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Velcro Modeling
design
February 14, 2004, 12:46 PM
In Sketching and Modeling class last Thursday, Bruce Hannington, one of our professors, talked about a technique called velcro modeling.
Velcro modeling is used by industrial designers to construct flexible models of products. The idea is to model the basic form (or perhaps several possible forms) in foam and cover the model with velcro. Next, get a collection of objects that can serve as widgets (buttons, knobs, dials, etc.) and attach velcro to them as well. Now you'll be able to easily reconfigure the product model into a variety of different possible representations.
Designers can use this technique during participatory design sessions to allow sample users to model products in ways that seem intuitive and pleasurable to them. By observing and assisting users in these sessions, designers can get a better sense of how their customers might think about the device and its functionality. Techniques like this one are designed to make it easy for users to get their ideas out into a visual, three-dimensional medium for effective communication to the design team. Since users are rarely expert modelers, such assistance is necessary.
I wonder, however, what a designer is supposed to do when analyzing the results of such a session. Obviously the naive approach of taking the users' designs as the ideal solution won't work. But perhaps designers could look across a wide range of the solutions users came up with for patterns in the placement of widgets, the intents behind the organization of different kinds of functionality, etc., and use these to inform their own ideation and the final product design.
Career Planning
life & times
February 10, 2004, 02:16 PM
There's an article on Boxes and Arrows about planning your future. It's a bit 101, but it's a good read for anyone (like me) who doesn't have much experience with career planning but wants a better sense of where they want to be in a few years. I plan to sketch something out similar to Erin's template before plunging into the workforce.
As an aside, I wouldn't mind having a manager like Erin who takes such an interest in her employee's career goals...
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roBlog is Printable
announcements
February 08, 2004, 01:03 AM
As promised, I've created printable versions of all the pages on this website. If you're wondering where the "printable version" links are, don't; the magic of CSS makes them unnecessary. Simply print any page on the site and it will be re-rendered by your browser to adapt appropriately to the new medium. In a nutshell, the print stylesheet removes the sidebar, forms, and other navigation and interaction page elements, changes the links to look the same as the text, and performs a few other tweaks to make the content appear presentable on paper.
For those of you who've always wanted to post my words of wisdom on your bedroom walls or lay them out on coffee tables for guests to read, well, now you can!
Posted by Dave on February 08, 2004 at 11:27 PM
W00t CSS!!!!
But hey...it still does't validate there buddy. I scoff at your standards compliance!
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Email Notifications are Operational
announcements
February 08, 2004, 12:41 AM
Some of you may have noticed the "receive new posts via email" option in the Syndication sidebar of roBlog. It's been there for awhile. Sadly, it hasn't actually done anything for most of that time; although you could enter your email address to subscribe, this didn't actually result in roBlog mailing you any posts. Movable Type, for some mysterious reason, requires the weblog author to manually request that notifications be sent out after each new entry is posted. Because I am lazy and forgetful, I pretty much never bothered to do this.
Happily, I found a nifty patch that modifies MT to always send out notifications automatically (and it's written by a fellow Pittsburgher, no less).
Bottom line is, if you tell roBlog your email address, the email notifications will work now. So those of you who claim you can never remember to read my weblog (or who just have a pathological fear of the web) have no further excuse.
Email Rob:
Email Rob: