jamin.org

I got back from the first Interaction Design Association (IxDA) conference, Interaction08, late Monday night after an 11-hour drive in a rented minivan with five other of my Carnegie Mellon peers. Rather than provide a blow-by-blow, I’ll apply a little bit of poetic license and start at the end.

At the end of the second day of the two-day affair, in lieu of one of the presentations, anyone who wanted to share their thoughts on the conference and what it should be next year was invited to attend a group meeting. At first, I wasn’t going to go, but one of my peers, Kyle Vice, was going, and the previous presentations were not inspiring me.

Kyle and I were the only ones to show up, initially. But eventually a small band arrived, totaling nine, though most were already IxDA board members. Thus, CMU students represented 25 percent of attendees. Not counting the board members, 50 percent. Gregory Petroff led the session and asked each of us to say why we came, what we thought could have been better, and what we would like to see next year. That seems like a reasonable way to construct this post.

Why did I attend?

I agreed with Bill DeRouchey, who was also present, who said that it felt important to be at the first conference on interaction design. I also mentioned that as an interaction design graduate student, who has been in the bubble of academia for the past two years, I wanted to see what the discipline thinks of itself, and contrast that against my thoughts of interaction design attained at Carnegie Mellon. What I didn’t say was that at the School of Design, we explore interaction design is a broad sense, and often talk about design and interaction design interchangeably. In design, there is no subject matter. My peers and I bring this perspective to interaction design and are thus interested in applications of interaction design beyond the screen and software.

Many of my peers were frustrated and angry with a lot of the presentations, as was I. Though I was tempered by the expectation that there would not be much new material, given that my life is currently devoted to the study of interaction design. That said, we found the application of interaction design by the representative community narrow, which brings me to the second question: what could have been better?

What could have been better?

I told the group that I would have liked to have seen a discussion and attempt at defining interaction design. Of all places and times to address this question, the first conference on interaction design seemed to be a likely place. And as this is a question that plagues every interaction designer, and serves as fodder for heated debate on the IxDA discussion list, I hoped it would receive some attention. Instead, the definition of interaction design escaped discussion, which I found disappointing. In relation to this, I also said that I would have liked to have seen a greater exploration of the boundaries of interaction design. What I didn’t say, and what my peers echoed, was that interface and software received too much attention. Surprisingly, there was very little presented regarding mobile interaction, physical products, ambient devices, gestural interaction, wearables, ubiquitous computing, and the role of interaction design in experience design, service design, organizational change.

Ironically, during the closing remarks, Dan Saffer listed five themes he garnered from the conference. The first was that we were exploring the boundaries of interaction design. In addition, he remarked that we skipped the question of the definition of interaction design, which received cheers from the crowd. This distressed me for the reasons stated above.

Five Themes

Since I brought it up, now seems like a good time to go over the five themes, mentioned in Saffer’s closing remarks.

Boundaries Where is our role? What defines us? Answer: comes from what we’re working on; common tools and prototyping

Tradition Not practicing in a vacuum

Context Space/time; organizations

Argument Providing tools for argument; and products are an argument

Influence How the products we create influence the way people behave

As I said, I did not think there was enough exploration of the boundaries, evidenced by the gap between what my peers and I think of interaction design and what we saw as practice at the conference. I disagree that what defines us is what we’re working on. It may be how others currently perceive interaction designers because other opportunities do not exist. But it doesn’t define us.

In talking with other attendees, I was glad to hear that people entertain the application of interaction design to more arenas. But it seemed evident that everyone was limited by their current circumstance and no place else to go. This is a fear that many of the students at the School of Design have when considering employment opportunities. If this is the situation, perhaps interaction design needs to design its way into other areas.

What would I like to see next year?

In the meeting, I said it would be great to see more representation from outside the community, like business and management. And for presentations, it might be nice to see designers and clients presenting both sides of the endeavor. What I didn’t say, perhaps because I felt it was assumed by my earlier comments, was that I would like to see a good and constructive discussion of the definition of interaction design, or some acknowledgment of the struggle. We did this at the Emergence conference with the question of service design both in the first and second year, and people seemed to respect the discussion and appreciate the struggle.

In addition, it would be great to see more case studies with actual projects. Heck, it would have been interesting to hear about the role of interaction design in the Charmr project. But what about interaction design for a service design project? Or the process of interaction design in organizational strategy?

One of the group participants mentioned a forum where attendees could show their work. This is an intriguing idea, which would allow greater attendee participation and provide greater exposure to the different types of work in interaction design. One project on interaction design in an area that is off the radar could spark debate and inspire curiosity and further broadening of current practice.

The Good

OK, now that I’ve offered some criticism, constructively, I hope, let’s talk about the good.

Dan Saffer, who according to my understanding, put together a lot of the content, did a great job of attracting some quality speakers. I especially enjoyed seeing Alan Cooper and Bill Buxton (not that I agreed with them). And I could see the attempt to have both practical and more philosophical presentations. Other speakers I enjoyed include Matt Jones and Carl DiSalvo.

Savannah is a great location to have a conference in February. T-shirt weather. Not too big. Lots of bars and restaurants. Also, the Savannah Collage of Art and Design was impressive. Carnegie Mellon should take note.

The food was top notch. Sunday’s lunch was better than any wedding I have ever attended. And parties with free food and booze are always welcome, and I would say essential for a successful conference.

As with any conference, the best part without doubt were the people that attended and the conversations that ensued. I was happy to run into designers who knew me from Emergence and UX Week, and to see some CMU alumni. Best yet, I made some new friends whom I hope to see at the next conference or elsewhere in the small but healthy interaction design community.

While I haven’t covered everything, these are the things that are resonating with me. I am happy that I went and feel that overall for the community it was a success. I am very curious to see how things shape up next year.

In total, eight interaction design graduate students from the School of Design attended the conference: Kipum Lee, Srividya Sriram, Carrie Chan, Kyle Vice, Beste Nazilli, Joe Iloreta, Imran Sobh, me.

Course registration for the spring semester began today. I was a bit sad the past few days realizing that the classes I chose were to be the last of grad school. There are still many courses that I would like to take. But alas…

In addition to my thesis project and thesis paper, I am registered for the following classes:

• Conceptual Models
  (mini)
  with Shelley Evenson
• Design, Management and Organizational Change
  with Richard Buchanan
• Emotion and Reason in Design
  with Richard Buchanan
• Color and Communication
  (wait list)
  with Kristin Hughes and Mark Mentzer

I talked to Kristin today about getting into Color and Communication, so there’s a chance I’ll get into that. If I do, I’ll likely drop Emotion and Reason in Design.

In addition to taking class, I am teaching another course this spring: Basic Interaction for mostly HCI students, I believe.

For the first time since the Internet was invented, Carnegie Mellon redesigned their website. Hurray for breaking out of 1996!

I applaud the grand undertaking of overhauling a university website. Having worked at the University of Pittsburgh as a web developer for three years, I understand that this is no small or simple matter.

There are numerous obstacles to overcome, politics to play, and too many people to please. Given my knowledge of those difficulties, I commend the result.

At first glance, the large photography helps the site look interesting. The main area is all Flash, and is a decent use of the technology to pull of subtle effects.

However…

Code Like a Platypus

Being the web standards nut the I am, after a minute I dug into the source code. Was I surprised to find an inflexible mishmash of CSS and tables? No. Was I disappointed that my cutting-edge tech school hired someone (Ripple Effects) that doesn’t know how to build without tables? You betcha.

I’m guessing the higher ups at Ripple don’t know about web standards, so the developers are not being forced to any standard, as long as the site appears to work; but the developers have heard enough about this CSS thing to throw in some div tags here and there, but not enough to actually achieve the layout they desired.

The resulting code is a bunch of gobbledygook.

These developers are not clueless, mind you. They’ve got some nifty Flash with XML and CSS going on, they’ve employed SWFObject to display alternate content if visitors don’t have Flash (though their alternate content has some problems), and they’re messing around with DOM scripting.

With all that going on, the lack of full CSS layout is a mystery, but unfortunately not unusual.

Just for fun, try turning off Javascript and images. I know, who does that? Me!

Light as an Elephant

It’s typically a good practice to keep your site light and speedy, like a race car. This site has six overweight passengers crammed inside, and a few sandbags in the trunk for good measure.

While there is an ever increasing trend toward DSL and cable Internet service, people do still use dialup. This site doesn’t care about those people.

• Total recommended size for 56 Kbps modem: 30 kb (8 seconds to load)
• Total size of home page files: 365 kb (73 seconds to load dialup, estimate)

The page loads in about 10 seconds for me using cable modem. Not bad, but these numbers are:

• 48 images: 126 kb!
• 5 scripts: 162 kb!

As a comparison, the University of Pittsburgh home page, which I built, is 58 kb total: 30 images at 24 kb; 3 scripts at 9 kb.

I’m not holding up Pitt as the standard of excellence.

Looks Like a Swan

Yep, it looks better, and it appears to work. But because of the above negligence, the developers failed.

General Take on the IA

I have some questions about the information architecture. But as I am not privy to the user research and strategy, I cannot fully comment. Though the Post-Gazette article about the launch indicates the guiding principle was people and stories.

I will say that I like that information is chunked in an attempt to make navigating more manageable for visitors. But does it? There’s a look going on, which may be overwhelming.

It’s interesting that Search is the first thing beneath the Carnegie Mellon logo. Does this mean there’s an expectation that visitors will not know how to navigate the site and will rely on searching to find the content they seek?

I feel a bit sorry for News, tucked away as it is beneath all the navigation, making room for the themes. I wonder if people will really submit theme ideas.

I also wonder about the font sizes, especially on the subpages. With all the large images and large main navigation links, the body text does not appear very readable (but who reads?). And check out the line length on the Research page.

What Many Are Calling Web 2.0

“In what many are calling Web 2.0, companies, nonprofits and universities are spending billions of dollars redesigning their Web sites, with varying degrees of success.”

That’s from the Post-Gazette article. Read it again. Did you catch the revelation? Web 2.0 is about spending billions to redesign websites, and possibly utterly failing.

Ending On a Good Note

I’m harsh, I know. Overall, I’m very happy to see the site has finally been updated. It’s a huge improvement, and a step in the right direction.

I just hope it doesn’t take another 10 years before the site is updated.

I just got word that the latest BusinessWeek features a section on the best design schools. CMU is listed.

In an article titled The Talent Hunt, CMU also gets a mention.

Intel is making big financial bets that design school programs like those at ASU, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgia Tech will provide fresh ideas.

Nice to know that Intel believes in me.

I arrived on campus 15 minutes before orientation started, so I went to the design office to turn in my time card for the Emergence conference website. No one was in the office except some guy.

He was sitting in the administrator area, so I assumed he was an administrator. He asked if I was a new graduate student. He then said, ?¢‚Ǩ?ìI?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m John Zimmerman.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

?¢‚Ǩ?ìOh, JZ,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù I said. I had heard of him. He will be teaching my interaction design class this fall.

He continued to engage me in conversation and asked what I wanted to do when I got out. I told him I didn’t know yet. He looked concerned.

Previously other faculty members had said they didn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t expect me to know what I wanted to do when I was done. I decided to dig a deeper hole, ?¢‚Ǩ?ìI?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m still having a hard time defining interaction design.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

JZ looked puzzled.

?¢‚Ǩ?ìIt?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s designing for interaction with stuff,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù he said.

Pause.

?¢‚Ǩ?ìThat seems too simple,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù I said.

He disagreed and went on to say what?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s hard is figuring out what interactions I was going to design for, and said I should start thinking about that. I heard he was tough, in a good way. I assumed this was an example.

Actual Orientation

We met more faculty, the design students that were not here over the summer, and many of the second-year students. We got breakfast and lunch. And we got our laptops and picked our studio space. This took most of the day.

Tonight there?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s a party at Shelley Evenson?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s house. I hear she has a nice place. And a big dog, or two.

Once again Friday brings the end of a project-driven week, and a big sigh of relief. The difference between this Friday and the last five is that next week there is no new project to work on. The design fundamentals course is over.

We’ve got two weeks off before fall classes start. I’ll be doing some work through Yum Yum Web, and next weekend I’m driving down to DC to visit some friends. So I’m hoping to be able to relax a bit.

Reflections

It’s hard to believe the summer course is over. Saying that it’s hard to believe something is over feels like a cliche. But what can I do. My feeling is a cliche.

The past six weeks have been a real transition. First, I quit my full-time job. Then I start being trained and getting used to the idea that I will be a designer (and maybe I already am). Also, I was thrown together with a group of amazingly talented people from various backgrounds, who, in a short period of time, went from strangers to good friends.

The latter experience has really touched me, especially this week with me entering all my classmates’ homes and getting to know them more personally. It’s helped me to realize that despite my take-over-the-world, be-the-best tendencies, forming a bond with a person is much more rewarding.

I’ll conclude by saying that the design fundamentals course was as much a bonding experience as it was an opportunity to learn the basics of design. I hope that this is a taste of the coming experience when the semester begins.

Time for beers.

It’s 1:04 a.m. and I’m listening to KEXP’s streaming archive of John Richard’s morning show. Now playing: Where Is My Mind by the Pixies. I love it.

Three Hundred and Six

That’s how many photos I took for the photo project.

At this point I can’t remember what the actual assignment is. There were two options, I believe. One was do shots of Pittsburgh. The other had something to do with your life. Maybe.

I choose to shoot my classmates in their Pittsburgh dwellings. Over the past two days I invaded visited 11 of their homes. Due to time constraints, I missed two.

