think carrie, think!

On Monday, I’ll be getting my music for orchestra. As I looked through the repertoire we’ll be going through this year, I am wondering how it will be possible to get through what our conductor has planned. Here’s what he has lined up:

Handel’s Fireworks Suite
Handel’s Water Music
Bach’s Orchestral Suites (yes, all of them)
Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos
Haydn’s London Symphonies
Mozart’s Last Symphonies
some of Mozart’s instrumental concertos
ALL NINE of Beethoven’s symphonies
all of Beethoven’s Overtures
some of Beethoven’s concertos

That’s insane. Then again, I’ve never actually played in an orchestra before. My ensemble experience seems to have included everything BUT orchestras. Concert bands, jazz bands, jazz combos, pit orchestras, chamber trios/quartets/quintets, solo gigs … but never a full orchestra. I’m excited.

Also, for those of you who are familiar, you’ll have noticed that we’re going through all of the late Baroque to early Classical periods. A good mix for me (I’m thinking of my piano diploma certification now), as all my music talents are known to lie in the Baroque and Romantic eras, where my take of Classical period music is considerably weaker. And don’t even talk to me about Contemporary music.

Sometimes I wonder how I’ll ever be able to focus this year. I’m sure I’ll find a way. And have fun doing it.

This entire morning, I’ve been seriously contemplating getting my piano performance diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Music (yes, it’s Canadian). Because I just have so much time on my hands. Ha.

For piano, the RCM offers 11 practical examinations. Grades 1 through 10, and then a choice of ARCT (Associate of the Royal Conservatory) diploma examination: either as a performer, or a teacher. Both of these last certifications are recognized worldwide. Additionally, starting at the grade 5 level, each practical examination must be supplemented by a series of music theory examinations in order for a passing grade.

I finished my grade 10 piano exam nine years ago. The only thing that has stopped me from doing the ARCT performance diploma is that sneaky music theory prerequisite. For the ARCT, three theory exams need to be written. Music history, analysis, and counterpoint exams need to be written, all within five years of the practical exam. And, because I never had time to study for the written exams, I never ended up finishing the diploma.

I figure it will take me at least two years to get back to the shape that I want to be in. Both physically and stylistically. So as long as I can get back into Canada sometime in the next five to seven years to do the practical and written exams, this goal of mine doesn’t seem too hard to accomplish. Except this whole time-finding business. Grad school is pretty good at stealing time away from me.

Playing and performing used to be my main channel for expression, stress relief, concentration, and just mental exercise in general. And sure, I could find other ways of doing that now. But I was a really good pianist. And it’s always a shame to stop something you’re really good at.

Moved into my new apartment in Pittsburgh this weekend. Thank you mom. She’s a superhero.

I like the place. It has windows that don’t look straight out onto pavement and the underneath of cars. I see actual trees! The sky! Oh the luxury.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with the Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital to figure out what I can do for them for my thesis. And to hopefully start all the IRB goodness that comes with working with little people. The Children’s Hospital is conviniently (for me) opening a brand new unit right under their Critical Care unit in October. That means there will be lots of room for me to go in and evaluate their current services, and hopefully find something lacking, or something to improve with respect to their current service offerings. It also helps that Bonnie Dean, the director of clinical education/research/professional development and patient care support (phew, long title), has enthusiastically agreed to be my second mentor for my year-long thesis.

As for my thesis paper, I know I will be doing something about music notation and services… but I’ve been thinking lately more along the lines of improvisation and how that can tie into services. Improvisation takes on a whole new notation system in terms of music. And improvisation in services is a whole lot different than fixed and planned service processes. It seems that a lot of problems with services occur because of the lack of proper improvisation, if that makes any sense. I dealt a bit with this over the summer at IBM. Example: routine checking-in at the airport, vs. finding out that your flight was canceled at time of check-in. Canceled flights can be a mess, but they don’t have to be if planned properly. So, planned improvisation, if you will. How do companies currently deal with out-of-the-ordinary situations? Do they know what goes on in their customer’s head as they try to deal with crisis scenarios? How can designers create a strategy for service providers for creating better customer experience? Would proper service notation and blueprinting help?

(Speaking of music stuff, I got into one of CMU’s orchestra classes this year. Very excited.)

After working here for a couple months, I’ve naturally drifted towards reading a lot of articles on bringing design thinking into management. Because my brain is a bit fried from the work I’ve been doing this week, I’m going to cop out from expressing my opinions for now and instead share some interesting pieces I’ve gathered from some of these articles. A lot of these articles have got me thinking whether or not I should rethink my thesis essay topic. Being that my current topic deals with the exploration of classical music notation (or scores from film soundtracks, I haven’t yet decided) as a means to discover new service notations, it would be a big shift of topics. But most of me knows I’m a musician at heart, and it would be nice to dive into that area with respect to interaction design. Anyway.

On bringing design simplicity to business strategy

“What if we used the Little Black Dress as a model for business strategy? We would end up with strategies that would be neither incomprehensible to all save their creators, nor banal and self-evident. They would eschew the faddish and focus on enduring elements, incorporating a versatility and openness that invited their ‘wearers’ to add adornments to fit the occasion at hand. Perhaps most importantly, they would emphasize our positives while acknowledging our flaws–all in the service of offering us hope for a better (thinner) tomorrow.” -Jeanne Liedtka, executive director of the Batten Institute at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business

On Design Attitude

“We were working at a large table, and Matt was leaning far onto it, marking the final changes. As he pushed back from the table, we were joking about how tedious the process had been and how glad we were to have it over. As we joked, Matt gathered all the sheets of onionskin and the marked up floor plans, stacked them, and then grabbed an edge and tore them in half. Then he crumpled the pieces and threw them in the trashcan in the corner of the room. This was a shock! What was he doing? In a matter-of-fact tone, he said, “We proved we could do it, now we can think about how we want to do it.” -Richard Boland Jr. and Fred Collopy, professors (Information Systems and Cognitive Science, respectively) at the Weatherhead school of Management at Case Western, while working with Matt Fineout from Gehry Partners

On Risk

“We’ve found that this traditional, negative definition [of risk] doesn’t exist in the lexicon of most designers. For them, risk isn’t a measure of ‘the downside’; instead, it is a measure of upside and opportunity. If the risk isn’t great enough, designers might well ask themselves, “why bother”?” -Diego Rodriguez and Ryan Jacoby, IDEO

This past Friday, I sat in on one of our weekly Stanford Video Seminar series. They’re basically seminars given by various people invited by Stanford, and broadcast online. Someone in our building thought it would be neat to bring some design spice into this IBM computer science mix (thank goodness), so every Friday, he reserves a room and plays a seminar on some design topic.

So the video lecture I sat in on was entitled “Designing Interfaces for Musical Experience”. It was given by CMU’s very own Tina Blaine (from the ETC). While I learned nothing new from the lecture, she had an exhaustive list of neat musical interface examples covering various domains (single user, multi-player, etc).

Even though I didn’t learn anything new in terms of musical interfaces, some interesting things were brought up and worth thinking about, even if not in the realm of music:

• How does one design for multi-player environments? More specifically, how do you make sure players know the impact they’re having on the environment? If you’re one of 100 involved in an interactive piece, how do you know if your actions are actually having an effect?
• How do you engage interaction and experience in a public space? Thinkwell Design & Production’s The Show (at The Pier at Caesars in Atlantic City) does a great job of this. They’re famous for an intense, five minute fountain show, but when the show isn’t in progress, the fountain becomes an “operator free, interactive” fountain. A fountain that plays games with people, how cool is that. An example of one of the games is Paint the Fountain: “When guests step into a spot of colored light on the floor, the fountain changes to that color and shoots into the air. The more people clustered in the colored light, the taller the fountain plumes. When all the colored light zones reach their maximum, a quick show payoff is performed.” Simple, but it does the trick.

And a partial list of some of the more interesting of her musical interface examples:

Pandora [not so much the music engine, but the Music Genome Project is what's interesting here]
MusicLens [a very neat, though not thorough, way to visualize and search music by type]
GlassEngine [this wasn't mentioned in the talk, but it's related to MusicLens - another great way to search music by type. and a shamless plug for IBM]
DigiWall [an interactive climbing wall using lights and sounds]
Midiball [a "showtoy": a five foot floating balloon with midi triggers, used to get a concert audience to make music by throwing it around]
BeatBugs [cute, handheld percussive instruments, can connect to a network to form a social group of BeatBugs]
AudioPad [a composition and performance instrument, tracking objects on a table for output]
Music Table
Electroplankton [an interactive music and art video game made for the Nintendo DS. Not so much a game as a demonstration of the power of the built-in microphone and the touchscreen of the DS]
PLORK (Princeton Laptop Orchestra)