Digression Tautology

The reference comes from an overly zealous grad student who read a little Derrida and decides she was an expert. Expert enough to try and embarrass a guest speaker all the while attempting to make herself feel superior but ending up sounding intellectually smug. Thankfully there were those in the audience who had also read Derrida and didn't take it as whole gospel fact nor beyond reproach. The question was concerning an augmented reality 'talk' that that uses augmented reality (AR) as part of the presentation. She enquired if the 'talk' was not just a digression tautology in reference to the performance of the subject he was researching. It seems fine arts folks have glombed on to the Philosopher as the official Artists spokesperson for philosophical debate. Not a bad choice but there are a few tenants I would question. What was more annoying than the grad students incessant need to reference her Philosophy 501 reading list and the overt need to inform us that unless we knew what 'digressive tautology' is we just don't cut it. We don't even belong in the room. The funny thing was, the room is filled with scholars! Many, as I have mentioned were well versed and willing to make the argument against her thinly veiled attack on us the audience. In the context of augmented reality the question of digression is a legitimate one particularly if you are interested in the philosophical question surrounding the virtual. The "redundancy" inferred by the notion of tautology in AR, seems naive (to be kind). The virtual still exists even if it is ephemeral or intangible. It is also making clear what may not be evident. For that matter most advertising would be a tautology if we are to believe the makers of products. Sure, I too was once an overly enthusiastic grad student who wanted people to know I could play hard ball. I just didn't kick the senior players in the privates on the way to the batter's box.

A Small Companion

This past year was a year of design research for me and the following posts will be about some of the work I have been doing at the Institute of Design at IIT in Chicago. The first project is one that has not gone as far as I would have liked. The potential for this device has wide spread implications and I have seen variations both theoretical and actual but neither perfected. We call it 'Jiminy', after the cricket in Pinocchio who plays the role of reason, conscience, advisor, and friend to a wanna be 'better human'. Some have described Jiminy as a friendly drone but with some natural language processing improvements we could see it as that and more. Imagine a helpful device that hovers quietly by your side as you go about your daily routine. If asked, it can go and find your keys or your phone because it can communicate with other devices that send out signals Jiminy can interpret. It can send video or photos back to your phone from distances that make texts more readable like a street sign or menu or a bus around the corner. When you need some extra light Jiminy is there or when you need to send a message he can send it but when you need to get on the train, Jiminy is small enough and close enough that you can reach out and put him in your bag. Jiminy also is equipped with some security features for you and in case someone else wants to put him in a bag.

Currently, we have designed and built a model with a mini quad copter in place. We are also well into developing the control mechanism which uses micro sensors to triangulate and determine the location of the device relative to the sensors. These sensors are built into a jacket running at 2.4 GHz on a two signal frequency in order to maintain location and constant connection over a 2-3 foot distance. Anyone wearing the jacket can control the device by just walking around or with safety controls built into the garment.

Our research will determine the viability of operating and maintaining such a device but also consider the social as well as practical implications, particularly if there are a number of these devices in the same space. Is this really a device for the home or can it be used anywhere in the wild? Many questions arise when we consider potential uses including caring for the elderly, to physical gaming (think new forms of keep-away) and how this device could be used. If Jiminy were equipped with cameras, lights, and audio recording or controls, what new uses each of those features potentially bring?

One common reaction to the device is, "that is scary" and "why would I want a machine following me?" These comments become genuine concerns if it is thought of as a tracking device however, as an assistive device people seemed less reticent about its purpose. Potential unease people have with a device hovering over them is a design concern that can cast Jiminy either as a companion or a drone? Preliminary studies will begin to look at some of these questions starting with a simple version filled with helium and attached to potential users. Once we have completed development on a working prototype we hope to move onto more of these questions over the next few months. 

Adding to the Axioms of Design

Reading Nam Suh's book the Principles of Design makes me think of the number of times I have argued the finer points of design education. Although the text is written as a guide to quantifying design through axiomatic precision it leaves one wondering about the human factors not fully accounted. Axiom 1 is the Independence axiom which considers the function of a design and its relationship to the parameters in which design functions must operate. Function has been a common quality for design that distinguishes it from other art forms. Many an artist will argue that fine arts has a function to which I would agree, however, its function is not paramount in its existence. If the function is missed, misunderstood, or represents a function greater than the localized purpose of seeing the work we can say it is outside of work and more a result than a purpose. Function as a corollary can not be a design. Axiom 2 is Information and admittedly a more difficult quantifiable term. Suh uses probability and the notion of time as it relates to the importance of reducing information required for the design to function. As you can see, the connection to function and through axiom 1 a relationship to design parameters, the  rounds out the axiomatic framework nicely. Coupled functions are problematic because of the unpredictable nature of resultant behavior when one function (or its related design parameter) is changed. Decoupled and uncoupled functions have both a more predictable behavior pattern and the added benefit of modularity. What is valuable about Suh's work is the ground work he lays for design to be seen as a scientific theoretically based field rather than the mystical art form. What is needed is the relationship to human factors that makes it design and not engineering.

