Korean delegate visits ID

by Ido Mor

This past Monday, ID hosted a Korean delegate from Seoul National University’s (SNU) Master of Design program for a day-long workshop. Thanks to a generous grant from Brain Korea 21 (BK21, English site), two professors and six lucky students from SNU joined Chris Conley and several students from ID in an exchange of project presentations and intriguing discussion about our respective programs, methods and cultures. For most of the visiting students, it was their first time to the United States. Somehow they managed to see beyond Chicago’s current sub-zero temperatures, as several expressed a certain delight with their short but sweet experience here.

One interesting fact that stood out was the great extent to which Korean corporations such as Hyundai, Samsung and LG Electronics are involved in project sponsorship for SNU’s design program. As a result of such outside support, a particularly interesting research tool is under development by design students in collaboration with several stakeholders in the mobile device industry. The MCR Network, short for Mobile Culture Research Network, utilizes quantitative scoring criteria to generate product profiles that enable various powerful forms of analysis. Thanks to participation by students from SNU’s computer science department, the tool has been prototyped to advanced stages.

It will be great to see how the relationship between SNU and ID unfolds. In fact, it was not coincidental that they ended up at our doorstep. Professor Soon-Jong Lee, head of the Department of Craft & Design at SNU, is an ID alum from the class of 1984. In an endearing moment near the workshop’s end, Professor Lee paused to express his appreciation to his long-time mentor, our very own Professor Chuck Owen.

From the IDSAB Couch

What’s happening:

the Couch: Come to the ID charette (Feb 17 9am-1pm)
recruitID: In full swing inviting companies and creating resume book
insideID: Working on a deal with Crunch gym, improv workshops
socialID: International movie night and Valentine’s Day party

The last two weeks have been very productive ones for the IDSAB.

With their flagship event just around the corner, recruitID (February 26-28) is leading the charge this semester. Employers, remember to register. Students, get your stuff together for interviews.

The IDSAB Couch is hosting a charette Feb 17 9am-1pm (see below).

insideID offered an improvisation workshop on Wednesday that was a great break to maintain sanity early in the semester. Now they are working on a deal to get a group membership at the neighborhood Crunch gym. Students, please take this survey to give your opinions on the matter.

socialID is hosting the ever popular Valentine’s day party, now with karaoke! (7pm-11pm Feb 16 Nathan Room) as well as an international movie night (7:00- 11:00 pm Feb 07 tonight! 4th floor student lounge). The first showing will be “Asian Fear” movies.

ID charette

The Couch is trying something new. Since our stated goal is to improve your ID student experience, we are holding a collaborative design session, or charette, to work on some of the most pressing issues within our school. Next Saturday (Feb 17 from 9am-1pm), we will provide breakfast and lunch while we break up and work on possible improvements to our fine institution. More information about registration will be posted on the 3rd and 5th floors by today.

In order to get you thinking, here are the topics that we will focus on:

Course Selection and Advising

For new students, ID’s course selection process can be confusing and difficult to navigate. Often, courses taught by adjunct faculty or sponsored by corporations are not finalized until near the beginning of the term, leading to uncertainty and anxiety about the nature and structure of particular courses. Bringing clarity to this process would benefit the entire school.

Class Structure

In order to focus on tasks of learning, class structure needs to be consistent, understandable and convenient. Factors affecting class structure include course descriptions, syllabi, and easily distributed reading materials and data. Appropriate mechanisms for providing meaningful course feedback factor in as well. Establishing a level of consistency throughout the program will go a long way toward improving the student experience.

MDM Program

The evolution of the MDM program, along with the increase in number of MDM students has been a source of tension within the student body. The needs and goals of the MDM community differ from those in the MDes population. The variance in expectations suggests the need for solutions that serve the distinct populations without dividing the community.

Prototyping

Prototyping at ID is undergoing a transformation. This transitional state has given rise to frustration regarding access to the shop and anxiety about reduced opportunities for hands-on learning. As long as design practitioners will be called upon to produce artifacts, prototyping should remain a core discipline taught at ID. How it will best be conducted needs to be explored.

