No Cost for Culture

So being an introvert, I’ve always been interested in how people make their initial connections with new people. There are several people I ‘know’ whom I’ve never been formally introduced to and therefore may have never spoken to - even if I’ve been seeing them at the same events for several months or more!

I really like having the chance to make worlds collide and introduce one group of friends to another, point out what they may have in common, or at least what my link to that person is (such as, ‘Mary is my oldest friend - we lived next door to each other and were born two days apart’) and hopefully they’ll be able to take it from there and at least recognize each other and be friendly, if not friends.

I’ve done analog projects that provide this purpose, introducing people to each other, and it’s quite fun.

I’m interested in how the internet and mobile communication and the great hopes of collaborative web 2.0 technologies will help us meet each other. How will we go beyond the computer and start to really meet people as we’re out and about? have any of you out there made good friends off the internet/myspace that you didn’t know in ‘real life’ first? Are you interested in being out and about and knowing that someone is nearby with similar interests? The more I brainstorm about this, the creepier it gets. I’m not an early adopter to new mobile technologies, I can barely bring myself to text message anyone, nor do I see a need in my life for a blackberry-type device. And yet I’m intrigued by the idea of taking some of the awkwardness out of meeting new people and making us all more of a social and aware society.

Anyway, here are some things I’ve found in my googling/ruminating on this topic:
Dodgeball looks cool because it’s based on who your friends are and their friends - you sign up and can let others know where you’re at for impromptu meetups (and it’s not like some GPS-creepy-stalker thing, you decide when & where you’ll be located). The Crushes feature is fun - but I think I’d be a little embarrassed about using it! (hmm, further googling tells me dodgeball was acquired by google. Wonder what the plans are…

My thoughts are so timely - just a few days ago a moble social networking patent sold for $2.6 million right here in chicago.

and this is a copout, but before I explore further, here’s a link to mobile social networking’s wikipedia page.

Oh yeah, and Meetro! I almost forgot. I like this one because it’s about who’s in your neighborhood (or at least the one you’re in). And i don’t have to be thumbing-off text messages to strangers. This is the one I’d be most likely to try - I’d be curious especially to see if any users are in Pilsen.

Do any of you use these type things or something else? I’ve made a lot of ‘internet friends’ that I met IRL since I started on AOL about half my life ago (whoa), but when location-awareness comes into the equation, it seems riskier and certainly less anonymous. I wonder how this will all play out and evolve.

Before this blog started I saw a series of ads for the Guardian that knocked my socks off. I could hang them up on my walls and never paint or put any other posters, photos, or art up and be forever satisfied (no this isn’t true, probably, but let me be dramatic for a moment)!

(You can read more about these ads and see them bigger over here.)

So then I thought, well gee I don’t think I’ve looked at the Guardian much, what the heck am I missing out on!? So I went to their website.

But I was taken aback by how small and centered and cramped it was. Uck! Not like the New York Times in its newspapery-but-still-very-digestible glory, that’s for sure.

However, I was happy to see the Guardian had a section called Ideas. Ideas make the world go round, after all. So i went inside, and saw an interview with Tom Kelley, from IDEO (this is from last year, but it’s still relevant). I was happy to read more of his thoughts on innovation, and his take on Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates, and he’s kinda dramatic, but he says “if you don’t innovate, you die”.

On a smaller level, I suppose that if we don’t push ourselves, our spirits will die. My creative spirit was definitely hibernating in some areas of my life for a couple years before I came back to school, but all I can do is be wary of this, and watch myself, because I probably can’t be a student forever! (and like Alfred said in our class last night, some of the job is going to be the boring stuff - my job happens to be the boring stuff right now, so I’m writing this in the meantime!)

Back to the Guardian - I think they’re being kinda retro-innovative in a way by offering their entire newspaper, page-by-page, digitally. Maybe this is the reason why the website isn’t spectacular, they want people to pay and read the paper online. You can view a demo of the paper here.

