I recently took a print-out of my own medical timeline (which I had created from memory) to a new Doctor I was seeing, hoping that the visualization of my symptoms and medications would help him better understand what I was experiencing and thus better understand how to treat me. The new doctor was Dr. Richard Ash, a medical doctor in NYC who is known for embracing alternative therapies.

The whole timeline - click and enlarge for the full experience

As it turned out, he spent less time with the visualization than I had expected. Because he had seen similar complications in the past, he felt confident that he knew what was going on with me before I even had a chance to show him the timeline. I also realized that Doctors and their staff communicate through their own language of scribbles and shorthand, and they wouldn’t necessarily want to take any extra time during an office visit to understand this new visual language.

But this timeline prop was still extremely beneficial, because it helped me tell my story in a chronological manner and it helped me remember all of the details I intended to talk about. For comparison purposes, here’s what usually happens during an office visit with a new doctor (or, for that matter, an office visit with an existing doctor but for a new problem):

I go into a bland, beige room devoid of any personality. It looks like this.

Typical exam room: beige-splosion

I sit on a paper-covered table and swing my legs. I look around for a magazine, and I might find a tattered Travel or Highlights for children sitting next to a stack of educational pamphlets (perhaps on the perils of chlamydia or the importance of proper nutrition, depending on the doctor). I stare into the distance. After 10 or 15 minutes, the doctor knocks and comes in the room.

‘So, what brings you here today!?’

At which point I spew forth whatever words and thoughts come to my mind, sometimes aided by a scrap of paper on which I may have written a short list of things like ‘calcium/bones, guts, tingly legs.’ I usually feel a little rushed, conscious that the doctor inevitably has back to back appointments, so I end up abbreviating my story to accommodate him/her. But once I’ve left the office, without fail I realize I forgot to mention a certain symptom, or a certain thought. Sounds inefficient, right?

But this time was different – when I spread the taped-together timeline in front of Dr. Ash and started talking, an ordered and coherent story unfolded and a bigger picture disorder came immediately into focus. I was able to point to certain phases of my history and explain what had been going on at the time. I talked quickly and deliberately, and showed both my timeline and full list of symptoms. The result was a more structured conversation that allowed me to communicate my story more efficiently while saving the doctor from having to listen to five minutes of my rambling.

I suspect I’m not the only person who has a hard time articulating my symptoms, fears, and questions when I’m sitting in a stark white room in a paper smock. We don’t often think about the importance of this moment to our healthcare experience, but it’s usually the only time we have the doctor’s full attention. How empowering it would be for all of us patients to take a little control over this moment and present our stories like expert witnesses.

I’m still feeling energized and inspired by the idea of empowering the masses and will continue pursuing it, while I’m also spending lots of time and energy getting better myself.

<3

My medical story: the background

BEFORE: Me, circa late 80s, with full smile functionality

AFTER: this picture is so awesome in so, so many ways. My family, circa 1993; I am the one in the top middle, with poor smiling power.

One early winter day when I was 13, I was sitting at the dinner table with my family laughing at something my brother had said.  My mom stared at me and asked why I was making that face.  “What face?” I said. She said my smile looked different, like a grimace. I ran to look in the mirror in the bathroom. I looked into the mirror and smiled back at myself, but it was like the corners of my mouth wouldn’t stretch to the sides. I looked more like a dog baring its teeth.

Such began my voyage with the auto-immune disease, Myasthenia Gravis. This non-degenerative disease causes muscle weakness, mostly in voluntary muscles, and often affecting facial muscles like the eyes or mouth. No one really knows why, but MG often affects older folks and girls around the age of puberty. Fortunately for me, I was diagnosed very quickly and soon had my thymus gland removed, which improves the long-term outlook for patients.