Career

Career services and a career center are greatly desired by students, but currently not available at ID. Whether seeking a summer internship or a full-time opportunity, the process of finding work can be stressful. Finding ways to enable students to define and pursue careers would enrich the ID school experience.

These descriptions are a starting point. In the charette, we will figure out what they are really about. Again, look for registration info to be posted on the 3rd and 5th floors.

So, please save the date, Saturday Feb 17 9am-1pm. We want to work with you.

Internships and you

by Eric Niu

RecruitID is rolling up pretty quickly now! In anticipation of (or preparation for) the coming scramble for jobs, some students participated in a brief discussion about the internship hunt and their experiences over the summer (or fall).

Maura Collins opened with a brief description of her time in Milan. She took the fall semester off for an internship with Design Continuum’s office there. She was then followed by students who worked at such diverse places as SAP (Zach Paradis, also Enric Gili Fort), Motorola (Lauren Schwendimann, also Maura Collins), Google (Joyce Chen), Mayo Clinic (Eric Niu, also Mark King), the RTA (Jordan Fischer), Doblin (Steve Babitch, also Hyuniee Jung and Mycal Elliott), and McDonald’s (David McGaw, also Clinton Barth, Irene Chong, Gabe Biller, and Kristy Scovel). Each of these internships provided different, yet invaluable, experiences. In some cases, students were members of a larger design team, while other situations might find a student to be the only designer in his or her group. Some students worked on multiple projects over their twelve weeks, but a few were tasked with a single big project instead. Honestly, though, what’s really great about internships is getting paid to challenge the status quo while test driving Hot Wheels.

It’s important to realize that finding and getting an internship can be a pain in the butt, but finding that rocking summer experience always pays off in the end. So clean up that resume and dust off your website. Show ’em what you’re working with!

Check out the current list of attendees on the idWiki.

Demo Ditty: ThinkeringSpaces

by J. Alexa Curtis, Alok Chandel, Jereme Dumm, Chelsea Holzworth, Lauren Schwendmann, Andrea Small, Heloisa Moura

ThinkeringSpace is an experiment in exploratory learning, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation as part of their “Digital Media, Learning and Education” initiative. In the Fall ’06 semester, the student team built and evaluated a series of behavioral prototypes, to understand how kids (ages 8-12) with various learning styles engage and relate to various types of activities through the arrangement of environments, objects and information. The information gleaned from these observations will feed concept development as the project continues through the Spring ’07 semester.

Through the team’s collective analysis of kids’ interactions with the prototypes, the team evaluated initial concepts and frameworks, resulting in revised frameworks, design guidelines, and a set of defined goals that ThinkeringSpace installations should provide.

ThinkeringSpace installations, it is anticipated, will have to be adaptable in both scale and content to fit the libraries’ spacial needs and leverage the libraries’ existing collections and resources. The goals, briefly noted below, provide a structure for future explorations of tinkering and frame a considerable opportunity to shape a “third place” environment where kids can explore, experiment and learn, driven by their own interests.

• Empowered Learners
• Membership Networks
• Interaction Affordances
• Flexible Environments
• Multiples Interaction Models
• Anywhere/Anytime Access
• Responsive/Adaptive Systems
• Evolving Thematic Content

Ultimately, ThinkeringSpaces are envisioned as a network of physical and virtual spaces, connected to libraries as a channel to the public. The physical installations within libraries would provide interactive environments that encourage school age children to tinker with things, both physical and virtual, reflect upon what they discover, and elaborate their ideas in ways they can share with others. Virtual spaces, accessible remotely, are envisioned to complement and enhance the physical experience found within the library environments.

iPhone - the death of product design

by Zachary Paradis

We are two hundred years past the birth of the Industrial Revolution. In those two centuries, the main force for generating value in society has fundamentally changed three times. First, at the dawn of well-organized society, value was generated through agrarian land ownership. Wealth and power in feudal era societies as diverse Western Europe, Japan, and the Maya of the America’s depended mostly on land to fuel their activities. Innovations in shipping and transportation changed this. The Basque had salted cod, the Dutch East India Company spice, the Portuguese sugar and rum. In the colonial era, value was primarily generated by the transportation of resources. These raw materials were then transformed by people in their own homes into useful items. The Industrial Revolution changed all of that. With the advent of factories and industrial design, Ford and later generations consolidated value creation in the production of fully realized “products” sold to end “consumers.” Product design and sales as the primary vehicle for creating value in developed society has dominated for nearly one hundred years. That said, it is time for us to recognize that product design is dead. Before tackling this sure to be contentious proposition, let’s shop for a television.

