My name is
Jack Moffett. I am an Interaction Designer with over ten years of experience. According to
Herb Simon, that makes me an expert, so I must have something worth sharing. I have started this venture as an exercise to spur critical thinking about my chosen profession. I hope that others may find it thought provoking as well.
DesignAday will present a brief thought about Design every weekday.
The very first project I was assigned in Visual Interface Design during my first semester of graduate school at CMU in 1996 was to redesign the QuarkXpress print dialogs. There were several different dialogs that were accessed individually from the File menu. My solution combined them all in a single dialog where options were grouped based on whether they applied to the page, the printer, or were specific to offset printing. You could choose Print from the File menu and have access to all of the options, rather than having to change a few settings in one dialog, close it, and open another to specify something else.
It still aggravates me today every time I use an application that doesn’t allow me to change the page orientation in the Print dialog. Sometimes a button will be provided that will open the Page Setup dialog where you can do this, but sometimes I still have to cancel out of the Print dialog and select Page Setup in the File menu. Take the Print dialog from the most recent version of Adobe Reader, for example.
It does have an option to “Auto-Rotate and Center”, which orientates the page based on the orientation of the document you are printing—and this is typically what I want to do—but it doesn’t allow me to specify the page orientation otherwise. To do that, it’s another trip to the File menu.
You would think that in 13 years this little problem could be solved.
This month, Gist Design will be hosting IxDA Pittsburgh and leading us in a unique, fun, and educational event.
Real-World Research
Designers know the benefits that design research provides in shaping good user experiences for products and services. But practicing effective design research for technology products in the corporate environment (whether for start-ups or for international corporations), requires ingenuity, flexibility, and a sense of humor. Want to try your hand at it? Join Gist Design and other design colleagues for a collaborative game of “Real-World Research.”
Date: Wednesday, October 21.
Time: 6:00pm
Location: Gist Design
33 Terminal Street, Suite 425B
(South Side)
Gist was founded in 2002 by John Beck and Shelley Moertel, two graduates of the masters programs at CMU. More recently, another CMU grad, Daniel Gloyd, who also happens to be an alumnus of the same undergraduate graphic design program that I hail from, joined them to open an office in Fort Worth, Texas. The firm specializes in design research, product and service planning, and user interface design, working with prominent clients in the mobile and medical markets.
If you’re in the area, you should plan to attend. It promises to be a worthwhile evening.
Last evening I participated as a subject in a study for a Ph.D. student’s thesis. From what I gather, she is going to try to develop a software tool with the purpose of helping a designer communicate the subtleties of expressive user interfaces to a developer.
For example, if I were designing the iPhone OS, and I needed to communicate to the developer exactly how a list should bounce when it reached the end, how could I do that? Though completely natural, it is not a simple behavior when you start thinking about it. At what rate does it decelerate before bouncing back? How far does it extend beyond the edge before returning? How fast is it moving on the rebound, and how long does it take to stop? I can picture it in my mind, but it could give me a headache trying to spec it in text, which of course I wouldn’t try to do.
I would do exactly what the designers at Apple did when they were designing Mac OS X. I would create an animation in Director that exactly represented the behavior I wanted. Then, once the developer had something implemented, I would sit down with him or her and tweak it until it was perfect.
I wish the student I met this evening the best of luck in her thesis work, but I think she’s working on the wrong problem—or at least not mine. The majority of developers won’t have the visual design skills to fully understand the nuances of the animation—I’d never expect them to. That’s not their focus. So, I’m wasting time if I have to try to communicate nuances to them.
I don’t need another tool that helps me communicate. I need a tool that helps me get what is in my head into code that can be employed in whatever environment implementation is occurring in, be it HTML/CSS/JavaScript, C#, or Eclipse RCP. I don’t want to rely on a developer to get the nuances right.
I want to do it myself.
Last night, the Pittsburgh chapter of the IxDA was hosted by Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. Betsy McIver, a second year masters student, met us in the lobby and introduced us to Quasi, a conversational robot who tried to convince us that he was a little boy. Quasi was a fascinating being to interact with. At first, I thought he was based on exemplary speech recognition and programming that would allow him to learn from his conversations. But when he started seeing things in the environment, I decided he was being controlled behind the scenes to some extent. For example, when a student walked through the lobby carrying a Nerf dart gun, Quasi said he hoped he wouldn’t shoot him. At other times, however, he said things that didn’t make sense—more what I would expect from an artificial intelligence. My best guess is that there was likely some combination of automation and puppeteering. Betsy’s explanation was that it is magic. What I am certain of is that it was entertaining, and I would like to have spent more time with it… err… him.
My blog tends to be rather light reading. I enjoy making observations about my environment and experiences more so than knuckling down on theoretical essays. My original intent for DesignAday was to provide a short, tasty design snack every day that wouldn’t take long to read, but would still be informative, inspirational, or entertaining. I think I’ve stayed true to that for the most part. My “In the Details” posts are probably the most enjoyable to write.