Over time, I went to college, studied abroad, was a ski bum in Big Sky, MT, lived in Vermont for six years, went back to grad school, interned in silicon valley, and eventually ended up working for the digital agency R/GA in NYC. During those full and exciting years, my MG was mostly under control, though I had a few serious flare-ups that caused complete double vision. When that happened, I had to spike my dose of the immunosuppressant corticosteriod drug, Prednisone, to bring my immune system back under control; and then I’d have to taper back down over a few weeks or months to my regular dose.

In full eyepatch regalia, late summer 2011

Prednisone, you are a harsh mistress. Over our 14 year relationship, this drug has helped me maintain a very active and normal life. It’s allowed me to hike some big mountains, ski some dangerous peaks, travel around europe, survive grad school, and work some long days at my job (which I love). But it’s also sucked the density out of my bones (at 31 I had osteopenia, which is pre-osteoporosis) and for the past 5 years I’ve dealt with sometimes crippling digestive issues caused by so many years of suppressing my immune system.

Antibiotics: the season’s black

I started trying to deal with my digestive problems starting in the fall of 2008. Since then, I’ve seen 4 gastroenterologists and have taken about 7 or 8 courses of antibiotics, none of which has permanently ameliorated my symptoms.  Last year, I started having chest pain/heart palpitations and joint pain, which seemed very associated with my stomach symptoms. The doctors I talked to didn’t seem to believe me when I said that it seemed like the problems in my gut were causing these other symptoms. But no one could explain why, when my stomach was good, these symptoms went away.

Unfortunately, I think that by taking so many antibiotics over the past few years, I have thrown my body chemistry way out of balance. I believe that I have systemic candidiasis that is causing my joint pain, heart pain, tingly legs, and other sordid symptoms. I’ve reached these conclusions mostly through extensive googling, but this week I’m going to a new doctor who has a more holistic approach.

How to communicate this story to my new doc?

The new doctor I’m going to see supposedly at one time dealt with his own medical problems stemming from long-term Prednisone use. He is an MD but does not take insurance, so if I end up seeing him regularly I may end up spending thousands of dollars on him. It is therefore utterly imperative that I maximize my time with him and ensure that he unequivocally grasps my entire story.

Here’s how this would usually work. I’d fill out some paperwork, maybe send some medical records. Then I’d come in for the office visit and, over a half hour or so of my rambling and his questions, I’d be able to communicate an approximation of my medical history. But I might forget a few things here, underemphasize a few things there. He would get a somewhat blurry picture of my past health.

This time I’m doing something different. I believe that this time, the best way to communicate my story will be in pictures and graphics.

Let me explain. I work as an interaction designer; this means, in a nutshell, that I make interfaces (like websites or mobile applications) more intuitive and enjoyable to use. It is my job, and my passion, to simplify the complex; to make navigation systems make sense; to help ensure that complex systems and processes feel ordered and logical. I know that to solve a problem, you must first understand it. I’ve found in my work that visualizing a problem is usually the best way to understand it.

So for this week’s office visit, I have prepared a visual timeline, an infographic, if you will, that I will print and take with me to my visit.  This timeline charts the progress of my Myasthenia Gravis since I was 13 – not only the hard facts like the medications I was taking at the time, but the way I *felt* during those times and the degree of weakness I was experiencing. Overlaid is the progression of my stomach problems over my lifetime, including the points in time when I took antibiotics. Laying these waveform-like patterns on top of one another reveals that often my MG and my stomach problems were involved in a dance of sorts, taking steep dives simultaneously.

These past few years have been especially interesting!

The whole timeline - click and enlarge for the full experience

I’ve prepared this graph from memory only. I don’t currently have possession of my medical records, but I would like to get them and create a real, scientific representation of my medical history – overlaid with how I was doing over that time period.

I’ve also created a simple chart that lists my symptoms and the way I feel when I feel ‘Good,’ ‘Medium,’ and ‘Bad.’ This was a way of helping me exhaustively list and catalogue my symptoms, so I won’t forget anything at the visit.

