ALL ART BURNS

On the first day of one of my classes (“Human Experience in Design”), the instructor asked us to complete this sentence in 15 words or less:

“I want to be a designer because …”

He read aloud some of the answers people gave and he challenged us to answer the question every year and see how our answers changed during school and during our careers. I think this is a useful excercise no matter what your discipline, you should try answering this yourself and checking back every year.

In keeping with the original spirit, I’m going to keep my answer down to 15 words or less. I’m going to append five rules for acheiving the answer to my question and see how those change over time as well as the answer to the question.

I want to be a designer because I want to make things that people can use to improve their lives.

Five personal rules for acheiving that goal:

• Always remember that improving a person’s life is easy.
• Every project I work on should improve at least one person’s life, even if it simply entertains them.
• Never work on a product that a person will have to send to a landfill.
• Never attempt to convince someone to buy a product they do not actually need.
• Leave the world in a better place than it was in when I entered.

Technorati Tags: design, personal goals

After some 15-odd years in the tech industry doing everything from programming parallel supercomputers to developing secure applications for consumer electronics I decided to go back to school for a BFA in Industrial Design. This journal, “ALL ART BURNS”, is as a public design journal and sketchbook. It might turn into my pro designer blog after I graduate or it might continue to be a journal and sketchbook. Either way, I hope this will be of use to other people interested in design or who are also on the path to becoming a designer. The name comes from one of the fire/art themed stickers I made back in 2002 for Burning Man.

The long version of how this came about is in the earlier journal entries. The short version is that I miss what got me sucked into computers and technology in the first place: making tools people can use to improve their lives. When I started developing software eons ago, I often did every phase of delivering a product: determine requirements, design both the architecture and what we now call the user interface, procure hardware, develop the software, build and run tests, write end-user documentation, and install and maintain the product.

Somewhere in the mid-90s, the technology world went through a sea-change. My IT projects turned into installing vendor-provided solutions so I moved into engineering. Engineering in the dot-com boom in the valley was not terribly fun: I had a choice of being either a minor cog in a machine or an ego-driven uber-geek. Neither suits me well and I’ve been a mediocre engineer as a result, with only my passions for hacking, security and privacy keeping me motivated (and employable).

A few years ago I started going to Burning Man and quickly adopted their philosophy of “no spectators”. I started making art for the playa; that quickly evolved into learning to work metal; and soon after the discovery that I really enjoy making physical things that people can interact with. Working over the summer on a project for Burning Man wasn’t enough, I wanted to make physical things year around. I considered going back to school for a degree in mechanical engineering or robotics but both of those felt rather sterile. One day I discovered what it is that industrial designers do, and realized that industrial design was what I’ve been wanting to do for a long, long time.

I still like technology and I’ll always be a hacker of some sort but I have little desire to write software as a full-time job for the rest of my life. I want to make physical things that people manipulate and understand how people interact with those physical things. It’s one thing to develop a new authentication mechanism, it’s another for that mechanism to be usable. Odds are that anything I make will contain some sort of technology and it’s likely that I’ll help design and implement some of that technology.

Technorati Tags: college, industrial design, personal

Classes don’t start for a couple of months yet but I’m already getting in the back-to-school mental space.

I’m filling out more paperwork for Carnegie Mellon than I ever did for a public school and it’s amazing how much of it is, in fact, paper. Some of it I can do online, including applying for financial aid and course registration, but I still fill out paper forms to prove I have health insurance, my shots, etc. Online registration for courses is one of the best things to happen in the past 20 years — no getting up at o-dark-hundred just to wait in line for hours down at the administration building filling in bubble sheets and getting signatures from admins. (If you’ve only registered online, let me tell you about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways…)

A fair amount of my time in the past few weeks has also been spent researching student loans and other forms of funding. My employer has no sabbatical policy and little in the way of educational programs that I can use to pay for school. They’re good about flex-time and would probably pick up the tab for a specific class required by work, but that’s about it. I’m planning for the worst possible case: quitting my day job, starting school on loans, then picking up consulting work during the academic year as time permits.