What should be included in the axioms of design principles is one of aesthetic value (AV) which can be quantified with the objective of describing good design. The importance of aesthetic value gets to the human response to a design that arouses visual senses and adds to the experience of using well designed objects. Two effects of design on human interaction include interest (I) which is the level of arousal at initial stages of interaction and experience (E) which is the sum of interaction and the positive or negative quality over time (T). Expressed as follows.

                                         AV= I(E)
                                                 T
These values are relative to the priori of the non-interactive T0 state to the state of T1.... Tn. Where interest is based on arousal levels of the same intervals. Interaction time is proportional to the value of overall experience where if interaction time is larger experience is more positive, and the more negative an experience the time approaches 0 but never equal to zero which would mean no time was spent interacting with the object. To say human experience is quantifiable is perhaps folly and at least controversial but if we are to have a clear axiomatic definition of design we can not eliminate the dimensions that exist within good design. To exclude the aesthetic value would be to neglect the human properties that make good design more value driven than the important features of function and information. Current data on human experience may show that the important nature of experience is, in its measurable self and all that is needed to describe its general value to design. Over the next months I will attempt to prove the axiom of aesthetic value and start the discussion of its inclusion in the principles of design. 

Futurism Starting Today

For those who know me, have heard me say that a new Futurism is soon upon us and there is an optimism in the air after the Obama win last night. If we follow the history of design and signals of economic and political waves that have been flowing over us for the last few years it is clear that a look forward is where our vision is turning.

This is not the Futurism of the early 1900's that whole heartedly embraced mechanical technologies as a way to direct culture away from traditional forms and ideology. The disdain written in vitriolic manifestos diminished the neoclassicists in all areas of culture. Embodied in the design forms was a celebration of modern living. What opened the minds of Italian architects like Antonio Saint'Elia to the possible opportunities material and engineering discoveries offered was a new found freedom by rejecting the past. The manifestation of Futurist thinking came about in what was then becoming a radical artistic movement that spread to areas of design. Within the academe, old architectural training emulated classical masters, where futurists forbade what they saw as a compulsion to decorate (cover with pretty things - F.T. Marinetti). Futurists' exposed a buildings "mechanical simplicity" or emphasized the buildings purpose through form. We now see the influence of Futurism in Modernist painting and sculpture but architecture and design spun off favoring the functional International Style. The 'box' of efficiency and economic modesty seemed to justify the designers intent more clearly for makers than that of contemporary cubist or later modernist art which seemed self indulgent.

Futurism of 2013+ will no doubt reflect the new technology rather than mechanical marvel. In some ways we have not seen much of 'technical' building but for a few exceptions like Gehry, Magma or iGuzzini. Materials and form move beyond the current norms of construction but also embrace a human relationship. Curvilinear walls and softer shapes seem to address the shape of human beings rather than drive us into oversized cubicles. Work is changing from its central role for younger people. Being a brand can not just mean 'profession' it means work, play, family, persona... life - both virtual and real. New Futurism will be techno-everything that will not have the edge of the previous version because all life can not be an ode to only work. Because technology has permeated all aspects of the modern world the new Futurism will seem to be more well rounded by human activity like play, and family. Oddly enough it is these things that have been fading in a technology based existence.

What will also make this new Futurism seem more palatable, but should be no less aggressive in its influence over culture is the importance of sustainability. Technology as we know it is only part of the answer but  guided by an ethical responsibility to the environment the new Futurism will be distinguished from the technological paradigm we live in by incorporating a 'green' perspective. Seeing the issues of sustainability as part of design thinking made possible through technological means will bring about innovation unlike the previous decade. New innovation will come about through the story we construct around a 'healthy planet' but backed by large data to suggest its importance and validity.

Research Revisited: Design Elevation

It has been a long time since my last post and the following will begin a series of post from my sabbatical here in Chicago, IL. I am using this year to follow up on research that I have wanted to return to and have neglected for program direction and teaching. The start of this series will be to document my discovery and renewed enthusiasm I have for design theory and some to the more important methods and processes I have missed or dismissed over my career for one reason or another.

The importance of these theories will primarily be to shape my own thoughts on design but will ultimately influence my teaching and approaches to design research. My current literary research includes four notable writings, which I will describe and add to in the commentary I have set out here. Starting with Charles Owens' Structured Planning, followed by Horst Rittel and Werner Kunz's theory of Issues-Based Information Systems or IBIS to identify case studies that follow methods laid out in the writings. The others I am working on through prototypes, employing the Repertory Grid technique and followed up by the Design Principles described by Schermann, Kremar, Gehlert, and Pohl from the Munich University of Technology, and the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany respectively.

Structured Planning, developed by Charles Owen who is a professor emeritus at the Illinois Institute of Technology extends the idea of user centered design practice to formalize the design planning or what he calls 'metaplanning' using design factors, a document that states, "information about the problem detected (opportunity)" and, " information about what might be done about it (action)". Owen goes on to describe his process of documenting the information under observations, extensions, design strategies, speculation, structuring, and synthesis operations. One of the more important aspect of this theoretical framework is the value in the resource itself. Few designers approach the process of design in this manner and even fewer document their work with such meticulous detail for two main reasons. First, designers feel they have little time to formulate such documents because of time they feel is wasted on a process that has been internalized and now naturally follows from their experience. This is short sighted in its inability to recognize the value in a documented process. Using structured planning helps to clarify ideas and connect conceptual thinking with practical responses and identifies opportunities for clients (an invaluable skill), and demonstrates a deliberate methodology for tackling projects of a larger scale also making designers more valuable. The second reason designers fail to see the value in documentation and deliberate methodology is the notion that they will loose their 'mystic' quality as an unpredictable artistic genius. A sentiment that has all been lost on the business community and discounted by the technology industry. It is no secret that I have little admiration for 'creatives' that believe their value lay in the aesthetic qualities that veil intellectual gems for the trained observer, and for the untrained you get a cool looking cereal box. What is also important is the early implications of this theory to lay the ground work for service design and experiential design practice. Its approach is inclusive and particulates complex problems establishing relationships of all people and issues involved. What service design and experience design have in common is the scope and complexity of design problems each face. Structured Planning is particularly suited for these types of problems giving designers tools to demonstrate their particular ability and expand the practice of design to include strategic planning and systematic approaches to handle complex problems.

To read a detailed description of Owens work and examples of a design factor document see:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/07479360152103813

Re-direct to System Design

After reading an article on service design from Live|Work a company that specializes in service design and thinking I am drawn back to the idea because it poses to overturn processes that are unsustainable in design. (see article Live|Work here) As a follow up from my last post changing point of view or approach to a design problem will significantly alter the interventions iterating from you sketch pad. If you are thinking of designing from a users perspective service thinking only extends this further and may help to justify ideas you have direction and creation of new communications. The most significant is the idea of sustainability and what that means for design. In the article, the writer uses the natural metaphor of the water cycle that is a closed loop on a large scale. The process of how water is used and returned to the system varies but does so continuously. If we think of design in these terms we would consider the brochure after the information is consumed immediately impacting the process we typically think about as graphic designers. In a more contemporary scenario we design and develop for web products or services but do we consider the energy that is being used by the electronic devices we are using to access information? How can you modify consumers energy use in the products and services you buy to offset the energy used to make the purchase of those products and services? Sustainability is a difficult variable to integrate into the design process but its impact on thinking about design solutions is immediate and complex. I often ask my students a question that is intended to be difficult for them to answer but one that was posed by my old school friend Rosan Chow. "How do you design a (fill in the blank) with kindness as a central criteria"? It is difficult for a number of reasons but it is often the first time my students have thought of a project in those terms. It forces them to think about the design from a position outside their own, kindness to whom, to what, how is kindness understood? These are the tenants of service thinking and should be encouraged from all our students. I am encouraged by our university to recognize students involvement with social learning and am rewarded by my own efforts to engage students in these ideas but they must extend beyond the classroom and be embraced by business leaders who are interested in real innovation. I believe there are a great many people capable of thinking in these ways but are stifled by tradition and old models that are entrenched by years of integration and investment. It will take a great deal of power and motivation to reconsider these approaches but proving their worth on smaller projects that have high performance and efficiency may encourage growth and an effort to adopt service thinking. My next few posts will discuss a case of service thinking. 

Something from the French

It has always been of interest to see what the French design establishment has embellished by way of industrial, graphic and fashion design. I say embellish because it feels applied to me whenever I see french design and yet it projects sincerity in its execution. From Yves Saint Laurent to Philippe Starck the material is designed with the human form in mind and a rightful approach to design function. Then there is something more - a detail, a finish that is not just stuck on but not without whimsy. It feels like a later idea in the design process with enough relationship to the bigger concept it becomes essential to the work. It adds more than the big idea expanding its luxury, wit or complexity. As I said to artist Sonya Clarkson, cheap is never funny. I will write more on the subject of French design and other cultures that have defined 'style' and the role style plays in design.  

Create what you love or what other people love?

We have often heard the advice to young writers, "write what you know and write what you want to read". This may be useful advice for writers but is it applicable to design? It is a conversation that I have with my students in terms of defining design as a service versus design as self expression. In talking with clients I often find the conversation coming around to this issue of "point of view" on how they develop new products or services. The conversation goes something like this:

Me: So, what do you think your customers see in the work you do?
Client: Well they like what we like. We built this company around our passion for the thing we make and a number of people asked, "how do I get one?", and the rest is history.

Me: How do you now tap into other things those same people like to expand your business?
Client: (paraphrase) We do what we did before and make what we love, and they will like it too.

I am always surprised to hear that companies are willing to bet that lightning will strike twice. They are also willing to forgo all they have learned or been told about understanding audiences and working from a user center perspective. Often they believe they are working with the user in mind but have suffered from a psychological bait-and-switch. "Our customers like what we offer so we must have understood what they wanted and filled that desire". In fact that is not the whole truth of the matter. Many businesses started off with a product or service that filled a need because the audience found it, not the the other way around. Products and service that do go out and find their audiences have an advantage of going through the process of positioning and fine tuning to the needs of the audience, but even that can have specific audience data of a particular product. It does not lead that audiences are understood because they like this particular product. Audience analysis requires both micro and macro perspectives to get a full view of who those people are. People come together around a product and service for different reasons but are seen from a marketing stand point as being similar. If you define these audiences as a collective the next proposed idea probably will only appeal to a small segment of this group. How often have we seen the sequel not do as well as the debut. Yes, some of it has to do with rushing the product to market, and not having the same originality of the first, or sadly just trying to milk something that has run its course, but often it has to do with assuming the same audience who liked the first will like the second product. Why, because they are the same people? Looking at smaller segments as discreet/overlapping groups of people will offer more insight into who may be interested in what. This is not a new concept it is just an observation of businesses failing to stay innovative after having success. Duplicating success is difficult and fresh points of view are always good. Change the dynamics of the conversation by bringing in someone new to the conversation. Maybe its a client you didn't know you would attract, maybe its a customer you want to attract, or maybe its just shaking up the meeting of the usual suspects and re-looking at the audience data and separating them into discrete groups based on unrelated interests rather than your product that brought them all together.

Novice to Intermediate Interaction

Yesterday, the group show "Shift" opened at the Elizabeth Patrick Dunlop Gallery. I had two pieces in the show, the first was a video piece in collaboration with photographer and colleague Phil Moody. The second piece was also a collaborative work with Shaun Cassidy and Seth Rouser that deals with communication, and information distortion over networks ( I will post video of the piece soon ). Viewers interact with the work by moving in front of it which triggers the movement of objects on the screen in a circular pattern. As the viewer gets closer the pattern movement speeds up and distorted sounds are triggered. What is interesting to me was the focus of the work became the viewers movement, even for themselves. As they became aware that it was them who was in control of the speed and sound they began to experiment with where they were in space. The focus shifted from the screen to, "what is the ideal location?" or for some "is it better if I move faster?". We have not fully become accustom to interaction where it demands attention and can override the visual experience in spaces that have an expectation of visual predominance. There is still novelty in interacting with technology even in very simple forms. I asked a few people who had spent some time in front of the work if they had seen something like it before? Many had responded that they had and gave various examples. I would categorize them as 'intermediate' users so their input was very valuable. As designers we tend to focus on the visual content which is important because 'expert' users will return to the visual communication over time. The interaction acuity diminishes as they become more familiar with the actions. However, the novice and the intermediate user must divide their attention between the content, the context and the interaction. A measure of time would be useful to determine how long it takes for users to transition from novice to intermediate and then from intermediate to expert. The gallery piece relates directly with the idea of communication technologies and how little we know about the information we upload on to it. We are too focused on what we are doing to notice the effect it has on us and on the rest of the web.

Design-by-Menu Challenges Why We Make

To begin, I would like to say that I am wholeheartedly in support of computer based design education. It is no surprise that the forms of digital media are not only how we design, but what we design and will continue for the foreseeable future. The important aspects of design education in the beginning of ones design life can not be compared to yesterdays methods of making. One simple example of incredible change is the advent of the database and what that means for storing, retrieving, and connecting to photos, color systems, font libraries, and general layout options that were difficult to do prior to databases but were also proprietary, guarded assets of individual studios. Storages of photos and fonts consumed space and time that has been cut extensively from the process. This continues to break down the notion that design is about the form and more about the ideas of communication that are carried out through design. This idea has come to me after watching my students over a number of years plowing through networks of databases, searching for photos or illustrations, finding free fonts online, and more recently using color systems to guide their choices.  General layout schemes also influence how they organize information based on what they perceive as successful and found again, in some archive somewhere.

You may be thinking that this is "design by menu" and you would be right. It is not that this method has not been employed in the past and we see copy-cat commercials and ads all over the visual landscape, but it is becoming the method of some design students who are no longer motivated by "originality" or "uniqueness", but rather by ease and their misguided idea that form is the most important aspect of making design work. It is easy to spot and with little experience one can analyze the pedestrian compositions or insipid ideas that grace the page but what is more difficult is demonstrate that these competent, glossy layouts are not as good a design as sloppier, yet sophisticated ideas created by those less enamored by database diving. What is more difficult is encouraging students to continue to question their designs to make them more appropriate, more interesting, clearer in their communication or communicate a more sophisticated idea. The final product has a particular level of polish and feeling of doneness that is hard for students to abandon in pursuit of better design. Design-by-menu still requires students to make choices but there is less analysis about what they are communicating because of the speed and ease at which compositions can be generated. It is not difficult to see that this kind of design making could be simplified further by having these database components of the menu talk to each other. It may seem futuristic but it is a direction of developers and content holders to make "menu coordinators" out of designers. Assemblies of components come in a variety of iterations for the menu coordinator to filter and propose as possible solutions to clients. Can we legitimately call this design?

This gets at the heart of the question of why we design and make things? There are psychology PhD dissertations a plenty that discuss this topic and attempt to answer this question but I would like to refine it a bit further. The reasons for making communications generally serve the purpose of informing people. The function of form and visual application have long been established and seem logical in the context of the arts to serve communication needs, whatever they may be. The question I have is more fundamental in the fact that there are those human beings who make for the purposes of their own interest and find that the inner dialogue with themselves is somehow insufficient. Self expression comes to mind, but this too seems to have a purpose of showing others the thoughts of an individuals genius, perversion, importance or some other ego centric motivation. If we make purely to visualize some idea with no intended purpose other than to clarify it for ourselves, we may tap into the best motivation to design. Design thinking attempts to solve problems based on the thinkers understanding of the dilemma in a given context and that is all. Moreover, we have anchored design education on the basis of communicating ideas and this would solidify the foundation of design education in cognition and analysis. If the motivation of making is held in the minds of those who are selflessly attempting to clarify ideas in their own minds we stand a chance for design to be sustainable. However, if overestimates of the importance of form to attract attention persist we will compete with database technologies making it more difficult to get passed the design-by-menu advantage. I question my students on why they make, hopefully they answer; "to better understand an idea".

The System Designers Role

The System Designer is the organizer of time, material and space for audiences to experience. The 9/11 memorial was an example of this in the organization of circulation, the bronze plaques, the large pools and trees surrounding the area. It will be an experience that varies for visitors but there is an attempt to encourage feelings and thoughts that are reverent, mournful, and reflective. These are managed by they system designer and the design choices that are made and carried through in all the aspects of the environment. The formality of the space in the way it is ordered, the symbolic references to the fallen buildings and their footprint, and the natural elements all add to the experience that says, "this is a memorial". We might even consider the fountain as a de-facto memorial trigger.

Systems may be large scale projects like the memorial or they can be small but analyzing the success of a systems design is based on the way that elements within the design interact, inform, and add to teh experience. I am reminded of a very simple stir stick I found at a local coffee shop in Athens, Greece. It was a beautiful, slender, clear plastic paddle with an oval hole at the end to allow the coffee to swirl through it as coffee, cream, and sugar co-mingle. It is the choice of a single coffee shop owner to select this stir stick and adds to the overall experience at his store. In a way the coffee shop owner is a system designer considering the total experience from coffee to chairs, from newspaper ads to stir sticks. It is not every business owner who can bring together all of the aspects that give customers some impression of the coffee shop nor is it something that they should do but they should know it is important. 

The advertising guru Claude Hopkins states that, "if you don't understand the common man and what they want you will never sell them anything". The "common man" Hopkins refers to is the customer of the coffee shop owner. This may seem obvious but all to often designers focus on their client rather than the customers of their clients. Naturally, the person holding the money gets the most attention but Hopkins and avid follower David Ogilvy agree that pleasing the customer is the main concern. The best way to do that is testing designs with sample users before it is released. A system designers will have a difficult time doing this given because it is precisely the interaction between all of the designed components that make the system work.  It is the nature of the connections between designed artifacts and the context in which they are used influence the artifact itself and ultimate the user within the system. This can only be tested and observed once the system is in place. How can accurate testing be achieved at early stages of the design process? The potential for modularity may be a consideration but it is the value of the custom design of systems that makes it interesting and the salable point. If we prefabricate subsystems and offer them as plug-and-play components we loose the overall connection to the experience. An approach that uses visualization tools through 3D models offers many benefits but little information about these tools and their influence on the users experience has been published. The benefits to visualizing are well known but that is useful to the designer to predict scale, orientation, relationships of objects and so on, but what influence have they had on potential users or the customers of our clients to predict experiences that are generally the same?

Here are a few more questions to consider:
How does the virtual 3D environment measure up to the actual experience?
What were the expected emotional, cognitive, social, or political responses to the design, and did the system encourage, handle, deflect, discourage or change over time?
How does the user interact with the virtual environment?
How can you integrate prototypes that are easily made physically with environment prototypes that need to be virtual?

Visualization within Critical Theory

I have always had an interest in critical theory and for those of you coming from my web site may have seen that as part of my research in graduate school research of this kind is one of the most rewarding things in my life. I will soon be commenting and posting conversations concerning critical theory that will be interspersed with other posts, but to start off review the following site: Critical Theory.


"Horkheimer's definition that a critical theory is adequate only if it meets three criteria: it must be explanatory, practical, and normative, all at the same time. That is, it must explain what is wrong with current social reality, identify the actors to change it, and provide both clear norms for criticism and achievable practical goals for social transformation. Any truly critical theory of society, as Horkheimer further defined it in his writings as Director of the Frankfurt School's Institute for Social Research, “has as its object human beings as producers of their own historical form of life” (Horkeimer 1993, 21)"


In the context of my work I will be looking at visualization of data and its effect on the audiences, their ability to interact with the data in a meaningful way, and attempt to clarify how the information can help and motivate others to change social conditions. I am also interested in papers that cover this material in any way as well as examples that demonstrate any or all of Horkheimer's criteria. 

Paradigm Shift Toward What We Needed

The most interesting conversation just happened in my neighbors kitchen and only seems like the most revelatory idea I have heard in a long time. Time will be the judge. It started with the typical complaints from professors, of which I am one, around the same age late 30's early 40's, about students who have a very different approach to social interactions in the classroom. The question that arose concerns our understanding of students and their ability to comprehend the issues that impact lives such as politics, economics, and social responsibility. We question ourselves about the thoughts that our parents and academic advisors had about us and if they were the same? Or are we just getting old and we have fallen out of touch with those 20 somethings whose lives are inundated with techno this and iStuff that only to become like our predecessors?

The conversation moved to the idea that the technological shift that has happened is so pervasive that little time has elapsed to adjust our thinking about consequences, or benefits of these advancement on teaching, the quality of education, and the real benefit of human interaction when learning about design in particular. As any good researcher worth their salt would ask, "is that necessarily bad that students have lost the ability, or more appropriately bothered to socially engage in the polite policies, and political morass that we have had to endure"? On the one hand, it is important if the shift, as great as the one we are currently experiencing, gets lost in the transition we later determine to be of value. On the other, (I credit my wife for this idea) it may be the perfect thing these people will need later in their lives.

As things become more difficult in the arenas of politics and ultimately by economics our students may need to be less socially engaged, less empathetic, and in many ways follow a kind of logic that is "pragmatic". We see it in our students who are not interested in the subjects they have decided to study and have fewer motivations for applying themselves to the work that we would categorize as passionate. As the populations become greater and as jobs become less prevalent these people will need to make difficult choices concerning others. If we believe in the broader "entitlement" tag defining this generation it may be easier to make these decisions if they are less attached, not emotionally involved and can turn away groups who are effected by problems that could make their lives more difficult. A kind of toughness their parents did not have and disconnect to ignore balance in social organizing their parents fought to achieve. This may seem bleak but it does give one some comfort to know that the quality of detachment has its benefits. Text on my children, its only words on a screen.

Interacting with the system

Recently, I was at the AIGA design educators conference as part of the panel on Changing Conditions: Emerging Practices. The beginnings of a paper on design process and the inter-relationship between computer science and business was the basis for the abstract that I submitted. This may have been premature in the context of many design schools still in the throws of changing curriculum and evolving programs that do not include fine arts - the dejected brother. Some educators like Jon Kolko who suggested they throw out 2D I and II, and 3D I and II to start new foundations courses. We had just finished doing that 2 years ago, which leads me to believe we were ahead of the game for a change.  Some students (and professors) have difficulty understanding this sentiment because they see the logical connection to the fine arts and all that it brings to the discussion of the visual aspect of design. The difficulty they are having suggests that we have not done a very good job in communicating our perspective and why it is necessary to change and more appropriately evolve.

Visual Communication Design like other design disciplines have matured to the point where we have established the frameworks for the pedagogical, theoretical and practices of the field to the point that it looks to be a distinctive discipline. A continued evolution of research mainly coming from, but not limited to business sectors on marketing and persuasion have informed design. Theories that have been evaluated in practice by engaging the designer in these areas of research have codified our relationship with disciplines outside the fine arts. Design has also wisely embraced technology in an effort to keep up with the demand of business expectations. This too brings us closer to the marketing and business community. We have seen in recent years the elevation of design to be the center of some business models who have used the design process and ways of thinking to leverage their competitive advantage. These are not new ideas but they have not been described to the general public in terms of our motivation to move design to a position of intermediary. Designers who have implemented user centered design philosophy do not see this as a departure from a progression initiated in the 1990's. We have stepped up in ways that may disgust our fine arts brethren but design has been very savvy in its negotiations with business practices. Market strategy has as much of an impact on design as visual considerations.

More importantly we see that design has expanded into taking a leading role in communications and building a visual language that has purpose and functions to the benefit of humanity. Our responsibility to encourage the easing of readability, legibility and functionality do not stop at marketing and the advertising world. We have increasingly shown that design expertise is of value in directing traffic, promoting healthy activity, and warning the public of dangerous materials. We are also very good at creating interactive experiences that teach, guide, inform and most recently negotiate systems. It was also at the AIGA conference that the discussion of system designer (see Shelley Evenson from Microsoft what she calls service design) is beginning to emerge as another branch of the Visual Communication Designers domain. The systems that we are familiar with include campaigns that have numerous add-ons, communications vehicles, and opportunities for viewer impressions. This requires an understanding of a variety of context in which the communication is going to be seen, interacted with, or consumed in some fashion. Because designers currently deal with these different context it is natural that we deal with context to control a specific experience. The moment you walk into a public space you will soon see that your experience is tailored to you. The design of the visual world around you will encourage the things you enjoy and diminish the things you do not. Your child will be drawn in by gender, subject and development stage they are in so that they can be stimulated but not over looked. Designers will be called upon to create flexible environments that are customized on the fly for visitors.

All of this suggests that we have out grown our fine art roots and yet we still need to understand those principles that make systems interesting and engaging that catch the eye of the viewer to start the conversation. It is understanding all of these perspectives that makes design one of the most difficult professions but also clouds the definition of designer that makes it difficult for other professions to see that we are experts in any particular domain. We connect disciplines, we control experiences, and we design systems, and still, I find we need to communicate that design is more than just making things look good. It is a positive indication that educators are starting to see that we are strong enough to stand on our own and redefine what the next evolution for design could be.

New frontiers - the smart phone

My students have been working on web pages, apps, and all things mobile. It is very much like the early days on the web, when we had to learn every possible browser interpretation of the pages you built. PhoneGap has made it easier to take some common files and convert them to different platforms. It still is not as easy as saving different file formats but it seems that we will see some conventions across smart phones soon. I have had some difficulty on the design side of mobile apps where many examples have used the interfaces put out by Apple or Android which work great but have little to do with designing for mobile marketing. There is little interest or initiative to use custom designs on the part of the students for apps that should reflect the web presence. Much of this stems from the type of CMS designs that are out there but little is changed to reflect the needs of the business and marketing of the company. As an educator I have resisted teaching students to use CM systems for this reason but also because students stop asking the questions of what does the client and user need from the site. I also despise the notion that designers are there to 'hang the drapes' after the building has been designed. (read my paper "A designer gets no respect") We can not be lazy in assuming decorating is somehow going to carry us through. We need to look at the entire system and experience of the app for the sake of the user. This does not mean we should reinvent the wheel, rather it means we need to know most of the possible plug-ins available for smart phones. Mobile developer Jonathan Stark noted that we need to take advantage of the sensors in the phone and I would include that we need to consider the relationship to the location of the phone and its inherit user. Games and entertainment apps defy this idea but considerations for locale even in games can make them relevant to the user and multiply the development of geographic specific games similar to augmented reality applications.

Interaction with Avatars, Robots and the Web

I just returned from the UK where I gave a lecture to a group involved in visual evidence. I had talked about a subject that I dealt with in my graduate work including animated reenactments of crime scenes. It was an interesting conference that disclosed some information that was new to me, not the least of which was my research was still relevant to the field of jury perception.
More recently, I read an article on robotics and their use in teaching autistic children because robots  potential to have endless patients and repetition skills that autistic children need. I have always thought that my brothers work in tactile fabrics that measure pressure could aid in child learning disabilities if designed to measure both pressure of mechanical "hugs" as well as measuring a child's pressure of returned affection or physical interaction as some reference to their satisfaction or frustration in their teachers.
What do these things have in common? My talk in Europe references Masahiro Mori's theory of "Bukimi No Tani" or the uncanny valley. His theory has to do with the eerie effect of humanoid robots as they approach more human-like qualities. I make the connection to the uncanny valley to animated reenactments affect on jury perception. A kind of unwanted side effect to being more accurate in depicting crime scenes. This eeriness creeps in the robotic interaction with autistic children and can have unwanted responses to their already socially distressed clients. The article described a fix where a staged encounter with the robot interacting with humans (a wave to each other, or short conversation) alleviating fears the child had with the robot. The children quickly became comfortable because of their perceived "humanoid" motion. It is important to note that this is a visual perception of motion and not to human characteristics that can be described as aesthetic. For example, they have human-like hair we find attractive, or human-like eyes either beautiful blues or bodacious browns makes little difference in their comfort level. It is precisely the fact that they react within one and a half seconds of a child's inquiry that makes them feel human.
The other connection to my research into motion suggests we recognize avatar behavior as "artificial" making us more comfortable in their existence possible because we know then avatars are not human. This is contradictory to autistic children being comfortable in aesthetically "odd" or "unusual" robots who physically respond in more human ways. I am not an educator of the mentally disabled but I do know that children who suffer from autism are motivated but hyper-sensitivity to physical response and audio signals. "Treatment may include having the patient handle materials with different textures or listen to different sounds" HealthCommunities.com. The research question arises in what connection to the physical interaction and viewing physical responses performed by robots or even avatars aid therapy in treating autism.

Discreet Piles of Data

Lately, I have been working in XML and AS3 and have seen how loading data dynamically can keep a website current and easily maintainable for clients. A simple admin shell goes a long way to helping people update their own sites. This begins to shift the point of view that text data can be separated into discreet piles; persistent data (different from static data), up-to-the-moment data, modular data, random data and others that I have yet to encounter. Persistent data is that information that can change but approximates the same type of information and probably in the same format, addresses of a semi-annual event for example. This is different from static data such as the address of a company that hosts the event. Up-to-the-moment data is just that, but can be any type of string of varying lengths and varying subject, format and style. Up-to-the-moment (uttm) requires the most flexible of parameters. Modular data has some format restrictions such as twitter's character count but can be used to string together conversation, narrative, or even poetic structure. Thoughts strung into an idea, like this blog for instance, stanzas in a poem are also a good example, but modular data can be reused in appropriate places with parameters that help it fit into the larger whole of the narrative. Random data may have some length constraints but that is its only physical restriction. Random data has a topical relationship to the site such as quotes of famous authors may be found on Amazon's site but not on Home Depot, yet these quotes may change out regularly.

These categories are my own construct to attempt to make some sense of their practical uses in programming or design terms but they also have some relationship to the site as a group. They do start to communicate the overall impression of a site if followed regularly, or they could give two different impressions by arbitrary viewers. We don't often consider our personal blogs as a set of text snippets that tell a complete story. These are the ramblings of a day in a life scenario. However, if we consider the aspect of brand and our incessant need to brand ourselves we should consider what the sampled view is at any given moment. The data categories I have described begin to talk about what we are, but also who we are, and the importance of texts as they describe our persona for us.

The relationships are complex not just because of their influence on each other but also the context of the site and who is viewing the data. Drunk pictures on a facebook page seen by ones peers seems more like a laugh than it would to an employer. Now consider the drunk pictures next to the text that reads "Just Married!" and a reserved image of the page owner with a nicely written, conservative job description which indicates that he just graduated a year before. The tag at the bottom reads "grandma made me get up and dance", maybe we will cut him some slack. Now take all that out of facebook and put it in a wedding site for the lovely couple, now put it in mywildwedding.com each of these context taints the viewer to perceive the image of the drunk in different ways. As we assemble these discreet piles and leave the sorting, formatting and proximity to algorithms we are obligated to assess these relationships and at least sample the brand we are attempting to build.

