless.
November 10th, 2008
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Thinking | No Comments »