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Vienna's Through With Me

personal

May 06, 2004, 02:39 PM

This post is mostly just to break the silence. I know it's been a while, but I was busy with end-of-the-semester stuff, then for the past couple of weeks I was attending CHI 2004 in Vienna, Austria, then traveling around Austria and Prague in the Czech Republic. After getting rained on twice today and enduring a number of other misfortunes, I've taken the hint and given up on sightseeing to blow a few euro at an internet cafe.

I return tomorrow, at which point I hope to post some thoughts on the conference and other things. I was planning to do a full trip report like I did last year, but sadly, one of my bags was stolen in Prague along with all my notes from the conference. But I'll do what I can from memory.

To tide you over while you wait, here's some random thoughts and lessons from the trip:

• SIGCHI is still full of a bunch of researchers.
• Viennese and Prague folks like their meat, which makes it tough for a vegetarian. I ate a lot of bread here. Fortunately, it was very good bread.
• According to a qualitative observational ethnographic analysis I conducted while here, Prague girls are, on average, cuter than Viennese girls. You may want to keep this in mind if you're planning to relocate or take up a foreign language anytime soon.
• Don't walk away from your bag in Prague, even for 10 seconds (see above).
• German kezboards suck when zouäre an American trzing to write a blog post on one.

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The End of the Tunnel

personal

March 20, 2004, 11:50 AM

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The Aims of Rob, a Mortal

personal

February 01, 2004, 01:18 AM

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Echo: The Emotional IM Companion

design, personal

December 12, 2003, 03:18 PM

For my fourth and final project for VIID, I worked with Dan Saffer and Jeff Howard on a system to enhance emotional communication over instant messaging (IM) and potentially other text-based mediums. Our target audience was teenagers, since they tend to be technically sophisticated early adopters, and we were interested in developing a novel interaction design. Our solution is a small avatar that sits on top of your computer monitor. The avatar has a camera inside it and monitors your emotional state through your gestures, your facial expressions, and the text you send via IM, then reports that mood back to you as well as to designated friends. We call it "Echo" because it echoes your emotional state back at you. Check out our final presentation for a summary of our research and a scenario of use. Then play around with a demo of Echo's emotional states. And for the truly curious, some specification sheets succinctly describing Echo's properties are available as well as our presentation of initial research and ideation.

During the first phase, we did some user research and developed the following design goals:

1. Enhance emotional communication through compelling, fun interactions
2. Use lightweight, natural interactions
3. Support privacy
4. Don’t interfere with the benefits of the chat medium

With these in mind, we went about trying to develop a concept for Echo. We struggled a lot during ideation for this project; surprisingly, we found that teens are actually pretty good at communicating emotions over the impoverished chat medium and most of the ideas we came up with failed to meet one of our design goals in some way or another. We developed the Echo concept after Ian suggested an onscreen tamagotchi that would somehow communicate your emotional state.

If I had more time to refine Echo, I'd probably focus more on discovering what emotions our users want to communicate, and to what extent these emotions can be "guessed" at by technology. There's a delicate balance in this design between producing a system that requires too much user interaction and thus becomes a bother versus producing a system that guesses too much and therefore risks getting the user's emotions wrong and possibly communicating information the users don't want to disclose. Echo is a novel and compelling design, but also a fairly risky one, which is an interesting observation to ponder.

Thanks to Jeff and Dan for working on the project with me. They're both creative guys and clear thinkers, which lead to interesting and stimulating design meetings and brainstorming sessions.

This concludes my series of IID projects (starting with my scheduling snake, continuing with the Keep in Touch app, the followed by the social robotic walker). I may have more reflections to post later, but this particular foray into new territory has officially come to completion.

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A Splintered Psyche

personal, psychology

November 29, 2003, 02:57 PM

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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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The Canonical List of Companies Rob Would Really, Really Like To Work For, Part I

personal

October 25, 2003, 05:01 PM

Here it is, just as the title says:

1. Google, Inc. - because they apparently have a great work environment and corporate culture (according to Kevin, who should know), because they do interesting things with information storage and retrieval, a big interest of mine, and because their motto is "Don't Be Evil".
2. PARC, Inc. - because they appear to have a nice blend of experimental research and practical application, and they do cool stuff with new user interface paradigms.

