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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 »
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 »
Goodness of Fit
For the independent study my colleagues and I are doing with Hugh Dubberly, we’ve been reading a lot of great old Design Methods movement texts. Hugh is of the position that these texts are not being taught, and he feels that there is great knowledge to be gained by looking at them, and I can’t help but agree. Interestingly, many of the movement’s leading figures were architects, such as Horst Rittel and Christopher Alexander.
Reading things written by (and for) architects, inevitably brings up some issues that we don’t often think about when designing software. Alexander talks at length about “goodness of fit” - how a design must fit the context in which it will be used. As interaction designers we certainly consider this (hence contextual inquiry and similar methods), but we tend to take a limited view of “context.” We most often talk about context of use in terms of the office, home, or culture that a design will be used within - but what if we considered context more as an architect might? That is, what if a word processor were to be designed to have greater “goodness of fit” with the city in which it will be used? Might the interface be more sunny and bright for users in perpetually grey cities such as Pittsburgh or Seattle? Should interfaces adjust their colors to be clearer in different levels of sunlight? Mac’s already automatically adjust brightness to account for this, but why not take it further and have the actual colors change responsively to provide different levels of contrast?
I’m not sure what other implications this view of context might have, but I think it’s an interesting line of reasoning, and one which I plan to explore further the next time I am designing a mass-market product that will find itself in diverse geographic locations.
February 14th, 2009
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking | 1 Comment »
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 »
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 »
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 CMU, Design Thinking | No Comments »
Accidentally Visual
As I’ve been working on my thesis, which looks at sound in computing (and digital products in general), I’ve also been looking at the history of the graphic user interface. One of the things that strikes me most, is how nearly accidental the evolution was of computing into an almost entirely visual medium. The earliest computers had no visual outputs but relied almost entirely on punch cards for both input and output (though most also had speakers - called hooters - wired into them to directly sonify their workings). It seems that had it not been for Doug Engelbart and the NLS Demonstration (and the work at Xerox PARC that followed), computers might today be a very different sort of thing. The first raster displays created by Xerox were made to look like a sheet of paper because Xerox was a photocopying company. What if a company that made stereo’s had funded PARC? Might modern computing rely more on audition than sight?
As I do more research into the matter, it occurs to me that in pre-digital technology, the visual modality was often given equal weight with sound and/or touch. Think of Babbage’s difference engine, for example; one would hear such a contraption working (or not working) much more clearly than one could see it. Perhaps the time has come for designers, engineers, and others involved in the creation of technology to move beyond the visual and realize that truly rich interactions are those that take advantage of all of the sensory modalities in engaging ways.
October 12th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking, thesis | No Comments »
Designing for Meaning When Data is Intangible
I was reading a post at createdigitalmusic.com recently when a new thought occurred to me regarding a possible path to successful products in the digital age. The post quotes Roger Daltry recently bemoaning that mp3’s have killed the album, saying:
“They’ve destroyed the form, as soon’s it went digital. The CD was a confidence trick,” Daltrey said. “It wasn’t just music that people used to buy, it was a total art form. … I think that’s what people like. They like it personal. They like vinyl because if you scratch vinyl, it’ll be scratched, but it’ll be your scratch. It will only be on your record.”
Daltrey takes pride in The Who [Associated Press, via CNN.com]
Reading this, I thought to myself, maybe that’s what made the iPod so successful. It wasn’t the design per se, nor the functions, nor the timing. Rather, it was a conflagration of factors that (perchance by chance) led to the iPod becoming the physical object in which people invest all the personal meaning that used to be placed in physical record albums. As a result, iPod users are often insanely loyal to those little pieces of plastic and metal.
So the question, then, is how can designers use this? I would say that the first step is to identify those trends wherein a physical object that has traditionally been a repository of physical meaning is being replaced with an “object-free” digital alternative (as the record album was). Then, we should look at how we might design a product that can step into and take advantage of the “meaning-gap” that occurs. I’m not sure yet what these opportunities are, but I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes open.
September 26th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking | 2 Comments »
Designing Design
I’ve been reading a book called “Toothpicks and Logos: Design In Everyday Life” by John Heskett, a professor at the Institute of Design (at the time of writing - 2002). Heskett, in discussing why my field is so hard to explain, offers the following as an example of the word “design’s” semantic variegation:
“Design is to design a design to produce a design.”
Heskett then goes on to show how every use of the word in that sentence is both grammatically correct and representative of a separate definition of the word.
I don’t believe that the problem of describing Design effectively is small or irrelevant. As a summer intern at Intuit I find myself working closely with engineers for the first time, and am often at a loss as to how to explain the value of what I do because I cannot properly define design. If I cannot define designs, then I cannot express the value of Design to people who have not worked with designers before, and I can’t expect them to seek out my contributions. I once wrote a paper on this where I described design as “finding, defining, and solving human problems pragmatically through the creation of products” but that definition requires quite a bit of definition itself. I believe that the root of the problem, as stated by Richard Buchanan, is that “design has no domain.” That is, design is a way of thinking and working that can be applied to any area of business (or otherwise), but which is not specific to any product type or activity.
July 10th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking | No Comments »