Device Design Day, organized by Kicker Studio, was a single-day conference focusing, on, well, the design of devices. The speakers discussed everything from mobile phones to iPads to Sky Mall to glucose-monitoring devices from a variety of perspectives… details and bullet points, inspirational conceptual approaches and beautiful curves. For a seemingly specific subject, I was impressed with the variety of speakers they had and with just how large the field actually is. The organizers put together a solid representation of interaction and industrial design practice both as separate disciplines and as tightly integrated work practices. We saw design from the software, hardware, interface and form views. And that was all well and good, and expected.

There are, however, a few reasons why I chose specifically to take the day off of work to go to this conference.

• It was intimate… sometimes too intimate as the auditorium only fit 150 people and got slightly stuffy.
• It was cheap. The ticket price of $249 after two years of grad school loans* isn’t like buying a stick of gum, but after dropping an undisclosed but slightly painful amount of money to go to SIGGRAPH, even with my contributor’s discount, $249 did not seem like all that much.
• Finally, and most importantly, the range of speakers not only included a number of principals from studios whose work I secretly draw little hearts around but it also included people from academia–such as my incomparable thesis advisor, Wendy Ju**–and people from research labs–or what I enjoy calling “places where smart people go to be smart”–like Julian Bleecker, whose work was a large inspiration for part of my thesis.

As I keep going to conferences, I haven’t fully found where I feel most comfortable as a designer. UIST was inspirational, but I don’t write algorithms for a living, so my involvement there seemed somewhat random…I also had to explain what electronic music was to someone… what?

TEI was even more inspirational, and somewhat closer to the things I find interesting, but it was still very heavily tech and academia-based with a complete lack of the word “design” or “practice” anywhere (with the exception of Jon Kolko’s involvement who seems to have cloned himself to be able to do as much work as he does–although someone should tell him not to make Wordles).

SIGGRAPH was exciting, shiny and very much involved both the academy AND practice… but primarily for 3d animation and video games. I’m not a Pixar, procedural, mesh, programming girl (though I can kick some code–compared to the people at SIGGRAPH, I’m in programming kindergarten).

In comparison, Device Design Day was a one-day event where I was excited about and familiar with every single speaker on the roster. It also threw together the heads of studios, leaders in the fields of academic and commercial research and stirred the pot to see what would happen. From people espousing design research to people saying–and I’m paraphrasing here–”we don’t need to go to Afghanistan to see how Real People Live”, I’ve not been to an event yet that encapsulated all the perspectives on design that I enjoy.***

It wasn’t just people pimping their latest book or their portfolio (I’m looking at you, HOW conferences) or some tiny advancement in research (I’m looking at you, entire huge organization of the ACM, although those tiny advances are still much more interesting to me than most print design conferences I’ve been to, and I’ve been to quite a few). It was people talking about interesting things and sharing new information.

More please…

* I don’t think I’m going to write a single blog entry in the next year that won’t, in some way, mention my student loans. In fact, I can’t seem to have a single conversation with anyone that doesn’t, in some way, reference my student loans.

** Would I have survived grad design school without Wendy Ju? Probably not without punching holes in the wall.

*** I also admit I enjoy contention. One of my favorite papers at TEI, Tangibles in the Balance, outright stated that there’s no hard data that supports the idea that physical/gestural interactions increase a student’s ability to learn. The presenter was a single naysayer in a sea of people with the exact opposite opinion–many of whom who have set their entire careers on the idea that physical interaction and muscle memory does enhance learning. I love opposing opinions, and Device Design Day certainly had plenty of that.

**** Is this entry too congratulatory? Possibly. But this is the first time I’ve seen academics in the same room with practitioners all focused on design. The separation between education and practice has been bothering me for two years. I am very happy to see someone else address it.

Following is a comment I left on a site discussing whether or not humanitarian design is a new form of imperialism. Honestly, I am not that invested in humanitarian design. I am intrigued by the debates surrounding altruism within evolutionary biology, but that is primarily a curiosity, like how I enjoy thinking about super conductors. In reality, I have yet to see a project under the heading of humanitarian design that does not very clearly have a designer behind it… and that designer–not always–but often is pimping themselves in full force.

And I don’t particularly see anything wrong with that. I should also say that I do often love what people do underneath the heading of humanitarian design but I’m wary of world-changing… not because the world shouldn’t change, but rather I wonder who is changing it–if anyone is–and why. Anyway…

Let me make sure I clarify myself.

I do not mean that because a project has a visible human behind it, it must be a bad project, or that it must be a project meant only to service and further the career of that designer or even that the designer in question wanted to pimp themselves in the first place. My only point–as has been made extensively before–is that altruism extracted from the math of science into the personalities and politics of people becomes extremely complicated.

Personally, I’m inclined to skepticism when anyone from a quote-unquote privileged country goes to a quote-unquote unprivileged country ostensibly to quote-unquote help, but also, I really don’t care that much. Or I should put that more appropriately and say that there are others who are much more knowledgable than myself who are better suited to make some kind of useful statement about it. I care, I just care more about other things at the moment.

So with all that preamble, here is my comment. I edited the poor grammar but the gist is the same. This discussion is unfortunately rotating around the old guard versus the new blood. My only point is that I’ve seen plenty of old blood act with insensitivity and naivete far beyond that of the youngins’.

I am young(er), just out of grad school and completely wary of anyone or anything that professes to be able to save the world with a noun. I have very personal reasons for why I feel there might be a tone of “west is best” beneath much of the kinds of humanitarian design I see, but I’d primarily like to point out that this is not a generational issue.

Rather, the most disrespectful, blundering example of cultural imperialism disguised as design that I’ve seen was a pair of much older, theoretically more experienced design researchers from one of the most widely recognized and respected design companies in the world.

They were presenting their design research from a trip to a small town in a small country in Africa. Their preparation for the trip included a week or two of listening to some tapes. That was it. Then they proceeded to try to learn about the people in the area via very western methods developed by the company mentioned previously.

The end goal was to figure out whether or not they could find viable markets to sell products to. They were guileless about that part which was… interesting, but the complete lack of understanding of the cultural differences and the havoc they caused in the village blew me away.

Again I stress that these were design researchers in their 40s (and possibly 50s) working for a very well known design firm. Bad design is not limited to the youthful. People can act without caution or care at any age.

On page 29 of CCA’s Viewbook, you can see my hand and Bloom. Proving that yes, if you decide to attend art school you too can design and program goofy software with pretty flowers.

This was short enough to be a tweet, by the way, but I wanted to test out a new plugin. Such is the horrors of the intertron.

On Creative Review earlier today, they posted an article about a BBC news program questioning data visualization as an aid to understanding. I haven’t time to watch the full program at the moment but I really wish they chose someone other than David McCandless to defend data visualization. I could be wrong but I associate his work with information graphics, not data vis and there is a fairly large difference between the two.

[So I'm writing a blog about another blog about a television program about data. All your opinions are belong to us.]