There’s been some controversy lately in the design blogoworld!
Bruce Nussbaum asks the hard questions in Fast Company with Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?
And naturally, the humanitarian designers respond. And then while the imperialists argue with each other, some designers who are not native to wealthy colonizing countries laugh at us.
Design Observer has a collection of responses.
As one might infer from my paper on Interaction Design Activism, this kind of conversation is near and dear to my heart, though the paper is not entirely in the same vein. For one thing, it’s kind of difficult to find traditional interaction design projects that will meaningfully impact the lives of people who live in places without, say, a reliable electric grid. I wrote the paper thinking of the kind of situation I expect to be in: an interaction designer with a day job where they don’t have a lot of control over choosing projects, looking for alternative ways to advance their insidious do-gooder agenda. In any case, I’ve only ever been able to deal productively with my own desires for change in a local way, as a committed member of a particular community.
And as a white American who grew up in an affluent suburb, who’s only left the US to visit Canada and western Europe, I don’t have much to contribute to the globalism of this conversation. I do know a few things, though. The first is that nobody actually needs more Nice White Ladies, in whatever form. The second is that the best thing to do in my position is shut up and listen. And so, I’ve added some more designers to my google reader.
This also seems like an appropriate time to recommend my current offline reading, an anthology of postcolonial science fiction and fantasy.
You don’t have to go very deep into interaction design to find a lot of people throwing around the word “intuitive.” A lot of people talk about the importance of intuitiveness as a design goal, and praise particular products for being intuitive. Search Boxes and Arrows for the word “intuitive” and all kinds of examples come up. What hardly anyone talks about is what they mean by “intuitive.” There’s a kind of general understanding of that as “easy to use/figure out,” someone can sit down and start to use the interface without any special training or guidance, and this is regarded as a good thing.
But at one point when I was pretty fed up with empty praise for “intuitive” interfaces without any real analysis of a design, and armed with Jeffrey Bardzell’s admonitions that meaning does not exist in things, but in people, I started thinking more about this whole “intuitive” business and becoming more dissatisfied with it. Because, of course, objects are not inherently “intuitive” all by themselves, sitting in a vacuum of objective analysis. Intuitiveness, like meaning, lies in people, not products. Because when you get down to it, all “intuitive” means is “familiar.” I don’t have to learn anything new with an interface when it relies entirely on things I’ve already learned. And sure, sometimes that’s a good thing. But sometimes it’s not. And of course when I was doing my blogger homework for this post I found that Jef Raskin said it all better than me 15 years ago, or else this post might have been quite a bit longer.
I do have some more thoughts on the term that Raskin doesn’t cover in that article, though. For one thing, the use of “intuitive” like it’s a property a designer can give a thing through their own skill and that it will have forever, masks the central importance of the user’s experience to the concept. And for a discipline that claims to be human-centered, that’s maybe not the best thing for a popular and important term to do. Which is not to say that everyone who’s used the term has forgotten that they’re tailoring a product to their users, or that using it is a sign you’re not being “human-centered” enough, or whatever. Anyone who is doing user research as part of a design process is presumably aware that they need to target a particular group of people with particular experience and abilities. But it can be easy to get careless and stop paying enough attention to those particulars when you say “I want this product to be intuitive” or “It’s not intuitive enough.”
But we all understand the concept of “familiar” to be rooted in a specific person’s experience. You can’t just say “this thing is familiar” and expect anyone to believe that the object in question has this inherent quality of familiarity. The implication is that the thing is familiar to you, and if that’s not what you meant, it immediately raises questions: familiar to whom? under what circumstances? These questions are always important to a user-centered design, and speaking in terms of familiarity rather than intuitiveness keeps the importance of the user explicit.
Life’s been sort of weird these last few weeks. I’m back with my parents in Pittsburgh, getting ready to move to Seattle for real and good next week. Most of my time has involved sorting things from my childhood bedroom into trash-donation-keep piles, applying for jobs, or avoiding one of the two. Also watching Battlestar Galactica with my dad. I’ve made Sim houses and Sim families and lists (to-do, box contents, etc) and done some sewing for mending or clothing alterations and that’s about it.