In 1946, a family in the market for a new television set had several options, but the top choice was the RCA 630. An immediate success when introduced (at a time when you were lucky to get three channels of programming), the 630 is a classic of post-war design. Although the original selling price of $435 was more than some automobiles at the time, the large 10-inch screen, “Machine Age” cabinet, and cutting edge technology was the perfect combination for consumers. The 630’s success helped RCA become the consumer electronics leader in the United States for decades to come. As time passed, screens became larger, and cabinets became less “designed.” Consider the best televisions of today. If you were given a choice of any new TV, regardless of price, what would it be and how would its product design differ from the classic 630? I suggest that it would be nothing but a frame, not unlike the top of the line SONY Bravia shown below (which, by the way, is also more expensive than many cars at $33,000 for the 70” model). Is the design of a frame an example of product design generated value? Where is the real value in a contemporary television? Engineering? Business model? Interaction? Content?

Let’s consider another example: telephones. The Model 302 telephone subscriber set, designed by Henry Dreyfuss, was released in 1937 by Western Electric and was in production for over two decades. It was a brilliant combination of functional utility and modern aesthetics becoming iconic through its use on the I Love Lucy show. Jumping ahead 60 years, Motorola released its first, then second (10 years later), mobile flip phones for which it became most well known: the StarTAC and RAZR. Both were tremendous successes, grew Motorola’s market share significantly, and are listed at number 6 and 12, respectively, on PC Magazine’s Top 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years. From Western Electric’s 302 to RAZR, industrial product design was a primary contributor to the value they generated. Enter iPhone.

Continue reading...

The Art of Competition

(or at least a suggested approach)

by Eric Wilmot

How many times have you heard this one: “I just want to design” or, even better, “I wish the client would just leave the design up to us.” I was one of those “grass is greener” designers - always thinking that a better project was just around the corner, or that if I could just convince my client to head in a particular direction, my interest in a project would increase ten-fold.

While certainly idealistic, these rumblings represent an interesting paradox for those who are motivated by design. If this sounds all too familiar, I hope you will be motivated and slightly enlightened by the following thoughts regarding competitions.

Competitions come in all shapes and sizes, and address a variety of talent from their contestants. Core77 often showcases current competitions and calls for entries from product and communication design on a range of topics. DMI and PDMA challenges are also abundant, but geared more toward management topics and white paper submissions. The list goes on and on, but the main point is this: make sure your entry meets the criteria and intent of the competition. We’re all busy, and so are the jurors. There’s not much sense spending your time to prepare for a competition if the jurors (who are probably reviewing your submission on their laptop in an airport) are wondering how your entry relates to their guidelines.

In baseball, coaches often tell their players to “wait for your pitch.” I approach competitions this way, too. I have my favorite projects, and if I see a competition that fits, I enter it. On the flip side, if I see a competition that piques my interest, I utilize that as an opportunity for blue-sky design. Like the academic setting, competitions are an opportunity to play, have fun, and explore.

Some tips for presenting your work:

1. Acquire proper consent. Be sure to gain permission from group members, supervisors, or clients in order to clear any confidential or intellectual property rights that may be at risk through publication.
2. Show your design capabilities through high-resolution images, good composition, and layout.
3. Write clearly and simply. Most entries require some standalone images and a brief description of the concept. Imagine you’re writing to your mother.
4. Set aside enough time. We all procrastinate. We just do. Set yourself goals. Yes, write them into your calendar, and treat them as deadlines. Design is iterative and the more time you can dedicate to the development of your concept, the more refined it will be.
5. Review the requirements of the care attractive to employers.

If you follow some of these tips and approach competitions from a relaxed perspective, I think you’ll find that it helps to keep you fresh and interested in new areas of design. Don’t be afraid to approach new co-workers for joint submissions. It all helps to avoid getting bogged down and burned out with work work work.

