May 11, 2005
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.
Posted by Dan at 05:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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).
Posted by Dan at 09:54 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 05, 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.
Posted by Dan at 10:56 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 03, 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.
Posted by Dan at 11:39 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 22, 2005
Thesis Project Beta Prototype
Please play with the beta version of the FilePiles prototype (~1mb swf)! I'd appreciate any feedback or comments you can give me.
Some thing that aren't obvious:
- Once you've made a pile, right-click/control-click for more options
- Use your up and down arrow keys to manually browse a pile
Hopefully, everything else will be more obvious. Remember that it's still a work in progress, so some stuff is still in development.
Posted by Dan at 05:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 26, 2005
Stress
In the last week, I
- lost my programmer for my thesis project, leaving me in the lurch with a half-finished demo
- madly scrambled to find a replacement, which I think I might have done with some help from Jeff
- searched for money to pay said programmer, which may involve cashing in some savings bonds I've had for 35 years. Seriously.
- had major issues re-printing my music map of Amazon
- got a tattoo
- presented our group model for conceptual models class
- discovered a cavity in a tooth that I need to deal with ASAP
- got yet another $300 bill for the hospital for my emergency room visit back in July (this after paying them $250 already. CMU's insurance is terrible.
- speaking of which, my wife just got a notice that our insurance company hasn't paid a dime for some doctor's visits for her either, to the tune of $225
- AND the insurance company keeps sending me weekly letters asking whether I have other insurance, which I clearly don't and they are just stalling to prevent paying these bills
- had three job interviews during career days
- set up two more phone interviews for this upcoming week
- tried to do a backlog of grading for my class so I can submit my students' mid-term grades this week
- added to my thesis paper presentation for my presentation in Montreal next week
- Oh, and did I mention my daughter went to the emergency room sick?
- and that my wife is sick as well?
Anyway, this is what I've been dealing with. In this last semester, the schoolwork has gotten lighter, but the stress is still high.
Posted by Dan at 11:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 31, 2005
CHI Rejection
My poster (363k pdf) of my thesis project was rejected from CHI, which is sort of a relief: now I don't have to go. But I did waste a couple of days writing up the four- page paper (on a poster!) required for submission. Oh well.
Posted by Dan at 04:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 19, 2004
Thesis Project Poster
I put together a poster (393k pdf) of this project for presentation at CMU and possibly at CHI and/or the IA Summit. I've submitted proposals and (for CHI) a paper in support of showing there, so we'll see.
Posted by Dan at 10:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 06, 2004
Thesis Project "Paper" Prototype
Please feel free to play with my low-fidelity, non-interactive prototype. Usually, these sorts of prototypes are done on paper, but I thought I'd try an online version so that I could get feedback from you good people. So please, feel free to leave me comments here or via email.
Posted by Dan at 08:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 24, 2004
Fall '04 Final Projects
The last three weeks of the semester bring with them the final projects of the fall. Here's everything I have to do between now and winter break:
- Journal Layout. For Graduate Typography, designing and laying out six pages of a fake journal. We got to choose the content, so mine is a literary journal whose theme is "20 Years of Don DeLillo's White Noise." (Dec. 14)
- Networked Art Piece for Interactive Graphics. I'm designing a program that fetches custom RSS feeds from Yahoo News based on user input, then shows the headlines in some sort of expressive typography display. (Dec. 9)
- Fine Draft, Thesis Paper. Finishing and refining my draft of my thesis paper. I'm on page 26 of about 35 as of this morning. (Dec. 17)
- Paper Prototype, Pile Cabinets. Create and test a set of paper prototypes of my thesis project. (Dec. 10)
- Poster of my thesis project, to be presented to faculty and classmates (and hopefully at CHI). (Dec. 17)
- Abstract and Paper for CHI on my thesis project, to go along with the poster. (Dec. 6)
Obviously, a busy time.
Posted by Dan at 09:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 21, 2004
Help a Fellow Out
If you are between the ages of 18 and 54, help me out once again by taking a 10-minute or less survey related to my thesis project.
If you haven't looked at my thesis project site in a while, stuff has been happening over there...
Posted by Dan at 10:40 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack