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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 thesis, CMU | 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 Design Thinking, CMU | No Comments »
The Bunny Returns
Regular readers will recall a few pics I posted over the summer of Cycloptobunny. Well, he’s back, but this time with far greater exposure than my poor blog can provide. The following is a screen-grab from the front page of the CMU design website (if you want to see it yourself, you may have to hit refresh quite a few times, there are currently quite a few things that can pop-up).
That’s cycloptobunny in the middle!!! With nunchucks!!!
November 6th, 2008
Posted by Paul in CMU | No Comments »
Plagiarized?
So I was checking my web stats, and the following phrase was googled 5 times this month:
“design is finding defining and solving human problems pragmatically through the creation of products.”
The thing about that phrase, is that I wrote it last spring (as part of a paper discussing the definition of Interaction Design for Jodi Forlizzi’s seminar). I also posted that paper here on my blog. If you do a google search with the phrase in quotes, then my blog post is the only thing that comes up.
So why on earth would anyone be Googling that phrase? The only thing I can think of is that someone somewhere stole it and put it in a paper they called their own. The smart person grading/reviewing that paper then noticed that the phrase didn’t fit with the rest of the writing and decided to Google it to see if it was lifted from somewhere else (which of course it had been).
If whoever has been googling that phrase reads this - please let me know, I’d love to hear the story. I hold no ire - if anything I’m rather flattered that someone might like my definition of interaction design enough to steal it.
October 27th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking, CMU | No Comments »
Thesis as Design Process
I have asked myself many times why writing my thesis is such a struggle. If I were to be simply handed a topic and told to write a 20-30 page paper I could easily knock it out in a weekend and be happy with what I did. With my thesis, however, I have had to fight forward every step of the way. Until now, I couldn’t understand why this was.
I’ve figured it out though (why its a struggle, not the thesis). The design process, you see, is all about the simultaneous emergence of both problem and solution. As Dick Buchanan has argued, design is fundamentally concerned with the indeterminate (thus wicked problems). The issue with wicked problems is that they are not clearly defined (thus indeterminate), and so require the designer to iteratively specify them in attempt to create a solvable problem (because wicked problems are, by definition, unsolvable).
In the thesis process, however, we are tasked with nailing down a “topic” which we are repeatedly told must include a definition of the problem we wish to solve. If we could nail down the problem, however, the answer should be obvious and the thesis essay a breeze. The reality is, in true form to the process we are taught in this program, that we must iteratively reformulate the problem which we are researching in an attempt to specify it in such a way that meaningful insight can emerge. That sounds fine, but it plays out as many (if not all) of us feeling like we are not making appropriate progress on our thesis (because we are in the process - quite natural to design - of researching:problem re-framing: researching: problem re-framing and so on, but were told that we should have defined the problem last spring).
Now the only question, then, is whether this revelation can act as a salve to my anxiety, or was simply an excuse to take a break from writing my thesis and blog instead…
October 19th, 2008
Posted by Paul in thesis, Design Process, CMU | No Comments »
The new and final year of D-School
I realize that I never wrote much about my summer experience at Intuit. In part, this was purposeful - I was (and still am) hoping to receive a job offer from them, and so felt that it would be better if I weren’t publicly blogging my thoughts on everything. I do, however, feel that it represents something of a gaping hole in my blog, and so have decided to write a little.
What can I say that won’t violate some sort of confidentiality (explicit or implicit). I had a good time. The people I worked with were top-notch and I got to see what design in practice is like in a large company. I personally worked on the Quickbooks product, and though I can’t go into detail about what I did, I can say that I believe I had an influence on my team. Sunnyvale was suburban coporate central - I lived literally down the block from the Palm hedquarters and a Sun Microsystems campus. If you read this blog you’ve probably seen my photos, so that should come as no surprise. Don’t ever live there without a car. The weather, on the other hand, was perfect. Just perfect - no rain, no clouds, warm but not too hot.
And now I find myself back at CMU for one more, final year. It’s funny how framing it that way makes it sound like such a long journey - I could also say that I’ve returned to CMU for the second half of my interaction design education, in which case it sounds bigger and I more energetic. Second year is different: I’m only in two actual classes, my thesis project and paper making up the other half of my curriculum. The two classes I am in are Designing for Service with Shelley Evenson and Graduate Typography with Kristin Hughes. Service is much like the other Shelley classes I’ve taken - one short project (already completed) and one very long group project. This semester we’ll be looking at the concept of “medical home” on behalf of the Mayo Clinic. What is that? Well, we’re not sure yet, but the main idea is to move the burden of medical information off of the patient and onto teams of medical professionals. The idea has been around for a while, but no one has ever done a good job of figuring out how to actually do it, and thus our project.
Type is turning out to be a bit more of an art class than I expected. Theres a lot of standing around watching Kristin point at our stuff saying “this is no good because of that. Do you see that? Do you see that?” And me standing there thinking “nope. don’t see it. no, still don’t see it. nope, not seeing it.” But then, I remember experiencing similar things in art school many years ago, and I’m sure it will pass and my sense of aesthetics greatly improve. So, I try to smile and bear it.
My thesis is a bigger problem, in large part because I’m now nearly a month into the semester and I don’t really feel like I’ve accomplished much. I am doing both paper and project on sound in interaction design. Simultaneously, I am still trying to get my seminar paper from last spring published - which is a learning process for me. More on all that as it progresses.
What I worry about more than anything else, is that I haven’t been posting my thoughts on design here on this blog. I believe that thinking deeply about things is a learned habit, and one that is easily unlearned. As such, I feel that it is important to blog my thoughts in order to keep my mind limber and open.
At any rate, there’s the personal update. hopefully I’ll have more interesting things to say soon, and that are more relevant to those interested in design, rather than my largely uneventful academic career (nudge, wink, sigh).
September 18th, 2008
Posted by Paul in thesis, Intuit, CMU | 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 »
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 Intuit, CMU | 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 Processing, CMU, Music and Movies | 2 Comments »