Category Archives: Life

Every man has his limits.

May 28, 2009

My grandiose plans for the day were aborted this morning when I locked myself out of the house. Our flat is on the third floor so squeezing through a window was out of the question, and after hopping our 15-foot gate and squeezing through its greedy wrought iron spikes I discovered that yes, the back door was locked as well. I took the BART into downtown so I could grab my roommate’s keys, and by the time I had sorted myself out of my little predicament it was too late to leave on my prescribed bike ride.

Oh well.

This evening I went to Adaptive Path to learn about Mobile Literacy, a research and design project where they traveled to rural India to understand how illiterate users interact with mobile technology. It’s a fascinating project, with strong currents of cultural sensitivity, social justice, and the role that empathy should play in design. Their blog continues to reveal further details regarding Mobile Literacy, so it’s worth a look if you’re into this sort of thing.

What’s super cool is that Adaptive Path has released all of their primary research under a Creative Commons license. Research findings, interview videos and transcripts, the whole shebang is open for you to study and pick apart, firsthand.

Their process culminated in two proposed devices. One is the MobilGlyph concept, which aims to make data tangible by sharing it through two-dimensional bar codes, similar to Cheng Fan’s wayshowing work last semester. The other is the Steampunk concept, which aims to make the functions of the phone as physical as possible, granting them affordances that invite dismantling and tinkering.

Finally, it’s been nearly five years but it still rings true today. Jeffrey Veen is still larger in life than he is in legend. We are lucky that he is such a kind and gentle soul, because he could very well crush every last one of us. Fortunately, instead of scheming how easily he could mash humanity into a fine paste, he directs his energies into building amazing things like Typekit, which stands to revolutionize how you use typefaces (or “fonts”, for those of you who aren’t an insufferable snob like myself) on the web.

Yes, Jeff is a benevolent giant, but I am a man of small stature and predictable bitterness. Thus I will use these newly found typographical powers only for evil, blanketing the landscape with cruel renderings of Papyrus, Hobo and Copperplate.

But not Comic Sans. No one would dare go that far.

Also posted in Design, Interaction, San Francisco, Typography | Comments Off on Every man has his limits.

Wednesday at Berzerkley’s

May 27, 2009

As soon as it gets dark everyone who drives down my street suddenly has a motorcycle.

Walgreens believes that because I live in a city I am either rich, stupid or both. Seriously, $7 for a bottle of shampoo? $10 for a thimble of Tide? At that price I should definitely not need to deal with the panhandler blocking my exit from your store.

A favorite pastime in San Francisco seems to be crossing a street while shouting and swearing at no one in particular. Or just walking around and shouting at yourself. Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of that.

Every sound associated with a moving BART train is unpleasant. If you want to encourage mass transit use on a larger scale, you’re going to have to make it sound better than a chorus of shrieking lost souls.

Outrageous. You mean I can get kelp chips at Rainbow Grocery but I can’t get curry leaves? Well then, I’ll just take my Obama Bucks® elsewhere.

Berkeley bookstores are more fun than regular bookstores. I got lost in one for an hour today, browsing Popular Mechanics drafting manuals from 1912, books on national park architecture, trademarks of the 20s and 30s, and 20th century U.S. travel brochures. It’s like someone crystallized all of my obsessions of the hour and planted them right at the corner of Shattuck and Durant.

Pedestrians in Berkeley do not observe traffic lights and cannot be trusted. I almost got hit by a car because I absentmindedly joined a large group of people who were crossing the street, without checking to make sure the light was green beforehand. That said, the jerk in the red Jeep Cherokee actually sped up and swerved to get as close to me as possible. Way to teach me a lesson.

Today I saw a Dixieland band that championed itself as “Old jazz music for the new Depression.” So at least we have that going for us.

On a similar note, I bought some great shirts at the Volcom store on Telegraph Avenue. The fellow working there told me I was their first sale of the day. It was 2:15 in the afternoon. Ouch.

