The appropriate Ending

I thought long and hard about what I felt was a good topic to go out on, at least as far as my responsibilities for class, and I elected to write an example of how design classes should be taught, if and when i become the teacher rather than the student.

I'll start with a week by week glimpse of what i would teach;

Week 1:
Introduction, Design Processes, Assign groups for projects

Week 2-8
5 minute review of expected current stage of design by weeks end, in class design activity, discussion of blogs, clarify any uncertainties, meet with students for a quick progress report

Week 9
Review Expectations for Presentation, Discuss Blog

Week 10
Enjoy a product demo from each group

Other standard Syllabus stuff

Now, you are probably wondering, what about texts?
There are none, if you need to do readings here's a list of resources, but other than the descriptions i gave on the first day, you should be able to manage.

What is our homework/grading going to be like?
This is mostly going to be a class discussion and participation class, you should plan on being active at each meeting. Each week we will have a design challenge and some unusual tools to complete it with, on the other day, we will be discussing the design problems you discovered and wrote about on your blogs, they will be due at 8am on Thursday of each week.

Blogs? Whats a Blog?
For your blog (go create one and post it to our google group), style it how you want, and each week discuss something, it can be an object, an idea, a person, whatever! The only criteria is that the topic must have the need for revision and must fall prey to a critical design flaw discussed in the first week.
Depending on the number of students, we may go by volunteers, or random selections. Each student will need to briefly describe the product, the issues they discovered, and their suggestions for improvement. (it may be a good idea to focus on design flaws that are relevant to the stage of design you are in)

The Project
Depending on your groups strengths, you will be able to tackle different areas, but the goal is this, to bring a product at least to an advanced prototype phase that meets an established need. Your product can be software, law proposals or physical objects, but you must reach them through legitimate design practices. Write down everything you do to get there, date it, save it, have proof that you completed your research, your brainstorming, your testing, your revisions, your failures, keep records for EVERYTHING. Each week you will be asked to show some sort of evidence that you are progressing through the design process, at the expected pace. At the end of the quarter, I will expect a product unveiling. This unveiling should be treated as if it were a press conference, and you were convincing the world of its need and glory.

2 days of lecture, 7 days of practicing pressure situation design, 8 days of dissection of other designs, 1 day of clarifications.

This setup allows me to keep track of my students, avoids boring power points to give or receive, keeps the class challenging, engaging, and different class to class, semester to semester. The content for the class is going to be generated for me, and I will be able to be a moderator, picking interesting topics from areas my students are interested in. Additionally, on the off chance that i am unable to attend, am late, or just having a bad day, my assistant will not be hung out to dry, and i can rest easy knowing that the students will be practiced at the routine and with a little encouragement can run the discussion or activity without me (unless i happened to have the materials with me for the activity in which case i will always have a text based scenario for my students to go through).

Its not easy being a teacher, but its essential to be upfront and clear on what the expectations are, and i believe this system would do that, while keeping the grad student feel.

Now why is it we can't have a twist it on, twist it off faucet?

A fairly amusing line from Jerry Seinfeld in his 'I'm Telling you for the last time' show, but for some reason, the people who needed to hear it never did. All over the country public water dispensing devices have some kind of automatic shutoff feature, mostly because it was noticed that some people are not responsible enough to turn off the water themselves. Instead of restricting their use of such faucets, it was decided that the rest of us had to suffer through spring loaded faucets which dispense water only for a set amount of time (usually to short).

Now though, instead of addressing the original problem of humans being irresponsible, clever designers went with the 'automatic' system. Put your hands in the sink, water comes out, remove your hands, water goes off right? Sometimes. I will admit, the newest of these types of sinks in my experience have been perfect, but for many years it was a guessing game to figure out where to put your hands (and as i mentioned in other posts, costs will likely prevent upgrades).

To me though, we as humans have leaned towards fixing our short comings with technology a little to much, especially now that it seems technology is going to be able to do just about anything we can dream up. A recent movie, WALL-E, describes the direction we are heading quite well and i have to be honest, its just a little scary. Faucets, doors and toilets are one thing, but how long is it before we get rid of our responsibility to pick up after ourselves, go to the store, or even be human?

Automation is great, makes our lives easier, frees up our time to pursue other interests and always us to relax. Eventually all we may have to do is breath, but even that is automated by our body already!

Red Light, Green Light.

A silly game I play with kids just learning to swim where I have them kicking on the side of the pool. Splashing and giggling is a must, but the kids are at my mercy, the stop when I say red light, go when I say green light, and its really not any more complicated than that. Its funny how when you get older, the scenario changes, and it’s a little bit more complicated, but not by much.

Most of you who read this know what I’m talking about, the joy of driving on a developed road with stop signs, turn signals, and traffic jams. We wait for the signal to stop or go, but it always feels like there’s a lot more stopping involved, which we don’t want to do. My issue with older traffic lights rest in the annoying unnecessary wait times. The left turn at 1am across the major street that takes 3 minutes to get, even though there is no one coming, the red light at the intersection that isn’t even developed, or a personal favorite, the green light I have, but can’t use because the traffic in front of is stopped by a red light (Golf/Emerson and McCormick in Evanston, IL)

I know that the technology is out there to avoid these situations, coordinated traffic patterns, motion detectors and intelligence. But the problem persists, year after year, undoubtedly due to cost associated with replacing all of those circuits that control the billions of stop lights all over the world. But as a city planner, who in their right mind would not include the technology to eliminate these frustrating experiences? or what about the repairs that i see being done to older lights, but never get improved?

Any way you put it, its better for everyone if we have more efficient traffic systems, lower stress, lower emissions, fewer situations where I don't feel bad about breaking the law.

