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Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Size Matters?

Looking over the list of HCI Master's students, I'm astounded by its size: 44 students, about 36 of them first-year students. Compared to the six first-year interaction designers, and the eight first-year CPID students, it seems huge.

Friday, August 22, 2003

Orientation

We had orientation yesterday, where the design faculty welcomed us, the ninth class to have gone through the Interaction Design program and our sister program, Communication Planning and Information Design. There are 14 of us first-year grads: six ID and eight CPID. Ten women, four men.

Orientation was led mainly by Dan Boyarski, head of the Design school, there was a lot of talk about the intensity of CMU and to prepare ourselves for that. He also implored us not to be too hard on ourselves while going through the program: there will be things we're good at and things we'll have to work harder at. And one inspirational message: writing and design together can change the world.

We also got to pick our seat in the graduate design studio and were assigned our assistantships. I got the unusual (for me) assistantship of tech support for the Smillie Lab, the new digital imaging lab. I'm also going to be doing a semi-TAship for Bob Swinehart's Corporate Identity class.

Refreshments were served.

I also managed to crash the HCI program's orientation party last night. Fun fun fun!

Saturday, June 7, 2003

UX in CS

At the Designing for User Experiences conference, according to Todd Warfel on the SIGIA list, "during the opening discussion, Mitch [Kapor] brought up the need for a User Experience program by design and not by CS. From his perspective, if a university tries to do a UX program from within CS, then it will suffer the anti-body syndrome. Much like how an anti-body attacks and kills a disease, CS will react to UX, treating it like a disease and killing it off, or assimilating it."

I wonder what my classmates in CMU's HCI program (which is housed in CMU's Computer Science department) feel about that.

Sunday, May 25, 2003

Why Carnegie Mellon

Despite US News & World Report's number 2 ranking for CMU's graduate design program, I'm fairly certain that it'll be the best place for me, mainly because what they are good at teaching matches 1) what I'm interested in and 2) what I need to know. These would include typography, cognitive science, design theory, industrial design, and a host of other things like game design. Plus, I was very impressed with where some of their grads were offered jobs: Ideo, Microsoft, Ford, IBM, Google. Not too shabby.

Even though it is an extra year, I chose the design department's Master's of Design in Interaction Design over the HCI program. To me, even the term "Human Computer Interaction" is like a relic from another era. HCI to me implies that everything about interactivity and interface design can be learned, studied, then simply applied. It's a scientific approach to something, for me, is more akin to a creative craft. GOMS studies and such are all fine and good, but I've found that making educated guesses can sometimes work as well. I think a design degree from CMU will help me better make those educated guesses.