jamin.org

Friday was the last day of my 10 weeks at Adaptive Path. We had the normal 4 pm tea time, but with more people and more activities. The Wii, which I had heard we had, finally made an appearance. The screen was projected on the conference room wall to make for some great fun.

Overall, I had a great time this summer in San Francisco with Adaptive Path. I was surprised—but delighted—to find out they are much more research focused than I imagined, and that they’re not as much of a web company as I thought. Though, they still have a strong foothold in all things web, they’re looking beyond.

While I’m no longer at the office, I still need to complete my essay. Because I was stretched between multiple projects, I didn’t have dedicated time till my last two days. I wrote 1,200 words on Friday, but it’s still a draft and may be too academic in its present form. So I will be working to complete that in the next two weeks.

Also, in two weeks is UX Week, which I will be attending. One of the projects I’ve been working on will be presented at the conference. I will be presenting that along with the rest of the team. I will also help facilitate a couple workshops, including one with Liz Sanders.

At Friday’s party I talked to a recent hire, Leah Buley, about being on the inside of Adaptive Path. We mused that the AP environment and company could not be replicated, or that it would be difficult to do so, because so much of what makes AP what it is are the people that work there.

It’s the people that I will miss.

And perhaps they’ll miss me, too.

At afternoon tea on Friday, one of the Adaptive Path folks explained why AP’s blog posts don’t necessarily express what the company thinks as a whole. “Todd was speaking for Todd,” he said.

He was speaking about Todd Wilkens’ recent post on why usability is a path to failure, which many usability professionals took issue with, and which not everyone within AP agreed with either.

But isn’t it important that the viewpoints expressed on the blog align with that of the company?

“I don’t give a fuck about alignment,” the APer rebuked. “I care about getting the opinion out there.”

This is one of the reasons AP is a very different company to work for.

As I’m going to Chicago to present our final Studio 2 presentation to a different set of folks at Motorola, I am done with Adaptive Path for the week. That means my first two weeks at AP are behind me.

So what have I been up to? Not too much. But I don’t say that as a complaint.

Being a small consulting company, AP works on a variety of projects with different time lines. Some projects have recently ended, others are now beginning. I seem to have caught them in the middle.

What’s great is they are very open with what’s in the works and how all the projects are going. Each week they meet as a company to talk about what’s going on. Transparency is the norm and very different from other places I have worked.

This week I started to get involved with a few projects. Mostly I sat in on meetings and observed. In fact, while I haven’t been doing any designing yet, I have been doing lots of observing. I find just being at AP educational. I can’t help but compare their practices with the startup I worked at in the late 90s and my own business.

Earlier in the week I sat in on a meeting with a new client that was particularly interesting. While I can’t say much about it, I appreciated the teams’ interaction with the client. I get the sense that AP is not about holding the client’s hand. They will tell it like it is, which I prefer to deferential layers of bullshit.

I also appreciate their client selection considerations. They definitely do not take on clients for the sake of making money. And anyone in the company can veto a client.

Some other more intern-y things to report are they set up a tour of Anchor Steam brewery later this month during the week in the middle of the day. And they’ve arranged a field trip to Google to meet the folks behind the Google Analytics redesign.

Also, I offered to share my Studio 2 team’s Motorola concept and I’m now tentatively scheduled to present during one of AP’s weekly brown bag lunches in a couple weeks.

And so it begins.

I introduced myself at the weekly Tuesday staff meeting. “Oh, so that’s how you say your name.” I also got a couple, “You don’t look like what I imagined.”

Today was pretty relaxed. I met the other intern, Irene Chong, from the Institute of Design. We compared design programs and conference-running experiences. She co-chaired About, With, and For (now Design Research Conference) last year.

I, of course, met a lot of other folks. I remember about half their names. Everyone seems very nice. There was a lot of concern and support for my living predicament. Someone even volunteered to drive me to a few apartment viewings after work.

I saw a place I liked near Dolores Park, but the girl showing the place was torn because until I showed up, she was ready to give it to another couple. I should find out about it tomorrow. And if not, I’ve got some other viewing lined up for tomorrow night.

In other news, “Surface computing has arrived.“

Just a brief note to say I recently accepted an offer to work at Adaptive Path over the summer. I’m super excited to experience what they’re all about and check out San Francisco. I start the end of May and finish in early August. Should be a good time.

In other news, my illness has not subsided. We presented our generative research and initial mobile media concepts to Motorola today, and my head was so stuffy and body achy that I felt drunk. Nevertheless, I managed to sound intelligible through the presentation (or so I was told).

The illness and the presentation have wiped me out, and I’ve fallen behind on many fronts (like blogging). Perhaps tomorrow will be the day I wake up to feeling well again.

At the end of last week, the School of Design held Confluence, a two-day job and internship stress fest.

The madness began two weeks prior, when we could submit our resumes to the companies we were interested in. The companies then selected who they wanted to interview. This was all handled by an online system that was being used for this purpose for the first time. Confusion and frustration ensued.

But in the end, things seemed to mostly work out. I had seven interviews set up for last Friday, beginning at 8:30 a.m. with IDEO and ending at 3:45 with Microsoft. I also met with Google, MAYA Design, Moment, Cooper, and IBM Research.

All the interviews seemed to go well (except with Microsoft—I think my brain was fried by the time I talked to them). Though, it turned out that Moment, Cooper, and IBM Research weren’t actually looking for interns. That was kind of annoying, as I could have lined up other interviews with people who would actually hire me. But it wasn’t all bad, as I learned what those companies were like and got to understand my options as an interaction designer.