I’m nearly done with the assignment. So I decided it was time to take a break to allow myself time to determine whether I’m finished.

Have Ideas, Need Plan

Aside from showing up with my camera, I never really had a plan. This meant that I had multiple ideas about what I was doing, and my methods were kind of random. And I’m guessing this will all result in a project that isn’t as strong as it could be.

At first I thought about using multiple photos for each person, so I narrowed down the 306 to 33, or three for each person. However, I wasn’t really happy with all the sets, so I decided to be strict and choose just one.

This decision saved me about four hours, I’m convinced. But I think it was the right decision regardless. Choosing one photo really made me think about why I was choosing the photo.

I think the end result turned out okay. Since it’ technically tomorrow right now, I will have to present my work in a digital format. Right now it’s in InDesign. So I’ll export it was a PDF.

But It Was All Good Fun

In the words of Stan Marsh, “You know, I learned something today.”

Having a clear idea about what you’re doing is a good thing. But sometimes not having a clue and doing something anyway is a lot of fun.

Okay, enough blabbering about poor planning and having fun not sleeping. Let’s see if I’m finished.

I spent the last several hours traveling around Squirrel Hill and Shadyside invading my classmates’ homes to take photographs for our project this week, which is due Friday.

I’m not exactly sure what I will do with these photos. One of my classmates gave me a great idea, but sadly after I had taken 130 photos. I shot seven of 12, and I hope to do the remaining people tomorrow.

Regardless how the project turns out, I am humbled that my classmates are opening their homes and their lives to me and my camera. I am getting much more from the experience than just photographs.

So class, if you read this, thank you again. I apologize in advance for making you so blurry.

I’m going to skip over what we did today in class, which was essentially reviewing the pairs of photos we took yesterday, and jump right into tonight’s assignment: On photographing a person; and, on being photographed.

We had to write about the experience, so I’m going to include that in it’s entirety because it’s after 1 a.m. and I’m tired. I just wrote it.

For the assignment, I thought it would be interesting to photograph each other’s scars. There’s always a story that goes along with a scar. It’s a reminder of your history, and proof that something happened to you.

I don’t like to injure myself. But sometimes after I have, I’m sadistically happy with the battle wound.

I have a lot of scars in various places on my body. I didn’t realize how many I had before I suggested the idea to Matt Forrest, my partner for the assignment. I have scars on my head, my face, the inside of my lip, the outside of my lip, my shoulder, abdomen, arms, hands, and of course, my knees.

The first scar I can remember is a chicken pox scar on my temple that I must have picked when I was four years old. My most recent scar is from an injury I incurred during a soccer game the day before I started the design fundamentals course. I suffered a four inch scrape from my elbow going toward my hand. It was bloody the first day of class. A week later that scab ripped off during a collision with another player at another soccer game.

Matt did not seem to have a problem penetrating my personal space with his camera to get close-up shots of my scars. I felt a mix of vulnerability and pride while he took the photos. I worried that the lens would pick up other things besides whatever scar he happened to be focusing on. Would the photos show things I don’t want people to see?

I have already seen the photos Matt took. Some make me feel embarrassed and some show my flaws. But we all have flaws. And I’m no different from anyone else. I told him to use whatever photos he wanted. Still, it was weird to see photos that focus so closely on my body. I can’t naturally look at myself that closely. It reminds me that everyone gets to see me and from different perspectives a lot more than I do, and I wonder at the potential disconnect between my mind’s eye and reality.

I did not have any problems getting up close on Matt’s scars. The task became more important than whether I was invading his personal space. I was more concerned with getting the camera to focus one inch away from the disfigurements of his skin.

Matt did not have as many scars as me. But I remember the words he used to describe one of his leg scars. He ran at a sprint into a fire hydrant in the dark, crashing into it with his shin. He pulled back his blood-soaked sock to reveal “chunks of fleshy meat.”

I wish my photos of his scars turned out better. Here’s his shin.

It’s the final week of the design fundamentals summer course. In some ways it feels like we’ve been doing this course for ages. And then, as always, there’s that feeling that it went by too quickly.

This week we’re studying photography with Charlee Brodsky. As stated in this week’s syllabus, “We will look at, discuss, and make photographs.” Simple. I like it.

The goal is to give us a better understanding of photography “in terms of reading photographs and making them.” Cool.

Our assignment for tomorrow is to make six pairs of photos of representational and abstract images. So this afternoon I scooted around Regent Square on my bike taking pictures according to my interpretation of the assignment, which I hope is correct.

The photos I took were okay. I wish they were better. But I was stretched for time.

Here’s an example pairing.