Also posted in Civilization, San Francisco | Comments (2)

The Iron Legs of Thursday

May 26, 2009

Yes. I am alive. So very sunburned and alive, in this enchanted land nestled intimately between the ocean and a bay and the other side of a bay. I am snug here in the heart of Mission, living at the House of Many Doors with my trusty Frankenbike at my side. Together we will get to the bottom of this fair city, discover its history and nuance, and learn Great and Amazing Things that we will share with you.

From satellite images San Francisco appears relatively flat. I come to you bearing witness that this is not the truth. Indeed, today while struggling up the beautiful wooded hills of Presidio the giant eucalyptus trees filled my strained lungs with a soothing perfume.

Yes. We have eucalyptus trees. And koalas, as I can safely assume. Also, I have learned that fruit grows on trees, and that these trees grow in San Francisco. There are fat and healthy lemons and oranges and grapefruits that beckon for me to hop the fence into the neighbor’s backyard and eat my way into a citrusy coma.

There are mysteries in this town, such as a bridge that disappears into the side of an island only to emerge from the other side of the island. This is a mystery.

Let me tell you a story.

I arrived in San Francisco at one o’clock Friday afternoon. By four o’clock my friends had already bought me a burrito from a truck and built me a single-speed bike out of spare parts. Thusly armed with my Frankenbike, they pushed me out the door to go toe-to-toe with San Francisco rush hour. Despite a few wrong turns and some freaky-crazy intersections between here and SoMA, I found my way to the Adaptive Path office and joined them for happy hour, Battledecks, and a brief tour of their studio. For how much I love Post-It notes, whiteboards and Sharpies, I may have just found my heaven.

Then.

After returning to the Mission I dashed out the door with my friends to catch a burlesque show, as this would seem the only proper introduction to San Francisco culture. Zooming down city streets with a pack of friends on bicycles made me feel like I was ten years old again, on my way to blow the week’s allowance on a sugar rush at the Minnetonka Mills gas station. This time, however, the goal was a bar in Mission, serving up IPAs that taste like grapefruit.

Josh and Kush

Josh Drops In

The next morning we took a surf trip down to Pacifica. I got my first taste of surfing a few years ago, during a scorching-hot fall weekend at the Oregon Coast. The water was still blindingly cold despite the air temperature, so I had some idea what those guys were paddling out in. While I am certain my future in San Francisco will entail taming the mighty surf, I decided that surfing through traffic on a bicycle was harrowing enough, and I didn’t want to push my luck by tackling the ocean. Yet.

Unicyclists

Feathered

Sunday the city of San Francisco threw a carnival in my honor, welcoming me to the neighborhood. This celebration featured an awesome parade that went right by my house and was jam-packed with thongs.

Folsom Street Iron Works

Delores Park

Shoe Garden

Yesterday I set out on foot, exploring Mission, Dolores Park, Castro, Buena Vista Park, Haight, Alamo Square and Market. I put some serious miles on my Converse All-Stars, which to this day remain a staple of hipster culture. I feel I have a lot more cred than a lot of the posers here, though, cuz these All-Stars I got way back in ’97. Hear that? These kicks are Pre-Dot Com Boom, suckas.

Alcatraz

Golden Gate Bridge

Today I took in an epic bike ride to the Golden Gate Bridge, which was named after the Golden Gate, which was named long before there was a bridge. This I learned from the San Francisco Maritime Museum, which was amazing and had awesome things like copper plates that were more than a hundred years old from which nautical maps were printed. Yes, the San Francisco Maritime Museum is a wonderful little museum, and it broke my heart that I was the only person there. I gave them a donation, but it probably wouldn’t hurt if you were willing to give them a reach-around as well.

So yes. I blasted through SoMA past Adaptive Path and IDEO and a Ferrari, through Fisherman’s Place-To-Get-Lousy-T-Shirts and Impossible-To-Spell-Something-About-Chocolate Square, almost fell off my bike laughing at a pack of tourists on Segways, took in Alcatraz, talked shop with some windsurfers and kiteboarders at Crissy Field, and before I knew it I was freezing in the shadow of the Bridge.

