LonelyStreets.com
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 »
Doodles and Hiroshi Ishii at Intuit
In case anyone isn’t feeling patient enough to see what those doodles in the last post turn into over time, here’s a few screen caps taken after about 5 minutes.
Personally I recommend putting on some nice minimal techno and just zoning out watching it. It’s better than your typical visualizer because you get to watch it build up over time. Personally I’m grooving to the awesome Richie Hawtin mix available free at Resident Advisor.
In other news, Hiroshi Ishii, second in command at the MIT Media Lab came and spoke to a crowd of about 30 at Intuit today. Professor Ishii does really cool stuff with what he calls “tangible interfaces.” Basically, the idea is that computers and other digital devices are black boxes that provide no affordances to the user (obvious ways of creating predictable effects through physical manipulation), and so Ishii works to design digital things that have such affordances. Or are at least really really cool. I wanted to go tell him that I’m a student of Golan Levin (who I believe was a student of Ishii), but I had to run to another meeting immediately after the talk. It was great to see lots of videos of Media Lab projects though, which never fail to wow. It turns out that Intuit is actually a sponsor of the Media Lab, so with a little luck there will be more of these talks…
May 28th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Intuit, Processing | No 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 »