brightly colored food

Yes, um, so it’s been a while. When I’m nearing a month since last writing here, the ringing bells of guilt start tolling in my ears. Part of the summer internship involves using a fairly ridiculous number of collaborative tools, so I’m usually pretty burned out by the time I get to thinking about this weblog. I’m also maintaining two other weblogs as well - one as a bibliography of sorts and an internal one behind the IBM firewall. Fabio would probably say that I’m suffering from a bad case of interaction anxiety. There comes a point where you realize that you’re writing more about what you’re doing than actually doing it. Not a good thing.

Two days ago I presented my paper on an approach to audiocentric interface design at the International Community of Auditory Display (ICAD) conference. For the first paper I’ve presented at a conference, it went well, though I wish I’d gotten more feedback. However, I got the sense that my approach was probably a too bit pragmatic (dare I say user-centered?) to garner much interest from the audience of researchers (mostly psychoacousticians and computer scientists).

In addition to presenting some auditory interface components I’d created, I was focusing on how to give designers - who primarily have a visual focus - a simple, generative approach to issues of mapping and communicating using sound as a medium. It was motivated by what Richard Buchanan taught us last year about a grammatical approach to design, through my own experience swimming in psychoacoustics and sonification literature, and through observing other designers deal with sound design for the first time.

I don’t want to say I left the conference frustrated (actually, I do), but it was one of those moments where I was really attracted to some of the design problems in an area but largely turned off by the approaches and emphasis within that domain. Different priorities I suppose. I was going to tackle another auditory interface design project next year for my thesis project, but the past few days (as well as a grant that didn’t come through) have deflated my enthusiasm a bit.