The long and the short of it

Animation projects take a long time no matter what software, planning schedule, skill level you have, they are just laborious. Trying to keep students interested in animation and its tedium is difficult and frankly I am not sure it is worth the results. In previous years the first project takes Edward Muybridge images and translates them into silhouettes to consider smooth movement in cell animation. This seems to work well to prepare the novice animator for the work ahead. Part two of the project maps a character the students have created onto the silhouettes to emulate the motion they have already performed. Lastly, the character is set in a short joke or tale that uses the motion of the character and some additional frames to tell the story.  The results for this three part project which, has been elongated into six weeks from its previous four week iteration, has not seen any improvement. In order to establish reachable landmarks for students mandatory dates to turn in parts of the project as we move through each stage were set. They have hit the deadlines but the final result of the project is still not well considered.

It is not unusual for students to overlook the final result of a project when they are so focused on the immediate "making" and completing. This is, in part, due to the nature of paper projects they have in graphic design which allow them to redo and review and redo multiple times. Time only allows for one well chosen plan of attack. Early sketching and sequencing inform the planning but not the crafting per se. Most students seem to be able to do this until it came to story boarding. Their drawing skills seem lazy and not given the attention it needs to consider the crafting of the character, environments or props that need to be included. It still seems as though connections of the obvious kind need to be literal an well established before they can embark on the long project. A better approach may take the form of collage and adding all the little bits together from short projects. The crafting should slowly improve as they create scenes instead of the whole movie, as well their approach should be more considered and efficient. This still will not produce quality animations but it may effect the telling of the story - that is - in a better way.

Long time coming

Creating animation is less difficult and more time consuming than most studio courses, at least that is what I tell my students in the VCOM 363 sequential media class. Going through the process of selecting a narrative (story, joke, etc) that is visual in nature, creating a storyboard, planning the making process, and executing the animation, not to mention the refinement process is more than one student seems to be able to handle in half a semester. At least it seems as though the final results don't reflect the efforts it take the students working at it.
The first problem is efficiency; students have a great deal of difficulty modifying the work they do to plan or refine projects. Even though they are forced to plan out projects and write out steps, benchmarks, goals and time management plans the still want to short-shift this process so they can get on with "making". The planning process is also inefficient because they do not take time to think about the process to making, or how they will proceed to making, or how they will legitimately cut time by reusing materials that they have already generated, backgrounds, characters, props, etc. Because they have not thought about it they commence with making and the endless discard, remake, discard, remake cycle begins. One the one hand they are not so committed to the work that they don't know when to through out an idea but on the other, they discard so quickly that they toss potentially good work. This can also be part of their inability to analyze and determine when something is valid and use it, while discarding the stuff that is superfluous.
The second problem is seeing quick results; I have found recently that I get more traction with students if I can demonstrate the practice quickly to them and have them attain an small amount of success early in the process. For example, using foreground, middle-ground, background principles a scene can quickly come alive with good results from small amounts of time and effort. It is critical that I follow up with the deeper more extensive explanation of those results, coding, principles, or theory that underpins the overall effect. Then the student is most likely to learn and achieve the deeper concerns I want them to attain. Some retain the information they have learned and others do not because of the first problem of inefficiency, the time laps between the demonstration and the need to use it is so long they have forgotten the success they had earlier.
The third major problem is interest; no you will not be an animator however, you may not be able to hire one, or you will avoid it because you can not do it yourself. This is the basis of my first book which could be titled "You think your kid is so smart! The electronic thumb generation". Yes our kids and students born in the 1990's do plow through a ton of information. Most of it is useless or forms some kind of tacit knowledge at best. This is ok but not what school is designed to do nor should be modified to accommodate. Knowledge needs to be explicit and formal for students to be prepared to the working world... Interest wains when we move from quick results to deep learning because of their inability to focus and maintain interest or seek out what is of interest in a given subject because they have a tendency to reject.
Two months in we are soon to wrap up the first of the projects. I don't see better results than when I made this a 4 week project. It is not apparent that they have learned any more about process either. Rethink this project again.

Sequential Media - VCOM 363

I have protracted the course from its original form and extended the projects, process and teaching of methodology for the students. I expect the final versions of the projects to be of higher quality in form and tempo as well as narrative. The Muybridge experiments are still involved in the early process of the animation production. This is followed up with a greater emphasis on character development than in earlier years of this course with the addition of the five profile drawings. The final product to be included in the first phase of this first project is the storyboard as seen in the examples shown in class. All three of these deliverables should give the students a foundation for fleshing out the final animation.

The Muybridge experiment will start fluid walking animation for the character. The side profile of the character may cause the animation to continue from this POV but with close direction on the storyboard I hope to encourage students away from two dimensional story telling.

The five drawn profiles is meant to encourage emotional definition of the character. Students should start to feel what the characters are feeling at some point in the story. This should come across in the way the character is drawn and then extend into the movement of the character.

The storyboard services as a plan to tell the story in a way that communicates humor. Comedy is difficult and not easy to describe visually. Relying on the story or joke the students have brought to class will have to suffice as a measure for how they will plan the animation. It is not a course in story telling or creative writing which seems best left to the students in the class to judge the comedic value of each project. Discussion on how to emphasize punchlines, or exaggerations, or reactions to dialogue will continue with the critique of timing and pace of the story.