If you are interested in sinking your teeth into some juicier content—deep, thought-provoking analysis of Design with a capital D—stop by Ghost in the Pixel. From the About Me page:
Uday Gajendar is a UI Designer in Silicon Valley. His work has included enterprise software, desktop tools, Web applications, and phone devices at a range of companies—Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, and Involution, a boutique studio. Holding degrees in both interaction design (Carnegie Mellon) and industrial design (Michigan), Uday continues to evolve his place within industry.
I knew Uday while he was a student at CMU, and it is obvious he was able to digest Dick Buchanan’s lectures much better than I. Uday’s writing is academic, very much rooted in his courses at CMU, yet tempered by his own extensive experience in the field. It spurs critical thinking while at the same time being directly applicable to a career in industry. Take, for instance, his most recent post, On becoming a design leader…
Every year, I tell myself that I should trek over to CMU and take a look at the masters thesis posters, but it’s difficult for me to just skip out of the office in the middle of the afternoon and drive across town. Today, I decided to do it, and I’m glad I did. There were a number of intriguing ideas presented, and I enjoyed chatting with a number of the students, as well as saying hello to my past professors (and a couple of classmates-turned-professors).
It’s not surprising at all to find that the thesis topics have followed current industry trends. Service Design, social networks, and sustainability were all conspicuously in evidence. I’m not suggesting that these topics were absent ten years ago, but they were a smaller percentage and didn’t go by those terms. One project is centered around self-organization and time management, although the student admitted that she hasn’t yet read Getting Things Done—a to-do for the holidays. Many of the projects were focused on improving local communities, from wayfinding to rehabilitation of prisoners. Interestingly, two dealt specifically with sound in interaction design.
I’m not sure which was the bravest topic to tackle—the prisoner rehabilitation or a service to help divorced parents collaborate in raising their children. All of the projects were quite ambitious, and I’m looking forward to going back for the presentations at the end of the Spring semester.
- Renna Al-Yassini, CPID
Seeing the In-Between: Cross-Cultural Design in Practice
- Leanne Libert, CPID
Designing for Women Empowerment & Leadership
- Marina Posniak, CPID
Green Clean: Communication Planning for Vida Verde Co-op
- Paul Robare, IxD
Sound in Interaction Design
- Wei Zhou, IxD
Designing for Collecting
- Alexander Cheek, CPID
Salon Classroom Interaction & Visualization
- Julina Golze, CPID
The Poetics of Mapping
- Christina Payne, CPID
Designing an Organization System for Paper Clutter to Enhance Time Management
- Kara Tennant, CPID
Lawrenceville Wayfinding
- Kyle Vice, IxD
Community / Embodiment
- Melissa Cliver, CPID
SHAKE ! (Sharing Arrangements for Kids Everyday)
- Lesley Fleishman & Wiebke Poerschke, IxD
Eco-Lux: An Exploration in Sustainability, Luxury, and Interaction Design
- Christopher Michaelides, IxD
Sound, Character, and Interaction: Giving a Voice to Snackbot
- Phil Robinson, IxD
Even Ground: Designing a Second Chance
I just read today the announcement for a new masters program at CMU: Masters of Tangible Interaction Design. So what, you may ask, is Tangible Interaction Design? As defined in the announcement, it is “…the speculative design of computationally embedded objects and places.” What this means in more pedestrian terms is that students will learn how to design products and services based on the combination of computer technology with anything from your sock to New York City. In fact, the two required studio classes they will take during the one-year program are “Small Things” and “Big Things”.
Hosted by the School of Architecture, the program will take advantage of other CMU programs, such as the School of Design, the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. It will be a truly multi-disciplinary program—one of CMU’s strong suits.
The MTID program aims to attract both computer scientists and engineers who want to exercise their know-how in creative and speculative design, as well as artists, musicians, designers, and architects who seek technical abilities to implement their ideas.
Does it sound broad? Absolutely! I think it’s an exciting direction for many reasons, not least of which is that it is focusing on the fact that Interaction Design applies to more than the screen you are reading this on.
DARPA has announced the finalists for the Urban Challenge in which teams pit robotic vehicles against each other in a 60 mile race through “live” traffic. The first car to complete the course in less than 6 hours takes away the $3.5 million prize. The vehicles must obey all laws of the road and react to the same circumstances human drivers find themselves in, such as other drivers running through stop lights.
Although 20 teams started the competition, only 11 finalists were accepted. The other vehicles were deemed unsafe, failing standard California DMV road tests. One of those finalists is my own alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. Introducing the Tartan Racing team as a finalist, DARPA director Tony Tether said, “The next team, if we had to give a ranking, it would be number one.”
The race starts Saturday morning. Best of luck to Red Whittaker and the rest of his team!