Quitting could also be the best case if I can scrounge the cash for the first year and really focus on school. I’m going to school to get my core art and design skills whipped into shape by experts not just get some letters after my name (“BFA, IDSA”). I’d rather go to school for 3-4 intensive years and live cheaply instead of taking a night classes and dragging school out over ~8 years. It took me 7 years to get my first BA, I’d like to not repeat that process again.

Looking back at my last tilt at school, something that I really didn’t understand was money. My family never had much money and my father didn’t know how to manage what we had so I never learned how to manage money. I had no idea how finances worked, how to save or invest, why one should buy a house instead of rent, etc. In retrospect I didn’t have to go to a local city college, I could probably have gotten loans and grants for a much better school had I or my parents known how the system worked.

While I won’t spill the entire financial details of my life here, I think I will occasionally talk about some financial things. I’m probably not the only person so clueless about money that they didn’t even realize how clueless they were (are?) about money.

Ok, enough boring personal details. Next entry is about spimes and security, hope you like it.

Technorati Tags: Carnegie Mellon, debt

“Weren’t you going to school or something?”

I really hate not being in school right now but I won’t be pursuing my degree until next fall for personal reasons.

Until I can go back to school, I’m putting myself on a little Industrial Design self-study program. The plan is to focus on reading and reviewing books, spending time in the local museums with a sketchbook, coming up to speed on Vectorworks and Solidworks, and taking classes in both figure drawing and Japanese language classes. (If you know of any Japanese classes in Pittsburgh that aren’t university classes, please let me know). There’s also another furniture project I’d like to work on, but that requires bringing the garage out of the last century and into this one. There’s just not much I can do with a single 15A circuit that’s shared with the lights and garage door openers.

Books to be reviewed:

• The Chair, Galen Cranz
• Industrial Design Reader, Carma Gorman (ed.)
• Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling
• Security and Usability, Cranor and Garfinkel

Anything else I should add to the list?

Technorati Tags: industrial design, books, Japanese, Pittsburgh

Ran into jwz at the Meat Beat Manifesto show and he posed the question to me, “What does an industrial designer do?”

My smart-ass answer was “make stuff!” followed by examples of what industrial designers make these days: furniture, video game controllers, tools, dashboards for cars, etc.

But I think my answer was biased by what I want to do as an industrial designer. There are a lot of Kareem Rashid and Philippe Starck wannabees out there competing to be the next Name and to be honest, I don’t care to complete with them one bit. Designing-to-be-consumed is just not something I’m interested in. If I make something, I want people to use it until it wears out or is completely obsolete, not just use it until it’s out of style and throw it away. Unfortunately for the planet, much of ID is based around convincing you to get rid of a perfectly good mobile phone, car, bicycle, couch or trashcan and replace it with one that’s simply different. (On the other hand there’s sculptor-turned-designer Michael Aram who makes plenty of things that people will probably replace long before they wear out, and of whom I’m unashamedly jealous.)

I respect the business sense of designers like Rashid and Starck, and there are some things they’ve designed that I wouldn’t mind owning, but making the same things in new styles just to support consumerism is not what I want to contribute to the world. It’s hard to imagine getting excitied about making This Year’s Sneaker when I’m completely happy with my ~10 year old ergo keyboards, ~100 year old ball-peen hammer, and Levi 501s that I wear until they fall apart.

What interests me is practical things that can be used for years: comfortable furniture that looks good, video game controllers that don’t destroy your hands and that can be moved from console to console, displays and layouts for motorbikes and automobiles, or kitchen utensils and household tools that you can hand down to your kids. I’m also interested in mobile computing and how to integrate wireless computing into everyday life, an area where people expect ot throw things out or replace them after only a few months or a year, so I’m sure I’ll have brain-lock any day now.

So, back to the question of what industrial designers make, here’s a few exmaples based on job listings I’ve seen posted in various trade magazines:

• sporting equipment: bicycles and accessories, golf clubs, tennis rackets, safety gear for just about any sport
• branded clothing and accessories: athletic shoes, motorcycle clothing, all the overpriced doodads you see in the display case at the car dealership (like the Jeep or Hummer sport radios)
• medical equipment: next time you’re at the doctor, look at all the fancy tools with integrated computers and displays, an industrial designer was probably involved
• power tools: the design-award winning De Walt boombox/battery charger really made people realize how useful industrial designers could be in what you’d think is a really boring market

Technorati: industrial design