Awesome, awesome potential

Visualizing information is one of my great passions, as is designing digital solutions to improve healthcare. By merging those two passions to try to solve my own medical mystery, I feel as though I’ve stumbled upon something that has the potential to help patients and doctors communicate more efficiently, and that could help doctors connect the dots for patients who have lots of mysterious symptoms or who see a bunch of different doctors. I don’t necessarily see this as a Personal Health Record, but more of a companion graphic that can be read and understood quickly and efficiently.

So, who should generate such a graphic? As things stand right now, I think the responsibility has to fall on the patient or the patient’s caregiver, as health data is not currently in the condition or format to be imported into a tool and dynamically made into a legible, relevant chart.  The question remains – can we create a tool expressly for visualizing personal medical histories, one that accounts for both ‘hard’ data points like medication dosages and procedures performed along with ‘soft’ data points like how the patient felt (physically and mentally/emotionally)? I think this is a design problem worth pursuing.

For whoever may be interested, I will update here after I’ve visited my new doctor this week and gotten his feedback.

As I walked down the hallway toward the kitchen I noticed a group of probably 15 business-looking people clustered around the 3 TVs that were embedded in the wall. Most of them were anxiously talking on cell phones, while others were just watching. I stopped, just to see what they were looking at. By this time, I believe only one building was hit and was smoking. I didn’t really know what the World Trade Center was – having been to New York only once or twice at that point, I didn’t realize how important they were to the skyline and identity of manhattan. I quickly realized how serious it was. I walked back through the kitchen and into our staff area, where they told us that the conference we were hosting was for FEMA – all of the FEMA heads in the country had gathered for a retreat in Big Sky. The meals and meeting room preparations were cancelled, and instead we worked to turn one of the rooms into a big call center – hooking up as many landlines as we could in the space. I can’t remember now why we needed to do that, but perhaps the cell reception in Big Sky wasn’t very good at the time.

People kept gathering throughout the day at those same TV monitors. We saw the towers fall, and one news network showed footage of people jumping from the buildings. That is the image that stays with me now and embodies the full horror of the day. It’s that image that will make me break into tears 30 years from now.

Eventually, they told us we could go home if we felt we might be a target, although by then we knew there were no planes in the air in the country. I don’t think anyone actually went home though. I can’t quite remember what I was thinking about – were we going to war? Would the attacks continue? But really I was most worried for my friend Mollie. At the time she was living in Manhattan around 26th St, I believe. I called her all day but the lines were overwhelmed and I couldn’t get through. Finally I think she emailed that she was fine. I remember talking to my parents in Chicago and they felt there was no risk for them there, and I wasn’t too worried.

I was only 23, and I didn’t really fully understand what had happened. I was dating an older man at the time and he was glued to the TV – I think now, I wouldn’t be able to turn it off. But it seemed like the next day, life sort of went on in Big Sky and though the attack was still important, it faded from my mind. I didn’t watch TV and didn’t read news online, so I didn’t really feel a big impact.

Fortunately I was able to visit ‘ground zero’ at the end of October of 2001, during a too-long visit to New York. I stayed with a friend for most of the trip, though I only saw him a couple times because he was working so much. I took the train downtown one afternoon and came out of the station, and the first thing that hit me was the smell. The buildings were still smoking, 6 full weeks after the attacks. It was a chemical smell, the smell of things burning that shouldn’t be. I walked a few blocks and went to stand next to a chain link fence that had posters of missing people on it. Posters of dads and moms, letters from kids, and flags. I looked at the wreckage of the buildings, two collapsed, mangled steel structures that were probably only about 8 stories tall. I was struck by the thought of over 100 stories collapsing into 8. The people around me took pictures, looking sort of guilty for being part of this disaster tourism but wanting a record regardless. I saw a man next to me take a picture of his friend, who gave a grim look to the camera. I snapped a few pictures myself and then had to leave. The smell and sadness were overwhelming and I was glad to head back to the subway.

I took a train a few days later to Baltimore to stay with Sarah. Grand Central was full of large boards covered with more missing person posters. It seemed part exhibit, part just providing a place for people to put these flyers, which blanketed the city during that time period.

