jamin.org

Last week I went to Helsinki, Finland for a Nokia Innovation Summit on the use of mobile phones to improve adherence to highly active antiretroviral therapy. Nokia’s Community Involvement group put together and ran the two-day event, which consisted of presentations and brainstorming workshops in an effort to gain opinions and perspectives on the treatment of HIV/AIDS. The summit included approximately 50 participants from around the world—mainly Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, India, Thailand, and the United States.

The summit was the beginning of a project to create a solution that will be tested in a clinical trial. I was invited to represent my team as possible designers for the project.

While there was an agenda, it was very unclear what would come of the gathering. The problems around HIV/AIDS treatment across cultures, borders, politics, and organizations is tremendously complex. Where to even start?

I could not help but think it was a great opportunity for design to facilitate. Who better to guide a group from various backgrounds and expertise on an ambiguous journey toward some tangible result and common understanding? The situation seemed ripe for designers to facilitate. And I wondered what good might come from designers facilitating more conversations like this, whether it be the treatment of a worldwide epidemic to a political crisis to the vision and purpose of an organization.

Designers have the tools, expertise, and experience to dive into murky ambiguity, identity opportunities, and surface with clear solutions. To me, the summit represented an actual case where design could extend itself and begin impacting the world in new ways. While this summit was a good start to exploring the issues at hand, I would really like to see what outcome such an event would have with more design facilitation.

The October issue of Southwest Airlines Spirit magazine features innovative work at Carnegie Mellon University. The key ingredient: human understanding.

The article mentions work involving Jodi Forlizzi and has this excellent description of John Zimmerman:

Perhaps fittingly, Zimmerman does not look like your average Carnegie Mellon professor. Unlike most of the paunchy, bearded, and semi-distracted men you typically see wandering the halls, Zimmerman is tall and clean-shaven, rail-thin with buzzed, graying hair, and dressed head-to-toe in black. He reminds me a little of Steve Jobs when, appropriately, he pulls out his iPhone and sets it on the table of his cluttered office.

The article also briefly mentions my thesis project, MetaMe (on page 4).

One of the more innovative creations, an electronic widget called MetaMe, displays various manifestations of your personality depending on where you are in the moment.

Sadly, I still have not added the final design to my portfolio. If you have an iPhone, you can view a prototype of the service at metame.jamin.org. The prototype is not fully functional, but shows the main screens. I will try to get the complete work up soon.

Adaptive Path recently hosted a brown bag lunch with Jeremy Yuille regarding interaction design education. I skirted up from my Nokia office a few blocks away to take advantage of AP’s open invitation. It took me a while to realize that Jeremy is on the IxDA board, and that I had met him at the IxDA conference last February during a discussion about future IxDA conferences.

Jeremy is also Program Manager at ACID, Digital Media Coordinator at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Communication Design, Interaction Designer at overt.creation, according to LinkedIn. And he is working on a PhD in design, which was the impetus for coming to AP to talk about interaction design. To paraphrase, he wanted to talk to industry stakeholders before making claims about interaction design as an academic.

For an hour, the group—six folks from AP, Dani Malik, who heads the San Francisco IxDA chapter, and me—shared our backgrounds and experience as designers. An overarching theme of the discussion was why formal design education is or is not important for interaction design. With the speed of which interaction design has gained relevance over the past few decades, and with many interaction designers having not been formally trained, the question deserves exploration.

Most of the participants had some form of design or art background—three of us had gone to Carnegie Mellon University. We talked about the value of crits, learning to both give and taken constructive criticism, working in teams with people from various backgrounds, and gaining an understanding that design is not a yes/no question. Other points included the importance of typography and composition, attention to detail, being able to explore, tinker, and play.

We also briefly touched on the boundaries of interaction design through a discussion on what we tell other people when asked what we do. I went off on my usual tirade of not wanting to call myself an interaction designer due to the associations many people have with interaction design and the web or software or even all things digital (interaction design can have nothing to do with digital). Jared Cole, a fellow CMU alum who also participated, stated his insistence on simply being called a designer. I too now simply tell people I’m a designer at Nokia, rather than imply any specialization.

Undoubtedly, web design, or UI design, are specializations within interaction design. But the boundaries are either much broader or endless, and we have only begun to push at them. This is something I learned through design education, a perspective that industry has yet to fully gain.

Overall, I enjoyed the discussion. Given that we ran over time and seemed to have a lot more to say, it seemed the other participants found the conversation engaging and worthwhile as well. It was good to begin having the discussion outside the walls of academia, and I look forward to Jeremy’s thoughts on the matter.

I’m not sure Carnegie Mellon’s master of tangible interaction design is news to me. I sort of recall hearing something about it last spring. But today was the first time I saw a curriculum for the program. Like several of my former peers, I am intrigued by this program. And as a master of interaction design, I am curious how this program relates to my own, given the only difference in name is the word “tangible.”

During my two years as an interaction design student, I took courses with several of this new program’s faculty. So I wonder what these students will get that I did not. What they will get, and what is a question for some of my peers, is a master of design distinction despite the program being part of the school of architecture and not the school of design.

From the program description…

The Master of Tangible Interaction Design program is a one-year program at Carnegie Mellon University centered around new computational technologies in making. The program serves two distinct groups: those with significant engineering and/or computer science knowledge who wish to master design or artistic skills, and those with significant design, art, or architecture experience who wish to master technological means of making. The scope of study in the mTID program is broad, including digital fabrication, analog and digital electronics, media and materials, and computer programming.

Some comments collected on Twitter:

Phil Robinson yeah we were discussing putting ‘extreme’ before our name, or making us interaction designers of everything

Kyle Vice is it just me, or does this feel thrown together? 

Jared Cole does the mTID fall under the realm of art or design? are we talking MFA or M.Des? Art, I can see… Design, I cannot

Jodi Forlizzi yes, just add water and prerequisites, you’ve got yourself a master’s program.

This sounds like a cool program. It’s new, so I can excuse its haphazard appearance. But I do consider my master of interaction of design to include all types of interaction, tangible and intangible. So is this a subset of what I studied? To a degree, with a lot less emphasis on design. And it does not seem like a focus within interaction design, but more experimental, particularly with its deference to art and computer science.

Certainly, it will only benefit humankind if more people that make products with embedded computing (which is how I interpret this program) have some exposure to design. But a master in design (albeit mTID, which is even more obscure than mDes) from the school of architecture? Curious.

Obviously, I have not been writing much recently. There are a number of reasons for this. First, I needed a break from all the design thinking to remember how to function with the rest of the humans. It seems they don’t often talk about design or know what I’m talking about.

Second, I’ve had a lot to do in the way of preparing for my move to San Francisco and Nokia. I moved out of my apartment and will be leaving Pittsburgh in a few days for a road trip that I haven’t completely planned yet. In general, I’m visiting a few folks in the east, then heading to the top of the country, hitting state and national parks along the way. Some stops include Geneva, New York; Vienna, Virginia; Charlottesville, Virginia; Great Smoky Mountains; Badlands; and Glacier National Park. I’ll eventually arrive in Mammoth Lakes around early August, where I’ll stay for a bit before heading to San Francisco. I’m doing this by myself and living in my car or a yet-to-be-purchased tent. I’m pretty excited for the adventure.

Finally, it’s been difficult to blog as I have not had a laptop since mid May when we had to return the ones the School of Design let us use during our time there. Not having a laptop has really cut down all the design reading that often inspired posts. Of course, not being in school and exposed to great teachers and peers has also had its impact. But I suspect I will pick up again when I start working.

Until then, don’t expect much from me unless I bite it and buy a laptop or make posts through my iPhone from the road.