Now, I tend to observe a rule, perhaps unconsciously adopted from Goonies, that one should never go out the same way that he came in. Thus I went up and over Presidio, descended into Golden Gate Park, went out via the Panhandle, and did the Wiggle back into Mission. All told it was probably a 19-mile bike ride, which is not too shabby considering that graduate school has destroyed any trace of my athletic physique.

Tonight my legs feel like rubber, and tomorrow they will no doubt burn like crazy. However, I know that in those Fires of Tomorrow will be forged the Iron Legs of Thursday, and such are the legs that will carry me forward into the summer.

Also posted in Biking, Civilization, Travel | Comments (5)

California Here He Comes

May 21, 2009

Okay ya’ll, listen up. In not too long an hour I leave for San Francisco, and by this time tomorrow I will be snug in the womb of Mission, no doubt suckling at a maté and swaddled in soft cloths of florescence. Indeed, such will kick off a two-month pilgrimage back to my beloved west coast, and I intend to greet the Pacific with a roiling fury heretofore unknown by its vast depths.

Upon my back I carry three books, three of my favorites, which set the proper rhythm for this grand excursion. One, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, written in a brilliant prose that one day I hope to emulate, if not the drug-wild carnage that lent to its inception.

Two, John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise, a champion of creativity and invention that has given more to the imagination than anything of late.

“I am not romantic about squirrels.”

Aye, lad. Nor am I. Nor is anyone, for that matter. But a good point to clear up, nevertheless.

Finally, The Dharma Bums, notable as Jack Kerouac’s best work. Yes. I still call bullshit on On the Road, even after reading it three times and despite the accolades layered upon it.

However. I am ashamed that I left my copy of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America back in Indiana, and I feel that somehow my San Francisco experience will be incomplete without such a cultural field manual. No matter. I am certain that the San Francisco Public Library has at least a hundred copies and an entire wing named after the author. All I need to secure a copy is a prescription from a doctor with questionable credentials, and the brilliant spoils from one of the city’s many LSD dispensaries.

It’s been said before but it’s worth saying again.

It will be a lovely summer.

Also posted in Civilization, Travel | Comments (3)

Genius Often Has Trouble Buttoning Its Own Shirt

May 21, 2009

My father just finished washing the car, and now he’s drying it off with the leaf blower. I don’t know whether to commend him on his brilliance, or curse him senile and sentence him to a home.

Also posted in Culture, Design | Comments Off on Genius Often Has Trouble Buttoning Its Own Shirt

Rounding the Corner

April 29, 2009

Today was one of the best days I’ve had in months, and I don’t think it can be entirely attributed to my massive caffeine intake.

I spent my entire morning grading assignments, drinking yerba maté, and watching small birds dine at our feeder. We are most frequented by house finches, and at one point we had six of them fluttering about on our deck. The chickadees are rather entertaining, how they grasp sunflower seeds between their feet and noisily peck them open. This morning we were even paid a visit by a male red bellied woodpecker, who was quite enormous considering our bird feeder is no larger than a cigar box.

My love for these birds isn’t universal, however. I hate the sparrows, or as I call them, hobo finches.

As most great stories often end, eventually I had to go to school. Today we were sharing and critiquing proofs for our final typography project, and my “Western U.S. ruggedness meets European luxury via turn-of-the-century railway hotels” concept for an Akzidenz-Grotesk specimen book went over well. I got a lot of really good feedback from my classmates, too, and I’m excited to continue refining my work.

After hearing everyone share horror stories about color printing and registration and all that “recto-verso” jazz, however, I must say I’m a tad apprehensive about this whole “physical materiality” thing. I definitely want to move beyond the intangible nature of digital work, but the hardships of producing a double-sided color print sound akin to sailing the Cape Horn, and leave me wondering how the heck I’m going to pull this thing off. I don’t know what kind (or even size, for that matter) of paper I’m going to use, and I certainly don’t know how I’m going to slap ink on it… let alone more than one color of ink. And sheesh, more than one side? Maybe Kinko’s will save my ass.

