A little past midnight Thursday I had a breakthrough with my paper candle holder design thanks to my resistance to using tabs and finding inspiration in an upright paper grocery bag in the corner of my kitchen. ?¢‚Ǩ?ìWait, that folds flat,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù I realized (a requirement).

The final design was simple, but elegant, and could go from flat to three-dimensional in about five seconds. I also devised measurements and tools so I could produce them quickly (not a requirement). So I made a few, which are now in the hands of Steve, who was last seen taking photos of our lit products.

I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m not sure what Steve is going to do with the photos, but I will take a picture of mine when I get them back and post it here.

It was interesting to see all of the designs together. As a class, we had made noticeable progress since our first attempts. I was very impressed at the diversity and ingenuity of all the designs.

What I Learned

Despite all the nuggets of wisdom that Steve proffered, I didn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t take many notes since my hands were often occupied with paper, scissors, tape, and glue. Though I will try to summarize some noteworthy points:

• To understand what the material you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re designing with can do, you must work with it directly. Imagining how the design will work or creating a sketch is useless if it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s not possible for the material to do what you want it to do.
• The more you work with the material, the more likely you will improve your design. Each iteration yields lessons learned and improvement.
• Instructions are a crutch. Why rely on directions and customer support if you can create a product that works without them? Or: Why create products that require directions and customer support?
• Designers are the people behind the curtain. That?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s what we are going to become. Most designs are not created by the companies that use them.

Happy Hours

Both to celebrate the end of our week and to introduce my out-of-town peers to Pittsburgh, many of us headed over to Mad Mex for margaritas, beer, and food. We got there around 3 p.m., and I didn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t get home until 12:30 p.m., which is why I didn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t post this yesterday.

Paper is pretty neat stuff, once you start to mess with it. And that’s exactly what I’m doing, and have done for a lot of today, mess about with paper.

I’m looking to use some translucent paper that’s a bit like plastic for my candle holder, which has been slow in coming. But I keep telling myself the learning is more important than the final product.

Of course, another part of me says my final product should be better than everyone elses. So it’s back to work for me.

Ever try to make a cube out of paper? It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s hard. Add requirements like it must have three-inch sides, fit flat and disassembled in an enveloped, someone should be able to assemble it easily, and the cube should stay intact after assembly, and you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re talking hours of frustration.

That?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s what we did today. We made cubes (without help from the Internet).

Our instructor, Steve, got this idea in the middle of the night last night. He wasn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t sure if we would go for it for fear that we would think it beneath us. At the end of class he was glad we did it because it taught us something and he learned that we don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t have a clue. He said it was a good thing for him to know.

If he wasn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t so funny and tactful, I might have found that insulting. Instead, I laughed. We all did. After all, he was speaking the truth.

Steve is the kind of guy you can listen to for hours without ever being bored and most likely with a constant smirk on your face. And he?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s a great teacher because he?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s full of insight but at the same time seems like he?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s learning right along with you, like he doesn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t know any more than you, or have any of the answers.

Despite the cube-making tangent, we are going forward with creating candle holders from paper that will pack into a flat 9?¢‚Ǩ¬ùx12?¢‚Ǩ¬ù envelope. While the inspiration for the design is supposed to be representative of an industrial design firm of our choice, we are not to make an advertisement, but something of beauty. Honestly, I am very skeptical of my ability to accomplish this. My cube was not beautiful, and it barely functioned.

Orikaso Won’t Make You Sexy

I might have had an easier time creating my cube if I had ordered delivery pizza more often in my life, or perhaps analyzed any flat cardboard box that can be turned into a three-dimensional object that can hold stuff.

One really nifty product that relies on clever folds and tabs is the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìsuperlight, ultracompact, easyclean, unbreakable?¢‚Ǩ¬ù Orikaso fold flat tableware. From their web site:

Buy a product, buy a life! Our product won?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t make you younger, fitter, or more attractive to the opposite sex. Sorry!

The Orikaso products consist of a polypropylene plate, bowl, and mug that fold completely flat and can be assembled for use and disassembled for packing. Inspired by the cube dilemma and Steve?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s enthusiasm, I purchased a solo set tonight.

