Formulas for Puffs

The sciences serving art

Heard today from an interview by Anne Strainchamps with Vijay Iyer on working with a mixture of science and art:

Strainchamps: This is fascinating because it sounds like you’re using math to explore music. You start with math and say well let’s, let’s see what might happen if we played around with this in musical terms.

Iyer: I can see it working both ways, but I’m less interested in validating the sciences by making art that’s in service of the sciences, I’m more interested in the sciences kind of serving art.

You know I think that all of my heroes, like Coltrane, and like  Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington, they were onto all of this, all this stuff that we’re talking about.

Linkset #1 

Jane McGonigal

http://cityarts.net/event/the-power-of-gaming/

One of the few pros of commuting via car instead of bike or foot is that I get to listen to the radio - especially National Public Radio - airing in my neighborhood at 88.5 FM.

Jane McGonigal had the most amazing interview at City Arts and Lectures about applying game design to solving problems. The anecdote about what happened at the library - she confined hundreds of gamers overnight in a history library, and designed a mission for them to create a book within 24 hours and experience becoming a published author… all of this was a project to encourage young people to use the library more  - the overnight event is a exuberant story of people flitting around in the library and performing theater… you should not miss it. 

Cowbird

http://cowbird.com/

The new project by Jonathan Harris presents a fast + slow way of sharing stories. 

Awesome elegant interaction and visual design. 

Week 9

The quarter is coming close to a wrap, and I discovered today, that my mind has either been brainwashed over the past eight weeks at school, or has completely been transformed in the way it perceives the world. I’m able to connect the dots better than at the beginning of the quarter. 

For example, as a designer, I always strive to create something beautiful, but often felt like the fast-paced structure of the academic quarter system and Stanford design process (also made famous by IDEO’s David Kelley and the d.school) was never conducive to beauty. On the other hand, I see beautifully refined graphic work in the portfolios of Carnegie Mellon graduates.

As I prepared a 4-minute talk for the designer fair about process design, I realized that, there is an aesthetic in the projects we do here at Stanford. It is not at the surface level, so it takes maturity and insight to see it.

In liu of a master’s project at the design program, the master’s students take a class called Design Garage. In it, students team up to locate a subject matter and design a product or service to address a need or want that we discover based on human-centered ethnography. Besides the collaboration requirement and deadlines to present our project to a big audience, we hardly have any constraints. This means that the students do all of the housekeeping. (It is just like how the student design studios- lovingly called the Loft is maintained and organized). We create our team, our team culture, and working process. We make the decisions about who we are going to interview and design for; what we’re going to design, and how we’re going to design it.

What we practice in the master’s program is how to incarnate a project from scratch, manage it, and produce solutions. We make things happen. And that’s huge.

Through Push, we have been doing all of the above and the process has been rewarding. The aesthetics of this process isn’t visible because I don’t have a screenshot for it  - it will come in the form of a story.

No program emphasizes all aspects of design and no program is perfect - which is why I believe that a good design team that produces work for web services at least will consist of talent from the school of thought in the Stanford Design program, paired with CMU’s.

The value of our work at Stanford is validated through social impact / feedback and may take a few months to physically manifest itself. The aesthetic of the design process at Stanford is contains fearlessness (because designers are self-determining the path and don’t always know where they’ll end up), empathy ( a word that is overused but really describes the feeling of being connected with people we’re working for/with), and experimentation.

Week 8

As I am working on improving the documentation of work on this site, as well as carry out complex projects at school (including Push and an art project in progress), a connecting theme appeared in front of me:

Design has come to be a conversation - a way to carry out a project. It does not refer just to a final product, but the documents and meetings that take place until arrival, or launch. It is also the lifestyle and team culture that is created along the way.

The idea of design as process is fitting for flexible design roles such as User Experience Design where the interaction designer’s role expands and shrinks to fill in whatever exists between a founder or project lead’s initial vision and a final offering. It is true also in the expansive role of the designer as Stanford’s program advocates.

Our project, Push has become a continuing conversation with our audience, thanks to the video that attracted people who are on wheelchairs and have something to say. 