However, last night I did put together a couple of book binding prototypes, properly armed with a stapler, stylish paper, this week’s 20%-off coupon from Bed Bath & Beyond, and Super 77:

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And folks, Super 77 needs to be inducted into the Periodic Table of Awesomements, like, yesterday.

But seriously, I almost shed a tear today when our final typography class came to a close. I’ve learned so much in that class, from history to composition to gestalt to kerning to grids to the innumerable parallels between graphic and interaction design, that it’s hard to believe it’s only been four months since we started. Sheesh, I got to work with printing presses, real mechanical printing presses with heavy gears that will pinch your fingers, and rollers that will tear the hair right off your head. Risking life and limb? that’s what we call design, baby.

Type Cliché Letterpress Project

Type Cliché Letterpress Project

Type Cliché Letterpress Project

Type Cliché Letterpress Project

The day wrapped up with an evening meeting with my experience design team. We’re in the process of prototyping a museum installation where people learn about light by playing with mirrors and prisms.

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There are some particularly subtle experiences we’re trying to recreate, not the least of which involve producing an immersive environment that suspends time and encourages focused, exploratory behavior. Our installation is designed to be fun, but we’ve described ours as a kind of “PBS fun” rather than “Nickelodeon fun.” Further, we’re introducing a social aspect that allows others to indirectly engage with (or contribute to) the experience, which will involve a separate prototype that we hope to build this weekend.

With flashlights. And Saran Wrap. And Sharpies, toilet paper tubes, duct tape, an iPod on repeat, and a dark, dark room. As our professor so lovingly told us the other day, “You guys are poor graduate students. You’ll build prototypes out of whatever garbage you can get your hands on.”

And so we did. And so we will.

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Summation

April 20, 2009

Our trip to Boston was great. Our favorite part was the cemeteries.

The CHI Student Design Competition went well. Our poster went through about fifteen revisions until we called it good, but all that hard work definitely paid off:

CHI Poster Revision Animation

Out of twelve finalists who presented posters, our team was one of four chosen to advance to the final round. Thus, we spent the next three days with our faces in our laptops, putting in 17-hour days working on our design presentation. We didn’t get to see a whole lot of CHI as a result, but we pulled down fourth place in the design competition, which is pretty cool considering there were, like, 70 original submissions.

As an aside, I’m not so sure that having the final round be a “competition” between four teams is really the most productive way to advance the state-of-the-art of academic interaction design instruction. Rather, a panel where each team openly shares its design process, discussing any hardships, techniques or insights discovered along the way, would encourage collaboration, and redirect competitive energies towards actually improving design education in the world. Interaction design is far too young a field, and there are still far too few of us in the community, for us to be actively snapping at one another.

So that’s that. Boston rocks. CHI existed. Jon Kolko is awesome.

Meanwhile, I really need a haircut. Fortunately I have been signed up for an extra-swanky one this summer, as I’m going to be working as an intern at Adaptive Path. Yes. Five years ago I slept in my car on my drive from Bend to San Francisco, to attend a series of workshops about redesigning Blogger and building Basecamp. Those workshops, hosted by none other than Adaptive Path, blew my mind wide open in regards to human-centered design, and set me on the path that ultimately led to the HCI/d program at Indiana University.

Yes. Adaptive Path. Needless to say, rollin’ with those homies is an honor beyond my wildest dreams, and I can barely sleep at night out of excitement for what awaits. It’s been a lot of hard work, a ton of thanklessly hard work, to get to this point, but it’s beginning to seem as though it was all worthwhile.

Meanwhile, how about a few samples of some stuff I’ve been cookin’ up, lately? I’m putting together an Akzidenz-Grotesk type specimen book for my typography class, and my theme is “European opulence meets American ruggedness, via turn-of-the-century railway hotels.”

specimen-book-1

specimen-book-2

specimen-book-3

It’s still a work in progress. Notably absent is any usage whatsoever of the typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk.

And finally, this is just plain awesome:

“It doesn’t fit in a Rolodex, because it doesn’t belong in a Rolodex.”

