I seem to be developing a habit of doing some kind of year-in-review post around the time of the Fall Equinox.

It’s interesting to read what I wrote last year, from the perspective of a year later. I mean wow, what a time of huge changes that was. I wonder if there will ever come a time when I’ll look back on the year past and think, “yeah I’m pretty much the same person I was then”. I don’t think it’s happened yet…

Anyways, onward to This Year in Sentence Fragments.

Work: 2 rotations down, 1 to go. Learning SO much. Figuring out what I want to do and how to best apply my talents, in the short-term. Thinking about the longer term too, but not doing anything about it yet. Am I a designer, a programmer, or both? Bought a car, which then got broken into. Relationship stuff. Performed with Spiral Song, took a break, then came back. Continuing to grow with largely the same friends. Moved from my city full of lovely old things and crime, to a small town full of lovely old things (and less crime). Not living with J anymore — an adjustment, but good. Sister’s wedding. Moved from focusing heavily on writing to visual art. Drawing class. Freelance work for AYSO. Trip to Missouri. Figuring things out.

Yeah, if I had to put it into one sentence, this might have been the year of Figuring Things Out. And also becoming more settled, although I still don’t really have roots.

We prefer to be called Buccaneer-Americans.

(For those who are confused right now: International Talk Like a Pirate Day.)

1) reCAPTCHA

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

[…]

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

This is such a neat idea. It really is a great example of that most clever type of design that draws on people’s self-interest to contribute to a greater good.

2. The Brick Testament

Someone has a) a good knowledge of the Bible, b) a weird sense of humor, and c) waaaay too much time on his hands.

3. My newest favorite XKCD comic

Is it weird that I’ve actually wanted to rappel down the outside of my office building for the longest time?

(Yes, I admit it: This post is a cop-out because I don’t have any original content right now.)

1) The order of grades of gas on a gas pump.

The vast majority of the time, the cheap grade of gas is on the left side of the row. However, there’s one particular gas station chain where the order is reversed, and the most expensive grade is on the left.

I’ll bet that chain makes a lot of money from consumers who accidentally purchase the premium grade instead of regular unleaded. I know I almost do that, all the time. So standardization in this case would probably have to be imposed from the outside.

2) The location and design of the wipers, headlights, and turn signals in cars.

It isn’t just annoying that this is always different; it could be a safety concern when driving a new or unfamiliar car. At worst, you could end up blinding an oncoming driver instead of turning on your windshield wipers in the rain. At best, it distracts attention from the road, which is never a good thing.

A friend once argued, when I mentioned this, that it was a branding method for car manufacturers. That doesn’t ring true to me; when was the last time you heard the location and operation of the windshield wipers trumpeted in an automobile ad? I think that standardizing these three things would still leave plenty of room for brand differentiation in the rest of a car’s interior.

3) The way you set the time on a digital watch.

I always dread the return to Standard Time, because I know that even though we get an hour back, I’ll spend about that long trying to figure out how to set my damn watch.

It has four buttons; you’d think that one of them would allow you to change the time. But no, they managed to design it such that setting the time involves three of the buttons (all of them but “glow”), which have to be pressed in a particular combination, including some which must be held down for three seconds to change the mode. I’ve had this watch for more than three years, and I still can’t remember how to do this every time.

I feel like analog watches have this down pretty well. Digital watches should follow suit.

From Part I: It’s the problem that you’re trying to address, and not the field of design into which it (primarily) falls, that makes a project important or not.

If this is true, that’s unfortunate in a way, because it means that I can’t be assured of doing meaningful work just by getting into the right field, or getting the right degree from the right school. It’s not so easy as all that. Every field has its frivolous aspects, which may still bring joy and definitely make money, but which aren’t as important to me; likewise, every field has its interesting problems.

If there’s no easy answer, then what is the answer? I can only share my own answer, which is necessarily personal to me.

First, what I can do is look at the types of problems I’m most interested in working on. Am I interested in figuring out how to convey important information in a clear and elegant way, or how to use words and images to spread a message and persuade? Am I interested in designing products that meet real needs and actually improve people’s lives? Am I interested in creating information environments that allow people to access and understand important data, or that bring people together and help them communicate? Am I interested in designing physical spaces that encourage community and that work with nature instead of against? All of these things are valuable, but I can’t do everything. I need to pick a direction of focus.

Second, once I pick a direction, I need more education. I need to be able to speak the lingo, to know the history and background, to have a toolbox of abilities upon which I can draw. I need to know current state, past states, and thoughts toward the future. I need to know people, places, and times. And most of all, I need practice and feedback, the kind that I can probably best get in a group of other people who are doing the same thing.

Third, once I get some education, I need to practice and practice and practice some more. I need to work, and to create, and to develop authority. I need to create a reputation for myself, and build respect so that people will listen to me. I need to become known. And practice, and practice, and practice some more.

And while I’m practicing and building my skills, I’m also observing, and noting problems that exist, and coming up with ideas. And while I’m doing that, I’m also trying to network and align myself with institutions and people that can support me and my work.

And then at some point, magic happens and the stars align, and I take a flying leap out onto the limb of a badly mixed metaphor and do something with it all. Something that really matters. Something that I know is the Point Of It All. (This is the point where my logic runs out, and I can only assume that I’ll know it when I see it. Hey, I never said I had it all figured out!)

This doesn’t sound rational, or easy, or glamorous. And worst of all to an impatient person like me, it sounds like it might take a damn long time.

Nonetheless. Nonetheless, the part of me that grew up believing in Big Stories, and believing that God had a purpose for every life, still believes. (Although I wouldn’t perhaps put it in quite the same words.) It’s not quite hip and cynical, I know, but somewhere buried in me is an incurable optimist, foolish enough to believe that I can do something that matters.

