brightly colored food

Some bright CMU student whipped together a webapp for visualizing class schedules, so here’s what I’m signed up for in the spring. Scroll down and click on the links to read the course descriptions.

Because I’ll also be taking Thesis Project and Thesis Paper as courses, I’ll probably only be taking two of those listed, most likely Awareness, Action and Interaction, taught by Carl DiSalvo, and Special Topics: Fundamentals of Computational Visual Form, taught by Golan Levin. It’ll be nice to do some design again: this semester has been all about research (literature and user) and writing. I got my appetite whetted last week when I went to a workshop on physical computing and using MAX/MSP that was taught by Eric Singer (check out his videos). Tina Blaine at the Entertainment Technology Center was nice to put it on and invited us design students to come play.

Good design means not leaving traces of the designer and not overworking the design. If you overdo the design it will touch the beholder’s consciousness. I think that when people and things are within the boundaries of consciousness they are at their farthest from heaven.
- Naoto Fukasawa

Congrats to Molly on her launch of The Hub, which looks to be an excellent weblog and design resource guide!

The weblog has some nice coverage of the conference right now, and it looks like Anne, Fabio, and Molly have all been posting to the weblog. There’s also several others who haven’t yet posted, including Matt, Adam, and Andrew. Could be quite good. Just one question: where’s the RSS feed for the weblog?

From Dan via email.

If you like your interaction design theory pronounced with a healthy Italian accent, you might want to check out the video stream [windows media format] from the Symposium on Foundations of Interaction Design, being held at Ivrea today and tomorrow. I already missed Don Norman, Tom Moran, and Gillian Crampton Smith (Ivrea is 6 hours ahead of Pittsburgh/East coast time).

Maybe if enough people ask nicely they’ll put up the archives online…

I just read a funny email off a distribution list for the school of Design. It’s from an undergrad, and he’s proposing a no-holds-barred Pictionary match between the Industrial Design and Communication Design majors. Ah, those crazy kids. As you’d expect from a Design program, most of these kids have excellent drawing skills, so it will be a fun spectator sport. (Yes, I can draw. No, nothing like they can.)

Concepts whose meaning, importance to my thesis, and previous usage and development across an array of disparate academic communities has vexed and perplexed over the last few weeks:

Dan Saffer is doing a nice job writing about our program. Wish I’d done the same. His posts on what is an art and what is a product are key to understanding the way we think about Design (yes, big D) in our program.

So, lots of good stuff, though Rob, who’s a masters student across the campus in HCI, finds it frustrating:

I’ve been half-trying to avoid reading Dan’s posts about Design Seminar recently, although not because they aren’t good. Every time I do, I feel like a penniless, hungry child looking in a bakery window; I can see the wondrous pastries and smell their delectable smells, but I’m helplessly tormented by the knowledge that I’ll never get.

That was from Rob’s post on the role of higher education in becoming a skilled professional, comparing trade schools to universities. Recently I’ve been interviewing HCI and interaction design students here at CMU recently to help some professors understand and clarify about the role of interaction design here, and Rob’s weblog brings an interesting perspective.

To Design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.
- Paul Rand