brightly colored food

The good days are simple.
A greasy lunch.
A bad haircut.
Sitting at a friend’s house in the afternoon with the windows open, sipping gin, working, gossiping.
Rocking out to Joan Jett in the living room at 1 am.

The NY Times has a nice article on the Simplicity Design Studio held by John Maeda, Cynthia Breazeal, Chris Csikszentmihályi, and Hiroshi Ishii at the Media Lab.

From the Simplicty Design Studio website.
We are working to establish an intellectual framework around the topic of SIMPLICITY by collaborating with some of the world’s top graphic and product designers. The SIMPLICITY Design Studio will leverage professional design knowledge combined with topics in emerging technology to find ways whereby complex user interactions can become vastly simplified.

I am excited by this for 2 reasons.

The first is the inclusion of professional designers, from multiple disciplines, in the research environment. The distance between professional designers (by which I mean a common-sense usage of that term) and research, even design research, is often vast. This is not only unfortunate, it’s problematic. The everyday practice of design/designers in the studio environment offers a wealth of knowledge and methods to be applied to research. In my own work, I often struggle to remember the practice of design in the midst of the demands of design research.

The second is the topic of Simplicity as a research agenda and the basis for a curriculum. Simplicity is not a new idea by any means. But despite all the discourse, there has been little advancement of the idea in practice. The development of a research agenda and curriculum around simplicity, especially within such a technologically focused environment, is encouraging.

It will be interesting to see how the ideas from this studio trickle out and through the world of technology research and design.

The Horror: Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen referring to Avil Lavigne as modern punk rock.

There is just so much wrong with this…..

Recently, I’ve been intrigued by the idea of the artisanal.

It started several months when ago a friend returned from New York with a collection of artisanal cheeses. He had a small party for the cheese and us. At the party we were introduced to each cheese, where it was from, what is was made of, and by whom. We ate the cheeses in a specific order, accompanied by specific wines. It was both fascinating and delicious. I learned something about a food and it’s making, and in learning that, I learned to eat it differently, to appreciate it while I consumed it.

There is something seductive about the artisanal. Both in the act of creating it (being an artisan), and in the appreciation of it (being a connoisseur). Some might suggest this is just haughtiness. But, in fact, the artisanal runs through many of the most unassuming of communities and practices.

And I wonder about the artisanal in design.

The idea of being an artisan, of tending to the craft of production, is old. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons it has been forgotten in some forms of contemporary design practice. It’s not new. It’s not all about concept. In fact, it’s all about reality, the real.

And as for the appreciation of design, when was the last time we allowed our self to pause to enjoy a design? To really enjoy it? Do we even know how?

To be fair, there are some interested in the artisanal is design. The exhibition Strangely Familiar, Design and Everyday Life, collects together many of them. Although the use of the word artisanal is absent from the exhibition, there is evidence of it throughout.

What might the artisanal in design be?
Designers interested in small batches rather than mass production.
Designers interested in cultivating connoisseurs.
Connoisseurs patronizing the cultivation of designers.

Wonderfully radical ideas, especially the last one.

And I’m first to admit, artisanal might be the wrong word. After all the artisanal has been re-manufactured as a marketing ploy. But there is something there in that idea – and there is something missing in design.

Chad is gone. I get to use the blog until then. It’s my first such experience. I’m trying to decide if I really want to commit to one, so Chad suggested I try his out. (…reminds me of an episode from The Love Boat. Or maybe one of those scary episodes of Fantasy Island.)

Anyway, I’m not Chad. I did not just graduate, nor am I looking for employment. In fact, I have a while before I complete my time at Carnegie Mellon University and am generally adverse to the idea of employment. I am in the PhD program in The School of Design. That bio that Chad linked to below is old. Disregard it.

So what does this mean – Chad gone and Carl here? I’m not sure. I think I’ll talk about design, probably a lot. I may also talk about food, drink, music, TV, movies, books, bars, robots, and Pittsburgh. And design.

Just know that nothing from here on out is from Chad. We’ll let you know when Chad returns.

- Carl

I’m racing off to the airport now for New Zealand. For the next two weeks, Carl DiSalvo will be guestblogging. He’s a PhD student in interaction design at CMU. Here’s his bio, but hopefully he’ll introduce himself as well.

Carl is brilliant and will make me look like the slouch that I am. Treat him well and he’ll start his own weblog. I have no clue what he’ll write about. He will certainly be more irreverent than me, though he just had a daughter, so sleep deprivation might slow him down a bit. Consider yourself warned.

Turned in the final thesis documentation on Friday, graduated yesterday, packed up today, leaving tomorrow, flying to New Zealand for two weeks on Wednesday, going to my girlfriend’s graduation in Boston after that, then headed west, hopefully to a job.

Quite an extensive list of videos that demonstrate ubiquitous computing interfaces - both the crazy stuff from sci-fi movies as well as UX classics like Apple’s Knowledge Navigator and Sun’s Starfire project. The range of concepts is broad enough that they probably should have included the mother of all demos, if only as a tribute.

Several of these were shown at the “Video Visions of the Future” panel at CHI, which included Hugh Dubberly, Bruce Tognazzini, and a guest appearance by Bill Buxton, who had some great rants on the importance of time-based “sketching” of interface concepts using video.

I couldn’t find anything that Buxton had written about on using video as a design tool on his website, but there’s a ton of other interesting articles, all online. Random aside: I met him at DUX last year when he sat down with a bunch of us grad students all having breakfast before the sessions and for about fifteen glorious minutes held forth with his visions of the future of computing. It was one of those moments that makes overpriced conferences like DUX worth it.