Derek Chan

I think most people can agree that the most talked-about theme that emerged from the presentations at Interaction 10 was that of “meaning”. Meaning in the sense that we, as designers, should be looking for opportunities to create artifacts that have deep emotional connections with the people who use them. Put another way, designers should be helping people find meaning in the products and services they use.

I buy that. And I do think it’s tremendously important that we use our craft in a way that offers people meaning as an end result. But what I took away from the conference and the theme of “meaning” was a little different.

Thoughts of education and mentorship have been running through my head for just over a year now. Kim Goodwin’s keynote last year at Interaction 09, “Each One, Teach One“, inspired me to follow a path of education. By that time, I had already applied to graduate school at SVA, and listening to Kim challenge each designer in the room to take some time to be a mentor only helped to clear away any doubt about applying to grad school. At that point, I knew I was going down the right path.

It’s interesting to note that the title of Kim’s talk is actually an African proverb that originated in the US when slavery was still acceptable. Pulling from Wikipedia:

“The right to an education and the possibility of learning were unachievable goals for many people, but slaves, free blacks and white sympathizers understood its value. Some of these people, despite the possibility of physical punishment, and for people of color, the continued assault on their psychological well being, were brave enough to risk themselves in an effort to teach others. When a slave learned or was taught to read, it became their duty to teach someone else….hence, Each one, teach one.”

If Kim’s talk was the catalyst for my new pursuit, the multitude of inspirational talks at Interaction 10 and the central theme of “meaning” only offered to strengthen my resolve. Thus, “meaning”, as it meant to me, wasn’t just about designing meaningful products and services. Rather, that designers have an additional responsibility to educate; to maintain the integrity and quality of design education for the future designers who are still in school, or are yet to be born. There is a sense of duty, in fact, that we make a meaningful impact on others through education and mentorship.

To that end, I am currently involved in a new initiative with two of my classmates, Carmen Dukes and Katie Koch, to bring design education into the classroom for students in K-12. As a bonus, I’m incredibly honored that it was Kim Goodwin herself, through a video conference, that helped us kick-off the initiative by imparting on us her knowledge and experience in the field, as well as offering us her ideas and support. That, meant a whole lot to me.

We’re still in the beginning phases of the initiative, but you can track our progress on our blog: http://www.ixdeducation.wordpress.com.

A couple months ago, I was casually chatting with faculty member, Jason Santa Maria, about the practitioners we’ve had a chance to meet thus far in grad school. I think he was on to something when he noted that there have been enough rockstar designers visiting the studio to fill a conference. And not just any conference – a pretty good one. Because things were happening so rapidly during the last semester, it’s hard to get a good grasp on just how fortunate we’ve been to have had so many guest lectures/critiques from these individuals. The scary thought is that it’s only been one semester + a week!

To demonstrate what I’m talking about, here’s a list of some of the people who have stopped by to SVA’s Interaction Design studio, either to give a  lecture or to be a guest critique in class:

• Andy Budd, Clearleft
• Cindy Chastain, RAPP
• Dave Gray, XPLANE
• Jason Fried, 37Signals
• Jonathan Hoefler, Hoefler & Frere-Jones
• Kim Goodwin, Cooper
• Marc Rettig, Fit Associates
• Matt Mullenweg, Automattic, Wordpress founder
• Nicholas Felton
• Peter Thum, Ethos Water founder
• Rob Tannen, Bresslergroup
• Scott Berkun
• Scott Thomas, Obama for America
• Steve Portigal, Portigal Consulting
• Steven Heller
• Tina Roth Eisenberg, swissmiss

Not to mention that Jared Spool will be making a visit this week for a event. And this is to complement our already extraordinary rockstar faculty members. Department Chair, Liz Danzico, has done a fabulous job bringing all these influential designers to us. Learning from and meeting them has been an invaluable experience, and I’m excited to know that there will be many more opportunities to come.

Assignment: Final Project – The Tarot Trunk
Date: December 16, 2009
Course: Fundamentals of Physical Computing
Instructor: Robert Faludi

This group project between myself, Eric St. Onge, and Russ Maschmeyer, consisted of multiple layers of interaction. From the onset, we wanted to challenge what we could do in this final project not only with what we had learned in Physical Computing, but to bring in other acquired skills in the classroom and beyond.

While brainstorming for possible ideas to start this project, we knew we wanted to tie in Twitter as a method for sourcing information. The themes of tarot cards, psychics, and mysticism came up afterwards when we were trying to find the right narrative for our approach.

The project played to each group member’s strengths as well. Although each of us helped out in all areas of the project, Eric was able to put together a lot of the code to get the communication right between Arduino, our web service, and Twitter. Russ masterminded and tinkered with a lot of the circuitry, and his amazing intuition in complex electronics helped set the foundation for our project’s physical form. I took on the reins of constructing the story behind the Tarot Trunk as well as conducting the research towards designing the trunk’s interface.

Some of the wiring on our initial prototype

Tarot Trunk’s “mystic powers” were a result of interactions taking place on Twitter. Through the trunk’s Twitter account, TarotTweeter, we were able to gather replies from the “Tw-ether” to use as a fortune to give back to patrons interacting with the trunk. The final output of these fortunes was in the form of a little receipt print-out.