Overall, I felt very lucky that none of my family or friends were hurt. I had one friend from college who knew people who were killed, but that was as close as it came to me. As the years have gone by I think that day has come to mean more to me, especially now that I am here in new york. My neighbor was a firefighter chief during that time and he has since retired, to become basically a chain-smoking shut-in. The city has recovered in the last 10 years but there are people all around us who were permanently changed, some of them unable to function. Today I walked by a few churches and felt the desire to walk in and attend a service, not out of any need for religion (sorry mom) but to sit in solidarity with my neighbors and feel some sense of togetherness and hope.

To close, a bit of perspective – what has 9/11 cost the US? From the NY times:

“Al Qaeda spent roughly half a million dollars to destroy the World Trade Center and cripple the Pentagon. What has been the cost to the United States? In a survey of estimates by The New York Times, the answer is $3.3 trillion, or about $7 million for every dollar Al Qaeda spent planning and executing the attacks. While not all of the costs have been borne by the government — and some are still to come — this total equals one-fifth of the current national debt.”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/cost-graphic.html

Time and materiality

During the conference a debate arose: what is the ‘material’ of interaction design?  Michael Meyer, in his talk ‘Proximus Maxiumus’ said that to be an expert interaction designer is to know our ‘material’ inside and out, know its capabilities and potential, and understand how to ‘craft the experience’ with this material. Richard Buchanan claimed that the material is ‘whatever you think is interacting.’ A man took the mike during the after-talk Q and A and stated that the material of interaction is Time. This pronouncement was met with a lukewarm reception from the on-stage speakers, which surprised me because it felt very true to me. Bruce Sterling, in his closing keynote, reinforced this concept when he said ‘we [interaction designers]  deconstruct reality into events and time.’

I love this idea. We designers try to help people accomplish tasks that take place over a period of time; we make sure that transitions are seamless; we try to create delightful experiences that keep people interested and continue to provide utility over time. I happened to sit across from Maria Cordell of Adaptive path at lunch one day, and I was reminded that she gave a great talk at last year’s ixd10 conference on ‘Interaction Design for the Fourth Dimension‘ – Time.

Though I missed the talk, Peter Stahl presented on The Rhythm of Interaction – check out his slides for more.

There’s another aspect of time that emerged especially during Bruce Sterling‘s keynote, and that is our limited ‘time’ doing interaction design as we know it.  If Sterling is right, and since he’s a futurist I trust his instincts, we’ll become obsolete dinosaurs much faster than our CHI forefathers; he encourages us to look harder at our CHI/IxDA institutional memory and figure out how we can better integrate and become a real professional organization (instead of a ‘social network,’ he said with a sneer before taking a swig of beer.) Bruce Sterling is kind of my hero, which is why I got this awesome autograph from him:

Bruce Sterling knows just what to say

Desirability & Delight

Richard Buchanan described desirability as the degree to which we identify with a product; the degree to which it fits our circumstances and culture and speaks in a voice that you are willing to bring into your life.  He described a continuum of useful/usable —-> desirable, with things like a fireman’s uniform belonging on the lower end and haute couture gowns belonging on the desirable end.

Stephen Anderson’s talk on sustaining passionate users also speaks to time and desire – how can we get people to fall in love with our application and stay in love?  He claims that giving users appropriate challenges and delightful/playful challenges will help sustain interest over time.  This brings to mind Csíkszentmihályi’s theory of flow: “the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.”

Morality, sustainability, evolution

Design ethics was a hot topic this year.  Kaleem Khan‘s Design for Evil: Ethical Design talk spurred some conversation and this interesting blog response about our own accountability for the upstream and downstream impacts of the products we design. Megan Grocki‘s ‘Marketing is not a Four Letter Word‘ presentation inspired many a lunch table debate about ‘good’ marketing vs ‘evil’ marketing – see Johnny Holland’s write-up for a great synopsis.

