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NEC's Future Designs

aesthetics, design

April 04, 2004, 02:26 PM

Jodi sent me a link to some product concepts developed by designers at NEC. A couple of them are kind of similar to two of my IID projects from last semester; the "tag" device reminds me of my scheduling snake (look at the first picture on the page especially), and the flacon is vaguely similar to the "Keep in Touch" application I did with Elizabeth and Chun-Yi. Not that I'm claiming NEC are culling my weblog for ideas or anything, but it's sorta neat to see that the technology that will make designs like these possible is actually in the works, and that professional designers coming up with concepts that are similar to the ones we're coming up with here.

I feel all designy.

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A New Year and a New Look

aesthetics, announcements, internet

January 01, 2004, 01:11 AM

The witching hour has come and gone and the year 2004 is now upon us. In this spirit of newness, I've been working on a new design for roBlog as well as the rest of this site, which I'm calling "Heimdall" (the name of the current design is "Odin", in case I never mentioned that). These changes will (hopefully) include:

1. More useful categories
2. Monthly and comprehensive archives
3. The "looking forward / looking behind" feature I mentioned a long time ago
4. Proper print versions of every page
5. Numerous usability-related tweaks

The information architecture of the site shouldn't change much, but I have come up with a proposed new visual design template for the site. Note that this sketch is intended to give a sense of the visuals only, and thus I've left out some page elements like some of the sidebars and the comments sections. In the interests of participatory design, I humbly submit this sketch to you, dear readers, for comments and criticism. If you love it, hate it, or have thoughts on how it could be better, please leave a comment below or send me an email.

Heimdall, I should note, was the Norse god who slew (and was slain by) Loki at Ragnarok, the end of the world. In hopes that it won't spell the end of me, I'm making a New Year's Resolution to complete this project by this time next year at the very latest (and hopefully soon before); a feat which is far from certain since I'm at least as bad as Kevin at completing all the projects that I undertake.

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Usability and Creativity

aesthetics, software development, usability

November 10, 2003, 02:55 PM

At the last SSS, MHCI student Jesse Kriss gave a talk on digital music and live performance, focusing on the technologies available for changing the way musicians perform. The important feature of all these technologies, according to Jesse, is that they separate the instrument's input from its output. With a regular instrument, like a violin, the form of the instrument is more or less dictated by the sound you want it to make. You can't make a violin with a substantially different form that is played in a substantially different way without changing the sounds the instrument is capable of making. But with digital technology, the "input" (the way the instrument looks and is played) and the "output" (the sound the instrument produces) are entirely separate. This opens up whole new possibilities for instrument design.

While listening to Jesse's explanation, it struck me how similar these concepts are to software architecture patterns like Model-View-Controller, which emphasizes the separation of input, output, and processing responsibilities into three separate components. MVC aims for this separation for exactly this reason; many types of systems require frequent changes and recombination of the input, output, and processing components, and separating them into three distinct modules helps facilitate this change. Jesse also mentioned how important it was to be able to plug together many different devices to build the kinds of instruments he envisions. He prefers Macs because they make plugging things together easy by requiring a minimum of setup hassle. It's easy, of course, because the Mac device architecture supports device discovery and auto-setup very nicely; more evidence of the impact of architecture on usability.

But it's more than just plugging together hardware. Jesse's work also involves reconfiguring that hardware to map behaviors to sounds. The software he uses to do this allows him to build processing capabilities using audio filtering components and logic controls. Essentially, this is a domain-specific programming language that reminded me of LabView's G. The flexibility and complexity of digital audio technologies is astounding.

All this got me thinking about a question I've pondered before (and in the context of digital music, no less): how do we design interfaces to support creative tasks? As I discussed in the previous post, classic user-centered design techniques focus on designing for the user's goals by distilling these goals into tasks that the interface can support. But the very nature of creative endeavors ensures that the users' tasks are difficult to define; after all, creativity by definition involves doing things that have never been done before.

Bill Fulton, the head of Microsoft Games, gave a talk here at CMU last fall and was asked this very question. His answer was that he was no expert, but that he suspected the interface should just "get out of the way" and let the creator work as directly as possible with their medium. This is good advice as far as it goes, but I suspect it's more complicated than that. After all, many programs that support creativity have some of the most complex interfaces available on the market (think Photoshop, sound editing tools, and programming IDEs). Generally speaking, however, the user populations for these tools are willing to put up with this complexity (to an extent) for the power and flexibility that comes with it. Is there even a user-centered design problem here?

I hypothesize that there is, and that we can make these interfaces better by thinking about those aspects of an interface that are essential to creativity. In general, I suspect supporting creativity is related to supporting exploration and problem solving, two aspects that are relatively well understood in interface design. Here's a few rough guidelines:

1. Make plugging things together easy, both in hardware and software. This involves building software abstractions that are robust enough to support current modules as well as future ones, and that can hide the technical complexity of configuring hardware and software interfaces to work with one another from nontechnical users. Plug-and-Play (PnP) technology has partially solved this problem already, and upcoming protocols like Jini, Rendezvous, and UPnP will hopefully take this even further. What we lack is usable equivalents for software components. Some component frameworks like J2EE try to tackle this problem, but we still have a long way to go.
2. Make problems visible and obvious. When users get creative, they tend to make mistakes like configuring the system in ways it wasn't meant to be. The system needs to provide users with sufficient feedback for them to evaluate the problem and correct it. Even better, create interfaces that make the state of the system continuously visible so users are able to diagnose potential problems before they even occur.
3. Make it easy to undo mistakes. Tog's guidelines on explorable interfaces, as well as Nielsen's heuristics and several other sources, emphasize the importance of creating an environment where users feel safe exploring by allowing them to back out of any operation they choose by accident. This is especially important in interfaces to support creativity, where almost every action the user takes is exploratory. In fact, many interfaces may benefit from a more sophisticated version of this feature than the ubiquitous "Undo" menu option. Programming IDEs have long offered integration with full-blown change management systems; perhaps its time for other applications to take a cue.
4. Allow for data sharing across applications. I brought this up in my earlier rant. Creative users may need to step outside the bounds of your application for some of their tasks, no matter how well designed your system is. Support copy & paste and import / export functionality.

This is, of course, just a first attempt. More thinking and research needs to be done to generate a list that can even resemble completeness.

It's worth noting that all of these features may impact the software architecture design of the system. See our U&SA technique for further information, especially the scenarios on Maintaining Device Independence, Supporting Undo, and Reusing Information.

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Logos

aesthetics, personal

November 04, 2003, 08:05 PM

A couple evenings ago, I put together this design to serve, henceforth, as my personal logo:

The design was inspired partly by Raymond's proposed hacker emblem and partly from some playing around with pennies I did a couple months ago in the MHCI labs, then was refined by the usual iterative process. I'm quite pleased with the result, and so far the other people I've shown it to seem to be as well.

The image makes a good logo for the usual reasons; it's simple and reasonably aesthetically pleasing, it has very few colors so it's cheap to print and display, it looks good at both large and small scales, and thus it's effective in a variety of mediums such as a web image, a t-shirt or coffee mug print, a watermark, etc. But in addition to all this, it has a number of semantic meanings as well.

The meaning becomes more clear when you think of the design as made up of four intersecting gliders. As I said earlier, the concepts behind the glider pattern (simple, effective design) resonate with me, and having the "hacker" theme run through the design is not unattractive either. The intersection of three elements provides a visual metaphor to my own professional persona, which is recently very much an intersection of the hard-nosed, problem-solving engineer, the rigorous, data-oriented scientist, and the creative, holistic designer. The logo also conveys a sense of rotation, cycles, and eternal motion, concepts that I identify strongly with. Finally, the single red dot (the color of passion) provides a subtle break in the otherwise perfect regularity of the design; a visual metaphor for my own philosophy on understanding and accepting the workings of society while still clinging to slight, but true, nonconformity.

The design alone doesn't communicate all this, I realize. But after much thought I decided this isn't such a big problem. After all, it makes for a good conversation starter.

I plan to integrate this logo with these web pages just as soon as I get enough of a breather to devote sufficient time to it.

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On Constrained Diets

aesthetics

October 14, 2003, 10:15 AM

There's an article on K5 written by a guy who's giving up vegetarianism after 8 years. It presents an interesting perspective on what it means to be a vegetarian in our society. As a vegetarian of 9 months (and the only one in my immediate social circle), I'd say my experiences with anti-vegetarian prejudice aren't nearly as bad as the author makes his out to be, but they are there, and noticable. He makes some other good points, too. I especially liked the following paragraph:

The longer I was a vegetarian (and the longer I studied diets) the more I realized how complex the issue was. My very rational decision to give up meat highlighted the irrationality of our society's relationship to food. After 8 years of dietary exile, one thing is clear: not only is our diet bad for our health, our environment or the animals, and it isn't even very tasty. When people say they like the taste of meat, I wonder if they ever eat anything else satisfying. Odds are better than even that their veggies, if something other than potatoes, are always served terminally limp, that their desserts are mostly fat and sugar, and their salad base - if they eat salads - is an uninspiring iceberg lettuce.

For a society that consumes as much as ours, we generally have a pretty boring relationship with food. The solution to mass-producing "tasty" food is to load it up with fat, salt, and sugar. Quite contrary to my expectations, I've found that when I gave up meat my diet got significantly more interesting, because I was forced to stray from the "standard fare" of steaks, burgers, chicken patties, etc. Certain connoisseurs may argue that you can have this experience with a conventional diet as well. This is entirely correct, but for many of us, constraining ourselves to new ground is the only way to encourage exploration.

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Keep In Touch

aesthetics, design

October 05, 2003, 09:03 PM

As a follow-up to my wicked-cool scheduling application design, I've been working for the past few weeks on a new assignment, this time a design for a situationally-appropriate interface for helping people keep track of long-distance friends, lovers, and family. Jodi teamed me up with Elizabeth Windram, a very talented graphic designer, and Chun-Yi "Grace" Chen, a skilled industrial designer / product illustrator.

The basic challenge was to produce an application that could help remind users of the people they needed to get in contact with while also not demanding their full attention (i.e. popping up a dialog box that proclaimed "YOU HAVEN'T CALLED YOUR MOM IN 10 DAYS!" was unacceptable). The interface also had to involve components that could 1) be understood at a glance, 2) be understood entirely aurally, and 3) be understood without the use of vision or hearing.

We never came up with a name for our design solution, so for the purposes of this post I'll call it "Keep In Touch". You can view our design presentation if you have Flash Player (warning: ginormous 13.5MB SWF file).

The Flash movie was intended to be supported by our verbal discussion, of course, so I'll try to cover what might not be clear from just watching the SWF. Our goals for this design were:

1. Not to demand the user's full attention (dictated to us by Jodi).
2. Take advantage of more of the user's senses than just sight (also dictated by Jodi).
3. Encourage, not force, the user to contact their friends and family.
4. Give the user enough context about what was going on in their friends lives that they would actually have a reason for contacting them.
5. Help the user avoid spending too much time talking to friends, so that they can also get other things accomplished.

Our solution is basically a screen saver that displays a collage of pictures of your friends whom you need to contact. Along with the pictures are a few images that are intended to give some context about what is going on in your friend's life right now. For example, the girl in the movie with the airplane next to her picture may be planning a trip abroad. At the same time, the system plays songs that are intended to remind you of the person who ranks highest on your "get in contact with" list (for instance, the song might be a favorite of the individual in question, or it may be one you often listened to with that person).

The second component of our system is an intelligent mouse that warms up to alert you to the fact that you need to get in touch with someone. It also plays the person's song, to remind you of who its alerting you about and to provide a link between the tactile and visual components of the interface. Additionally, the mouse tracks how much time you spend talking to someone (on AIM, for instance) and produces small bumps that give a rough measure of how long its been. This is intended to help you manage how much time you spend with each friend in a subtle, unintrusive way. The mouse is cordless and portable, so that you can carry it around with you and receive reminders when you're away from your computer.

The system determines who you need to get in touch with using a complex and largely-unspecified algorithm, but here's a few of the things it takes into consideration:

• How long it has been since you last contacted the person (determined through monitoring email, phone calls, IMs, etc.)
• What an "appropriate" amount of time would be before contacting the person. For example, you can and should allow much more time to elapse before contacting distant business acquaintances than you should for close friends.
• Whether an important event, such as a birthday or wedding, is occurring in your friend's life.
• Whether your friend is in a situation where they might want or need you to contact them (if they are feeling depressed, for instance). These last few might be determined by monitoring your friend's weblog or online photo journal, and thus our interface might be considered a futuristic news aggregator (Newsable 8.0! :)

So that's "Keep In Touch" in brief. All in all, I think we did a bang-up job on the project. Special thanks to Elizabeth and Grace for their great ideas, their awesome visual design skills (this project would be 10 times uglier if I'd had to do it myself) and for generally being great group members.

As usual, Dan has some great content demoing his project, BreakAway, if you want to read about more awesome products that you can't buy.

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Redesigning Scheduling

aesthetics, design

September 22, 2003, 11:58 PM

Our first assignment in Visual Interface and Interaction Design (a.k.a. "Jodi's class") was due last week. This was my first attempt at real, live interaction design (well, my first intentional attempt), so I'm documenting it here for posterity or something.

Our assignment was to design a new type of "scheduling application". The first thing I learned was that Jodi's concept of an "application" is much broader than mine. Most of the examples she showed us were entire products and not just software running on a standard computer. The implicit message was that, to an interaction designer, it is the experience of the user that counts, not the form of the design solution. Jodi placed no constraints on this form; software versus hardware wasn't an issue.

Instead of a fully fleshed-out product specification, Jodi wanted a refined concept for the application that could demonstrate how a user would schedule an appointment, remove an appointment, and handle double-booked appointments using the interface. As part of our familiarization stage, we developed the product taxonomies and mood boards that I mentioned earlier. I found the taxonomies useful insofar as they helped me really focus on how the form of a product impacts the way we use it. They got me thinking about affordances again, which I hadn't really focused on since reading Norman's book so many (four) years ago. I didn't get into the mood boards quite so much, but I did take from them some general thoughts on how human senses and emotions might relate to my interface, as we'll see.

I set aside all this work for a bit when I came up with the initial concept, however. To do that, I reflected on the scenario I articulated in my Visions of a Distributed Future post; I thought of a world, not too far removed from becoming reality, where physical location is less important, we are far more mobile, and where work and play blend together into a single concept of "living". What would a scheduler look like in this world? Despite the advances in mobility, people still can't be in two places at once, so it would have to be heavily time-focused. I threw up some thoughts on my whiteboard:

Around this time I decided to focus on a particular type of user. Since I had no data on what other people want, I focused on creating a scheduling app for people like me; i.e. students / lowly technical staff. I drew a picture of how I conceive of time on a day-to-day, operational basis (its on the left of the whiteboard); essentially, time consists of "now", a past that I care little about since its already over with, and a future that is segmented into slots that I can fill with meetings or other engagements. This concept, combined with the drawing of a fancy armband I doodled next to it, essentially turned into my initial design. It struck me that it resembled a snake, and I started thinking up some ideas for how it might work.

The next morning, I built a low fidelity prototype of the concept so Jodi could critique it:

As you can see, I strapped this monstrosity to my arm and walked around with it for the better part of the day. Strange thing was, this actually really helped me come up with refined ideas for the product; having the snake really sitting there on my arm gave me a new sense of what it might be able to do were it really functional.

For the second iteration, I developed a higher fidelity prototype using modeling clay and a real watch:

The interaction design didn't change much, but this prototype helped communicate the vision for the scheduling application more clearly (I hope). To describe the functionality of the inert prototype, I put together a small product spec sheet and a scenario-based description of how the product handles the functions Jodi asked us to demonstrate. Looking over these might give you a better sense of how the snake works than the photographs alone do.

The knurling and basic product design came largely from my exploration of the taxonomies. The anthropomorphic reactions of the snake came (in part) from reflecting on the concepts that appeared in my mood boards. The general design concept came from the distributed future scenario, although I realized as I was finishing the product that it was really a fairly realistic device even for the near future. It's odd, but I felt that considering an "out there" scenario helped me come up with some interesting ideas even for a product that didn't wind up being as futuristic as I initially thought it would be.

I wish I had the chance to explore more options with this product; once I came up with the general form of the solution I kind of stopped exploring. However, our second project has already begun, and for it we're required to go through a much wider exploration phase. I'm also still a little unsure how much I used the familiarization artifacts (the mood boards and the taxonomies) in my final design. They were helpful, but maybe not helpful enough to justify the large amount of time I spent on them.

If I'd had the time to refine further, I would have liked to produce an even higher fidelity inert prototype (that was thinner, for one, and possibly made of metal rather than modeling clay) as well as an interactive flash movie that demonstrated how the interaction with the snake's screens would work. But all projects have a deadline, and this one's is past.

Dan discusses his design on his weblog if you just can't get enough.

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Of Moods, Taxonomies, and Exploration in Design

aesthetics, design

September 09, 2003, 10:55 PM

For the last week and a half or so, I've been hard at work for my Visual Interface and Interaction Design (VIID) class developing two sets of artifacts: four mechanical product taxonomies and seven "mood boards". In theory, all this work is supposed to lead to ideas for our first assignment: to develop vignettes for a new scheduling application. There are very few constraints, but Jodi seems to want us to explore radical ideas instead of sticking to old hat; for instance, last year Abby did a "schedule ball" that let you set appointments by turning its two halves in different ways. Another student made a piece of ribbon that represented time and that you could pull from its spool and mark with pins to represent appointments.

If you take a look at my taxonomies, you'll find we were asked to examine a few physical, mechanical products and describe how users interact with them, how the products' parts responded to this interaction, what sort of affordances they provided, etc. I found this really forced me to sit down and think about these common artifacts in a way I generally never do; I started to realize why we know (or don't know) how to use them fairly intuitively.

For my mood boards (warning: ginormous 9MB pdf), I took the seven words Jodi gave us, then brainstormed some other words that came to mind when I thought about those concepts. I picked four of these "attributes" for each board and searched for pictures that I thought exemplified their meanings. In the end, I found that three pictures wasn't really enough to capture the meanings of these broad concepts (duh), so instead I put in images that I felt gave enough of a sense of the contrasts within each attribute that I could reflect on the range of thoughts and emotions I associate with each.

So far going through the process of doing these exercises hasn't helped me to come up with any brilliant ideas for the actual scheduling application. Abby, however, assures me that this will come in time. The extent of my thinking so far is that I want to come up with some ideas for a scheduling application that might appear in my Distributed Future scenario, but whether that will pan out or not, I can't yet say.

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Quality, Quantity, Progress, and Design in the World

aesthetics, design, society & sociology

July 29, 2003, 12:51 AM

Once again, CDF has reset itself and we've procured a new teacher. This week its Craig Vogel, an industrial design teacher with a penchant for waxing philosophic on the nature of design and its place in society.

Craig described the design problem as a process of understanding the existing world and then envisioning the world in a new, preferred state. Progress, then, is moving from the first to the second. I've described something similar in my definition of design. Yet people have different definitions of "preferred", as I hinted at in my earlier post. Some argue that modern society's concept of a preferred state of the world, and perhaps even its understanding of the existing state, is short-sighted, misled, or even downright inhumane. Craig mentioned an environmentalist architect (whose name escapes me) who felt this way. I thought of an old roommate back in college, Eric, who passionately believed that architecture and urban planning could be conducted in harmony with the environment, leading to a better world for all, except that society didn't value these things and thus they never entered into these visions for a preferred state of the world. Maybe he's right, maybe we need to develop such a vision. Alexander had lots of ideas along those lines back in the seventies, maybe its time for more people to listen to him.

Next, Craig discussed qualitative versus quantitative methods. He argued that qualitative methods have been deemphasized, when not actually reviled, in modern society. Our society values quantitative methods and skills such as mathematics and "hard" science. Our educational system emphasizes these skills and even defines intelligence (the primary educational value) in terms of these skills, while paying small heed to more qualitative skills like art and design.

So far so good. Personally, I'm very interested in merging quantitative data gathering with qualitative design and decision making, since I strongly believe both have great value for different purposes and both are essential for a healthy society. Along these lines, Craig discussed the cultural divide between engineering and design, which perked up my ears since I see my work on U&SA as one facet of bridging an instance of this divide. However, although Craig preached for bringing the two perspectives together on equal footing, the rest of his talk, I felt, had a definite "design has got it right; engineering is so materialistic!" slant to it. Over dinner, Matt remarked that it seems every area of study he encounters preaches interdisciplinary unity at first, then turns around and argues why their particular discipline is the best and should ultimately be in charge.

All too often, such discussions turn into power games. Perhaps its due to our tribal ancestries, but we humans always seem to want "our people" to be the dominant ones, whether our people are defined by nationality, race, gender, or discipline. Too few of us genuinely see ourselves as truly multidisciplinary, as having a foot firmly planted in two or more such cultures at once. Yet the disciplines must cooperate, and to do so they must see the other's point of view. Sometimes I'm amazed that anything ever gets done...

Craig also discussed the MAYA principle of design, which stands for "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable". A powerful concept, that speaks to the need for progress to proceed in digestable portions. Too many sweeping changes, and you've developed a product, interface, or system that is unusable, aesthetically displeasing, or otherwise rejected by the populace. Sometimes we refer to products and ideas of this ilk as "ahead of their time" (if they're lucky). Which is very visionary and avant-guard and all, but such ideas, almost by definition, never pan out, never make a significant difference. Keeping this principle in mind is especially important for us intuitives, who are always seeing the possibilities of the future and risk losing touch with the here-and-now reality our fellow humans live in. Perhaps here is where the quantitative methods come in.

Craig contrasted the design of two cars, one of which he held up as a better example of design. He mentioned that buyers know there is a problem with the second car but can't necessarily articulate what the problem is. They're likely to say "it just looks ugly" or something similar. This reminds me of the maxim of HCI that "the user is not always right". The designer's job is to define, articulate, and respond to the problems the users "know" are there but can't quite grasp, let alone offer solutions for.

As we talked more and more about these two designs, I couldn't help but feel how ironic it was that, after all that initial high-minded anti-modernity talk, we wound up discussing cars. If ever there was an example of a poor definition of progress, I'd argue its embodied in the automobile. They're dangerous, bad for the environment, expensive (on both the personal and societal level), and yet our society keeps demanding more of them, with more features and better designs. And thus our designers fight with our engineers over how to make the cars pretty and cheap at the same time rather than confronting the larger issues. Do we even need these things at all? Why is the only alternative an overpriced fancy scooter?

Unfortunately, all people, even designers, work within frameworks. Cars are so much a part of the framework of American society that people either take them for granted or dispair at ever improving on them. And no matter how convinced you are that you're discipline should rule the world, you still should recognize that its culture lives within a larger culture that dictates a surprising array of its values in deviously subtle ways.

I guess no one has all the answers, be they engineers, designers, or HCI people. But hey, if there weren't all these important unanswered questions out there, there'd be nothing for people like me to write about.

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Redesigning My Space

aesthetics, design, life & times, personal

July 25, 2003, 04:07 PM

I've moved into a new apartment recently. I moved in two weekends ago and spent last weekend cleaning and redecorating. All my Pittsburgh friends will (hopefully) get to see it in person soon since I hope to have a housewarming party, but in the meantime (and for those who won't be able to attend), here's a few pictures I took.

Street View

Front Porch

Kitchen

Dining Room

Dining Room Wall

Living Room

My Center Of Operations (a.k.a. Desk)

Reading Area

Patio

Backyard

All these pictures are partially to make Micah happy, who has always frowned at me for having too much boring text on this weblog :).

As I was redecorating my apartment I couldn't help but think back to the design process we learned about on the first day of CDF. I went through the familiarization phase while looking for apartments and while moving all my junk, then the development phase when I decided where the major furniture would go, then finally the refinement phase when I positioned all the little things on the shelves and tables and desks. And sure enough, there were "architectural" issues; it would be prohibitively expensive for me to move to a new place just because I didn't like the way my stuff fit into it.

Looks like the basic pattern (along with its consequences) fits to even the most mundane design tasks.

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Expressive Type, Visual Structure, and Human-Centered Design

aesthetics, design, usability

July 21, 2003, 07:59 PM

This past week in CDF we studied Expressive Typography with Dan Boyarski, head of the School of Design and typographer extraordinaire. Our running assignment was to arrange a quote on a page in a way that expresses its meaning. For the first couple iterations we were constrained to just positioning the text, for the rest we could also change the font size and stroke weight.

First off, I was amazed at how much emotion and meaning you can communicate using only type (no color, no images, and no shapes other than letter-forms). I'd seen typographic presentations before, both static and kinetic (kinetic typography, or videos of moving type, is one of Dan's research interests), but viewing someone else's piece doesn't quite drive home the point as much as actually sitting down and doing one yourself. The sheer number of variables and choices was daunting, to say the least, when the position, size, and weight of every word (or even every letter) necessarily conveys meaning across even small visual differences. And this is just type. When I imagine trying to put together a piece using the full range of colors, shapes, drawings, pictures, time (if the piece is a video), etc. my head starts to swim. Yet from the design perspective, interaction design (what we do to design software systems and other interactive experiences) is all these and more; its like kinetic design minus the strict sense of control the linear flow of a video gives its creator, like a movie where the viewer rather than the director gets to choose the next set of frames to play every few seconds from potentially hundreds of options.

This "design perspective" is a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world. The visual designer learns to give their full attention to how something looks, to its visual representation. Programmers, philosophers, writers, and (usually) interface designers generally think quite differently; to them the underlying ideas are more important than the visual presentation of those ideas. Yet perhaps the visual designers have something here; after all, we know that the appearance of a web site is the most influential factor in determining whether users trust the content. And that's not all it affects.

We humans are visual creatures; sight is our primary sense and thus it is integral to the way we think. In many cases, people can suck in and process a lot more information when they can see it all laid out before them than they can if they have to view bits and pieces in sequence or, even worse, read a linguistic description of it. This jives with some of the studies I've done for Newsable; I found that all of my users were quite adept at visually scanning for interesting content, but they were much worse at describing what they were looking for. Likewise, Dan preached about the need for large walls in project rooms so designers can post their work up for easy comparisons. Visual comparisons of design artifacts are much easier when you can see all the artifacts you're comparing at once.

Another interesting lesson, both for this expressive type week and the more mundane hierarchy week, was how much the visual presentation dictates the structure people ascribe to the content. This is pretty clear when you compare my final version of the first assignment with the raw text; this shouldn't be new to anyone. But it was interesting to see that visual presentation isn't just important for sound information design; it even proved critical for the "fuzzier" quotes. Take a look at my classmate Jennifer's piece and you'll see what I mean; the quiet meditation of her quote comes out clearly in the small size of the text, its position in the bottom corner of the vast whitespace of the page, the natural grouping of the words through line breaks and indentation, etc. (The papyrus piece is © 2003 Jennifer Anderson. All rights reserved. Used with permission.)

This approach to visual design as a communication medium that enhances (or even completely changes) the meaning of the content is very much in line with the philosophies of information design and technical writing that I'm familiar with. So far, the professors we've had have talked a lot about communication and what message our designs are sending to the viewers. I've been impressed by how much attention these expert designers pay to the viewer (dare I say the user?) of the artifacts they produce (or are asking us to produce), because it means their basic values are very much in line with ours over in HCI. Dan even outright said "We believe in human-centered design". Insofar as this holds in practice for both camps, we'll always have a common base we can stand on to collaborate. Most designers don't do user tests, and most usability practitioners don't do critiques, but these are just differences in approach, and both approaches are valuable in their own ways. There seem to be many opportunities for synergy between these two cultures and bringing them together, as we're ostensibly doing here at CMU, is a tremendously good thing.

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Architecturally Sensitive Visual Design Scenarios?

aesthetics, software development

July 21, 2003, 12:38 AM

Last week Dan Boyarski, the head of the School of Design, was our instructor for CDF. More on what I learned from him shortly; I have to check up on an intellectual property rights issue first.

In the mean time, though, I wanted to mention a comment he made in our last class about software design and limitations for designers. He made the (quite correct) point sever