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November 24, 2004

Fall '04 Final Projects

The last three weeks of the semester bring with them the final projects of the fall. Here's everything I have to do between now and winter break:

Obviously, a busy time.

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Drawing with Fungus

It's been a while since I've posted any projects from my interactive graphics class. I just finished this small drawing program (page with 108k java applet). I was trying for an organic feel with the spreading ink and it ended up looking like growing mold. Some of my classmates solutions

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November 23, 2004

Hi M.O.M.

Another week, another poster. This time, an event in a familiar place (ie. Pittsburgh). My event was a local tattoo convention.

Apologies for the large image, but since I'm underwhelmed with how this turned out (despite the best efforts of my model) there's no sense in providing a pdf. But I did want to show it, if only for the hours of effort that was poured into it. And maybe it's not as flawed as I think, who knows.

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November 22, 2004

Sick of It All

If you’re fine, you can wait
Don’t mention that you’re sick of this place
Say you’re not sold, you’re sick of it all
Say you’re not sold, you’re sick of it all
Just as long as it takes
What’s the upside of this place?
-Pete Yorn, "Carlos (Don't Let It Go To Your Head)"

This is a rant from a tired, burned out man. I can understand if you'd want to skip this post. You've been warned.

I am so sick of school. I'm tired of everything: the projects, the classes, the constant, unrelenting work. The lack of money. The lack of free time. (I haven't read a work of fiction in a year and a half.) The constant feeling that you are falling behind and need to be working on something. It's wearing me down and making me irritable and angry.

I feel like I don't have the time to do anything as well as I'd like, thus everything I'm doing sorta sucks. Everything is suffering. And I don't have the adrenaline (or, frankly, the desire) that I had last fall to just stay up until 2 a.m. every night to make it all come out all right. I am just creatively drained. Although I'm still learning a lot, the projects are all starting to just feel like impediments to my graduating, rather than being enjoying unto themselves.

Adding to my agony is the knowledge that I don't want to feel this way. I want to enjoy and appreciate school. I'm paying through the nose for it, after all. And I chose to do this. No one has to go to graduate school. And many would kill to be here, doing what I'm doing and learning what I'm learning. It's just exhausting and right now, I can't wait until it's over. I so envy the HCI students with their one-year program, and the classmates who've already graduated.

I'm hoping this is just some end-of-the-semester funk, because I've still got six months left of school to make it through. I am so over it.

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November 19, 2004

Like the Horizon

The more I write of my thesis paper, the farther away the end seems to recede. I'm trying to remember the immortal words of Chad Thornton: Don't overthink the thesis paper. But it's hard when there's reams of information on your subject and you want to include a decent sampling of the ideas in the space.

Anyway, I just sent in another 6 pages of the paper. It was supposed to be my last chunk, but it isn't. But I've written for nearly 12 hours straight and I can't write anymore.

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November 16, 2004

Onomatopoeia Poster

We're running out of time in typography class, so we've collectively decided to pull the plug on the poster project that got put on hold to do posters on a place we've never visited and an event in a familiar place. Which is a shame, because I'm basically done with this poster.

To recap, this poster involved combining an onomatopoetic word (pop, wow, zap) with another word and an image. The three things together were supposed to make some sort of statement. Mine (36k pdf) is, not surprisingly, political.

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November 15, 2004

Wake Up Call

Today was probably the last time I'll ever wake up at 6:00 am, trudge blearily to my laptop, and register for classes before trudging back to bed again. It's good and bad.

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November 11, 2004

Waiting for Mok

Once every couple of years, the Design Advisory Board pays a visit to the School of Design to make sure we're on track. This week was one of those times. After a flurry of frantic activity, cleaning studios and hanging posters, most of the grad students hung out in studio all afternoon Tuesday, waiting for a studio tour that never happened. Oh well. Hopefully the visit went well.

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5VV337

CMU has an undergrad named Kermin Fleming in Jeopardy's College Tournament and he's apparently kicking ass too. In true CMU style his final wager in an opening round game was a message to nerds-in-the-know: $1337. Classic.

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November 10, 2004

Classmates 04-05

Pictures and bios of my fellow classmates are now finally up online: master's candidates in interaction design, master's candidates in communication planning and information design, and PhDs in design.

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November 9, 2004

Post-Midterm Malady

It's about the time in the semester when, thanks to the unrelenting workload and the fluctuations in the Pittsburgh weather (65 degrees F one day, 35 degrees F the next), people start getting sick. I'm no exception: I've been fighting off a cold for about two days now, and I've finally lost. I woke up this morning with a raging sore throat. I think I finally got what a lot of my classmates had last week: the post-midterm malady.

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Comments Partially Turned Off

The last week has been a nightmare as far as comment spam, with numerous hits on my comments hourly. Even as I'm writing this, two more comment spams just came in. So I'm disabling comments except on the main page, which has the most recent entries. Please do mail me about various entries; I'd hate for spammers to totally ruin the interactivity of this site.

Meanwhile, I'll try to come up with another solution.

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November 8, 2004

A Long Road

HEMINGWAY: I rewrote the end to A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
GEORGE PLIMPTON: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
HEMINGWAY: Getting the words right.

I'm no Hemingway, but I think I know a little about what Papa is talking about. I've spent the last two days finishing and printing my Unfamiliar Place poster for graduate typography class. This involved hours of kerning and pixel pushing to get the words (and images) right. I'm pretty proud of it; it's probably the most beautiful poster I've ever done. It's about a place I've only visited through music, pictures, and my dreams: Iceland. Take a look (5.1mb pdf)

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November 7, 2004

A Fun Space for Interactive Art

In my Interactive Graphics class taught by digital artist Golan Levin, we naturally look at a lot of interactive and digital art. Imagine my surprise when I took my daughter to the grand opening of the new Pittsburgh Children's Museum yesterday and found it chock-full of interactive art exhibits, including a few we've actually discussed in class, including the very cool Text Rain and soon, the Wooden Mirror.

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Write On

I cranked out another sizable chunk of my thesis paper last week, turning in to my advisor Shelley Evenson roughly another third, bringing me to around 20-some-odd pages roughly written. This last section I wrote was mainly about metaphor as part of the design process. The final section, which I'll be writing this upcoming week, will be on metaphor in interactive products. Looks like the paper will be around 30 pages.

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November 3, 2004

CMU and the Semantic Web

Interesting CMU project called myCampus that uses a semantic web environment for context-aware mobile services. Read this article on its implications. My question: how come there's no designer on the team?

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Service Design

I crashed a session of Shelley Evenson's Designing for Service class to hear Mark Jones, head of service design for IDEO Chicago, talk about service design.

Service design is at the cutting edge of design, and it's not easy. Traditional design is about the relationship between a user and a product. Service design, in contrast, has multiple touchpoints (environments, processes, people) and is about these touchpoints interacting with users over time. Users can be exposed to multiple experiences via repeated exposure to the service, and it requires multiple stakeholders to make a service come alive, usually through complex choreography. Moreover, there are multiple pathways through a service; it's usually bigger than any one pathway, so you can't design the service in a controlling way. You won't be able to control the entire experience.

Most services involve person-to-person interactions in real time, thus the point of consumption is the same as the point of production. This is tricky and the stakes are high. You can't plan for every contingency or for the entire experience. However, you can design service moments, or small parts of the experience, which, when hung together, constitute the service and its experience.

There are four types of service design at IDEO. For new services: service validation and service innovation. For existing services: service audits and service improvements. Alongside traditional design research methods, role playing plays a significant part of their design process. Prototyping a service typically means finding service moments (granular parts of the experience), then creating scenarios around those moments and acting them out with clients and stakeholders.

It's important to remember that you aren't just designing for the end user, but also for the people doing the service. You need to resolve issues with all stakeholders for a successful and satisfying design. The earlier you get the entire team and stakeholders involved, the better the outcome and buy-in will be. If your designs involve significant operational changes, you are going to need internal champions to enact those changes.

In service design, small details can have power and impact to delight customers, and that's what you are looking for: to give users something extra that resonates with the company's brand. You can't really do service design with dealing heavily with brand. There's very little that's random in service environments. Even spoken words can be designed.

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November 1, 2004

Figuring Out My Spring 05 Schedule

When I was young, some of my favorite comic books were the Marvel "What If...?" series, where some decision or event happened differently and they show the consequences. The spring course schedule is out, and it's time to play What If with my schedule. "What if I took Class X? Then I need Class Y so I have enough units to graduate." Etc.

It's hard to believe that it is already time to choose spring classes and that this is the last time I'm ever going to do it. Grad school is rushing by.

And oh the decisions I have to make. Here's a small sampling of the courses I could choose from:

But I've only got two slots left and the last semester is very intense, thesis-project wise. Plus job hunting. And teaching. So I don't want to overextend myself. Decisions, decisions.

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