It’s your world, have fun with it.

digg this : del.ici.ous this :: top

Favorite ID Courses

by Tina Ro

Here’s a brief description of the classes, which were designed to complement each other (although Special Problems is not a prerequisite for Interactive Media):

• Special Problems (JoEllen Kames and Ryan Powell, A-session): concept generation and development for a collaborative system; involves creating personas & scenarios, interaction maps, use flows, wireframes, storyboard of interactions
• Interactive Media (Julie Pokorny, B-session): development of concepts from Special Problems; involves concept redefinition, wireframes, site map, working prototype, prototype testing with users and experts (interaction design professionals)

I definitely got my tuition’s worth out of these two classes. Through the course of the semester, we went from concept generation to the demonstration of a realistic, feasible system. That is, we actually got to flesh out our systems to a fairly high degree of fidelity (which we donÕt often get to do at ID), just prior to the development of visual design and aesthetics. Though I had little prior interaction design experience, I felt comfortable in these classes. We were provided with a good foundation on interaction design principles and a whole slew of tools that really helped us to develop our concepts and better understand conventions of interaction design, not to mention plenty of one-on-one attention from the profs.

We were given the challenge of designing a collaborative system. Accounting for the myriad of ways that different types of users could interact with each other and with the system was at times frustrating, but valuable. The tools, especially the ‘patterns’ (widgets and other interface features) that were covered in Julie’s class made this complex design challenge a lot less scary. User evaluation with wireframes and working prototypes was one of the highlights of the classes for me. The use of scenarios helped us to focus on the key interactions to tell a series of clear, simple stories that communicated the value of our complex system. The wide variety of user opinions gathered through user testing broadened our understanding of the problem, rather than the scope of the project. It forced us to contend with the different mental models on what interactions should be to come up with a single, coherent system.

Heuristic testing by experts (professionals from the field of interaction design who visited the class) came at a good time - towards the end of the semester so they were the icing on the cake. These experts helped us refine our flow of information and introduced a couple other interaction conventions that were not covered in class or readings.

New IDer: JD Barton

MDes, Product Design, Fall 2009

My name is JD Barton, and I'm a Product Design candidate for Fall 2009. My full name is James Daniel Barton III, I am 24 and born and raised in Austin, TX. I have an undergraduate degree in athropology and have been a circus graphics monkey. Married: Someday. Children: Someday. Politics: Obama. Religion: Animism.

How did you end up at ID? What were your motivations for coming? Where were you working before?

Before coming to ID, I worked for a small traveling circus. I started out by traveling with them, researching their audience and helping raise the tent. Later, I stayed in Austin doing graphics and wrangling their website. The research I did all went towards marketing, which was one of my motivations for going back to school. I realized a lot of my suggestions were changes to the experience itself rather than just marketing directions. I decided that user research would be more rewarding than market research. In the meantime I was living in Austin and hanging out with jugglers, making big toys and watching people interact with them. “Could I do this for a living?” I asked myself.

What are your first impressions about ID?

Visually, the “campus” really suffers from comparison with University of Chicago. The lackluster office space feel bothered me until I saw IIT’s main campus. The building has become more familiar to me, but I still find myself saying that I’m “going to work” rather than “going to school.” When I first met everybody in my foundation class, I felt way younger than anyone else and it made me worried that I was relatively inexperienced. Once I got to know everybody I learned that the group’s median age is about 24 and that I had been judging everyone’s age based upon their mode of speaking and dress. I guess that means I’m just relatively immature, which isn’t so bad.

What do you think you can bring to the people here at ID?

As a new foundation student, I really haven’t seen enough of the student body to know. In some far-flung conceptual sense I’m bringing another anthropologist voice to topics like user research, but on a more personal level it’s difficult to answer the question. A boundless immaturity and a desire to do projects unconnected to classwork? Visually, it seems like I’ve brought camouflage to the fashion language of the school, but I’m not sure if there’s any flattering cultural descriptor that would go along with that.

Is there anything amazing from Austin that you think people should not miss?