Rain Forest People Protection Act

So as I was sitting on my plane from the desert that is the southwest part of the United States, I started thinking about all of the farms that were created during the evolution of the American society all across the U.S. over the past 400 years. I thought about all of the trees that were cleared and cut in the northeast, the swamp lands that have been drained and developed into houses in the south, the vast prairies and huge herds of buffalo that were replaced with corn, wheat and cattle in the Midwest, and I thought to myself, what were those people thinking? Didn’t they know that they were ruining ecosystems and destroying nature? How could they be so barbaric and wasteful, where were the environmentalists to tell them that resources were limited?

Well they didn’t exist in mass, and they didn’t know that the world was round and finite, but more importantly, we were in it for the money! The land of opportunity! The blessed land! It turns out we are far from a perfect land, but we are now one of the wealthiest, we do have it better than most of the world, and our biggest concerns don’t usually include how to protect ourselves from the elements or where our next meal will come from (maybe what our next meal will be or whether we should pay electric bills or car payments, but you get the idea)

We like to think of our society as one that is trying to protect the environment that’s left, especially when you consider all of the efforts that are put into stopping the clearing of other resources, planting new forests, limiting harvesting of fishing, but I realized its ok for us to do it because we can afford to. We got our share of the money, we worked hard destroying our once limitless environment and now we don’t want others to go down the same road of destruction, right?

Or is it more complicated? Let’s consider the nations along the equator where all of the rain forests are, most of the diversity of the plants of the world is located, where huge amounts of oxygen is produced and spread over the world, and where a lot of what we consider undeveloped countries exist. We get angry when we see those fires burning, the video of animals running from loggers, and the pictures of the rare and exotic creatures that hide there (for now). Why don’t we get as upset when we see the people with a need for clean water, protection from the elements, or food?

It seems to me that they have the resources to acquire all of those things, but for some reason don’t. I want to believe that the only answer is they are not as smart, not capable, not motivated, or otherwise not worthy, but that’s just a little too cruel and cold for me. We know they are human, capable of all of the things we are, and have the ability to do the things our society did, but are being discouraged from it. They could take charge and start farming and building their cities, roads and malls; yet they don’t (or perhaps not as fast as they could would be more appropriate).

I have a problem with our society supporting the protection of things and places that in the end are going to disappear no matter what we do. The earth’s population of humans is going to double, soon, and the food to feed those people is going to have to come from somewhere. I know we would all like to see those rare and exotic beasts still exist for our grandchildren, but as any one in the population genetics field will tell you, it’s already too late.

We may be able to keep them alive for a time, but eventually they will have to be inbred, and eventually they will not be able to produce viable offspring. Eventually, those forests are going to be cut down so the people can feed themselves, eventually they are going to create demand for housing, roads, cars, and everything else that we consider normal, and when it does, what then?

When we can no longer support the population with the surplus of our society, what will be more acceptable, clearing forests as we once did, or allowing billions to starve so we can have jaguars and orangutans? Maybe its not so black and white as that, maybe we can boost the production of farmlands already out there, maybe we can solve both problems, Maybe we won’t even be around that long if the world gets destroyed by global warming, but how can we truly justify preventing other nations from striving to improve their lives when we did just as they did during our development? We preach freedom, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but do those ideals stop with our borders?

I don’t know about you, but I like to think we have been going to war across the globe for the past 100 years for exactly that reason. But how do we go to war when the enemy is us? I always knew my shadow had it out for me; I’ll be back once I do it in.

SUN Glasses

Sun glasses, it seems that the only way to not have them is to just be an idiot. We know the sun hurts your eyes, you are going to get wrinkles faster without protection, and still some people don't wear them. Ok, fine, at least you aren't spending money (yet) on terrible sun glasses design. Sun glasses first and foremost should stop harmful rays from reaching your eyes, but take a look at these bad boys;


I understand that they are a fashion piece, but none the less, i can't help but notice that these glasses didn't follow any kind of logical design processes. They do not do what sun glasses are supposed to do, are not adjustable to any degree, and about all they have going for them is an obsession from the R&B artist circle. I could bash them all day, but perhaps I started out on the wrong path. Perhaps i am assuming that the persona for these are users who are out in the sun and need to be protected when in fact i couldn't be more wrong!

Lets investigate these glasses with a little reverse engineering and design.
What do these glasses actually do?
The Block around 45 percent of all light wave lengths striking the area around our eyes
They make it hard to see where the user is looking
They are usable at night, artificial light, and cloudy environments
They are extremely cheap to produce as they are just a plastic injection mold with 2 screws

What don't they do?
They don't block a reasonable amount of UV rays compared to any other outdoor eye wear (which block 99.9999 percent of all harmful rays)
They don't hold up well in harsh environments

Well with these observations, clearly the designers had a different persona in mind than i did, lets take a look...

They must have been targeting individuals who didn't have to worry about the sun a significant amount of time, so we are looking probably at individuals who are night travelers, live underground, or are from Alaska. We can safely say that the night owls are the primary persona as nearly every college student could be considered here at some point, not to mention the numerous night shifts and 24/7 walmart positions, the secondary are pasty white hermits or World of Warcraft players, and Alaskans probably were not considered as a viable market (harsh weather clause).

Since they block all light, not just UV, these glasses must be intended for users who need to block out their environments, but since they are so cheap, they must also have been meant to be either replaceable or affordable. If we stick to what we already know about their environment, then it would make sense for the college night owl user to be our focus; they can't handle to much input and need help blocking out some information, chances are they have just arrived at a bar/party or are waking up to some unpleasant realities. If someone knocks them off, they put them down and get stepped on, no problem! just get a new pair.

A weak persona to be sure, but its better than nothing.