Hmm I should have looked before I linked (ha ha), I’m kind of disappointed by it. I think this may be useful if you’ve seen the paper already and want to go back and read an article you missed and it’s easiest to find it in its physical location (online). The text treatment of the articles is totally boring, just plopped in there. The images have to be opened separately, not viewed with the article, in context. It seems rather limited in its usefulness, and more of a novelty than anything. Is this for people who have read physical newspapers for so long that they can’t wrap their mind around a new way to browse the articles? That could be, my mom would definitely fall in that category. But she’s more likely to keep stacks of papers to read and cut out articles than to go to a newspaper’s website, surf around (are we allowed to say surf anymore ) and bookmark articles she found interesting.

I gotta cut this off. I think I made some interesting points and I hope someone has the courage to make sense of a part of this and reply. Or at least read it most of the way through. Until next week!

As much as I love learning about theory and conceptualizing and brainstorming, I still like to take the ambiguous and make it something concrete. Which is largely what I think our job is as IAs, UXDs (UEDs, if you prefer), IDs and all those other acronyms, taking in data, filtering it, and making it work for people. I like education to be a blend of Columbia College, and SAIC - one is very skill-based (Columbia), the other very conceptual (SAIC), at least that’s my observation as a member of the former who has worked with and managed the latter.

So I’ve been thinking about what DePaul’s HCI program is, and comparing it to what I know of other HCI and design programs, and also comparing it to what I thought I’d be learning about in school and what I’m actually learning about and how to still get what I want out of my last 8 classes here.

Some things I think we’re not talking about (or doing!) that we should be:

• Strategy: How do the changes we propose to a system tie in to the world at large? What can we learn from studies, stories, etc. that will affect our designs and how do we effectively represent what we’re learning with what others have learned?
• Innovation: When I took HCI 440 (that’s a usability engineering class, for you non-depaul-hci folks), one of the first things we did after learning we’d be proposing interfaces for all-in-one office machines was a competitive analysis. To me, we sullied any wide-eyed freshness we might’ve had that would have given us a new take on what these machines can be by looking to the competition and saying ‘oh that’s pretty good’ or ‘yes, i’ll take these parts and then make it more ipod-esque’. The ultimate irony of the class was that we were talking specifically about IDEO, who pride themselves on real innovation, and then doing something that amounts more to “best practice”. Which maybe is how it’ll work at 80% of the places that have UCD teams, but I’d like to learn how to be a part of the other 20%.
• The Real World: Back to Columbia College where many professors were working professionals who taught part time. They got it. They were able to talk and teach from a place of experience, and when I’m looking for the concrete, rather than conceptual I like to know what’s happening out there, so I’m excited that this quarter we’ll not only have a working-professional teacher, but also guests!
• Community (awww…): Really. I don’t want to leave here and feel like I barely know anyone I went to school with or those who are working in the field we’re looking to enter. I know that’s up to me too, but our HCI-info list has so far only been a place of announcement, rather than discussion, and I know a lot of people are going to school part time and working full time and we have relationships and other lives and all that jazz, but we should look out for each other too. More guest speakers for the whole program or casual happy hour meetings at exchequer or whatever! I’ll see what I can do. Or maybe Matt will get to work on that linkedin-esque network for HCI students to move us along.
• Higher standards, more critique, more intensity: I know, I’m asking for it. But we’ve all got portfolios to build, right? We should have lots of iterations, lots of process, and lots of research through at least wireframing, if not execution, to show. These quarter systems and low standards do not a great portfolio make. But again, that’s something I can do on my own.
• human-human or human-world interaction: I was partly inspired to get into a HCI program because of The Design of Everyday Things (and because Don Norman himself said that you shouldn’t try to get into this field without having specifically studying it!). All day long I think about how the world can be improved - people could wait for those getting off the train before they try to cram on to it, doors could be marked better, stop signs could be more apparent, etc. And I’m interested in how to delve more into that whole idea of experience design without a computer being part of the equation. I don’t know if that’s something that would work for me career-wise, but I like the idea of going beyond people and their interactions with computers.

Overall, I’m quite happy. I’m learning what I wanted to and meeting nice people and feeling more employable each day - these are just thoughts on what may be missing. I’m an idealist and pursuing HCI is my way to change the world, even in small ways, so I don’t see why school shouldn’t be a bit of a utopia on its own.