But not foolish enough to believe that it will fall into my lap without a damn lot of hard work. Which is okay, I’m good for that.

First, a little bit of context: Cornell was one of the first schools to get Facebook, and as a result I’ve been using it for about 4 years now. (In fact, I still remember when the URL was thefacebook.com, and facebook.com was something else entirely.) In that time period I’ve seen it go through some pretty drastic changes — most especially, the change from a closed, school-specific network to a wide-open network that anyone can join. This change has its good sides, definitely, but it also presents some problems.

In real life, we present ourselves differently to different people, depending on who they are. I act differently at work vs. when I’m on a date, vs. when I’m with my parents. When Facebook was limited to students at one college, this wasn’t so much of a concern, because it was more or less just one’s peer group. But if Facebook wants to become a social network for everyone, then maybe it should consider letting people do the same thing in virtual form.

Right now you have the ability to specify a limited profile, which is a subset of your full profile, and to show the limited profile to certain people. Why not take that even further, and give users the ability to create multiple profiles, with different subsets of information in each? So for example, one could create a full profile for college buddies and one’s peer group, a sanitized version for coworkers and professional contacts, a “flirting” profile for romantic interests, and so on. You could have different pictures in each profile — save the kegstand pix for your college buddies, and show colleagues a nice professional headshot. And you could show different applications, too.

This would be similar to one of the features of LiveJournal which I absolutely love, which is the ability to define subgroups of friends and to target your posts to specific friends groups. I use this all the time; in fact, it’s one of the reasons that I’ve kept using LiveJournal for the past several years.

On Facebook, when you approve a friend request, it would be easy to right then add that person to a class of friends. And each class of friends could be targeted by a different profile.

If Facebook is trying to become a tool for adults, as well as a toy for college students, it needs to consider how to balance the effects of its new openness by allowing users to do as we do in real life: present ourselves differently to our contacts depending on who they are. And doing this might also address some of the fuss about privacy that periodically comes up.

With this post, I’m inaugurating a new blog category: “Navel Gazing”. Like a good introvert, I tend to do a lot of that, and I thought I would share some of it with you.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about meaningful work, and about what that means to me, and how I can create meaningful work for myself. And I’ve been thinking about what Matters, by which I mean: solves a problem, helps people, or makes the world a better place in some way. These are the questions I’ve been wrestling with:

How much does design Matter, really?

And are there certain types of design that matter more than others?

I started out thinking that the answer was yes. That, since I’m so interested in this Whole Design Thing, maybe I just had to get into the right field and then I would be able to work on Things That Matter. I wrote this in my UX Week program while I was at that conference: “It seems like some types of design are pure nicety; others are beneficial but not essential; and others have the potential to impact real problems and make a huge difference.”

At that time I was thinking, maybe if I were an industrial designer, or a product designer, or an architect, maybe then I’d be able to work on Things That Matter and make a real difference.

And I was thinking especially that I needed to move away from interaction design, because how much does anything that happens on the Internet really matter in the grand scheme of things?

(Looking back, I’m tempted to turn that into a sarcastic statement. At the time, though, it really wasn’t at all.)

Then throughout the course of the conference, I was presented over and over again with examples of design that Mattered, that addressed real problems. In the keynotes, we learned about Charmr, Adaptive Path’s R&D project to redesign a medical device for diabetics. We got to hear about ClearRx, a redesign of prescription drug labeling to make it easier to understand and safer to use. And we saw a UI demo from One Laptop per Child, with its innovative new operating system created for schoolchildren in developing countries.

I was very impressed by all of these examples. And the thing about them that struck me the most was how they all came from different fields of design, from graphics design (ClearRx), to industrial & product design (Charmr), to interaction design (OLPC). And really, none of those projects was pure — they all drew on and mixed up all of those fields and more, to varying degrees.

The conclusion that I’ve come to, and where I’m at right now, is that it’s more the problem than the discipline that makes a design project Matter. It’s not an issue, in the broad view of things, what I end up calling myself, or even what my diploma says. Rather, it’s an issue of looking at the problems that are out there in the world, and looking at the skillset that I have and the skillset I could reasonably gain, and then applying the one to the other in order to try and fix some shit.

And we all know there’s a lot of broken shit that needs fixing.

(Stay tuned for Part II, in which I continue to gaze fixedly at my navel.)

Here’s something I’ve been pondering lately:

What does a portfolio look like for an information architect or an interaction designer? What sort of information should it contain, and in what media? How do you convey the “story” of an interaction that you designed, when an interaction is a narrative that may be different every time?

I get portfolios for graphics designers. “Here’s a poster, a layout, an icon, some graphics for a site that I designed.” And I get resumes for tech jobs. (In fact, I have one.) “I speak Java, Perl, Flex and SQL.” But how the heck are you supposed to impress anyone with sitemaps and Visio wireframes?

And if you do show examples of live sites, what if you didn’t design the visual layer? How do you tell people to focus on the right things that you’re trying to show?

I feel a little bit stuck on this at the moment. Any advice or examples out there???

I love the crazy light reflections off the keys.

This is damn cool.

Called Teleshadow the system pipes video of what people are doing at home via the net to their friends’ houses.

But instead of showing images in full motion and colour, Teleshadow turns them into shadow outlines projected on the inside of a small decorative lamp.

Creator Shunpei Yasuda said the shadow presence system aims to fill the gap between live video and static images.

I love products that incorporate modern tech without coming off as “consumer electronics”. Technology doesn’t always have to scream its presence; sometimes it can be more effective by making itself virtually invisible.