As I prepare material for Social Brands a class on designing brand experiences out in the wild, I realize that companies now create stories that never end - establishing continuing relationships with customers. It’s as if the brand is a persona that lives alongside us. 

Week 7

This past week was Week #7 of the year, and #6 of the school year.

The Push created a prototype for a web service, that is like an Instructables for people with assistive devices. We want to motivate people with disabilities to create and empower others through making and modding. After receiving feedback on wireframes from experts and users, we’ve adjusted details and created version 2. The biggest insight gained from the prototype was that it is dicey to call DIY examples, “solutions.” Disabilities are diverse and stratified, such that a solution for one person can be dangerous and not beneficial for another. 

For the art project, for which we have a show in April, I am using plaster casts as my medium and am looking for objects that symbolize our culture. 

Managing projects have been smoother over the past week, since I started to block out time for project-based activities as far as 3 weeks in advance, and log the number of hours I spend on each.

By the way, Push is looking to talk to caregivers for patients who have been disabled due to an injury. Contact me through this blog or the Push homepage with leads. 

Week 6

Week 5 of the school quarter, and 6 of the year has passed. 

I’m late on the weeknotes, which is unacceptable. Weeknotes is a lowest-maintenance way of keeping the world updated about Formulapuff, and thus there can’t be an excuse to miss the time to update (from now on).

The week always ends with a lighthearted bang, thanks to Making and Breaking Things, a seminar taught by Wendy Ju and David Sirkin. This week, we modified old-school pop corn poppers and created coffee roasters. The session ended with each group roasting their own fresh coffee beans to the second, light pop, grinding them, then dripping and drinking the aromatic liquid in the end.

We are charging ahead with the team project, Project Push, and did some additional ethnography. Our video about Sh*t People Say to People with Disabilities has gotten lots of helpful responses and attention that are informing our next steps. 

The art side of things is still ambiguous, but I will say, that it involves interviewing people as we design students do in ethnographic research. There’s a tribute to artists Mark Lombardi and Gillian Wearing. 

This week will have the most hands-on studio time after the beginning of the quarter. 

Week 5

Week 5 of the year, and week 4 of the school year has passed.

As I promised last week, I simplified my schedule by dropping a class I was auditing out of interest. Opting out is always painful because it feels as though I am throwing away an opportunity to learn and make something great. At the same time,  only by throwing away something, will I be able to gather the time and focus to materialize some of the projects with “great potential.”

We are pushing forward with Project Push , and I spent a couple of hours updating the website with our basic info. We are grateful to be working with people who are supportive of our investigative process.  

That is Cameron and Albert taking notes during an interview. More relevant photos to come after I verify that our project partners aren’t being chased by the FBI.

This week will be a prototyping week for Push, as well as for the art side of things at the program. 

Week 4

We just completed week 4 of the year, and week 3 of the school quarter.

My project team visited Berkeley and met with people who use and play basketball in wheelchairs. Dimitri from the beautiful and accessible Ed Roberts Campus says that people with disabilities is a very large minority. It was became obvious to us that community, and support from family and friends is crucial to a rehabilitating patient with paralysis. Our original assumption that “people with physical disabilities” is itself a category of people is starting to seem irrelevant, as people with disabilities are just living their lives, just as the rest of us are. It’s the built environment and design of interfaces that segregates.

For art class taught by Amy and Michael, we watched “the Five Obstructions” and created obstructions for our classmates to follow and produce a small piece of artwork. I am really enjoying the class, which is itself designed for each session.

Digital artist Camille Utterback is teaching a class I am auditing, and we watched David Hockney marvel over a Chinese scroll that merges multiple perspectives onto one scroll. He compares it to a single point perspective, and argues that the multiple perspective painting, even if it’s considered to be unscientific, is actually closer to reality and provides a richer viewing experience.

In the tinkering class, we played with conductive fabrics and strings — copper-coated fabric, silver-coated string, conductive tape, and the likes. 

On a personal note, it’s time to focus attention on the few important things, as opposed to the many exciting opportunities on campus. I’ll have to eliminate some items on my to-do/wish list and report back next week to say how that went.