Prototype used for user testing

When it came time to put everything together, we worked hard to build out the trunk’s form. Russ found an antique trunk from a junk store and we built all the components for it individually. The presentation of the trunk had to align with the theme we had created for it, which was centered around mysticism. As such, lights were installed to emit an “aura” whenever someone walked up to the trunk (using proximity sensors hooked up to LEDs). The crystal ball also glowed to show when the trunk was ready to accept the patron’s “energy”, which was essentially the submit function to get the trunk communicating with Twitter. All the technical details were invisible to the patron, which was exactly what we wanted. To them, the experience we were curating was an interaction with mystic forces that played on their feelings of curiosity and wonder.

Tarot Trunk in its final form

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to try to add some of the work I’ve done during my first semester in the inaugural year of the MFA in Interaction Design program.

First up:

Assignment: The Human Interface
Date: October 12, 2009
Course: Interaction Design Fundamentals
Instructor: Christopher Fahey

By turning a human being into a product and the actions performed by this person as the behaviors of its interface, the first part of this assignment caused us to examine behavior through a different lens. The second part was a crash course into creating the appropriate documentation to capture our findings.

Although we typically don’t talk about human beings as products with their own set of users, there is a lot of overlap when it comes to how the human is “used” by its “users” who all interact, depend, or interpret them differently.

The “human” I chose to examine for this assignment was the Classical Conductor.

Through my research, I learned that the role of the conductor is integral and irreplaceable in the function of an orchestra. In many ways, the conductor acted as the head of the “orchestral body”, so to speak, in that the body would not be able to operate without the directions given by the head. The different methods of communication between the conductor and the orchestra are astounding. The first thing I wanted to research was the actual makeup of the orchestra (the different users) and whether or not each musician would be “using” the conductor differently.

What I discovered was that the orchestra is divided into several sections – Strings, Woodwinds, Brass, and Percussion. The Strings section is further broken down into another five groups – Violins I, Violins II, Violas, Violoncellos, and Double Basses. I also learned that each section had a Section Lead who had additional responsibilities and the Strings section had a Lead for both the Violins I and II groups, with the Violins I Lead being at the top of this hierarchy.

The communication between each musician and the conductor was also critical to examine, because this was the means by which the “users” were using the conductor. My research led me to determine three methods of communication between individuals – visual (eye contact), gestural (hand motions), and auditory (listening). To document my findings, I created a concept model to map the hierarchical ecosystem of the classical orchestra.

Concept Model

Although the assignment only asked for a flow chart diagram, I felt it was necessary to map this rich system of communication and hierarchy to frame our understanding of how the individual musicians operated. The flow chart I ended up creating focused specifically the gestural communication between the conductor and the musician.

Flow Chart

To round out my documentation, I wrote functional specifications for the conductor, outlining how the different parts of his/her body operated and how the resulting actions caused behavioral change in their users, the musicians.

To sum everything up, a four-page Experience Brief was written which outlines all my research, findings, and analyses of the conductor and their role in the classical orchestra.

It’s been a while since I last wrote. A ton has happened and I haven’t even had time to digest everything. I’ m looking forward to the winter break to relax and to reflect on everything I’ve learned over the past 4 months. At some point I’ll be putting up my work on a separate school portfolio.

There’s been a lot of great work coming out of the studio from all the students in the program and I’m excited to see everyone’s final projects in the coming week. School work aside, I’ve also been involved in a project with the Philip Johnson Glass House for the past month, which has been, simply put, awesome. The project will be on-going until spring 2010 and we’ll be writing in our department blog to document our process.

Finally, last month I founded a new student event for our program called, Confabulate. The year-long series of monthly events is aimed at allowing students to present topics and ideas outside of interaction design to enrich our educational experience. Fun!

Links to my Processing lab:

Albers
The Albers painting I selected was, Departing in Yellow:

By Josef Albers

Drawing Area with Clear Button

There’s a noticeable gap since my last post about school because this past week has been beyond hectic. But, with that out of the way, I can now talk about the final two classes from this fall semester.

Strategic Innovation in Product/Service Design is taught by John Zapolski and is a very interesting class because strategy is one of those buzzwords that gets tossed around a lot, but few are  able to clearly articulate its meaning like John can. Strategy is also one of those topics that I was only partially involved in back when working at Interactive Partners. I’m looking forward to getting the most out of this class because frankly, I don’t think strategy is very easy to learn, let alone used effectively. My opinion is, what distinguishes an interaction designer is their involvement in the strategy phase of a project and their ability to communicate strategy to professionals of all types. A lot of practitioners say they are involved in strategy, but it’s likely they’re involved in planning instead, which John indicated is quite distinct from strategy. John is also an incredible lecturer and I can sense the confidence in his voice when he speaks – a characteristic that not all instructors or practitioners have, I’ve noticed. I’m hoping some of that can rub off on me as well because presentation and communication is something I need to work on while in school.