I spent the last of my time in Bloomington packing and getting rid of stuff, and then as soon as I got here I started packing and getting rid of stuff, and once I get to Seattle I’ll be helping my partner get rid of yet more stuff – we’re hoping to move to a different apartment once I get a job. Goodbye, artifacts of my past. I feel this obligation to want to hang onto things, but also an intense desire to stop having to deal with all these piles of crap. It’s easier here, where my room is full of things that haven’t been part of my daily life in six years. If I didn’t miss it before, I won’t miss it in the future.
It feels strange to be back here. I thought I’d try to contact some of my old friends here and spend time with them, but I felt really strange about it. I thought I’d have this free time and energy to get things done and I’ve felt really strange about that, too, unable to make plans or sustain motivation. I’m not sure it helps that my mom was laid off in December and my dad just retired from his job, so my parents are around all day long and I’d gotten pretty used to living independently. I’m sure it doesn’t help that I’m in a suburb with nothing in walking distance (and no sidewalks anyway), including access to public transportation. Just going outside I feel surrounded by the eyes of people who knew me when I was ten years old.
I feel sort of…stuck, in a place where I’m not what I was and don’t know how to be what I’ve become, and I’m not sure what to do about it except leave on Tuesday.
I’ve never really been good with transitions, especially drawn-out ones. If something’s going to change I just want it to happen and be over so I can deal with it and move on. Drawn-out goodbyes, sitting in airports, waiting for approval or instructions, they are not experiences I enjoy.
Ok International No Diet Day (I’m sorry, the website is in comic sans. I hope you can forgive it) was like three weeks ago and I missed it even though I had PLANS for THINGS but whatever guys, every day should be no diet day if you ask me.
This is not a subject I can think or speak or write about calmly, detachedly. It involves a lot of very strong and personal emotions for me. So I normally don’t bring it up except among people I feel really safe with. The most I do around casual acquaintances is abstain from participating in conversations relating to body shame or food morality, and enthusiastically consume food in public.
I’ve tried at least four different directions for the rest of this blog post, but they’ve all ended in excessive abuse of the shift key, and lots of pacing and angry muttering and trembling on my part. Let’s just say I have some really personal reasons for believing that dieting can really fuck up a person’s life.
Every time I say something like that I worry that people think I used to have an eating disorder, because I’m small and thin, and I used to be downright skinny, and in the past I have in fact had people try to convince me I don’t eat enough food. And sure, looking back at my behaviors and attitudes in high school, I didn’t have what I’d now consider a healthy relationship with food or my body, but it was a pretty far cry from pathological behavior. I’ve never really tried to lose weight, and my adolescent attempts to “sculpt” particular parts of my body with exercise were always pretty half-hearted. Plus I paid attention to research on exercise fads and learned pretty quickly that the notion you can “target” fat anywhere on your body is basically ridiculous. You can develop specific muscles, but you’re still going to have fat distributed on your body in just the way your genetics dictate.
And usually I don’t address this fear because then I worry that sounding defensive will just make people even more convinced that I’m trying to hide something. Which is all basically ridiculous and paranoid, but welcome to what social interaction is like inside my head.
I have seen people close to me, friends and family, hurt by cultural ideas about weight and health and food, and seeing that has hurt me too.
The most personally I’ve been affected, aside from the fairly typical insecurities about my body that I’ve mostly been able to overcome, is in people assuming that I don’t eat enough, and that they should push me to eat more. This is usually because they are only seeing me at one meal (it’s almost always people who do not see much of me in general), and I almost never eat a lot at once. I am not usually physically capable of eating a lot of food at once. As I said before, I’m small, so on the one hand there’s only so much that can fit inside me at once. On the other hand, it’s just not how my metabolism works. The most natural eating pattern for me is to snack often throughout the time I am awake. Eating a lot of food at one time and then nothing else for hours just…doesn’t make me feel good. Unfortunately, this is not practical in most of the settings I find myself in, so I have to find ways to work around it.
So, I have no use for low-fat versions of perfectly delicious and nourishing foods, or artificial sweeteners (besides the part where they all taste gross and most of them make me feel gross in one way or another), or any meal that is somehow designed to trick my body into thinking I’ve consumed more food than I really have. My body knows better. My body knows when it has enough energy to function and when it doesn’t, and most of the time I have been in school I have struggled to plan my days around getting enough calories into my body at the right times so that I can think straight and tolerate the presence of other human beings. You can be pretty sure every day is a no-diet day for me, and if I’m not eating very much at the time you are seeing me, it’s because I have something else I’m going to eat in two hours. Probably cheese or a donut or full-fat yogurt (wishful thinking, this is impossible to find in convenient single-serving containers, so I have to go for the least “diety” kind I can find) or peanut butter and crackers. Something you’d probably be embarrassed to see me eating if I weighed 50 pounds more, you hypothetical nosy busybody with no business judging my food choices because you don’t know my life. Just like you don’t know the life of any stranger or casual acquaintance you see eating.
Anyway, some linkings:
the first rule of nutrition: eat, or die. There are no other rules.
health at every size – if you really care about health, care about health, not weight.
Junkfood Science on the obesity paradox – this is part of a whole series on a blog devoted to debunking the worthless crap that gets reported as “health” news in typical media outlets. I recommend scrolling down until you see “Junkfood Science Obesity Paradox Series” in the sidebar and read everything. Or just go back and read all the archives from before the blogger started writing about nothing but healthcare reform.
Shapely Prose’s FAQ probably covers the rest.
If I’ve got your interest, you might try an experiment and spend a day looking for messages or comments about the moral value of food. You could spend a day refraining from making moral judgments about food (or at least from speaking them out loud), from criticizing your body, or the bodies of others. You might spend a day forgiving yourself for wanting to eat, rather than die.
I keep thinking this blog ought to be about something, because most of the good blogs I read have a particular focus, but I haven’t had the spare energy to try and devote myself to developing content about a specific topic. I mean, interaction design is the obvious one, and the one my blog header claims, but I feel like my thoughts and experiences on that topic would need a lot of work to be really *bloggable*, and most of the times I try I end up with a 3/4 finished draft that never makes it out of my draft folder. So it’s just been a blog about things I do and think, which is of course never confined to a neat topic. I suppose I’m writing for myself more than for an audience, anyway. I want to work as a designer, not as a blogger, so probably that’s ok. The blog is just not the point.
So that’s my justification for writing a post about a book that has nothing to do with computers or design or user experience or whatever, on this blog. This post won’t really make any sense to anyone who hasn’t read Nabokov’s Pale Fire, or at least knows something about it, so probably y’all can just skip this unless you got here by googling Pale Fire, in which case I doubt my rantings and musings will really be enlightening. I just have Thoughts and I feel the need to have those Thoughts Recorded somewhere, and what else is a blog good for. Plus, spoilers. Normally I don’t care about spoiler warnings for things like 50-year-old novels, but Pale Fire really is mainly a big puzzle/joke, and much of the fun in reading is in working out the layers of the puzzles. If you think one day you might want to read it, and I do highly recommend it, though probably not as one’s first introduction to Nabokov (which, really, read something by Nabokov. The man is brilliant, his writing is gorgeous and sad and complex and disturbing and often very, very funny), you should probably just go read it.
Ok, so maybe what Vimeo had was not a problem with programming, but communication and managing expectations. About 3 hours after I signed up for my account, I finally got a confirmation email. And then half an hour after that I got a bunch more emails that had been generated by my attempts to get a first confirmation email. I’m assuming that when Vimeo told me an email had been “sent” what they really meant was that a request had been made to a server that would eventually get around to actually sending an email. I have no problems with that, as long as I’m informed that that is what is going on. Instead I was told that if I don’t already see an email, what I should do is check my spam folder or try getting another email sent.
