Not even a week left until I am back at school. It is time to start thinking (again) about my thesis paper and project. I have to admit that I haven’t really thought about either all summer. The stuff I was working on at Adobe was totally different and also time consuming, I hadn’t much energy left to think about anything else.
For a start, here are my paper and project proposals.




Paper
The Meaning of Product Ecology: Targeting eco-friendly products at a broader consumer mass
“In today’s consumer world products marketed as green, sustainable, or organic have significantly increased in numbers. One can encounter products like green cleaning solutions, all-natural sneakers, and organic cosmetics in almost every store.1 But what does it mean when a product is advertised as green? What are the advantages for the user? The increasing amount of products in this market segment combined with a low familiarity of the user keeps a significant amount of people from aligning their growing environmental awareness with informed purchase decisions. [...] While eco-friendly products are at least as useful and usable as conventional products, I argue that a lot of them have shaped their desirability aspect to satisfy the needs and wants of the very narrow target audience of eco-aficionados. This limited targeting lets designers loose a significant mass of users. That leads to the question: What are the reasons that we are only targeting the “eco-neophyte” as an audience, and not a broader user mass? ...” [Full proposal, PDF]




Project
Eco-lux: a response to emerging consumer values, benefiting businesses, consumers, and our earth
“Sustainable consumer products are not just a passing trend but a new and lasting shift in values—in fact they are a necessity. The luxury sector can be a leader in its capability to impact consumers and other consumer brands alike. There is a potential to change the very definition of luxury, deepening it to include not only technical and aesthetic quality, but also environmental and social responsibility. Eco-lux aims to support luxury consumers that are already thinking sustainably, to convince luxury companies to provide products, which satisfy these values, and thusly to create awareness amongst other consumers and businesses that might not be thinking about sustainable luxury products at all.” [Full proposal, PDF]

During my summer internship I’ll work for Adobe in the San Francisco office. I’ll be part of the platform experience team. As far as I know I will be working with the team that is building a new application called Thermo.
Check it out:

I think this is an awesome example for kinetic type!

FreeRice is a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com.

FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.

This was the first task I got in Shelley Evenson’s Basic Interaction class:

Starting with a cube, design an interactive object that you think best communicates the following uses. The cube should look as though you can:

> rub it
> turn it
> squeeze it

The cube can be no bigger than six inches in any dimension. You may add or subtract from the cube, but it has to remain cube-like. Other shapes may be used as long as they play a secondary role. You may also use color, texture, material as well as a relative context. For example, the final solution might be a green fuzzy cube with little circular nibs placed on the floor.

This is my solution:

It is a plush toy with a caterpillar wriggling around all 6 sides, having little cute animals riding on its back. The caterpillar and the animals arouse your curiosity and make you TURN the cube. I selected a really soft fabric for the surface of the cube, which makes you want to stroke and RUB it. The whole thing is soft, and squishy and has little beads in it which makes rustling noises when squeezed and touched. On the side of the cube where the caterpillar ends, it meets a little frog and he red button/target animates to squeeze the cube, which initializes a frog sound.
I had a lot of fun building that!

If you are looking for something hand-made, that’s the right page for you. I definitely love it!

Wow - great recipies, and great pictures! I was looking for a good Apple Crumble recipy and I found this food blog. I guess I will try some of the stuff out soon.

Wow - first you have to pay $499,- to $599,- to get one, and then contract with AT&T for 24 month for at least 60 bucks a month?!! I definitely don’t want to pay that. To be honest, I thought very briefly about getting one - but when I got to know these plan prices, no way! Well, maybe I am not the target group, being a poor student. But I am definitely curious if they really gonna sell 10 Million pieces within the first year…

I am pretty sure everyone is talking about it already, but I just checked out the new feature of Google Maps! The street view! It’s like walking through the streets, it’s awesome! I checked out if our place is on it, but unfortunately they haven’t gotten everything, yet. But San Francisco is pretty much done. Amazing what these guys are doing!

I decided to combine my 2 blogs to one - this one . When I applied for the masters, I created this online portfolio plus blog plus picture gallery. It doesn’t make much sense for me to have to blogs, because I am not really blogging very often. So, I am going to move over to this blog here completely. At the beginning I am going to post most stuff on both blogs, but from summer on I am going to close the old one down.

Nothing really exiting is going on right now. Work is going as usual - except that my supervisor quit his job at the beginning of this month and is starting his own company now. Good for him, sad for me, because my new “boss” has no idea of design at all and I am basically on my own. I am really gonna miss Eric, and the learning experience with him.
Other than that I am filling out hundreds of forms regarding my masters studies starting in August. Yes, I am going back to school. I will do my masters in Interaction Design at the Carnegie Mellon University. Despite looking forward to it, I am definitely excited and anxious how it will be.

OK everyone, I miss you all, hopefully I see the German guys in summer, I gonna be in Berlin end of July to mid August.

It’s rainy season in Northern California - so what to do on a Sunday afternoon? Me and my boyfriend decided to take the 2.30 tour at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I only heard from friends that they have an impressive collection of hardware, starting with the first punch cards of Jaques looms. It was even more impressive to hear, that what they are showing is about 5% of their entire collection.
The tour took about 2 hours and I think we could have spent a lot more time between these relicts of the past 60 years of computer history. Though I was impressed by the size of the ENIAC and Cray 1, I was more interested in the early personal computers. Currently I am reading Bill Moggridge‘s “Designing Interactions” and I was delighted to find some of the pieces he is talking about in the museum: I saw the Grid Compass Computer, personally designed and developed by Bill Moggridge, the NoteTaker and the Osborne 1 two of the first luggable computers - and of course the Apple Lisa and the first Mac. All in all the visit was pretty interesting. We decided to go there again soon, because we haven’t seen all, yet.

Me and Cray-1 - “the world’s most expensive loveseat”

Today I went to the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Seminar at lunch time. Scott Jenson from Google was talking about “Why Phones are not Computers”.
Scott Jenson is the lead mobile UI designer for Google.  He talked about the history of mobile services, he presented early failures, and talked about how engineers/designers tend to create use cases of new technologies for every day life situations and fail with this badly. He brought 2 very strong examples: One of the first ideas how to use television, was to record and replay stage plays. Another idea was about a usage for the telephone: to listen to opera plays in distant cities.

Scott Jenson emphasized the importance of using a device regarding its constraints, and remodel usage approaches accordingly. He introduced the concept of a (swedish?) bank who didn’t try to squeeze an entire web page on a tiny cellphone screen, but sent (account, balance,...) information via SMS to its clients. It always will be hard to display the information of an website on a screen as small as they are of today’s cell phones. I think we can assume that it’s only a matter of time until we will have rollable screens, as first results from Polymer Vision show. The screens also get bigger, as the iPhone shows - which by the way was also a topic (I think it’s everywhere right now).

Scott also hinted that Google has some strong ongoing projects in the field of web on mobile phones…

The talk was extremely interesting, though I don’t know much about mobile computing. I don’t think I will get a huge fan of browsing the web with my cellphone - because the costs are still high and the screen is too small for my linking. A PDA could solve the problem, but I am not that busy that’s it’s necessary and the iPhone is just too expensive. And - it has not buttons, as I said before I am not a huge touch screen fan. My boyfriend has a smart phone w/o any buttons at all and he is always fumbling with this stylus and it takes him ages to textmessage. It would drive me crazy.
I guess I am waiting for the rollable screen.

Anyways, very interesting talk, I did not only learn a lot about the history of mobile phones and mobile computing, but he also had this nice quote:

”The trouble with the world is that the stupid are always cocksure and the intelligent are always filled with doubt.” (Bertrand Russell)