I miss going to school quite a bit. Academia was basically my life for so long. Even when I wasn’t in school, I was still in the atmosphere. Maybe someday I will go back when I mature more for a PhD. In the meantime, Online Language Help has again become my obsession as I try to make it make me a living.

While working with Emotive Or Not, I developed a small fascination with web cams. Seeing nothing barring the situation, I choose to continue with that fascination for the second assignment. Below are my two studies for this project. 

Ready Set Go - Flash Webcam Motion Detection Dance Music Toy

Ready Set Go 2 - Flash Webcam Art Piece

Never Stop: A Rolling Stone is a jacket designed for the traveling youth by Rahel Ritchie. It features an inflatable hood so you can sleep comfortably with your head rested almost anywhere.

I’m very disappointed this hoodie isn’t actually for sale.

[ via LikeCool ]

Found out about this video from class today.  I thought it was pretty awesome. Hope you enjoy it too.

Our app is called 25 Things About Us. We try to take the whole phenomenon a couple steps further by allowing the user create new lists about other things, as well as view community lists. We have a couple other ideas too, that you might see on their in the next couple weeks involving further community features. My role on this project has mainly been design, but I did some of the early programming and CSS. Zhuofeng Li has been the main programmer, and also acted as designer. Sean Connolly is the main designer.

The other app I’ve been working on, Emotive Or Not, is from an earlier design collaboration between Connolly, myself, and our classmate Kshitiz Anand. We wanted to experiment with affective and ludic design, and the Facebook app is our third prototype. Here are our first and second prototypes. Also, I have an earlier post I made about Prototype #1.

Fast forward four years and now I’m on the cusp of holding a masters in HCI/d. We are trained to never blame the user. Even when the user is doing something grievously unintended with the digital artifact, it’s “emergent behavior” – and if even that user is getting frustrated, we blame the design. HCI/d is a humble discipline, always ready to take responsibility.

Having been now on both sides of the spectrum – from the blame-the-user developer to the blame-the-design – I would like to propose a new group of people to blame our digital troubles on: developers. Yes, those hapless geeks who just do what their told when given design specs. 

But, why would I be so mean?

Well, let’s looks at the latest version of Dreamweaver, CS4. Below is an animated GIF detailing the troubles I’ve been having with it this morning.

So I will be in a web browser window (not uncommon for someone working with Dreamweaver) and use expose to get over to Dreamweaver. In the first frame you can clearly see that Twitter is still showing through where the Dreamweaver tab menu should be.

So, I click again, and still no dice. The tab menu does appear, along with two(!) menu bars, but my code disappears. I guess you’re paying extra for the second menu bar considering how expensive CS4 is.

And, finally, on the third(!) click I get what I actually want. Now repeat this a thousand times, and that’s how annoying it is.

But who can we blame? Maybe it is my fault for using Dreamweaver,  but Adobe certainly wants a user base, so we can’t generalize that to the blaming the user.

It’s not the fault of the designers. The tab navigation and tool bar there aren’t great works of revolutionary design, but they’re not bad. I understand them easily enough and they do what they look like their going to do.

So, in this case the only person really left to blame is the developer. Adobe charges enough for their products that you’d think they’d be able to hire some decent code writers, but apparently not.

The larger point I want to make is that while UX is  great buzzword right now – and one I’m happy about, considering I’m in HCI/d – designers can only do so much. Developers actually have to follow through well on any design, or else the whole experience with that digital artifact will continue to suck, just like with Dreamweaver CS4.

The piece I have is called Discount Electronics. It’s a satire of consumer electronics websites. As one interacts with the site, it starts to degenerate until it becomes an unusable mess, revealing the mess consumerism produces.

[ via Kitsune Noir ]

Design Observer

Having a strong brand is a wonderful goal, and a good way to build a strong brand is by having a design that customers desire and trust. Design should not be subservient to the brand. Instead design helps build the brand by providing meaningful products. Having a trustworthy business in general – not just good PR – also helps. The problem isn’t branding as such, it’s the false messages that motivate people to support lower-quality products.

Join the fun at the original post: Design Observer – Obsessive Branding Disorder.