Location: San Francisco, CA
Camera and Lens: Nikon D80, 50mm f/1.8 lens
Creative Process: Taken during the San Francisco Worldwide Photo Walk. I just saw and photographed.
Post Production: I cropped this photos just a bit, and played around with the color saturation to increase the yellows and oranges just a tiny bit.
A vivid dream from July 14, 2010. So vivid that I needed to write it down and sketch it out.
I was with a girl, in a skyscraper where her fathers business was housed. There was housing on the top floors. I remember some things about being nervous around her father. I remember we went to sleep together in the same bed looking out a window into the night sky. The earth shook. We both woke up thinking that this was our first earthquake. We decided it wasn’t much and went back to sleep. Seconds later we were jolted awake by some very loud noises. We somehow knew (from other people?) that we had to evacuate the building. I didn’t remember how to evacuate, so we just took off. We didn’t have on shoes and were wearing sleeping gear. I still had my pillow as we rushed down some stairs and outside. Everything was completely dark outside, but things were violently visible. The sky was full of a menacing black storm.
So, I’ve been thinking a lot of process, especially about how critique fits into process both in academia and in the workplace. In academia we are constantly pushed to have our work critiqued, which is absolutely fantastic. However, what I failed to realized, despite all my preaching about getting feedback and critique as often as possible, is that in academia critique comes to you. Often times it simply wasn’t necessary to go out and explicitly ask for critique for someone. Someone was constantly around, and usually looking over your shoulder. They would just walk up and say what they thought. This is absolutely fantastic, but it’s unlike the real world which I’ve experience here at Mozilla. While we work strongly in teams, we often perform a lot of work on our own. This work happens at our own desk on our own computers. While working at our desk, everyone at the same time, it’s very unlikely that someone is just going to come up and start talking about what you are working on at that very moment. Sure people come by your desk and talk, and once in a while it’s relevant to the stuff you were working on that particular moment. But often, it’s not. This means that the work you are performing right now is being looked at by you, and likely only you. Despite our somewhat deepest fears, our colleagues are not looking over our shoulders. No one is peeping at our computers secretly judging us and see how many times we log into twitter and facebook. It’s just not happening for the majority of us, especially in our field.
I recently got back from the Mozilla 2010 Summit in Whistler, BC.
I can sum up my entire experience in just one word.
Awesome!
As you may know, I’ve been doing a lot of researching and thinking about post Firefox 4 Home Tab during my internship here at Mozilla. I’ve taken the research I’ve conducted, my colleagues thinking, experience and ideas, along with my own experience and ideas and put together some wireframes. These sketches represent some very basic directions that we could take with the Home Tab.
It’s important to note that these concepts represent some very basic and rough ideas of what the home tab could look like in the future. These are in no way absolute directions, but rather provide some jumping off points for future work.
That being said, let’s frame these concepts a bit better.
Below are some recent photographs of my good friend Katie O’Donnell. Katie is a fellow masters student with me at Indiana University and does awesome work. She is interning for the summer at Oracle in the San Francisco Bay Area. Katie just picked up some new glasses so we headed out to a local park and took some photographs. Below are some of my favorites.
Location: A Mountain View, CA park
Camera and Lens: Nikon D80, 50mm f/1.8 lens
Creative Process: We went out into the park around 6:15pm and looked for good light in some shade.
Post Production: Nothing much more than normal portrait stuff.
Last week AIGA in partnership with IxDA and other organizations held Design Week. The week held many events but what I found most interesting were the Open Studios. These are times in which different studios across San Francisco opened their doors to the public. Most of these studios had food and drink for patrons and gave tours talking about their own studio. While touring around these studios I took a bunch of photographs in order to really see how these studios operate, better reflect on design practices, as well as take some new ideas with me to the new IU HCID studio which is currently under construction. I hope you enjoy these photographs as much as I enjoyed touring these studios. I would like to thank the following studios for hosting myself and many others during design week: IDEO, Adaptive Path (where my awesome friend Dane Petersen works), Fuse Project, Hot Studio, New Deal Design, Ammunition LLC, Lunar Design, Frog Design, Smart Design, and Astro Studios.
Below are some of my favorite photographs. You can find the entire set at: http://picasaweb.google.com/johnwaynehill/DesignWeek2010.
Firefox is fast, no doubt about it. But for many people it feels pretty slow when starting up. Chrome, while only marginally faster than Firefox at starting, feels much faster. By analyzing videos of these start-up processes we can start to understand what makes Firefox feel slow.
First, last start with some definitions of browser start-up events.
Location: A San Francisco bar
Camera and Lens: Nikon D80, 50mm f/1.8 lens
Creative Process: My beautiful friend Kat and I were exploring some SF bars. We sat near the front at this bar area that had fantastic light coming in through a window. I simply picked up my camera and starting shooting.
Post Production: Very little post production on this photograph. I converted the photograph to black and white and did a little skin re-touching. That’s all folks. Simple as could be.
For the final project in my Experience Design class, my team created a museum experience of what life might be like on Mars. My team started this project out by visiting the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. We read multiple papers, and looked at research that had been done about Mars and what life might be like on Mars. From there we created a prototype experience and ran some user testing. We iterated and tested our design several times until we came to this final design. Although our design targeted families with children, we had a design constraint to be universally accessible. In order to better understand accessibility issues, each member in my team prototyped a handicap of some kind. The video also shows these disability prototypes, the insights we gained, our prototyping experience, and our user testing. In this video we attempt to show what the experience of our exhibit might be like for visitors.
I’ll be posting this design, along with more detail about our process on my site soon. For now, I hope you enjoy our final video of Life on Mars.
Life on Mars from John Wayne Hill on Vimeo.