Also I signed up for two more services today that involved email confirmation and they both sent me emails that arrived minutes after my signup. I do not think this is an auspicious start to my relationship with Vimeo, especially since all it would take to have avoided my ire was all of one sentence telling me the email might take a few hours to show up. Unless of course the delay itself was the result of a bug, in which case, get on it, Vimeo. And add the warning anyway, at least until you can be pretty sure you’re not going to get large numbers of people wondering whether or not it will be possible for them to use their accounts.
But whatever! The video is up now, and I haven’t actually looked at it because I don’t want to worry about all the mistakes I’ll see myself making that no one else cares about and can’t be changed now anyway. So…I hope you can see and hear me.
The Break Light from Lorelei Kelly on Vimeo.
I also uploaded my slides to slideshare, so you can follow along.
Finally, ages ago I mentioned a Super Secret Project a couple of times, and yesterday we finally revealed the project, which was a set of books we created as a class gift to our professors, containing photos, class quotes, and messages from students. A group of six of us planned the project and put everything together, but most of the graduating class of 2010 contributed messages to the professors. Here is a video of us presenting the books, and if you go to the Vimeo page you can see photos, and links to the previews on Blurb.com. The books turned out totally amazing, if I do say so myself. The profs were totally overcome.
2010 Class gift for the HCId Professors from siriomi on Vimeo.
or maybe just…SCIENCE.
So last Friday I was recommended for the conferral of the degree Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction Design or whatever it was they said during that remnant of medieval pageantry known as a higher education graduation ceremony. I mean, I participated willingly, and even though it was more of an event where the master’s candidates watched the phd candidates get hooded for an hour, I’m glad I did. I like rituals, and sometimes I need them to convince myself that something has really happened and is important. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking the whole thing is more than a little bit silly.
So basically today is the first time I’ve had real free time since…May 2nd, I think. I’d like to say I spent this time getting a video of my capstone uploaded so everyone can see it and then post a link to said video, but actually completing the final step of uploading a video would have required Vimeo to send me a confirmation email so that I can verify my account and start doing things with it, and though I have given them three different email addresses and clicked the “send another email” button several times, and also waited for many more minutes that an email that was supposedly “already sent” should take, no emails have been forthcoming. Not in my spam folder or anywhere else.
I just looked at the help forum and there’s a thread with over 100 comments of people asking for confirmation because they’ve never received a confirmation email, starting nearly a week ago. Awesome job getting your bugs fixed, Vimeo.
Sometimes when I do not want to do work I browse Etsy and dream of having the disposable income to buy many frivolous and pleasing things.
I haven’t worn jewelry regularly in years, but over the course of graduate school I’ve been trying to convert my wardrobe into something more compatible with looking like an adult and maybe even a professional, competent adult, and I’m thinking my new life of doing more than grabbing a pair of jeans and whatever silly printed t-shirt is nearest ought to include some jewelry. But I want my jewelry to be expressive of who I am, so what I want is nerdy jewelry. Ideally, a kind of “stealth” nerd jewelry that is attractive in its own right, and that would mainly be recognizable to other nerds in the know. Currently I have a pair of earrings made from recycled printed circuit board that fit the bill ok (most people up close recognize it as PCB, but they’re also just cute earrings from a bit of a distance), but I want more!
And what better place to find unconventional nerd jewelry than Etsy? (if you know a better place, point me there because that would be awesome.) I added a bunch of stuff to my favorites and thought maybe I’d try to make a treasury, but they limit the number of treasuries existing at one time and you have to like camp out and wait until there’s an opportunity to make new ones, and who has time for that?
So decided to make a blog post instead.
Brain earrings! A nod to my former life as a psychology major. I can’t really tell if other people would find these gross or not, I think they’re quite tasteful but then sometimes I have trouble understanding what other people find gross. I dissected a sheep’s brain in my physiological psych class and that was really cool. And when we did dissection in 9th grade biology out of a group of three boys and me, I was the only one willing to saw open the rat’s chest to get to the heart. Rotting things are gross, but well-preserved and clean dead things? Super interesting!
But I digress. I like these earrings.
More circuit board earrings, I like the unusual color on these. I feel more legitimate wearing electronic components like this now that I’ve actually put together circuits and soldered things. I’ve never really been interested in the hardware of the computers I use, but building little toys with Arduino is fun.
