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.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m taking a grad typography class this term. I figured I needed a lot more training on my visual design skills and grad type seemed to be the perfect way to do that. And it’s fun, even if it’s frustrating a bit at times. It’s one of those things where you’re just using your eye a lot rather than your brain. I’m never satisfied with my work, so it seems like I’m always re-working my assignments.

The first assignment we were given is to make a three book covers for a series of book by John Cage. Each had to have the title of the book, “lectures and writings by john cage”, the volume number, the publishing company, the ISBN number, and the bar code. In addition, we are to choose only one type system, and use only three type sizes for all three book covers. Each week we do one book cover, and we’ve done two so far.

After some studies of a couple of type systems, I chose to use Univers. I’ll be forever attracted to sans-serifs, and Helvetica was too heavy for my liking.

The first book cover focused on the use of the standard grid, and was exploring simply how type size, weight, letter spacing, word spacing, leading, and alignment affect the legibility and readability of the form. Here’s my cover for this (Book was entitled A Year From Monday)–click to enlarge:

For our second assignment, we were asked to bring in an image of something from nature that had some sort of system. I chose an image of a snail:

From these images, we created some grid structures (mine could’ve either been a radial or dilatational structure), and from that made book cover layouts, all the while thinking about the words contained in the book cover, both in terms of their meanings and their forms. Here’s my book cover for this (Book was entitled Empty Words)–click to enlarge:

I’ve still got lots to learn. But I think I’m making some progress into stepping away from the familiar and trying to push towards exploring forms that are outside my comfort zone.

September 12 addition: Slim, a fellow student, has started a blog for our class where students can post work in progress… feel free to browse and comment!

This past weekend I attended Emergence, CMU School of Design’s second annual student-run conference. The theme this year was Exploring the Boundaries of Service Design. Dan Boyarski, Head of our School of Design, discussed the theme by asking how service design relates to disciplines such as systems, strategy, information, infrastructure, information, interaction, and product design. We spent most of the last conference trying to define and introduce service design as a discipline, and this year sought to work at the definition a bit more by looking at different fields.

That being said, here’s a quick glimpse of what I got from the conference. I attended one workshop, nine lectures, and two panel discussions. Here goes nothing.

Read the rest of this entry »

This afternoon (and by this afternoon I mean the afternoon of August 31st) I had a meeting with Dr. Jim Levin, Chief Medical Information Officer at Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital. He contacted me after reading this blog, and was interested in what I was doing at CMU.

It was great to meet someone that was interested in design as a way to enhance patient experience. He knew a bit about usability and related topics, having a bit of technology background. Actually, Don Norman will be in town in a couple of weeks as part of a team doing site visits at UPMC (one of three hospitals chosen in the States), and Jim will be touring them around Children’s Hospital. It will be interesting to see what Don has to say about the current state of the hospital.

For those of you who don’t know, Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital will soon be moving to a new site in Lawrenceville (it’s currently in Oakland). One of the newest developments for the hospital is that that they are going completely paperless. And so, a neat part of Jim’s current work (besides the fact that he also has an appointment as a clinician for infectious diseases) is that he is responsible for figuring out how that all works. I can’t even being to imagine how one goes about managing that sort of thing.

Anyway, at one point we started talking about how we’re starting to think of products as services, and services as experiences. A lot of products nowadays of course, are mostly being designed as tools for a larger service system. I guess in the back of my mind I always knew this, but that made me wonder whether that now affects the way we design for products versus services. One of the major differences between products and services is where the responsibility of value creation falls. With standalone products, the consumers are responsible for creating value from the product, whereas with services, the creation of value from the service is the responsibility of the service provider. But if products become a part of a service system, who’s responsible for the creation of value in the product? And does that then affect the way we should think about its design during the design process?

I’m back at school for the last year of my Masters degree. It feels good to be back after a couple months of work… nothing will ever beat the freedom and self-set schedules you get in academia (except maybe the money factor).

Aside from my thesis project and essay, which count for two full courses, this term I am taking two additional courses: Graduate Typography with Kristin Hughes and Stacie Rohrbach and Product Planning and Development with Matt Beale. If all goes well, I will also be picking up an independent study with John Zimmerman and Scott Davidoff. They’re working on a project dealing with Smart Homes. So, between dealing with the Children’s Hospital, music notation, typography, product planning, and smart homes, I think I’ve got a pretty good variety this term, which is what I was aiming for. I had intended on taking a class (Customer Driven Strategies) at the Tepper School of Business, but seeing as how I’m number 36 on the waitlist, I think my chances of getting into that are pretty slim. If I’m lucky maybe the prof will let me audit instead.

Here’s to another crazy year of grad school!