That's all for right now, but here's a few that are close contenders:

• Microsoft - The Redmond Giant does lots of neat projects and has the market clout to actually make a difference in the world. But their anticompetitive business practices make me uneasy...
• Amazon - The web's biggest retailer is changing the way we buy products and the way companies do business, and that's pretty nifty. But I don't know enough about their work environment and corporate culture to get really excited about them.
• Carnegie Mellon University - There are lots of interesting projects to get involved with right here at CMU, but the pay is low and the influence on the real world is questionable. Plus Pittsburgh is a nice place but you wouldn't want to spend your life there.

I'm still looking and learning, of course, in anticipation of a full-on job search this spring. I'm also considering doing a PhD if I could get one while working on my open source and usability project, but, to paraphrase Scott, I'm looking for a special company to seduce me away from intellectualism :).

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roBlog's Scannability

internet, personal, writing & communication

August 02, 2003, 10:15 PM

Neema told me yesterday that he finds all the content on this weblog hard to digest. He suggested I provide a summary or bulleted "main points" section for each points so he could get the gist of the content without having to read the entire article.

I tend to post a lot of content on this forum because I see it primarily as a form of personal reflection and only secondarily as a form of communication. However, I'd love to improve on the second goal if there are ways of doing it without sacraficing the first, and I do realize that having several paragraphs of dense text is asking a lot from my loyal readers :). So I'm open to comments, ideas, and criticisms on how best to fix this problem.

For now, I'm trying a technique Jacob Nielsen uses on his Alertbox: he recommends highlighting important words and phrases to improve scannability. Personally, I feel this makes his essays "shout" a bit too much, but I'll give it a shot anyway. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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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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Photographing Miss Bodine

aesthetics, people, personal

July 08, 2003, 12:42 AM

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The Agony of Getting Started

personal, software development

July 07, 2003, 12:23 AM

Whenever I start a largish programming project, I always fall into the same trap. As with any complex undertaking, I always find there are many, many things the project requires me to understand that I don't; there are many uncertainties or "risks" as the software engineering people like to call them. This freaks me out. I hate uncertainties; as a (mostly) INTJ, I prefer to work in areas where I know what's going on, where I feel that my knowledge and competence will carry me through with few difficulties. And so I wind up following an algorithm similar to the following:

1. Procrastinate starting for as long as possible by basically pretending the problem doesn't exist. The more uncertainty, the harder I find it to get started, since that would mean facing the uncertainty.
2. Try learning everything at once by madly flipping through books, searching the web, etc. to try to get some information that might help clear up the uncertainties. Give up when I realize there's no way I'll ever read and retain all the information I need.
3. Think through the whole system to try to address every problem up front. I tend to go through a lot of dry erase marker and loose sheets of paper in this stage. Give up when I realize I'm never going to get it perfect on the first shot.
4. Sit down and start writing some code, breaking up the problem into smaller bits and solving each bit one at a time. Learn what I need to when I need it. Fix mistakes as I come across them. Find that this really isn't such a tough problem after all.

This algorithm works, but I'm afraid it's not very efficient. Steps 1 through 3 could easily be cut out, saving me possibly days worth of time and immeasurable amounts of sanity. Yet no matter how hard I resolve to follow this wiser course "next time", I always realize after several days of agonizing that I just slogged through steps 1 through 3 once more. I'm wondering how many times I'm going to put my hand in the fire before I learn that orange-flashy-stuff-no-touch.

In short: yes, Newsable is coming along just fine.

If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, just remember that no amount of forethought can replace the experience of actually writing and testing code! This isn't to say that a bit of up-front design isn't helpful, as long as it's done in moderation. Just don't get carried away and forget that you aren't really getting anything done until you're down in the trenches mixing it up with the compiler and its nefarious code libraries.

On a completely unrelated note, according to Movable Type this is my 100th post to roBlog. I kinda feel guilty that it didn't turn out more insightful than this...

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The Last Straw and a New Itch

internet, personal

July 04, 2003, 02:15 PM

AmphetaDesk has annoyed me for the last time. After having to manually change the localhost port from 4888 to 8888 since it sometimes randomly decides to launch the browser with the wrong port number in OS X, I wanted to see the exact time a couple new weblog entries it harvested were posted on, and of course it does not display this information. So I trashed it, for good. The next news aggregator I use will be Newsable, or my name is not Robin James Adams.

Which it is.

So there.

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The Joy of Programming

personal, philosophy, software development

June 13, 2003, 01:05 AM

I've been thinking recently about the craft of programming, and why it is that some people derive a strong and fulfilling enjoyment from this activity that many others do not. I'm certainly among those who enjoy programming, but I was at a loss to clearly explain what it is I see in sitting in front of a computer monitor typing in cryptic codes, testing them, getting angry and frustrated when they inevitably don't work, etc. This lead me back to Fred Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month.

In the first essay of this wonderful collection, Brooks articulates the joys and woes of the programmer's craft better than anyone I've read since. At the end of "The Tar Pit", he writes:

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures....

Yet the program construct, like the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

Programming is, above all, a creation act. In this sense, writing a good program is not so very different from designing a usable interface, or producing an aesthetic work of art, or writing a clearly articulated essay, or any of the other myriad creation acts humans delight in. And yet, in a sense, programming is more "pure" than these others, with the possible exception of poetry, as Brooks implies. For the programmer essentially works with concepts alone, he builds abstractions that have no real basis in reality. Our interlocking pieces, our classes and modules and functions, have no true existence within the machine; we simply pretend that they do because it is much easier to grok than the billions of electrical signals flying around that constitute what's really happening. Castles in the air.

My father is a cabinetmaker. He builds fine furniture and other functional art from wood, nails, and glue, and he takes pride in being considered a fine craftsman. I too am a craftsman, but I do not work with wood. I work with pure thought, with interlocking concepts, patterns, and algorithms. And where my father creates with his hands, I create through pure force of will. Dream up a vision, then type the words, the correct incantation, and it shall be so. The mantra of the modern magician.

Yet like any craft, programming has its dark moments. Brooks continues to describe the woes of the craft:

First, one must perform perfectly. The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirements for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

...

The next woe is that designing grand concepts is fun; finding nitty little bugs is just work. With any creative activity comes dreary hours of tedious, painstaking labor, and programming is no exception.

All creativity has its share of toil and drudgery. It is sometimes easy to get lost among the toil; to get frustrated by the bugs and distracted by syntax and details. Veils. It is easy to miss what lies behind them. Ultimately, it's important is to keep your eyes fixed on the goal: to produce the creation, to perform the act of creating, to be the creator. Little else brings you closer to the divine.

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Weblog Redesign Cocked, Locked, and Ready to Rock

announcements, internet, personal

June 11, 2003, 07:03 PM

As you have probably already noticed if you're reading roBlog dot org through the web interface rather than through a news aggregator, I've finally rolled out the new design I claimed "should be changing soon" when I started this damn thing over two months ago. Some nifty new features to note: the "active discussion" sidebar lists the top two most-recently-commented-on posts so you can see where conversation is happening at a glance, the archives have better(?) navigation controls, weekly archives are generated instead of the (overly long) monthly archives, the categories are finally reader-visible and category archives are generated, and the general look and feel of the weblog is consistent with the main site. The design isn't finished by a long shot; I still have a bunch of ideas I want to implement including the "Threads of Thinking" I mentioned awhile back. Most of these changes require modifying Movable Type, however, and since I have a few other projects that need my attention, these changes are going to need to move to lower-priority threads for the time being.

I've added some PHP code to the pages to handle the rotating quotes and taglines up at the top, which has unfortunately necessitated a file extension change that has un-perma-ed the permalinks. I put a mod_rewrite rule in place to hard redirect visitors from the old links to the new ones, but I can't guarantee it will be there forever so if you've linked to my site in the past, please update those links at your earliest convenience.

If you have any comments on or criticisms of the new design or find any lingering bugs, please do let me know. Feel free to comment on this post or send me personal email.

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback about the mockups; I've tried to take everyone's reactions into account and I think that has improved my initial design tremendously. And special thanks to Mathilde and Kelly for their help with the visual design of the site. Everything that looks good about these pages is a result of me following their sage advice, everything that looks bad is a result of me ignoring it.

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Another Adams Awakens

announcements, internet, personal

June 01, 2003, 09:09 PM

My brother, Geoff, has started a weblog on The Labs with the apropos name of "Geoff Adams's Weblog". He is the only person I know who is (possibly) lazier than I am, so it remains to be seen how often he will choose to update it, but the first steps have been taken (and so far he's not doing half bad).

A warm welcome to him from my modest little corner of the blogosphere!

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Justifying My Existence, or Why I Have A Weblog

internet, personal, society & sociology, writing & communication

June 01, 2003, 01:57 AM

Back when I first set up this here weblog, Micah asked me what my reasons were for doing so. At the time, my answer was "I want to have a place to record my ideas" This was accurate if rather vague; I wasn't even sure then if I'd continue to maintain roBlog dot org or if I'd get bored after a couple weeks and take it down. Since then, I've obtained more experience with weblogs as a medium (I'm even planning to write my own news aggregator), and I think I've managed to refine that initial thought a bit.

The News Hour with Jim Lehrer did a report a few weeks back on weblogging. One of the people interviewed half-jokingly gave the reasons people blog (I still can't stand that word, but when in Rome...) as "narcissism, creativity, and a desire to connect with like-minded people". Not bad as one-sentence summaries go, but I think the reality is more complicated.

At Micah, Andy, and Don's CHI BOF on Weblogs, we talked some about the reasons people have weblogs. From that discussion and others, I've learned that there are myriad varieties of reasons why people choose to share their thoughts online. These range from:

• Emotional exhibitionism, or the thrill of sharing the intimate details of your personal life with (potentially) complete strangers. This works into the "narcissism" comment, and unfortunately is what some people tend to associate with weblogs.
• Communication with friends, which also involves sharing personal details, although possibly of a less sordid nature. Usually these types of weblogs are of little interest to those outside the author's immediate social circle.
• Sharing ideas with friends and strangers, so the author's thoughts can get wider circulation.
• Getting feedback on ideas from people with a different perspective, which may be the main reason the author wishes to share them.
• Recording thoughts and experiences for the purpose of having a "backup brain" that you can refer to later when your primary wetware has failed you.
• Improving writing skills, which was mentioned in the News Hour piece. Writing is a skill that requires frequent practice and good feedback to maintain and enhance.
• Reasoning through ill-formed ideas, since having to articulate an idea in written form is often a good way to identify where the idea is weak and needs further development, as well as identifying those ideas that sound good in your head but look pretty stupid when the (metaphorical) ink hits the paper.
• Connecting with others, since weblogs are a good way to express your interests directly without having to work them into a conversation. Others who are interested in similar things may find your weblog and get in touch with you about your common interests.
• Influencing others, since reading your thoughts may cause others to change theirs. You may express some insight they wouldn't have come to on their own, and thus start the spread of a meme. This is innately satisfying to many.
• And many others I've probably missed...

There are other dimensions of differences as well. Some authors tend to restrict their weblog posts pretty religiously to a single predefined topic, others write about whatever happens to be on their minds. Some authors post lots of personal details, others prefer to keep it dry and intellectual. I believe this variety is a tremendously good thing. Weblogs are a medium, they should be used for whatever people find them useful for.

I don't want to digress too far into ruminations on why other people use weblogs, however, since this post is supposed to be about my reasons for doing so. I set up roBlog dot org for several reasons. First off, as I said initially, I want to record my ideas, to have a "backup brain" where I can look back a couple of weeks, months, or years later and see what I was thinking about in June of 2003.

I also want to be able to see how my thinking has progressed over time, which gets to my second reason; I want to have a means of connecting ideas explicity, both my own and other people's, and if there's one thing the web is good at, it's connecting ideas. Within the context of roBlog, however, I'm hoping to develop a better way of accomplishing this.

I also hope to improve my writing skills and ability to articulate myself clearly, which helps me reason through my thoughts in ways that I couldn't if I just kept them in my head. On several occasions, I've written up a weblog post just to sit back and remark "Ya know what? I'm not so sure I'm entirely convinced of that anymore." I've rethought quite a few points as a result.

Finally, I hope to share my ideas with others, get interesting and helpful feedback, and hopefully influence others and help them think about things just a little bit differently. I've already received lots of interesting comments from my friends (often in person, but sometimes on roBlog itself), and I know my thinking has been stimulated by the thoughts of others I've encountered on their weblogs. To me, this is the most unique and exciting property of weblogs as a medium, this ability to spontaneously share ideas and form connections between them.

In closing, I'd like to present my current vision of the site. I think of roBlog as my open notebook on life, intended both for my future reference and as a window into my head for others, both strangers and friends. I see life as the ultimate research project that never ends, and I hope roBlog continues to reflect that. Stay tuned for as long as you'd like.

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