Also posted in Design, Interaction, Travel | Comments Off on Summation

Things About Which I Am Exciteding.

March 13, 2009

A few notes before Kate and I dash out the door for spring break.

I am really enjoying the new shows that Phish played last weekend. According to The New York Times, Phish loved Phish circa 1995. I, too, loved Phish circa 1995, and I’m glad that’s the Phish they’re bringing back. And geez, that’s a fast turnaround in getting those shows online! Props to Brian Cash for the find.

I love my SIGG water bottle. It’s obvious they put a lot of work into getting the shape to feel just right on your mouth. The fine smoothness of the threads, the volume of the lip around the edge… kudos.

sigg

During the little free time I have each day, I can’t stop playing Zen Bound:

zenbound

Beast Pieces is the amazing blog of Studio On Fire, a letterpress company in Minneapolis who does work so beautiful it makes me want to drop out of school and sort California job cases all day.

beastpieces

Our group got into CHI, which means our six-page extended abstract will be published at an academic conference. In April we will be traveling to Boston to present our design for WattBot, a home electricity feedback system, in front of some of the most awesomest people in human-computer interaction. Here’s a preview of our poster:

wattbot-poster

Have a good spring break, ya’ll!

UPDATE: Yup, it is just a coincidence. Our proposed WattBot system is by no means affiliated with Wattbot, a home energy advisor that is available for realz!

Also posted in Design, Music, School | Comments Off on Things About Which I Am Exciteding.

Type

January 25, 2009

Three weeks ago, I packed up my Subaru and left Minneapolis in one heck of a hurry. It was Monday, we had just been socked by a winter storm over the weekend, and another one was forecasted to hit on Tuesday. Thus, making it back to Bloomington in a timely fashion required that I gracefully duck between competing storm systems. Just as when I drove to Minneapolis for winter break. Just as when we drove to Madison for Thanksgiving.

My plans in Bloomington were about as time-sensitive as they were ambitious. As soon as I arrived home I placed myself under house arrest and spent the next two days writing and typing. Indeed, twelve hours a day I did nothing but write, drink green tea, and draw down the already-vanquished stores of our refrigerator.

Today we learned that all our hard work finally paid off. Our extended abstract paper for the CHI 2009 Student Design Competition got accepted, and we will be presenting at the CHI conference in Boston this April. We spent the bulk of last semester working on this project, and after a series of fits and starts and upsets came upon the idea for WattBot, an energy usage feedback monitor for the home. Enormous thank yous and shout outs to everyone who helped make this possible.

Meanwhile, this semester is off to a strong start. In one class we’re working on designing a new wayfinding/wayshowing system for downtown Bloomington, and in another class we’re getting all philosophical about what “experience” actually means in the context of HCI. I’m also taking a typography class in the School of Fine Arts that continues to blow my mind every day. We sketch letter forms and talk about counters and tittles and finials, and bask in the glow of 46 new Gothams. Tomorrow we will start working in the type shop with real mechanical type, and I will probably pee my pants the first time I open a California Job Case.

On the weekend Kate and I have gotten out hiking at McCormick’s Creek State Park and Brown County State Park, and we are duly impressed with the quality of outdoors available in Indiana. There is some beautiful country tucked into this state, and kudos to Indiana for doing such a wonderful job maintaining their parks and trails. Indeed, we will vehemently defend this bluff country from any west coast douche bag who wants to talk smack.

UPDATE: Yup, it is just a coincidence. Our proposed WattBot system is by no means affiliated with Wattbot, a home energy advisor that is available for realz!

Also posted in Design, Interaction, Outdoors, School | Comments (4)

Works Cited

January 10, 2009

I’ve been running an intellectual marathon for the last four months, but today things have finally calmed down enough to get my wits back about me. After spending Monday and Tuesday under house-arrest writing twelve hours a day, our team has finally submitted our paper for the 2009 CHI Student Design Competition.