I thought there was some interesting blurring of lines between humans and technology. Bill Verplank talked of an ecological worldview in which machines may become part of evolution, perhaps evolving on their own. Brenda Laurel stated, ‘we can’t blame technology.  Technology is us. We do it, we intend it, we make it.” She talked about swarm intelligence, evolution and evolutionary symbiosis, and ‘authoring for the planet’ – she calls for a convergence of technology and nature, instead of continuing on diverging paths. Brenda’s talk was complex, theoretical, moving, and slightly over my head at times; but it was a highlight for me and for lots of the twitterverse – people ‘got chills’ and ‘became choked up.’ I will definitely revisit it once the video is up online.

The ever-quotable futurist and novelist Bruce Sterling had a number of admonitions for the ixd field, which are probably best communicated via direct quotes:

“Design is not very good at morality”

“The best you people will come up with is morality in permanent beta”

…and perhaps a moral judgment: “15% of users are no damn good because 15% of the general population is no damn good.”

Filmmaking

This isn’t so much a theme, but I wanted to highlight one presentation that I found extremely interesting, relevant, and practical – Adam Connor‘s presentation on Applying Filmmaking Tools and Techniques to Interaction Design. His appropriation of ‘beat sheets’ to bring intended user emotion along through the design and development process was an interesting idea that I think a lot of attendees were interested in experimenting with.  See his slides. (They’re pretty awesome.)

Outdoor sports!

Because the conference was in Boulder, I was able to finagle some extra ski and mountain time on either end of the event. I was elated to be able to spend some time outdoors in the bit mountains; I got to ski before the conference started in Breckenridge, hike as part of a conference activity, and hike again after the conference ended. Here are some pics:

View from the top of Breckenridge - sick pow, yaw'

At the trailhead for the conference Flatirons hike

Our expert guide explaining the flora and fauna to the conference group

There’s so much more to say, but overall the conference was fantastic and I can’t wait to apply some of what I learned to my jobby-job.  Check out links to other awesome write-ups below.

More Interaction 11 recaps and commentary

Johnny Holland Interaction11 Reports: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

Love in the Age of Robots | Chloe Gottlieb’s posterous

Recap from Frog’s David Sherwin

Great post on morality and ixd spurred by Kaleem Kahn’s talk

Emenel’s on ixd history, critique, where the field is heading, moving beyond software, etc.

The lady in blue, Nick and me

My friend Carol taught me to have no regrets. ‘You did the BEST you could with the information you HAD at the TIME,’ she would say, as we sipped strong gin martinis in her art and sculpture-filled living room. She was a great listener and coach, and she was sharply witty; she attracted people who were enchanted with the idea of keeping company with an eccentric, intelligent, boozing, fun old woman.  And who also didn’t mind receiving her sometimes pushy but well-intentioned advice along the way.

We came to her for advice and companionship, because she needed us for help with small physical tasks or help with the computer, because she was wild and provocative, and for the knock-you-down martinis. We came for the stories about her seaplane flying days, about when Frank Sinatra asked her out, about when she visited Jim Henson’s apartment and saw a giant kermit hanging from the ceiling; we thirsted after details about the young japanese lover who still occupied her thoughts after 40 years; we caught up on her grandchildren who were all about our age. We found an intimacy that we never had with our own grandparents, and a surprising kinship across the 60-year age difference.

My husband and I took Carol to Maine three years ago to visit mutual friends.  On the way we stopped for gas in rural Vermont, and while my husband was in the gas station he noticed the attendants craning their necks to see out the window and laughing.  Carol had gotten out of the car to stretch, which for her meant performing a prolonged high-kick against the side of a garbage barrel – with her foot at eye level.  She didn’t mind the attention.  She did the same trick the morning of my wedding two months ago – here she is, with my dad (photo by Carol Sloane):

