Look at those cute little koala and kangaroo watching the monitor trying to learn the stuff. They are too cute.

randomly came across and screen captured from a adobe flash tutorial http://tv.adobe.com/watch/flash-downunder/3d-inside-of-flash/

Notes from the morning section about
“Persona & Goal-Directed Design” by Lee, Jaeyong (from PXD)

1.Why user research fails? lack of understanding of users, methods, research findings
2. FGI is often not the best way to dig up the needs for various reasons like /it’s about the present/it’s about the given stories /it’s about the purchase, not about the ‘usage’.
3. Two moments of truth: Buying (where demographics are mostly factored in), Using (where life style, behaviors, level of involvement of users are factored in)
4. Collected data from research should lead to the modeling of insight partly enabled by building personas.
5. Persona is ‘vivid, narrative description of a single person’.
6. What makes up a persona: Attitudes, Behaviors, Context, Details, Photo, Quotes, Goals & his/her pain points using a products/services. It’s more helpful when compared to those with other characteristics. (What is not is just as important as what is.)
…

1. Design that brings people’s attention to, raises their awareness of the things that are often overlooked

2. Solving given problems vs. finding out problems worth solving

3. Attention – It had become a ‘big word’ for me after hearing it from many places recently – in my cog psych and understanding perception through design class and the Dan Saffer’s lecture I attended a few weeks ago… and today I came across a quote by Herbert Simon (who might well be my cog psych professor if only he was alive now and young enough to teach) saying “…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” And I went on to think that the action of designing something maybe then isn’t different than bringing something to its users/viewers’ attention… This then led me to think (along with the projects I’m currently doing where I have to deal with the information and data) that we, designers, are really given enormous abilities to shape what gets our attention and how it’s interpreted, and maybe even what’s valued, which will make up the building blocks of our culture. hmmmm… maybe I’ve gone way too far… talking about designers’ role in shaping the culture seems to be a little too overwhelming to deal with for a mere individual student. And yet I do believe it’s true that the quote I’ve seen somewhere “the great power comes great responsibilities” can not be more appropriate than anything else to suggest what our mindsets should be like.

It’s all good that I’m feeling these wriggling thoughts growing out of my mind and hopefully I won’t lose them so that they will guide me when I have to navigate through my career as a designer.

Attention, Awareness, and Interaction Design

There was a lecture by Dan Saffer, who used to be here in Carnegie Mellon as an interaction design grad student. It was amazingly inspiring and much more worth than just an hour. He got me to think about so many exciting things about being a designer as well as the roles and responsibilities that entail. For a lack of time, I’ll leave the details about the lecture and my thoughts that were evoked and being evoked even at this moment for later. But again, it was such a great talk that will certainly leave a huge mark in shaping what I think I should do as a designer.

I never knew how important it would be to be able to verbally communicate my thoughts before coming to CMU. With my fear of dealing with ‘words’ at all and english being my second language, I used to be terrified whenever I had to ’say’ something or ‘write’ something instead of ‘drawing’ or ‘visualizing’ it. Thankfully though, as a design major, I can rely on visuals to get across my ideas, but at times I’m asked to write, even jot down what I think, or to actually create some contents myself for some of the typography projects. Especially the idea that communication designer is not merely a person who ‘beautify’ the content that’s given to him/her, but rather a person who has his/her own voice to really change the way the content is conveyed makes it even more important to be able to ‘write’ and ‘edit’ properly. So this is why I’m trying to post stuff on my blog regardless of its crappiness. And hopefully I will keep myself up for blogging and get closer to becoming a more capable designer.

As I was making my portfolio both in a pdf format and online, lots of thoughts came to me about how I should communicate my work-concept, thought process, rationale, and the final piece itself. For the most part, it was enough to have a blurb that described what the project was about and some static images of the final piece; especially for print-based design, it worked totally fine. But when it comes to interactive/time-based pieces or the ones for which the concept and process are important to show, I had a hard time coming up with a good way to present them. Because they need clear communication so that whoever views my work can understand what they are all about without me walking through them. On top of that, technical issues also added to the difficulties I had. For the information design project I did in flash or the mobile application I designed with two other people, the final presentations would only be useful when I navigate through them myself following a specific scenario since I was not able to build a fully-working prototype by no means. In other words, after all the hard work I did, it’s almost useless to be used in my portfolio. In order to work around that problem, for the project I’ve just finished, I designed the final presentation such that it’s almost self-explanatory which I think turned out pretty nicely. Knowing that I was going to have it in my portfolio made it easier for me to craft it the way I did. From all these trials and errors, I realized the best way to communicate my design is to have it speak for itself to the point where some parts of the presentation seem to be almost redundant and then to trim it down so that I won’t come across as literally reading from or repeating what’s on the slide. Although frustrating at times, it was an experience that paid off. As a ‘communication’ designer, what would be more shameful than being unable to communicate my own ideas…?

I always find myself losing motivation to study as an exam approaches closely. And it’s happening again this morning; I can’t help getting distracted after a few hours of looking at the lecture slides in the library. Never meant to write random stuff like this on my blog, but just feeling like to do so now. Can’t wait for a spring break, when I’m actually planning to blog about something more meaningful…