Category: Design

  • Beginning Thesis Paper Readings

    With Emergence over, my attention has turned to my neglected theses endeavors. Earlier this week I bought a bunch of books, some of which arrived the past few days. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies) by Bill Buxton The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert A. Simon Design…

  • Emergence 2007 Reflections

    We did it! After nine months of planning, the conference went off splendidly. The team and I are pretty pleased with ourselves. We succeeded in bringing in more money and more registrations than we had hoped, and were also successful in bringing together a diverse group of speakers and attendees. We got a lot of…

  • Making Furniture Interactive

    Instead of doing an independent study on composition, or Research Methods with Dick Buchanan, or an introduction to industrial design fundamentals, I’m taking Making Furniture Interactive with Mark Gross. I’m working with a microcontroller, wires, LEDs, and writing programs with Processing. We’re using Arduino—an open-source electronics prototyping platform—for development. I decided to take this course…

  • Mattress + iPhone Mashup

    Why I thought I needed to actually have my iPhone in bed with me last night, I cannot answer. But let’s just assume that it was a normal thing to do and move on… If you know you have an important email coming, but you also feel the need to sleep, and you don’t want…

  • Survived My First Day Teaching

    Today was the first day teaching Intro to Design Computing. It was my first day teaching anything, ever, officially. I didn’t die. So hurray! But it was harder than I thought it would be. My throat got dry and we’re not allowed to have any drinks in the computer lab. And my introduction and presentation…

  • My Classes This Semester

    Because I’m in my second year as a graduate design student, half of my course load is taken up by my thesis project and paper (note to self: start working on those). The two classes I’m currently signed up for are Social Web with Jason Hong and Robert Kraut, and Designing for Service with Shelley…

  • Why Attend Emergence

    I’ve been busting my balls on Emergence over the summer, and things have kicked into high gear with the conference less than two weeks away. Overall, we’re in a good place. We’ve already matched last year’s attendance, and the lineup is one that I’m excited about and believe will appeal to a variety of designers.…

  • Designing for Beauty

    Just finished watching Crash, and am now thinking about the ability films and other media have on stirring emotion and changing our perspective. I used to say that I never felt more emotional than during or after watching a film. There was a time when I would go to a film on a weekend night,…

  • Intro to Design Computing

    This fall I am teaching Introduction to Design Computing, a required course for first-year interaction design graduate students at Carnegie Mellon. Last year, I waived the course because it was primarily a Flash course and I had six years of professional Flash development and design experience. This year, a couple students asked to waive it…