She wrote a book called Yoga in the Morning, Martini at Night or the First Three-Score and Ten are the Hardest.  She had become a yoga teacher in her 70s, and taught until her late 80s.  She did yoga every morning, no matter what, and she also believed in laugh therapy – she would look in the mirror and laugh for at least a few minutes each day.  She listened to the radio, watched TV, and read books and newspapers; she even used email and started a blog.  She would say to me, “you can’t begin to imagine the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime.”  She was involved in political groups, she worked at the food co-op, and she was anxious about the impending shortage of water.  She liked a stiff drink. She surrounded herself with artists, musicians, and intellectuals – for a period of time she would hold court at events she called ‘Musicales’ in her living room, with live folk music and wine and cheese.  It’s easy to understand how she had so much in common with young people.

Carol was an incredible conversationalist and an inquisitive and dynamic person. She grew old and frail on the surface, but her spirit shone with a childlike energy and passion.  My only regret is that I never called her in those last weeks, when she was undoubtedly lonely and maybe a little scared, but I know she understood how much she was unabashedly adored by her troupe of followers. We will miss her but it’s comforting to know she is finally at peace, and I’d like to think she’s somewhere in the ether leading yoga classes, telling stories, and sipping martinis.

Carol in Maine

I was incredibly honored to be asked to speak about my education experience on a panel at the IDEA 2010 conference in a few weeks, so this is my attempt to distill a few of my thoughts in advance.  I’ll talk a little about how I ended up studying HCI and what I took away from my experience, and I’ll try to isolate the precise reasons I am so incredibly satisfied with my current job.

Why I studied HCI

After college I spent a colorful 8 years in Montana and Vermont living a ski bum lifestyle, working at a cocaine treatment center, working with the mentally ill, advising students on their loans, and producing web content for a food magazine.  I finally became interested in a User Experience career after studying web design, working on some large scale information architecture projects, and seeing Google’s ‘Interaction Designer’ job description.  The description seemed to perfectly describe my interests, and it required a background in HCI.  I decided on the Human-Computer Interaction program at the University of Michigan’s School of Information because of its interdisciplinary nature and high regard; Umich was also my undergrad alma mater, so I knew it’d be a relatively smooth transition back to Ann Arbor.

How grad school prepared me for my job:

Going back to school after an 8 year hiatus was the best thing I have ever done, and it helped me get a job I love every day.  Here’s why.

1. Presentation skills
   This week one of my coworkers said I seemed like the type of person who never was nervous speaking in front of other people.  Actually, until recently I was a chronic blusher who would get physically ill before every speech or talk.  In grad school we had to present in nearly every class, usually multiple times per semester, and I jumped at every chance to get up in front of people and practice speaking.  Over time I developed a degree of confidence and poise that have helped me successfully present my work to clients.
   

   Introducing a student design challenge to SOCHI, our HCI student group

2. Taking part in SOCHI, the HCI student group
   As an officer for SOCHI, I helped plan and lead group brainstorming sessions and design exercises; I helped bring in speakers and coordinate local events for professionals; I mentored other students and networked with professionals from companies like Mozilla and Yahoo!.  Our group also held career events like resume and portfolio reviews, and mock interview design challenges.   Aside from helping me grow as a person and leader, my SOCHI experience helped me connect with local UX professionals and get prepared for the sometimes grueling interaction design interviews that I experienced.
   

   Mock interview design challenges with SOCHI!

3. Sketching practice
   Whether alone or in teams, I probably spent at least a solid month of my life sketching in the past year.  My interaction design class was heavy on the sketching homework assignments, and group sketching was part of every team design project I worked on.  I may not be the best artist in town, but I’m confident that I can quickly communicate through sketching.  At work I find myself reaching for a piece of paper and pen during nearly every discussion – it’s simply much faster to illustrate ideas than to talk around them in circles.
   