The Enchanted Forest: They’ll put on a gallery show, pyrotechnics performance and dance party all at the same time, outdoors. Alamo Drafthouse: Watch an eclectic selection of movies while eating food themed to the film.

Which designers or thinkers have impressed you the most lately or you are following now?

Shigeru Miyamoto impressed me by leading Nintendo towards creative interfaces. If I had any free time I’d buy a Wii.

This question is worded as if recent thinkers should impress me, which rarely happens. Lately I’ve been thinking about Jim Henson and Frank Oz a lot. I’ll go ahead and call them designers for the sake of comparison, suggesting that puppetry is a sort of crypto-ergonomics. If I had to name someone else I’d say Zhuge Liang, the Chinese strategist and inventor from the Three Kingdoms era.

What are the websites you could not live without?

If I could live without Youtube and Wikipedia I’d have 4 more hours in every day. Otherwise Qwantz.com and Achewood.com distract me daily.

What kind of activities are you planning to do in your free time (in case you have any) while at ID?

It would be nice to have a space to juggle, and while it’s cold I wish I had more time to play with fire. Otherwise I’m just waiting for the next free weeknight to make a pop up book. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to head to the nap room.

Past IDer: Luis Arnal

MDes, Design Planning, 1998

My name is Luis Arnal, a Design Planning (are we ever changing this to innovation planning?) graduate from 1998. I was born in Mexico City, where I live now with my wife Karen and kids Adela, 3, and Alfonso, 40 days. Politics: Fascinating from a distance, like watching gorillas. Religion: Yes.

What do you do now?

• President and COO of in/situm (a 35+ employee research and innovation consultancy with offices in Mexico, Chicago and Sao Paulo)
• Professor at ITESM (Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey)
• Father

What was your background before coming to ID?

Industrial Designer, but still had to do a semester of 497 - now called Foundation (I still don’t know why).

In which ways and dimensions do you think ID has changed your career?

It widened my vision of what the industrial designer was supposed to do. Took me a while to understand that it’s not about the product only!

I get a lot of suspicious students asking me how I can say I am a designer if the result of my work is a document with frameworks and pictures of people and just a few lousy sketches. Well, “I do design” but now applied to strategies, brands, ideas, workshops, and even companies. ID gave me the tools and confidence to say these things in front of students and big clients alike.

Can you imagine what would you be doing if you had not attended ID?

I would probably be a chef in a beautiful beach town (mmh, a tempting option).

What are the skills learned at ID that you use the most in your current job/life?

The ability to learn very fast, confidence, systems thinking, dealing with complexity and what Herbert Simon calls ‘satisfice’ – to be good enough for the world, although not perfect.

What was the most valuable class that you took while at ID?

Many. Any coming from: Chuck, Grimes, Heskett, Larry, Chris (Conley) and Vijay. They are the soul of ID. They seemed to have it so clear, but even if they didnÕt, they were always encouraging you to fill in the gaps—and this is an invaluable skill. By graduation, I thought I had it clear [what design planning was], but now, looking at these last 9 years, I realize I knew too little.

The point is:
1) If you feel like you are not getting all what it takes to be a professional design planner, good. This is precisely the feeling that will make you succeed and continue learning.
2) If you feel you have all the tools you need to be a professional design planner, bad. Because you will no longer seek to fill in the gaps that any new domain requires to evolve.

Which member of the faculty influenced you the most and why?

Same as above.

What hard times did you have at ID, and what got you through them?

Geez, the last week before I turned in my demo project. I have not gotten through this yet; I am still in mental shock as all IDers of the time.

If you could have changed one thing about ID while a student, what would it have been?

The building. You are lucky not to be at 35th Street.

What’s the best anecdote you have from the time you were at school?

The first day at school we were clustered around one of the Unix machines and typed: http://www.[something].com

Nobody imagined what would come after that. It was the start of the e-commerce revolution (i.e. Netscape) and all options were open for new businesses and innovations. The following year we heard of a small Seattle company called Amazon and we all thought it was a cool name for an online bookstore. The rest is history, we did not know the web was going that far, that fast.

How many nights did you sleep at school?

Fortunately none.

