Jeremy Yuille Explores IxD Education at Adaptive Path
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 [...]
mTID Gets Panties in a Twist
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 [...]
Thoughts on Interaction08
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 [...]
Classes for Final Semester
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 [...]
My Opinion of the CMU.edu Redesign
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 [...]
BusinessWeek Names CMU Top Design School
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 [...]
CMU Grad Design Orientation
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 [...]
Design Fundamentals Is Over
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 [...]
Where Is My Mind?
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 [...]
Photographing My Classmates’ Homes
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 [...]
Photographing Scars
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 [...]
Photography Week
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, [...]
Illustration Week Wrap-Up
Our five-day drawing bonanza ended with empathetic form. In our case, that meant drawing our own hand. As usual, Mark was there to help. And I needed it, as I have a hard time figuring out how to portray the dimensions of shapes such as the hand. This week was the most fun for me. [...]
Amorphic Space
Today we drew organic shapes, what Mark referred to as amorphic space. He asked us to start by drawing a sphere within a cube, which was kind of funny because he told some of us yesterday that it was an exercise he did with his undergrads for weeks that drove them crazy. Was he trying [...]
Rotational Space
As has been the case every week of the design fundamental course, each day we are forced to make leaps due to the time constraint. This has been working out so far, even though it always seems like a stretch when presented with the new task. Today we launched into drawing 3D objects. We first [...]
Fat Space
Today, we tackled fat space, or cubic space. And the first thing we learned, after being asked to draw a cube, was that 90 percent of the class and likely most of the populous has an unrealistic idea of what a cube looks like on paper. Simply put, what you would likely draw as a [...]
Drawing 101
I don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t recall ever being able to draw well. Last year I started reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I enjoyed the reading and psychology part, but I found the drawing part rather laborious and other things began sucking up my time until I stopped. One year later, I am learning to [...]
Information Design Week Wrap-Up
This week was not as intense as the past couple weeks, which was a nice change. Part of that had to do with us not starting to actually create our change of address forms until Thursday. Despite only having one day to turn it around, everyone turned in quality work. It was impressive to see [...]
Deceptively Weak Thumbnail Sketches
Today Bob critiqued our thumbnail sketches. Mine were pretty bad in retrospect. Bad in the sense that they didn’t look like much time or thought went into them, which is true for the time part. However, as it turns out, I followed my thumbnail sketch for my final production. Mine were full scale: 10.5 x [...]
Redesign USPS Change of Address Form
Yesterday my group and I wandered about CMU campus looking for people to fill out the US Postal Service’s mail forwarding change of address form so we could see what types of problems people have. The idea was to use the information we gathered to inform the redesign of the form that each of us [...]
Candle Holders
Candle Holders So here is a shot of the candle holders I made during week two of the design fundamentals course. I don’t have any tea lights at the moment, so I couldn’t light them up. Again, these are made out of paper and were required to fold flat so that they could fit in [...]
Information Design Week
This week we’re exploring information design with Bob Swinehart. Today we talked broadly about information design, and defined it as designing to help people understand information. And while that makes sense, it also has the feel of defining interaction design as “designing for interaction.” Though I do like the simplicity of both. Our project for [...]
Playing it Safe
While I was quite happy with my poster yesterday, today is just seemed okay. I had a suspicion that it was too safe. It worked well, but I felt like I didn’t really push myself. Type Poster Stacie essentially confirmed my suspicion when I asked her. She also commented that I seem fairly familiar with [...]