The CHI conference is kind of a big deal in the research and academic community, and it’s where a lot of the intellectual powerhouses in human-computer interaction like to hang out. Don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t heard of it, though. I have been violently active in the web design industry since 2003 and I went to SXSW three years in a row, and I had never even heard of CHI until enrolling in the HCI/d program at Indiana University.

And this program. Wow. I felt like I was on a reality show for much of the first semester. My mind was destroyed, quite literally destroyed at a few points during the last few months, and let me tell you how great it feels to finally be on the other side. That said, I believe it had to happen. Even given the fairly sophisticated understanding of design I already had upon entering this program, I realize now just how naïve I still was.

So I’m better. Now. I grew a beard, and I shaved it off after it had served its purpose.

Schmortfolio.

In other news, I updated Brainside Out with a new online portfolio, in my quest to fetch coffee and shine shoes as an interaction design intern somewhere this summer. All the old versions still exist, including Terra, Rosco and the old weblog Siskiwit, but I wanted to revamp the whole thing to better reflect where I am right now, and where I think I am going.

The process of building it is a story unto itself, but I can offer the Cliffs Notes version right here, right now. In planning out the portfolio I wanted to feature my work, certainly, but I didn’t want to do so in a cookie-cutter sort of way. I realized that I have worked on a ton of incredibly diverse projects, and the last thing I wanted to do in sharing them was shoehorn this eclectic collection into a standard portfolio template. You know the drill: header, screenshot, description. Lorem ipsum, only with more references to branding and marketing.

It took discipline, but I forced myself to describe each project, and write out the primary content for each before putting down a single line of code. I collected all my photographs, sketches and screenshots. I re-photographed all my sketches, on a day when the low winter sun was shining perfectly through our deck door. I dragged our dining room table into the living room, shined it up with Pledge to bring out its wonderful wood texture, and stood on a chair with my camera photographing paper. Why not a scanner? Because design is deliberate, man.

I created sketches of what I wanted the layout of the portfolio to look like, of course. However, I wanted the design to emerge from the content it would be cradling, not the other way around. Thus, each of my primary projects came out with its own unique layout, as determined by the work itself. Jason Santa Maria’s latest website turned out to be a huge inspiration for me, and while my work can’t hold a candle to his, I can still recognize a real man of genius when I see one.

Better push up your nerd glasses.

The technical underpinnings are fun, and I’ll give ’em to ya even though they hardly define the experience of the website. Brainside Out uses Blueprint CSS for its pixel-perfect grid layout, and it is served up by the lightweight CodeIgniter PHP application framework. I maintain the codebase in a Subversion repository hosted at Beanstalk, which I interact with via Versions for OS X. I wrote all the XHTML and CSS by hand in TextMate, which I will continue to do until someone convinces me that I can do the same work in CSSEdit, only ten times faster.

Cabel Sasser’s FancyZoom made the killer image effects possible. Any other JavaScript wizardry is courtesy of Prototype, if only because no matter how hard I try, I cannot wrap my brain around the documentation for jQuery. Believe me, if I could learn how to do what I needed to do with a 56KB JavaScript framework, I would be all over it.

While the entire site works perfectly in Internet Explorer 7, I had initially hidden all but most the basic Blueprint CSS styles from Internet Explorer 6. I tested extensively in IE7, but since I couldn’t get my standalone installation for IE6 to identify as anything but IE7, I was unable to test compatibility until I configured a fresh install of Windows XP under VMware Fusion. Once that was settled, however, I was startled to discover that nearly everything rendered just fine in IE6. So, for all 7% of you who browse Brainside Out in Internet Explorer 6, you’re welcome.

That said, I did try to fix the transparent PNGs in IE6 using this handy script, but ultimately abandoned said efforts. There were a few isolated rendering glitches, where a normal PNG <img> would stretch to fill the full width of its containing element, and the fix didn’t behave well with FancyZoom. Hey, I tried.

Future work.

So anyway, that’s where all that has been. My time back in Minneapolis over winter break was wonderful, Kate is on her way back from Hawaii as we speak, and our new semester starts in three days.

Let’s make this a good one.

Also posted in Design, School | Comments Off on Works Cited