What is the last book that has impressed you the most?

The Art of Wordly Wisdom. Written 400 years ago, it’s amazing how current it is today.

What other advice do you have for current and/or future ID students?

If you complain, go and do something about it. Otherwise, be silent and let others do the work.

Strategic Dine Planning: Rosemary White Bean Soup

by Joyce Chen

If only we could all spend as much time meal planning (and prototyping) as we do design planning, how much healthier we would eat! This week we try out a new column for ID students to share their recipes and planning tips with fellow classmates who want to cook more, but can’t seem to find the time.

The one upside to Chicago winters is that, as an ID student, you can pretty much discount the great outdoors as distraction from your studies. When you’re stuck indoors with an endless to-do list, there’s nothing like the sound and smell of slowly simmering broth to warm your apartment, and nothing as simply comforting as a bowl of hearty bean soup and some warm, crusty bread to recharge you for another round of reading, meeting, analyzing and strategizing.

You can make this soup with either chicken or vegetable stock and either dried or canned beans. I usually make it with homemade stock and dried beans; I distrust most things that are moist and have been sitting indefinitely on a supermarket shelf, but student life has occasionally necessitated the purchase of boxed stock and canned beans in the interest of time. This recipe makes over a half gallon of soup, so it will last you for the whole week. You can also freeze some of it to eat later.

Did I say “supermarket?” Yes, you will have to go grocery shopping:

• 1 1-lb. bag of dried cannellini or great northern beans, or 3 15-oz. cans
• 2 quarts chicken or vegetable stock
• 1/2 c. olive oil
• 2-3 onions
• few cloves of garlic
• 1 branch fresh rosemary or 2 tsp. dried crushed rosemary leaves
• 1 bay leaf
• salt and pepper to taste

Soaking the dried beans

The dried beans need to be soaked for 6-8 hours to soften. You can either leave them in a bowl covered with an inch of water overnight, or soak them in the morning before you leave for school and make the soup that evening when you get home. If they are already reconstituted but you have an emergency meeting or deadline and can’t make the soup as planned, simply drain and put them in a Tupperware in the fridge—they’ll keep for a couple of days this way.

Drain the beans when you are ready to make the soup and pick out any discolored beans.

Making the soup

Roughly chop (dice, sliver, mince, whatever) the onions and start them sautéing in the olive oil in a large pot over medium-high heat.

Chop the garlic and add it to the onions when they have started to turn translucent. Add the rosemary, bay leaf, drained soaked/canned beans, and the stock (the last time I made this, I only used 3/4 of the stock, or 1-1/2 boxes) and bring to a boil over high heat. Lower the heat and allow the soup to simmer for 30-40 minutes until the beans are soft while you catch up on email or reading.

Final touches

Depending on what equipment you own and how hungry you are, you may want to just roughly mash up the beans with a potato masher, or puree some of it in a food mill, blender, or food processor before seasoning it with salt and pepper and ingesting it with gusto. If the latter, ladle out most of the beans (leave a few whole for texture), process until smooth, and return them to reheat in the pot with salt and pepper to taste. Add more stock if the soup is too thick.

Serve drizzled with extra olive oil, if desired, and with a nice fat slice of grilled bread and/or a green salad.

Have a fast and healthy recipe you want to share with your classmates? Email it to us.

Around Town: Bake For Me

by Amy Palit

When it’s 10 degrees below outside (yes, that’s Farhenheit), going out for lunch is daunting. Suddenly, the fourth-floor vending machine is sounding like a meal, and maybe Seven-Eleven, if you’re ambitious. However, that cold won’t be enough to keep you away from Bake For Me, just around the corner from Kinzie on Clark. The deli has sandwiches and a variety of cookies and pastries, but their selling point for me is their great selection of soups and chilis, which are made fresh in their South Loop location. The owners are Lithuanian, and they offer some of their homemade specialties at the asking (try the bacon stuffed bun). Right now, get a red frosted heart cookie with phrases like “be mine” and “love” for your valentine, or as a treat for yourself. Keeping warm and fuzzy this winter isn’t so difficult anymore.

Bake For Me
350 N. Clark
312-644-7750