ALL ART BURNS

It does, you know. You just have to get it hot enough.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

japan and design: issue 0

I’m just now finishing up two weeks of design observation in Japan. My one sentence summary:

omfg.

I’ve always liked Japanese design, but I don’t think I could understand why until a few years of design school and a couple of weeks in Tokyo. Design is a part of everyday life here, in a way the west doesn’t get just yet. For one example, do a search for “tenegui” and check out the complex history of a simple piece of cloth.

Over the next few weeks I’ll try and summarize what I’ve learned/discovered during two weeks in Japan.

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posted by jet at 10:16  

Monday, May 25, 2009

DONE

Finally.

~4 years after deciding to go back to school and study design, I find myself in possession of a rather fancy diploma from Carnegie Mellon for the study of Master of Science in Tangible Interaction Design.   

Right now, I couldn’t tell you what that actually means. I need to wander off and do some “reflection on doing”, as the Eindhoven gang says. I’ll be wandering to Tokyo first, then back to the bay area to put in time for my employer that gave me an unpaid leave to get my degree, then, actually, I’m not sure what I’ll be doing.

If my employer and I can agree on something I can do for them using my newly-learned skills, then great. I’ve been there ~8 years and have a lot of wonderful relationships and memories that I’d hate to walk away from. On the other hand, maybe what I want to do isn’t something I can do for someone else, or isn’t something I can easily do at a public company smaller than Nokia or Microsoft or Apple.

Thus the “reflection on doing”. I just did ~4 years of design learning, and I need to think about what it means and where I want to go.

However, I’ve decided one thing already: I’m not a “foo designer”. I’m a “designer”. I’m not an “interaction designer” or an “user experience designer” or an “industrial designer” or a “whatever designer”. One of the most important things I learned in these recent years is that it’s all design. Architecture is design, industrial design is design, graphic design is design, typography is design, service design is design, etc.

Over the rest of my career I’ll design (and probably prototype) small, medium, and large things that I hope will make people’s lives better, even if it simply entertains them or amuses them. The last thing I want to do is silo myself and reduce the opportunities offered to me by defining myself in some narrow fashion.

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posted by jet at 22:10  

Friday, May 15, 2009

Work in Progress

I’ve posted slides and a poster or two over at my mTID page. There’s a lot more than that needs to be documented and written out, but it should give you a taste of some of what I’ve been working on for the past two semesters.

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posted by jet at 10:19  

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

A comparison of two task lists separated by one week

Monday, 4 May 2009:

  • finish final project for Interactive Technology and Live Performance
  • prepare presentation for end-of-Masters presentation
  • prepare 18″x24″ presentation board for drawing class
  • remove installed “Art That Learns” project from Children’s museum
  • prepare for final “Art That Learns” crit
  • attend crits, give presentations, etc.

Monday, 11 May 2009:

  • Start catching up on 3 year backlog of comic books
  • FInally watch Farscape’s last season
  • Ride bicycle someplace and back
  • Get brake fluid for ’81 R80G/S, order engine gasket rebuild kit
  • Order 30# of live crawfish for post-graduation boil-n-bbq.

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posted by jet at 20:53  

Friday, April 17, 2009

Thoughts on “Tangible Internaction Design”

Some stuff that’s been floating around in the back of my head as I finish out the semester and start reflecting on what I’ve been doing. Ripping the Tao te Ching, “The Design that can be explained is not the everlasting Design.” Now I can say whatever I like about capital-D design and always have an out!

Towards the end of last semester, I sat through a number of 10 minute presentations by designers, engineers, and artists. I wrote this in my sketchbook about half-way through:

Graphic design is the ability to focus on multiple compositional elements at once in a 2d space, taking into account typography, color, grid, graphics, etc. It follows that capital-d Design is the ability to focus on multiple compositional elements at once, independent of the medium. Background, typeface, color and grid (2d) are as important as shape, texture, temperature, and other tactile elements (3d). All of the elements have to be considered simultaneously as foreground and background, content and context, instead of focusing on them as individual elements.

I wrote that in response to slides that all had a similar problem: individually-good-but-conflicting elements. Perhaps a nice background and a good typeface, but they have nothing to do with one another at best, clash horribly at worse. A text-heavy set of slides about office workers that quickly became boring due to lack of illustrations of what office life is like, only page after page of fully justified text. Or an in-depth look at music in two different cultures that had no audio examples, only transcriptions of lyrics. Another was a image-heavy slideshow about youth culture with the images sort of randomly placed against various stock background images. All the presentations had excellent content, were clearly researched well, and the conclusions were all supported with lots of data — but because of the design choices made, the presentations were not very effective.

It seems that there is a gestalt people need to be able to comprehend if they want to be a designer, be it of images or things or processes. Maybe that’s how type, color, grid, and whitespace work on a piece of paper; how form and color work on a tool; or how space and light work as an architect. In design classes, we learn to “see the grid” or “learn what gives a thing the quality of thing-ness” but we also learn to look at things within their greater context. If need be, we keep popping contexts off the stack, until we’ve backed out far enough to get a full view and understanding of what it is we’re doing.   

So what does that have to do with tangible interaction design?

If the elements of communication design are in a plane and those of industrial design are in a volume, where do the elements of interaction design lie? For web sites and most software, within the plane, but what about interaction design applied to form? Are the elements shape, weight and texture? What if the form can change itself as part of the interaction? What if the form can change its characteristics in ways previously impossible, much less conceivable? How do we sketch these tangible interactions and what language do we use to discuss our sketches?

If the elements of tangible interaction design are the ability to manipulate the elements of texture, temperature, shape, stiffness, etc; what is the context that these elements live in? What is the “grid” of tangible interaction? What is a “form study” in tangible interaction? What will become the traditional exercises performed by students of tangible interaction?

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posted by jet at 19:09  
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