SUPERLIMINAL

user interface design is rarely about designing pretty widgets, it's about making usable widgets. the trick is anticipating the user's movements: understanding the user's intent makes user interface design easier because their moments are no longer ambiguous, they follow a prescribed path.

another way to think of the following statements:

• what can it do?
• what is it for?

the first is obvious. for most anything, you can usually see what it does by looking at it or watching it in action. the second is not obvious because it explains a relationship between the object and its user. in some rare cases, knowing what something does may suffice, but more often than not, we ask what something is good for.

i give you a laptop. what's it do? it can perform billions of calculations a second and store information on a spinning metal platter! what's it for? mobile blogging? image manipulation? programming? but often its use has nothing to do with what it actually does. the laptop is a usable interface to a hard drive, cpu and other technological niceties.

However, considering what a computer can do, it's strange that most calculator programs that come with them can often do very little. Or for that matter, why it is difficult for me to easily record the output of my screen to a movie file. Half of the computer's ability lies in storage, but i am somehow unable to harness that power myself. By decoupling intent from ability, we avoid asking these questions.

i sit you in a classroom, we're learning about fractions today. what do they do? well, they don't do anything really. what are they for? well, we can have 'one third of a pizza.' or we can use fractions as a way to express a ratio, 'thirteen miles per hour.' let's learn how to add them or subtract them!

wait, i lied, fractions actually do something. but what is it? does it have anything to do with math? does it always?

understanding one half of 'what does it do' versus 'what is it for' puts you in a strange situation. You may have technical mastery of a subject but never know why it works. similarly, you may understand the theory but you may never have technical skill. the reason for teaching one over the other is clear, although unsettling.

the past three blog posts (and ones that will follow) are the kernel of my statement of purpose for risd, cmu and mica. the more i reflect on the situation, the less i suspect i will get in to any of the schools (all for different reasons). However, aside from my portfolio, the statement of purpose is the only other thing that i possibly have to make me 'stand out.'

The ideas aren't complete, i mean, each entry is self contained, but all of them together do not represent an essay, just points that i suspect i will make. I haven't written the essay yet, i have only started using this blog as a whiteboard.

so if you see anything that makes you say "hmm.. good point" or more likely "does not follow" "awkward" "redundant" "irrational" and so forth, just make a little note.

thanks
--marcos

i haven't had any formal design training with the exception of one class in computational design. that said, my perspectives on design, composition, color and so forth are all based on personal taste. Granted, i have studied enough to approach something and say 'the dadaist focal point detracts from this venetian design,' but this feels unsatisfactory. anyone could say that!

instead, i approach my students with comments that mirror thoughts about computers, math or life: the strongest topics i can work off of. "You don't need to use four fonts," "this will be easier to work on if you pick away at the smaller problems first," "design to get it wrong the first time, fix it in the second, third,... who knows, but don't stress the first draft." The first is kind of like saying: try a doodle before you hop on illustrator. The second, thankfully, seems universally applicable. The third is empirical cs canon: things rarely work right on the first go, so they're designed knowing they won't be perfect but that they'll be incrementally improved.

These are foreign to my design students. I have one student who insists something work perfectly from the get go, i tell her she'll just frustrate herself, she says she doesn't care, she's a perfectionist. I have another who gets flustered because she has the whole adobe font folio on her computer: does helvetica's a look nicer than arial's or frutiger's? i ask her how she's using it, she shows me a treatment at 700% of the three faces. I respond: rasterized at 6pt, you're probably better of with verdana. Again, unsatisfactory.

Math is a language for expressing complex ideas. Take for example, multiplication: we multiply because it's too burdensome to add repeatedly. While it's possible to repeatedly add, we create a mechanism that allows us to group repeated addition into a conceptually simpler task. We create these abstractions unconsciously when we say things that are more involved than they appear like "I'm going shopping" or "I'm just making dinner." Nobody learns how to "make dinner" or "go shopping," instead we learn how to cook a vegetable or purchase an item. Math education is peculiar because the steps we learn often belie the concepts that motivate them. Addition and multiplication, though intimately related, become mutually exclusive concepts.

Design is a method for packaging complex ideas. If poor design obfuscates the purpose of abstraction, then good design should elucidate it.

The last math class I took at MIT was called 'Modern Algebra.' Its only prerequisite was Calculus. On the second week of class the professor began his lecture with a genuine preface, "Today we divide. Does everyone remember how we divide?" I took at least four classes at MIT that asked this, each in earnest. The reason is actually very subtle: depending on your number system or your algebra, division may work any number of ways, but the meat of it typically stays about the same, both mechanically and conceptually. I first learned division in the fourth grade. I have been dividing for about 13 years. Plus some remainder. Honestly, my mastery of the mechanism hasn't much changed since then.

My conceptual understanding has changed.

the first thing i thought when Michel Richart said this was of Phlogiston.

there were an inordinate number of twinkies in the audice tonight for the chocolate tasting, each asking a question more inane than the last.

I had purchased a box of Richart chocolates for my family after commencement while i was staying at the Mariott in copley. They had tasted good, but not quite as good as Kee's. The essence, however, of chocolate is not its flavor, which Richart claims is an immensely simple concept. l'arome is king and we were promised that we'd enter a universe of them.

And that's what had made kee's chocolate's so much better for me: that you ate them in the same way that you drank wine, you inhaled as you ate them to savor their tones and bizarre complexity and you slowly let them melt in your mouth to savor the finish. richart groups his chocolates by aroma families which i thought was novel at first. It turns out, if his enthusiasm is to believed, this is a way of life. stop tasting. start smelling.

the other half of chocolate is cocoa butter.
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It's back! The spam! i have posted two photos to flickr (here's one!) The turkey says: I am BIG and FAT because people eat me. WHAT is YOUR REASON??

Hilarious!

Also. i realize that people don't read these things, but yet i feel compelled to post to it! maybe the new blog smell will wear off soon enough.

i decided to hop on this bandwagon. again. for the, maybe, fourth time.

(this theme is grotesque.)

and... i'm reading a book right now (three actually) but i am a slow reader.

after i started working through the exercises in sicp, in particular one about Church Numerals, i found (on wikipedia) a link to gödel numbers and then an article about zen and Koans. somehow i was inspired (immediately so) to buy the book Gödel, Escher, Bach which cary had told me about when we were freshmen or maybe sophomores in high school. That he was capable of grasping this book's thesis isn't surprising, but if he understood it i stand impressed. While i understand it in some context, my understanding is heavily influenced by all that i have learned at school and all that i have read up til now.

i have never used my laptop to dj and have only used cd decks at wmbr, so perhaps this theme is inappropriate, but it's funny, kind of like those waving cats in asian supermarkets.

paz
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