Notable is the article’s focus on interaction design, referring to the studio course as the “annual graduate studio in interaction design,” even though their were folks from the communication planning and information design program (CPID).

But also important is Motorola’s desire to share the projects within the company and continue to strengthen its ties to CMU.

“We wanted to bring people back to Motorola to show off the results,” [Rick] Hoobler, [Motorola design manager in experience planning and design,] said, “[everything was] received very well.” He went on to say that the concepts are continuously being shared across the company.

In addition to dipping into the campus think tank for creative ideas, Hoobler said that Motorola also hoped to broaden their relationship with Carnegie Mellon and to recruit more from the university in the future. As a School of Design alumnus, he knows the quality of thinking and dedication to excellence that the school has to offer and his prior relationship with university faculty lent a critical hand to the partnership. And based on the exceptional performance of the class, recruiting from the program will certainly continue. “We feel like there’s a good synergy between our design group and the school,” Hoobler said, “and we’re looking forward to bigger and better things.”

The management of Motorola, the ailing mobile phone maker, has promised to turn the company around. Instead, Motorola’s troubles worsened yesterday when it announced that sales would fall considerably short of earlier projections and forecast a quarterly loss.

Mr. Zander has said Motorola’s struggles reflect a handful of factors, including a strategy of building market share by selling relatively inexpensive phones, instead of putting more emphasis on developing new high-end, highly profitable models.

This is what my mobile media team told them in February after the exploratory research. The idea that they were selling inexpensive phones hit a nerve.

I wonder what they’re doing with the concepts the CMU graduate design students gave them.

Interestingly, the articles does not mention the iPhone.

The most conversation centered around the value of the scenario video sketch versus a lower fidelity demonstration of the concept. Jesse James Garrett seemed particularly interested in whether I thought the effort put into the production was worth the payoff. I said yes.

Why? Because real people, sound, and a story are more compelling that cartoons.

Incidentally, the same day Jared Spool talked about Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video vs. cartoon scenarios.

“When choosing a presentation format, you’ll want to choose the technique you’ll find easiest to work with. As long as the final product tells the story of user’s ideal experience, you’ll produce a successful envisionment.”

I don’t know about that. Given two equal concepts, the higher fidelity presentation will win over the lower fidelity one. But as an interaction designer, do you have the time or ability to produce something beyond a cartoon experience?

Another question: Can a well-produced presentation give greater weight to a concept that is not as good as another concept that isn’t presented as well? In grad school I’ve seen some nice presentations that impress for their quality, but not so much for the concept, and vice versa.

Perhaps I’m jaded by the competitive nature of my peers and high expectations we have of ourselves at CMU. I have several times gone against Jared’s recommendation above that I choose a technique that I found easiest, instead choosing the one I thought was going to be the most successful, even if it meant I had to teach myself something new.

The goal for me is to have a kick-ass concept coupled by a kick-ass presentation. I don’t see how cartoon scenarios can compare to a good video sketch in communicating the experience.

The morning started off slow, as there were a lot of problems getting all of our presentations onto one of the Motorola laptops. Motorola used NetMeeting so the presentations could be viewed by a remote group of designers on another floor. I’ll spare you all the frustrating details, but it took about two hours to get everything working, and even then things were not all squared away. For instance, the remote viewers could not see our video portions.

(our team name was Red Kangaroo, which is why we named it the MotoRoo)

During our presentation, the sound would not play for our Flash scenarios. So I had to talk through them. This actually turned out to be a good thing as I could focus more on particular aspects of the interface and explain things that might have sped by too quickly in the actual video sketch.

I’m not sure if it was because Carrie and I both slept before this second take or what, but the presentation seemed to go better this time around. And we received a fair amount of questions afterward, which I took as a sign that people were engaged (though we received a lot of questions the first time around as well).

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.