   This is my real hand. Photo by Annie Fang

4. Defending my work
   Similar to #1, I had practice presenting my work to a highly critical, analytical audience of teachers and students. My Interaction Design and Information Visualization classes were run as studios, with weekly design challenges and presentations as well as milestone deliverable presentations. Both were taught at the time by Mick McQuaid, an excellent design teacher and wonderful, warm-hearted person who could nonetheless turn a meek person to stone with a hard-hitting question and stern look from behind his thick fishbowl glasses. Fishbowl glasses, is that even a thing?  We learned from Mick and other teachers to be prepared to defend every design decision, or risk minor public humiliation.
   

   Explaining our design challenge sketches (photo by Kerry Kao)

5. Learning to receive feedback & work collaboratively
   During my schooling I and my teams were subjected to cross-examinations, critiques, gentle criticisms, general feedback and heartfelt praise.  I learned to love getting feedback from other people and to seek it out, because it always resulted in a better design.  This led me to gravitate toward a highly collaborative environment like R/GA, where group sketching and brainstorming sessions are commonplace and I rarely work in a vacuum.
   

   Group sketching and ideating for our semester project

6. Evaluation methods
   I feel fortunate to have had the experience of following many projects through the entire interaction design process, from user research to wireframes and prototypes and usability testing. I find it rewarding to design for users that I’ve spoken with.  During school I learned the fundamentals of user research and system evaluation; I had significant experience with rapid contextual inquiry, user interviews, comparative evaluation, heuristic evaluations, personas and scenarios, surveys, and usability testing.  The result is that I feel well-equipped to deal with front-end project research and planning, where someone with less experience might be somewhat overwhelmed.
   

   Affinity diagramming with the team

7. Graphic design
   Though I’ve always been a crafty girl and not too bad with a pencil and paper, prior to grad school I had pretty much zero experience using tools like Illustrator or In Design.  They intimidated me.  They made me feel small and inconsequential. Last fall I took an awesome Graphic Design class and learned these tools pretty well, which meant that I didn’t flail helplessly at work when I started creating wireframes exclusively in In Design.
   

   A timeline of my favorite books and authors I made for the class

8. Testing the waters: the internship
   My internship at VMware, a virtualization company in San Fran, was surely one of the most valuable experiences I had during my school career. During my 3 months there I designed a mobile application that lets enterprise IT guys monitor and manage their virtual machines.  Say wha?  It was such a valuable experience to have to go from 0 to 90mph along the highway of virtualization technology knowledge…I had to ramp up quickly, and I got to do my own research, design, and usability testing through the project.  It was incredibly helpful to be able to talk about this self-directed project in job interviews, and I began to learn over the course of the summer what kind of work environment was right for me.
   

   Me and my VMware coworkers at Great America

9. Student conference rates
   Arguably one of the most important things I did in school was go to professional conferences and networking events.  Indeed, I was a prolific conference attendee; I went to five conferences in two academic years, a pace which I plan to keep up as long as my personal conference funds hold strong.  I also hit up Bay CHI meetings and other HCI talks in California and Michigan.  Because of all my frenzied networking, I had 3 job offers when I graduated and I’ve personally met a host of hard hitting HCI or IxD rockstars.  And really, most importantly, I feel like part of a supportive community of practice.
   

   I met awesome people at conferences, like Amanda Schonfeld at IDEA2008!

   

   RIchard Saul Wurman at DRC 09, in a giant scarf

   

   Sweet ice luge at the Interaction 10 conference in Savannah

10. THE PEOPLE
    I saved the best for last.
    I have been impressed, inspired, and fundamentally changed by the people I met at school.  World class artists and intellectuals, inquisitive and analytical thinkers, unselfish collaborators.  Taeho Ko, for example, who could take a drawing done by a cat, wave his magic in its vicinity, and reveal a data-driven flash-based  visualization. Debra Lauterbach, probably one of the calmest, smartest, and most self-actualized people on the planet.  Leanna Gingras, the first person I saw make a paper prototype of  an iphone application. I could go on.  My fellow students are now at places like Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Adobe, Apple, and IBM, and a fair number are also at smaller start-ups and agencies. I count myself fortunate to have walked in their midst.
    

