LonelyStreets.com
Cyclopto-Bunny Tackles Sell-in Strategy
February 21st, 2010
Posted by Paul in Design Process, Humor | 1 Comment »
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 »
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 CMU, Design Process, thesis | No Comments »
iMix
My team presented our iPhone application design in Shelly Evanson’s Basic Interaction course on Tuesday. I think that we were a spectacular success, and hopefully impressed Freddy Azures (one of the iPhone’s original designers), who attended by video-chat from California.
Our application, iMix, is a simple song-mixing toy for the iPhone. It is, however, designed as a native application, and so isn’t actually functional on the phone.
Here’s our full presentation, including a video and link to a functional prototype: iMix Presentation
Some things to note about the presentation:
Use your arrow keys to move forward and back through it.
When you see the “Scenarios and Flow” diagram, you can click on the boxes to zoom and see more detail.
When you get to the screen with just an iPhone showing it’s home screen, click on the iMix icon (the blue one in the lower right) to proceed.
The video isn’t ass well compressed as it might be for the web, so give it some time to load if you don’t want it to be choppy.
I was extremely lucky to have an awesome team who all worked extremely hard and were each integral to our ultimate success. So thanks to Wiebke Poerschke, Gabe Clapper, Allison Gallant, and Dave Hora. Personally, I am most proud of the demo video portion. Wiebke designed the pictured interface and put together the assets in Photoshop, and I animated them all into the video.
October 17th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Process, Flash | No Comments »
Poster Critique
My Self Portrait poster was critiqued in class this week. The crit went badly – the opinion of most of my classmates came down to “it’s confusing.” My poster was also talked about last - meaning no one picked it to talk about, but rather the last person to talk got stuck with it. The interesting thing is, however, that everyone I’ve talked to who was not in the class really liked it. I think that maybe the problem was that all of my classmates saw each others’ posters in development and knew the concept behind each one prior to the critique (mine being the exception, as I threw out my original idea and redesigned the poster in the last week before the critique - hence most of my classmates were seeing my concept for the first time at the critique).
This raises an interesting question about design and users. Was the poster a success because many people outside the class found it engaging and informative, or a failure because my classmates (who may not have put as much effort into understanding it as a result of circumstances), found it to be neither. Both groups are users in this context, so I’m not sure of the answer. I guess I would say that it was a moderate success - it would have been better if were more accessible to all users, but was not a failure as many users found it interesting.
On a side note, I found that it is just as easy to become a slave to Adobe Illustrator as a technology as it is to become a slave to Actionscript. I think I have done a lesser design job on some prior projects because I spent too much time making the code work – in this case I could not redraw my poster for greater clarity in the time I had due to the way it was constructed in Illustrator. I need to do more sketching next time.
September 28th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Process, Design Thinking | No Comments »
Digital Square
For Shelly Evanson’s Introduction to Interaction course we were told to create a digital square that invited dragging, turning, and rubbing. It took a whole lot of new actionscript and a helpful tutorial on kirupa.com, but here it is, try it out and see what you think:
In other news, I’m working on a self-portrait poster for my studio course, and am learning something about iteration. After a week and a half working on one concept, I through it all out the window last night and started with something brand new. Fortunately the deadline was just extended till next Wednesday. I’ll make sure to post it when it’s done. For now, suffice it to say that I’m logging every time I do any of about 30 tasks over the course of this entire day (such as eating, smoking, listening to music, working on my laptop, etc.).
Also, here are a few shots of my physical “squeeze it, rub it, turn it” cube from last week.
September 12th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Process, Flash | 1 Comment »
Week 1 of Semester 1
Our first week of class has been tons of fun. The classes are a joy - especially Shelly Evanson’s which is focusing very much on the topics of most interest to me. One of the first readings was an article by Tog which I had actually read before (a sure sign we’re looking at the stuff I came here to study). Also spent one night(the second day of class actually) in the studio until midnight already. It feels good to be working again.
I’ve just completed my first assignment for Shelly - a cube which invites people to rub it, squeeze it, and turn it. Working on this project has made me realize that I’m already starting to get a sense of ‘Design thinking’ (I think). I went about designing my cube in what was for me a new way. I started by making exhaustive lists of everything I could think of that people are tempted to rub, squeeze, and turn. In doing that I also went around and solicited ideas from my classmates and wife, and came to some interesting conclusions. Basically, I think that the urge to squeeze something comes almost entirely from the material used to construct that thing. While there are some exceptions (the trigger on a squirt gun), these outliers seem to fall almost entirely into the realm of complex mechanical constructions, and thus are not really relevant to a cube. The urge to rub, I decided, comes very much from surface and texture. In particular, if we see something and recognize that it has some texture, but cannot decide what it will feel like, we tend to touch that thing in order to get more information. The trick for me was thus to find a texture that was unusual enough that people cannot help themselves but to touch it (and which rewards them with an interesting or pleasant sensation upon doing so). Finally, I concluded that the urge to turn something is largely a product of that things form. Since form in this project was constrained to that of a cube, I tried to think of ways I could reference artifacts which people would naturally turn. One thought was to make my cube look like a Rubik’s cube, which would not even need to be functional but would still entice users to try turning it. I also realized while building my final prototype that the cube would have to look sturdy, or else people would not feel comfortable manipulating it.
Unfortunately, I ended up rather constrained by choice of materials (basically stuff I could find at Micheal’s or Lowes), and so was not able to construct quite what I had imagined. We’ll see how my final cube stands up in critique tomorrow though!
September 3rd, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Process | No Comments »