WHO I AM

WHAT I DO

WHAT I'M
THINKING ABOUT

WHAT I'M STUDYING

Friday, August 29, 2003

Labor Day Weekend Readings

For those of you playing at home who want to know what I'll be up to this weekend, it's the following readings:

• "Information Ecologies," chapter four from Information Ecologies by Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day
• "Knowing What To Do," chapter four from Don Norman's great The Design of Everyday Things
• "Touch Me, Hit Me and I Know How You Feel: A Design Approach to Emotionally Rich Interaction," by Stephan Wensveen, Kees Overbeeke, and Tom Djajadiningrat
• "But how, Donald, tell us how?: On the creation of meaning in interaction design through feedforward and inherent feedback," by Stephan Wensveen, Kees Overbeeke, and Tom Djajadiningrat
• "The Mathematics of Communication," by Warren Weaver
• "Communication Theory," from Introduction to Communication Studies by John Fiske

You envy me now, don't you?

Party like it's 1989

We had our first all-Design outing last night as well, at the Lava Lounge on the South Side. The DJ inexplicably played music from the 1985-1993 era, but a good time was had by all.

Ready, Set, Design!

Ever tried to design an interface for a kiosk in an hour and half? That's what we did yesterday in our Interaction and Interface Design class. The kiosk was supposed to be for drivers passing through an E-Z Pass-type system. Our professor, Jodi Forlizzi, handed us the assignment when we got to class, explained it for 10 minutes, then we went away and designed it for an hour and half. Then we pinned them up on the wall and had to defend/explain them.

Ouch. Needless to say, I was less than pleased with my result.

I'm comforted that no one else's design blew me away. It's really hard to work like that, especially with the added pressure of trying to do something great for the first assignment.

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Data

What you think you know about data is wrong. Or at least, incomplete. That's what we learned in Seminar today, which started with our professor, Dick Buchanan, tossing a metal wrench onto the table with a loud clang.

What is data? It's the evidence of a relationship between two things. We tend to confuse data with fact. Data alone has no meaning. The number 4683 is an example of data. Without knowing anything else, the data is meaningless. Datas are the simples of existance; simple in that they are uninterpreted.

Fact is the interpretation of data. Or, to put it another way, data in context. Facts have meaning. If data are nouns, facts are whole sentences. Only in interpreting and connecting do we find out what is meaningful.

However, when we think we know what the facts are, we tend to limit our world. "If your eyes are too closed, you'll fail to see the possibilities." We can become trapped. We must avoid this at all costs. We need to be conscious and self-conscious about data.

Different people can look at the same set of data and make different interpretations. Be careful of interpretations: they block what we see. When viewing an object, try not to be sophisticated. This will make you very sophisticated. Data can help us focus on an object.

Dick introduced the concepts of Given and Taken. What is given to us is the infinitely rich field of immediate perception. What is taken is a selection of data from that field.

Physical features are not the only, not even the primary, form of data. Data can come from four "realms:" Cosmos (ideas and approximations of things), Environment (function, how it works and in what context), Personal Persepctive (signs and frames of reference), and Things (materials, physical properties). What you feel matters: it's part of the data! In interaction design, what people feel matters.

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Tuesday, August 26, 2003

So it begins II

Today I started two more classes: Computing in Design and Interaction and Visual Interface.

Computing in Design used to be Intro to Programming for Designers, where they taught the design students the basics of Java. So many students complained about it that this year instead the focus is on Actionscript, the coding language used by Flash. Of course, the day we start class is the day after Macromedia announces a new version of Flash. Oh well. And I just bought my copy like two months ago too. Grrr...

In any case, the class uses Actionscript as a basis to teach us the basics of object-oriented programming while providing us with a tool we'll actually use in other classes and in professional practice. It's being taught by Ian Hargraves, a second-year interaction design student and TAed by Jeff Howard, one of the first-year ID students.

Chances are, I won't be writing overmuch about this class, since, while useful, probably a good portion of what I'm learning about can be learned elsewhere.

My other class was Interaction and Visual Interface Design, taught by professor Jodi Forlizzi. This class is going to be very project-based, with four longer projects and several one-day ones thrown in as "quizzes."

We talked about three trends in design over the last 50 years: a systematic way of breaking down design problems (human factors and HCI), then having users design (participatory design), and the most recent, a combination of user and a designer's knowledge.

What is interface design? Interfaces are the "skin between the product and the world it exists in." The skin can be a digital image or it can be an environment, like the inside of Starbuck's, or a physical set of controls like the dashboard of a car. Interfaces offer the user a "story of use." That is: here's how to experience/use me.

We then launched right into our first project: Expression and Physical Interaction. We're going to be looking at physical objects (like, say, an egg beater) and create from them a list of rich interactions that could be applied to a digital context. Then we're going to apply them to a simple scheduling application.

First, though, we're creating mood boards made of images based around various words: vision, hearing, touch, place, pose, movement, and facial expression. We'll use these throughout the course as a sort of pallete to refer to.

Homework tonight: working on my Studio and Seminar homeworks for class tomorrow. So it begins. My life isn't my own any more.

Monday, August 25, 2003

So it begins

Today was the first day of fall semester and, really, the first day of school. Yes, I did CDF in summer session, but today seemed so much more real somehow. Maybe it was that all my classmates were around. Maybe it was the several thousand undergraduates that appeared on campus. And maybe it was just that both professors talked about the experience of CMU and about being in graduate school. Whatever it was, it was an exciting, nerve-wracking day.

My first class was Design Seminar I, which is taught by the former head of the design department, Dick Buchanan. It's a rather infamous class, much talked about by alumni and the second-year grad students. And, three minutes into the class, it's not hard to see why. "I'm here," Dick introduced himself, "to change design in the world. I want to change the way design is taught and practiced." Then he turned to my classmate Jennifer Anderson. "Why are you here?" he bluntly asked. Then he went around the room, asking each person in turn. (My answer, in case you care, was that I want to make the world a better place by improving the tools we use.)

That done, he talked about the difference between undergraduate and graduate study. Graduate study focuses on themes, connecting (and mastering) a set of facts to create an approach to design practice. Graduate students are expected to become leaders of the industry, able not only to create good designs ("good" being defined by Dick as "well-designed and the right thing to do"), but also to discourse on them. Master's students aren't expected in their theses to contribute something new to the design field, but rather to deepen a theme. It is the doctoral students who are more concerned with inquiry into new design areas and research.

Interaction is at the heart of all of CMU's Masters of Design programs, even the new one in Product Development. Something he's obviously going to get into more is that interaction design relates to Poetics (creating emotionally satisfying experiences), while CPID relates to Rhetoric (creating persuasive products). I'd be lying if I told you I knew what that meant right now.

The stated goals of the class:

• establish a common framework of the concepts of interaction design
• provide a strategic perspective on the community of practice
• find our place in the field of practice
• encourage creativity

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