The last class to be mentioned is Interaction Design Fundamentals taught by Chris Fahey. As the name of the class suggests, what we are learning are the essential building blocks of interaction design. I find this class to be the most immediately useful to all of us because for most who have not been exposed to interaction design in the workplace, the methodologies and analytic skills Chris is teaching us can make an impact right away. For me, since I’ve read my fair share of books in interaction/user experience design and because I’ve been practicing for a couple years already, the first two classes have more or less been review to me.  Nevertheless, it’s always refreshing to listen to someone else talk about these fundamentals because there are ever so slight differences in their approach and perspective. The first assignment Chris gave us has been my favorite thus far – basically doing an observational study of a product, service, or environment and discerning what the touch points for interaction were, if any, and what experiential qualities could be exhibited while paying attention to user behaviors.  I did my study on public restrooms, which I will write about in more detail soon.

That wraps up my analysis of the first few weeks of school. More to come as the assignments/projects roll in!

Storyboard sequence of my imagined physical computing product – Augmented Reality Glasses.  The storyboard tells the story of a new guy in town who is looking for a place to eat.  He turns on his glasses and is shown a variety of visualized data within his field of vision and relative to the objects/buildings he’s looking at.  The glasses’ exterior camera recognizes objects while the interior eye-tracking sensor detects his eye movements and gestures to determine which pieces of data to focus on.  An auxiliary application downloaded on his phone allows him to listen to audio via earphones, complementing the visual cues he’s being shown.

Almost one week after classes officially began, I can proudly say that I’m a grad student.  No, it’s beyond just saying I’ll be attending grad school as part of the inaugural class in SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design.  It kind of hit home last Tuesday on our first day of class when our first assignment was issued.  It’s not all fun and games anymore, I thought.  We really have to start working.  And that we have, as the onslaught that is first semester of grad school came knocking on my door.

Despite the piles of work we have to go through, the classes themselves have been very rewarding.  Tuesday’s class, History of Interaction Design, taught by Karen McGrane, wrapped a contextual framework around who we are as interaction designers and how we got here.  The course is designed to tell the story of the pioneers in our field who were never considered interaction designers at all.  The people who helped shape our discipline came from other backgrounds in HCI, computer science, engineering, physiotherapy, human factors, and so on.  Over the course of five weeks, we’ll be learning about these people, the technologies involved, and the interplay between them that gave birth to the notion that technology ought to conform to human behavior, and not the other way around.

Wednesday was a full day of classes.  First was the class I was originally worried about – Physical Computing.  From someone who has never taken an engineering or computer science class, this was pretty intimidating to read about on paper.  But as class went on, instructor Rob Faludi eased us into the material and by the end of it, I was actually pretty stoked about soldering some wires together to a switch. :)

Later that evening, the first of the program’s fall lecture series took place, and we were lucky enough to have Cooper’s Kim Goodwin talk to us about her perspectives of interaction design.  I was greatly inspired by Kim after hearing her speak at Interaction09 in Vancouver last February.  Her vision of sustaining our craft, through education and mentoring, helped re-affirm my decision to apply to this program.

On Thursday, we started Jason Santa Maria’s class, Communicating Design.  We ran through the usual course syllabus stuff and once that was through he assigned the class their first task – tell a story of how you got here (with some emphasis on type treatment).  We were given one and a half hours to do this in any way we could.  The class scrambled off and when time was up, we all gathered to take a look at everyone’s work.  We were treated to seeing everyone’s work and the unique styles and approaches, as well as the diversity in interpretation of what the assigned story meant to us.  Some pieces had a fairly unique styling to them, and if we knew even a little about the people in our class, we’d know who it belonged to.  Kristin’s information visualization, Gene’s wave of coffee graph, and Colleen’s neat little booklet come to mind.  Others were more obscure and invited exploration and interpretation, such as Carmen’s amalgamation of quotes and Jeff’s series of empty parking lot photographs.

We still have two more classes to go so stay tuned for more interpretations of semester one at SVA.

It feels like a lot has already happened in grad school, yet the first day of class is still a few days away.  This past week, the inaugural class of the MFA in Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts met for a variety of activities and events, mostly put together by the department to get everyone together for the first time.  On Monday, the department orientation kicked off a night of introductions, welcomes, and mingling between the incoming students and faculty.

Doodling on the studio's whiteboard walls.

On Wednesday night, several members of the class as well as some faculty were treated to an outstanding cooking tutorial led by Top Chef, Nikki Cascone from 24 Prince.  Finally, Thursday night was SVA’s graduate students reception – a two hour event where grad students from all departments get to meet and greet over food and an open bar.  All in all, this was one hell of a week with SVA and I haven’t even cracked open a course textbook yet!

Stephanie and I at the grad students reception.

I can honestly say I’m really pumped for the next two years.  From the day I submitted my application to the program, I’ve been excited about having the opportunity to learn from the group of respected designers who have been invited to teach in the program.  But after getting to know half my classmates over the summer and meeting the rest of them this past week, I think I’m even more excited to have the opportunity to not only work with everyone, but to learn from them as well.  I guess it also helps that everyone in the class is pretty awesome. :)

Most of the gang.