Here is a desktop wallpaper I created quite a while ago. The background image is from Fergal Claddagh, under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike license. Please feel free to share and remix. This wallpaper is under the same license as above.
After completing my graduate requirements for my master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction Design, I headed out on a road trip in order to move to San Francisco. This post chronicles my journey across the American Southwest as I drove my Jetta, a UHaul trailor, and my dog towards California.
Warning, this post contains many large images. Some are beautiful, some are not. (more…)
Recently I held a Wine and Interviews event at my house. I invited second year Interaction Design masters students over to talk about interviewing and share some wine. We each told stories about our interviewing experiences and learned quite a lot from each other. Following are some basic tips we talked about through our stories and experiences. These tips are not meant to be exhaustive, comprehensive, or applicable to every interview experience; rather they are meant to share the knowledge and experiences between fellow students. You likely already know many of these, but it’s good to be reminded and keep them in mind.
Spread the love, if you have tips to share leave them in the comments.
Have a good story about failure.
Have a project to talk about in detail.
Prepare your capstone elevator pitch.
It’s ok to talk about the thermostat project.
Have an elevator pitch for your capstone.
Have an example of some design documentation.
You might be asked to show a task flow or wireframe flow, be prepared.
You might be asked to show some usability test results.
Know your process.
Know your design philosophy.
Understand what you want from your future.
Talk to Jeremy Podany!
Understand that a UI Designer is not the same as a UX Designer.
It really helps to research your interviewer when possible.
It’s ok to ask about the dress code for your interview.
It can help to know some basic visual design principles.
Get your resume critiqued by many people.
Build rapport with your interviewer.
Take notes!
You will be exhausted.
It’s ok to ask for water during the interview.
Show that you are willing to learn.
While shaving this morning, I had several “ah ha” moments. I decided to quickly jot these down on my blog for mere entertainment and fun. I’m probably not the first person to think about these things, but none-the-less, here they are for your reading enjoyment.
image courtesy of lintmachine
[note: this post has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I'm actually working on]
As many of you know, my current capstone topic is about Discovering Local Music in a Digital Age. Upon glancing at the cover of today’s IDS (local student newspaper) I found this article, which covers a local music festival that was held just this weekend. However, I wasn’t in attendance. Why, because I didn’t freaking know about it!
image courtesy of amboo
My initial reaction is that I’m already failing at my capstone topic. If I was really interested and passionate about local music, wouldn’t I have know about and gone to the show? What does it say that I had no clue this was going on, and worse that I had no clue about the local music label Crossroads of America (XRA Records)? Does this mean that I’m really just not that into local music? Does it say that I’m not working hard on my capstone?
Or, does this show a really great design opportunity? What if more people (like me) had known about the ‘festival’? More importantly, why didn’t I hear about the show? What things could have helped me to learn about this event? Was this poor promotion on XRA’s side? Or am I really just out-of-tune with what’s going on in local music?
I don’t have the answers here, but this certainly frustrates me and stresses me out. It makes me re-think my feelings about my current capstone topic and question my commitment to it.
What do you think?
As an Experience Designer I often make things. Usually I make in order to better understand a design, or test out an idea that my team or I have had. I’ve built prototype designs using a myriad of tools including paper, foamcore, wire, photoshop, playdough, etc. Check out a project called Mirror Map to see some large prototypes made with paper, foamcore, and aluminum foil.
I’ve been wanting an iPhone dock ever since I bought an iPhone. However, I never wanted to shell out money for some boring dock to always sit on my desk. I wanted to dock my phone at times, but not in some boring white box. So, after returning home from my amazing internship at Mozilla and acquiring a new iPhone 4. I decided to make myself an iPhone dock.
For materials I used legos that I had sitting around. The base was built from a pirate themed lego package. Other supplies were used at random. I used the USB cord that came with my new phone as the connecting cord. In order to secure this cord into my lego contraption, I used some hot glue. This would allow me to dock and undock the phone using just one hand.
It works marvelously and looks super cool. Argggg!
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.