    Sometimes we all went out for beers. Pictured: the halcyon days

How could grad school have prepared us better?

I’ve loosely surveyed a group of my fellow students to learn how grad school prepared them for their jobs, and what they wished they would have learned in school.  Most of the good preparation was covered above – presenting, defending design decisions, having a good theoretical foundation, collaborating, and working with clients were all considered helpful.

Prototyping and wireframing were commonly-mentioned skills that people didn’t get enough of during school.  It’s excellent to be able to show these kinds of deliverables to prospective employees, but because our work groups were generally 4 to 5 people, usually someone in the group was an expert programmer or designer; so more often than not, that person would take on all of the prototyping or wireframing work.  Which leads to my next point.

Independent projects were seen as vital to being able to secure a dream job-type job.  At U of M, all of our work is in groups; it is definitely up to students to take the initiative to work on an independent project (of course, it is well worth the effort.)  Some students mentioned they would have liked to have an independent capstone design project of the sort that is typical in Interaction Design programs.

The art of persuasive talking and defending decisions… I’ve talked quite a bit about the fact that we did have to defend our design decisions in certain classes, and this helped prepare me for my job.  But I wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer amount of time I’d need to spend advocating for design decisions and arguing my case.  Truthfully, at this point I find it fun, but in the beginning it was somewhat scary.  I think some kind of persuasive arguing class would be incredibly useful for any prospective Interaction Designer.

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And also, one last thing.  How did I end up in a zany, collaborative, wild work environment that seems tailored to my personality?  First, I visited my friend who works at Facebook one day, and I fell in love with the work setting there.  It felt open, fun, hard working.  There was wit flying around the room.  My goal from that day forward was to find a work environment like that.  Then I met Mark Shewmaker from R/GA at the Interaction 10 conference by chance, and that meeting turned into an interview with him and Chloe Gottlieb – Executive ID director at R/GA who made a hilarious salame joke during my interview. Hilarious salame joke + successful design challenge presentation during my second interview = me, living in Brooklyn and commuting to Manhattan every day, getting off the stinky subway and buying a muffin from the cute mexican pastry cart, going into work and being happily challenged on a daily basis.  So it’s all about the networking.

There may be more to say.  Until then, lots of love to my program, my school homies, my zany R/GA peeps, and Liberty Richter foods – importer of Finn Crisps, the Original THIN CRISPS, which fueled this post.

If you’d like, check out the podcast!

Here is the synopsis from the Mad*Pow site:

At Interactions 10 in Savannah Georgia, students from around the world discuss their projects and insights about the future of design along with the strengths and weaknesses of the design community.

Anahi Bagu, Vincent Steurs, Katie McCurdy, and Laura Rodrian share several experiences and design projects including:

• A mobile application that would help the elderly more easily find public transportation which in turn would help the environment.
• Embracing the diversity of experiences with those who haven’t taken the traditional academic channels to become designers and draw inspiration from these individuals.
• The desire to take on a leadership role and mentor high school students about what they are learning at college.
• The need to down-play “rock star” mentality of some and the hope that the biggest names in the design community will take a proactive approach to helping them in their careers.

With future leaders like these, the design community is in great hands…but only if we listen carefully and act accordingly.

The entry is on flickr – go there and comment on the design.  The more comments, the more likely I might win something! Help a gal.

I’m heading there with three SI students – Laura Rodrian, Annie Fang, and Mohammad Hadhrawi.  We’ll report back on how it went w/pictures and stories!

mibo, the main character of our application

Over the holiday break, I created a process book to enter into the IxDA’s Interaction10 conference student competition. The book details an interaction design project that my group and I worked on last semester; we designed a mobile application called ‘mibo’ that encourages people to walk.

Download the process book (2.1 mb)

If you’re interested in reading more, our team website documents our process (though a bit less succinctly than the process book.)  Our final presentation is also available on vimeo; in it we give a brief overview of our project and discuss our usability testing results.