New AV cabinet that I commissioned from Sef:

After watching Kerry's speech, I'm left with an impression of beauty and possibility, and I'm absolutely blown away by the charisma and passionate articulation of the candidate. His words, his body language, and the semantic quality of his delivery is reminiscant of Kennedy, and I anticipate a debate between the two candidates as being as starck and contrasting as when Kennedy trounced Nixon. I especially liked the references to scientific exploration, and it makes me wonder of an America where Design and Education are actually respected and well funded instead of kicked to the curb.

I hope the promise to keep the future campaign civil is upheld; I'm quite sick and tired of hearing lies and distortions from both sides, and I really wish all politicians would simply suck it up and speak the truth.

And this is just hysterical.

A recent article on slashdot referenced a recent article on NewsForge relating to usability - and I was absolutely astounded at the ignorance of some of the comments to the article:

Useablilty [sic] is simply a matter of taste and choice, that's why when you ask a quesiton about useablilty all you get is opinions. Useablilty labs are like marketing labs; they are there to gather opinions from focus groups on useablility.

This is the culture of engineering, the culture that builds the products we use on a daily basis; while certainly not the rule, that type of comment is hardly the exception. Part of my HCI class touches on the culture of development cycles, and I always have a hard time imparting the true brick-wall nature of the logic-minded. "Do you want it to be usable, or do you want it to work?" is a statement I remember hearing over and over at Trilogy, as I would complain that defects entered relating to usability were automatically categorized at the lowest possible level. I'm becoming more and more convinced that usability is not a science at all - instead, it's a political issue, pure and simple.

How do you teach this to students embedded in a supportive culture of design without completely tainting them? Teach a class in politics - in lobbying and compromise?

Such is the changing state of design education.

On the nature of assumptions

Central to the development of any type of educational undertaking, numerous assumptions are made. Granted, these are continually revised through the course of the investigation, but the assumptions initially define the boundaries of the domain. Often, the assumptions are implicit - they remain unmentioned, and become vaguely structural in nature rather than central guides. Yet when the assumptions are made explicit, they become constraints; constraints, designers quickly realize, are the only tools they have to "wrap their head around a problem".

How does a constraint become explicit?

Is it enough to simply state it - verbally, out loud, to the group of investigators (or, to yourself, if you happen to be playing all by your lonesome)? I feel that there must be more to the developmental process of assumption -> constraint, yet I'm not sure I'm aware of what it takes to accurately transition from one to the other.

I also feel as though my assumptions about some of the skills and capabilities my students have are implicit - and, unfortunately, wrong - and until I make these assumptions explicit, the students won’t be able to properly “connect the dots” of design process. Simple things – understanding that “everything is a presentation”, remembering that “project planning is important”, adapting to unexpected occurrences: these are all aspects of a real world design problem, often implicit in the “design ness” of the problem itself. Making them explicit is so .. demeaning.

Yet, apparently, necessary.

I'm working on completing a new paper on the changing face of industrial design education, and I'm beginning to tie up loose ends that are cite-less. It's interesting - although some things have really been beaten to death in academic research, Industrial Design seems to constantly evade dissection; it eludes reduction, much as Buchanan's infamous article on Wicked Problems suggests. I'm beginning to question the value of a substantial quantity of the educational methods I learned and am subsequently teaching; the value, for instance, of foundation studies, of model making, and the focus placed on making rather than communicating (or logisticating, for lack of a better word). I have a feeling this paper will really serve to solidify a lot of the questions I have regarding these issues, and that may ultimately find its way into our curriculum redesign that we've been working on. It may also, ultimately, shape my future professional direction ..

Speaking of writing, lookit Petro making the front page cut of core :D

Jess and I had a nice long holiday weekend, and enjoyed cooking some Indian food to celebrate the fourth of July :P

I met with Ashton and Stefanie at The Bean today to talk about Information Architecture stuffs; I'm continually impressed with how much conceptual ground gets covered in this course, and the amount of synthesis that shows up in their first project. If Information Architecture exists as a field to shift the understanding of data towards wisdom - to create wisdom out of data - then the process of learning is, in fact, the process of architecting. This specific class in the interaction minor seems to allow the students to exhibit the most growth - the most architecture in their interaction structure.