When I got it home, I immediately tried putting the tableware together. The plate took me about seven minutes to figure out. And I got pretty frustrated during the process because I didn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t think the instructions were very good. But after I got it together, I was rewarded with amazement. I put together the mug next, which took less time, and was even more amazed by the result. Cool, cool stuff.

I plan to bring the set into class tomorrow. But my ultimate motivation is to perhaps learn something from the ingenuity of the products that I can bring to my candle holder design. But I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m skeptical I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll pull it off.

What I didn’t say yesterday was that we had to choose an industrial design firm for our one-page write-up. I looked at a half dozen sites before deciding. The determining factors for the company I chose were the site didn’t totally suck, and they had photos of the products and text I could grab for quotes.

Unbelievably, one of the sites I looked at only had a front page that consisted of one image and no content, and another had multiple pages but was still built as all imagines. (Turn off the images, and poof.) It amazes me that these arguably top-notch design firms care so little—or perhaps understand so little—the impact their web sites have on their reputation, and how ineffective their sites actually are.

I’m not saying industrial designer should understand web design. But this is an example of a larger observation. The more sites I look at and clients I work with the more I see a ubiquitous lack of understanding of how and why you should create an effective web presence. And this means there is either a huge opportunity for web design firms or gigantic void (can you have a small void?) in the current ability of web design firms to help companies build effective web sites.

Making Candle Holders

Our objective in choosing a industrial design firm is to create a tea light candle holder from paper that can be mailed in a flat 9″x12″ envelope and represents the spirit of the firm.

Yes, it does sound like a fire hazard. But we created tons of prototypes today and put tea lights in all of them, and none caught on fire. Fun project. Of course, when isn’t playing with fire in a classroom fun?

I had a pretty full day. CMU classes from 9 a.m. until about 3 p.m. Then I had a initial strategy meeting with a new client. Then a lot of post meeting discussion. And now I’m sitting down to do some homework that I foresee taking me into the early hours.

This week we’re being introduced to industrial design by Stephen Stadelmeier. My homework assignment is to choose a design firm from the Association of Professional Design Firms and write a one-page profile of the firm. It shouldn’t take long once I pick a firm. But first I need to pick one. And for some reason I’m procrastinating by blogging.

I’m pretty tired, so that might be a reason. And blogging doesn’t take too much brain power (though this is the second revision of this post). At any rate, it’s probably foreshadowing of what’s to come over the next two years. And it’s made me consider whether I’d rather work late until the night or wake up early to complete a project.

I prefer staying up late than getting up early. At least you’re gauranteed enough time and you can rest assured that it’s complete, rather than worried about finishing in the morning.

What’s your preference?

Today concluded our week with Karen Moyer and typographic hierarchy. I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but we will have a new instructor who will explore a different aspect of design each week. Next week has to do with 3D objects, I believe.

After class we were treated to lunch with Dan Boyarski, head of the School of Design. During this lunch, while Dan was chatting with others, one of my peers asked me about my thoughts on taking a web design class to learn to build web sites. She wasn’t sure if she needed to learn HTML or what. And I started telling her about my distrust of web design courses, for these reasons:

• Web design (and by design I also mean development) moves very quickly, so instructors need to be actively engaged in web design, which I don’t think is the case.
• If you can be assured of finding information about anything on the web, you will undoubtedly find tutorials, articles, and examples about web design, so you don’t need a course.
• Most non-University web design workshops (Event Apart and the like excluded) are business driven and more concerned about getting your dollars than what you take away.

But before I completely dissuaded her from taking a web design course, I turned to Dan and asked him what the courses were like at CMU. What he said encouraged me. And I appreciated that he seemed to agree that designers need to understand the code behind the design, even if they don’t do the coding itself.

Then Dan asked me how I would teach a web design course. I said I would take a holistic approach that started with a focus on the strategy and goals of a site along with an understanding of the audience, and show how that drives everything else: information architecture, design, technology.

Only later did I think about how I could have given an answer that was completely focused on markup and standards, leaving the sum of web design for a broader class. Regardless, Dan seemed to like my answer. And it got me thinking that I could very well teach a broader web design class.

I’m not sure if that would be a possibility or if that’s what Dan was fishing for, but I find the idea very appealing. Presented with the opportunity, I would accept.

Okay, so it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s day three of design school, and I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m writing about it yet again. Today I felt even more excited about the path that I’ve taken. I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m learning stuff and it’s fun. I doubt I will keep up my blogging about the coursework, but I don’t think I really want to, because as I said before, it’s been done.

We?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re working on a piece of content that?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s referred to as Richard L. Gregory. The content announces some lectures being given by the aforementioned individual. And apparently, this piece of content has been used within the School of Design for years, or longer.

I took away some great insights today, but I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m not going to get into all of them. But I will say that I really dig the difference between logic and visualogic: what might make sense logically may not make sense visually. I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m a pretty logical person, so I see that as a challenge.

I also learned more about InDesign today. Being that I have a strong software background, it has not been too difficult to pick up. My major complaint is it seems rather cumbersome when it comes to styling large bodies of content. Perhaps it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s my inexperience, but I did ask the instructor about it and she agreed that it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s a bit tedious. Maybe I just want it to act more like CSS.

Today I was introduced to the idea of typographic hierarchy and visualogic, which was defined as the cognitive relationship between any two lines and groups of text, and the way those relationships are reflected visually.

I also received my first assignment meant to explore typographic hierarchy. After years of arranging text into meaningful and digestible chunks of information in poetry and on the web, it’s fun and fascinating to get some formal training as to why certain things work, and why others are—as stated by my instructor—dumb.

We also went around the room and introduced ourselves. I kept mine pretty brief.

My name is Jamin, and I have no pets. I have lived in Pittsburgh for the past three years where I have worked as a web developer for the University of Pittsburgh. I am in the interaction design program.

The pets thing was in response to the instructor’s introduction of herself. Obviously, my introduction wasn’t very exciting. I went for efficiency. But afterwards, I realized by being efficient, I was also being boring, and not really letting people know who I was and what my experience has been.

Perhaps I am being too harsh on efficiency. I could have still been efficient and concise, as I was in my CMU application:

I am currently a web developer for the University of Pittsburgh. I also started my own web design and consulting company in early 2005. I have a degree in English Writing with a concentration in poetry. I have been a journalist, an editor, a web producer, and now a web developer and business owner.

And I have no pets!

And I love cake!

And sprinkles.

After having met a dozen or so of my peers and spoken to them individually about backgrounds and experience, I feel a slight sense of dread when they ask about me. I’m not sure if it’s because I feel there’s too much to tell, or that they don’t really want to hear everything and therefore I’ll have to censor myself, and where do I draw the line—or if I just don’t really want to talk too much about me because somehow I have come to think that talking too much about oneself is a bad thing. Maybe it is, but it seems I sometimes take the opposite extreme and say too little.

Something to work on.

This also reminds me of something on my to-do list: create an about page for this site. I’ve been putting this off because I have a difficult time talking about myself.* (Did I already say that?)

*Also note that sometimes I have no problem talking about myself due to my habit of being a self-conflicting human. See this blog for details.

Today was my first day of classes at CMU. My first day as a graduate student.

Weird. Strange. Surreal.

But cool. I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m really excited and happy to be back in school. It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s hard to believe I completed my undergraduate degree (in poetry!) 10 years ago. I definitely do not yet see myself as a student.

The actual interaction design program doesn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t start until the fall. But for the next six weeks I’ll be taking design fundamentals every morning Monday through Friday. And for the next four weeks, there will also be a software boot camp in the afternoon for InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, and After Effects.

Today was a lot like kindergarten, because we got to play with a big pile of random objects. Though a higher purpose was being served. We were asked to categorize the objects so that someone walking in off the street could make sense of them. We were told this is what designers do.

There was also some higher-level talk about the phases of development and the off comment about space communicating meaning and form communicating meaning, blah, blah, blah. But I won?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t bore you with that stuff, since it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s already been covered.

Fourteen of us showed up today. (Although the instructor thought there should have been 18.) I met at least half of my peers, and even mostly remember their names and previous locations.

We have tomorrow off, it being Independence Day and all. But I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m looking forward to the next class on Wednesday. Sure beats working. Except, of course, the money.

Looks like this summer course and fall tuition, minus a $4,000 scholarship, will run about $14K. Still haven?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t received word about financial aid. But I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping it will all work out, with, ideally, money left over for beer.