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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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 CMU, Intuit, thesis | No Comments »