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.

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.

The School of Design is getting its act together and getting the grad studio a mess of subscriptions to design-related magazines. Our library actually has a pretty decent collection, but it’ll be nice to have have them nearby, borrow them for the weekend, etc.

If you had to pick a few of your favorites, what would they be? Not just slick, pretty photograph design rags either - what periodicals are most important to a designer’s education?

Sometimes people surprise you with their skills. Marc Rettig, for example. By day he’s a visiting professor: mild-mannered, insightful, and affable. By night he’s a party-thrower, the seasoned mixologist that keeps a drink in every hand and the conversation lively. Obviously, this is a man who takes the wide view of “interaction design”.

It makes me wonder what his tutorial at DUX is going to be like…

Using 2 sheets of ordinary 8.5 x 11 inch paper, create a structure that supports the weight of 10 pounds worth of books for 30 seconds. How tall can you make that structure?

Hugh Dubberly visited our grad seminar last week week and posed us design problem. Stacking three dictionaries on top of the table, he handed us a ream of paper and let us - students and faculty alike - loose. It was a nice moment, seeing that much experimentation and innovation (not to mention excitement) in such a short period of time. In the land of thoughtful, user-centered design, I enjoyed having such a difficult yet clearly defined challenge. You might want to try it sometime as an icebreaker or kickoff activity for a brainstorm. Track the height of the successful designs against time to reflect on once you’re done.

Anyone who tries it out is welcome to post their results - think tall…

Blow-by-blow of last semester’s course load.

Independent Study: Auditory Interfaces.

I covered what I did in slightly more detail in a previous post, but to summarize, I looked at how auditory interfaces might leverage spatialization, and how a person might interact with the interface. I’m still finishing up the research, and I’m currently looking at a person might select one spatialized audio object out of many swarming around their head. We’re using a great big metal dial to tune into the objects, so we’re exploring some of the different ways that might happen - types of motion, feedforward/feedback, etc. It’s all good fun, but I’m trying to wrap it up quickly to see if I can get a conference paper from the work, and the deadlines are fast approaching.

The work was done in the Interaction Design Studio, located within the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems. I worked with Francine Gemperle, who directs the Studio, Tad Hirsch (now at the MIT Media Lab), and some very bright engineers who know their way around MAX/MSP. Here’s a short blurb about the studio, and some of their previous projects (though it hasn’t been updated in a while. Much of their work now centers on wearable computers, as they work with the aptly named Wearable Group at CMU.

Classes I took last semester…

Computing in Design

An introductory programming class. We used Java. Not much else to say except that there’s better languages that an interaction design student could be learning, especially ActionScripting and Lingo, or maybe some web scripting or services languages. Hopefully that will change - there’s a proposal up for ActionScripting next year.

In my continuing series of oversharing about the classes I took last semester…

Graduate Design Studio

A studio class taught by Dan Boyarski, head of the school, and by two other instructors - Colin Campbell and Tina Blaine. There were three sections to the class.

1. Interpreting Voice - mostly dealing with typography, both static and dynamic type. We produced dozens of graphical treatments of quotes we were given. Mine was from the avant garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who in 1913 wrote, “Catalogs, posters, advertisements of all sorts. Believe me, they contain the poetry of our epoch.” Lots of time spent alone in InDesign and AfterEffects and together in critiques. It helped to build critiquing skills, explore a design space given some specific constraints, and strengthen our communication design skills.

2. Information Visualization - an exercise where we each had a different thing to be re-interpreted using the principles of information design - mostly content, some artifacts and spaces. I got Scrabble. People, I *hate* Scrabble. I learned a bit of respect for the game, but not before I pledged to never play it again. My interpretation was based around seeing the board topographically, with individual tile scores represented by their respective heights. It gave a nice way to see scores at a glance - something ordinary Scrabble doesn’t do well. My final piece was a 3D Flash animation of a particularly high scoring game I found on the internet between a Scrabble pro and a ScrabbleBot. I used Swift3D (terrible, terrible application) and Flash. There were animated tiles flying through the air, growing taller, multiple camera angles - much craziness (of the elegant, restrained sort).

3. Sound Design - We covered the basics of sound production, talked a great deal about the role of sound in film (read Chion’s Audio-Vision if that’s your film sound or sound design interests you), and produced two pieces: a soundscape and an sonified version of our kinetic type piece from the first section. As a sometimes foley artist, I worked on my techniques for performing sound using physical objects as well as software-based synthesizers. There was lots of editing, layering, effecting, and all that other fun stuff as well. I used Deck, Peak, Reason, and Live. Part of my piece incorporated a conversation at a party between a number of aliens - odd, yes, but a great way to learn about formants and other elements of speech along with the dynamics of conversation (think sound puppetry). Apollinaire got a dramatic reinterpretation using some of the “poetry” of recent TV ads - a bit of a juxtaposition, but it worked out well.