May 14, 2005
Master of Design
This is my last entry for this blog, as today I am no longer a master's candidate, I am a Master of Design. This isn't a boast; it's my degree: M.Des. And today I will walk across a stage and be handed my diploma and my graduate studies will officially end. I hope you'll move over to my other blog and follow my adventures at Adaptive Path and beyond.
Last night, a group of us went out together with our families for a pre-celebration, and tonight, on this rainy Saturday in Pittsburgh, I'll do it again with just my family, my friend Jeff Howard, and my advisor Shelley Evenson. I'm sure we'll raise a glass and toast CMU.
What Dick Buchanan said on the first day of school is ringing in my ears: "We will teach you to do design so well that we will, at the end of two years, call you a master of it." And so it has come to pass. I hope you've enjoyed reading this blog, especially those of you who have been following it since the beginning. I'm glad to have done it--almost as glad as I am to finish it.
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May 12, 2005
Graduation Gifts
Being the designerd that I am, I treated myself to two graduation gifts today: professional memberships in AIGA and IDSA. I was especially pleased with the IDSA membership, since now (or at least, after Saturday when I graduate from a design school), I will be finally eligible to join.
And hey, if you've enjoyed this blog and want to buy me a graduation gift, well, here's my Amazon Wish List.
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Flashbacks
I turned in my keys to my classroom and to the grad studio today. It reminded me of that day less than two years ago when Ian Hargraves took me to the Design office to help me get my keys in the first place.
I also cleaned out my desk, which had me recalling when I picked my first seat last year, and picking my seat this past year at orientation.
It's gone by so fast.
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May 11, 2005
The Role of Metaphor in Interaction Design
My thesis paper (340k pdf). I think it's an interesting piece of work and I'm proud of it.
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Busy Work
The last days of school are filled with busywork: printing stuff, copying stuff onto CDs, picking up caps and gowns, cleaning out your desk in grad studio, turning in keys, dropping clothes off at the dry cleaners for graduation, getting your advisors to sign off on your thesis project and paper, which mine did this afternoon. After a frantic period of printing, I dropped my stuff off with the graduate coordinator and left, feeling about 20 pounds lighter.
One of the documents I had to drop off was the project documentation (5.3mb pdf) for my thesis project. Seeing as how it was put together in a flurry of frantic activity yesterday and printed and bound late last night, it's no masterpiece. But it will do. It has to do.
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May 10, 2005
Thesis Project Presentations 2005
Another milestone reached. The graduating master's students presented their thesis projects yesterday. Some personal highlights:
- Miso Kim's "More Information @ Small Screen"
- Jeff Howard's "Collaborative Exploration: Building a Shared Image of the City"
- Phi-Hong Ha's "PassTime: Anticipation in Today's Airport Experience"
- Ashwini Asokan's "Designing a System of Grammars from Tradition--An Exploration of Design Languages in Cultural Systems"
- and Yuan-Chou Chung's "Monitoring and Managing Presence in Incoming and Outgoing Communication"
I presented my own thesis project of course, the final prototype of which can be found online, or downloaded for Windows (1.9mb Flash) or Mac (2mb Flash).
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May 5, 2005
Design is in the Details
Finishing my thesis project prototype this week, it struck me that there's a significant blind spot in CMU's program (and from what I understand, other interaction design schools' programs as well): working with developers on a prototype to get the feel of the thing right. Because at school you very seldom get to the working prototype stage (due to time and money constraints), you don't ever get into the finesse of an interactive design, those tiny things that make a huge difference. And those tiny things can usually only be seen in a working thing that can be played with and broken and fiddled with. Animations and delays and such don't appear in flat paper prototypes and storyboards. At least not well.
CMU is supposedly better at building things than some other schools that have lots of cool ideas and slick videos to go with them, but it could be better. I suppose one could argue that this is what the thesis project is for: to take an idea out to the working prototype phase, but it seems like too important a thing to save until the very end of your graduate education. Especially considering that many people don't make it to the working prototype phase in their thesis work, or do projects that would be almost impossible to do that with without a team of developers.
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May 3, 2005
Last Days of D School
The last days of graduate school are surprisingly quiet, although filled with anxiety and a tinge of panic. I went to my last class last week, which, like my first class, was with the inspiring Dick Buchanan. My last crit was yesterday, for service design, presenting a rethinking of Pittsburgh's light rail service, the T. Next Monday, I present my thesis project and turn in the final version of my thesis paper to be bound. Thus, these last days are about the final polish on my thesis work: typesetting and proofreading the thesis paper while creating the presentation and process book for my project. I'm also sending frantic emails to my developer, Dave Rowett, about bugs and final features to make it into the project prototype. It's all coming to a close.
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