I LOVE THESE EARRINGS. Theobromine is my friend. I have become a connoisseur of fancy dark chocolate, and theobromine makes me feel pretty good. And here we have found a way to make chocolate nerdy. Perfect. I’m pretty sure I’m going to buy these in the future. Perhaps to celebrate my first paycheck if I ever manage to get a job. Unless of course someone who loves me buys them for me as a present or something first. 
Probably not something I would actually wear, for one thing I have wee slender wrists and bracelets never seem to work out well, for another I would never stop fiddling with it, even if it did fit in better with my overall “look” such as it is, but I heart it nevertheless.
The previous caveats about bracelets apply equally here, but I think this is just gorgeous. Would absolutely wear it if it fit and weren’t a constant distraction.
Not so much hidden nerd meaning here, but the whole thing is very geometric and mathy and this pleases me. I kept looking for pieces with some kind of secret algorithm basis, and this was the closest I could find. I don’t think I’m very close to a place in my life where I can spend $140 on a necklace, though.
Perhaps less “stealth” than I was hoping for, but awfully cute. I do not really have any sort of claim to be a chemistry nerd, but I love science, and knowing things about science, and I had one of those children’s chemistry sets when I was a youngun and I liked it.
Math nerd jewelry! I’m pretty sure everyone learns recursive programming by generating the Fibonacci sequence somewhere along the line. I get into almost as much trouble fiddling with rings as with bracelets, but, math nerd! and so pretty! The design is available in plenty of other stones, but the carnelian is my favorite. I always think deep red and silver looks so elegant.
Again, not “stealth” in the sense of being mistakable for something that is just pretty and not a geeky thing (even someone who has no knowledge of Harry Potter would probably find radish earrings a little weird) but Luna Lovegood is one of my all-time favorite fictional characters. I kind of like her better than all of the other students in Harry Potter.
It’s actually been quite some time since I went searching through etsy, so there may be a lot of new stuff I missed, but a quick perusal didn’t turn up much except for the radishes so you’ll just have to deal with the things that I’ve had in my favorites for ages.
Alright, I wimped out and postponed my capstone presentation until May 11th. I want to record myself and put it on my portfolio, so I really want to be well-prepared and alert and also not sound all scratchy and gross, and that just wasn’t going to happen yesterday. So I went to I101 lab for a few hours and then came home and slept for a few hours, which suggests that I probably made the right choice.
I can talk more loudly today, which is good because I had another presentation, this one just a few minutes on my Human-Robot Interaction project. Which, the reason I’m posting is to brag about how I soldered things (for the HRI prototype) for the first time since like 6th grade science class, and I didn’t screw it up! Or burn myself. I’m not sure if I’ve cleaned the soldering iron correctly, though. I’m supposed to be able to just rub the tip on a damp sponge every time I use it, but I swear that wasn’t working. I don’t know.
Anyway now I am very tired.
I started getting that pre-sick feeling last night, and woke up this morning with nasal congestion and no energy at all. I’ve been able to stay conscious since about 2:15 this afternoon, but before that I’d get up to go to the bathroom or get some food only to get right back in bed and fall asleep.
Of course I’m supposed to present my capstone tomorrow. If I can’t handle it, the next available time is May 11th. I want to be done!
Last night I was thinking, ok if I’m sick I’ll just stay home Monday and get work done and it’ll be ok. I didn’t count on exhaustion being the main symptom. I have gotten basically nothing done today. My major accomplishments have been taking a shower, cooking myself a quick dinner and then taking out the trash, and now I think I need a nap to recover.
I think if everything I had to do was like, all at once tomorrow, I could maybe be ok. Or if all I had was capstone in the evening I could sleep all day and then get up long enough to go. But I am supposed to grade I101 presentations from 1 pm until 4 pm tomorrow, and then my capstone presentation isn’t until 7:30 pm. I don’t know if I will be able to do both. And I hate to leave my I101 students to be graded by someone who hasn’t gotten to know their work all semester, but it may be that have to take care of myself first in this situation.
Ugh.
