The New Idiom | The Student Newsletter of the IIT Institute of Design

Design Research Conference: Bird’s Eye, Rear-view Perspective

by Matt Gardner

Design Research Conference 2008 has officially closed.  Besides the energy drain of the two days, not to mention that of the previous two weeks, DRC came off fabulously. The jury is still out on the evaluation cards, but everyone we talked to found value in at least some part of the event. In the weeks preceding the event, we had several comments on the superstar lineup of speakers. During the conference several people told us how great and organized and slick it all was. AND, the food was good—although I did miss the chocolate bundts served Friday night.

But that is all about what it was—what about what it could be? One comment I received during the conference about how the ID students were missing from the picture really got me thinking. Where were the presentations about some of the cool stuff that students were doing? The token piece of student work in our lineup was “Getting People to Talk,” the fabulous video that  Kristy Scovel and Gabe Biller developed for their demo project. And, because student work had become such an afterthought, we were only able to slide it into the lunch hour. The original About, With and For, reputedly featured a good deal of student work, and as a student produced conference, students have a right to be featured.

We considered, briefly, early in the planning for the conference whether we should try something different, like an unconference. We also considered for a short time some more student-oriented features such as student project posters. But, having never had the experience of running a conference, we agreed on a conference format that we knew and understood.

Video Killed the Interview Star

Ok, try to follow me here, but the other day I was interviewing a couple second-year students about their project on interviewing, where they were interviewing expert interviewers. Let me explain...

Kristy Scovel and Gabe Biller are graduating in a few weeks, and to cap off their Institute of Design careers, they wanted to do a project that could be used as a tool to help future students learn not only the value of user interviews, but the process of doing them well. After being influenced by last semester's "Story In Motion" class, they decided a video would be a powerful medium to tell the story. So Gabe talked to Jeremy Alexis about doing the video as an independent study project, enlisted Kristy (who has a small background in film studies) to help, and set off to make the project: "Best Practices in User Research" also known as: "Video Project."

By Scott Mioduszewski

The time may not be very remote…

image courtesy: Culver pictures

More than a 100 years ago, HG Wells, the notable science fiction writer, said:

The time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.

H.G. Wells, Mankind in the Making, 1904

I think it's time for some edits, don't you? :

The time is near when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient effective citizen of one of the new great complex world wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to create and communicate, just as much as being able to compute, consume information, and write well to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.

Me, 2008

By Ash Bhoopathy

The method is not the trick

"Why are you asking me to watch you tear up a dollar bill? The method is not the trick. The method is never the trick. Once you've mastered the method, you've hardly begun the trick."

-- Jamy Ian Swiss, closeup magician

You may have seen the Methods Poster. You may even have it hanging on your wall. On it are displayed the methods taught here at the IIT Institute of Design, but they alone are not the sum of our education. Or at least they shouldn't be, right?

By Eric Niu

Designing Your Life

Finishing up A-session of Spring semester and recruitID in the past two weeks has brought prospects of the future front and center for us here at the Institute of Design. While in the midst of analyzing data, building conceptual prototypes, and conducting user research, we are also trying to figure out where we will be interning this summer or working after graduation. But more importantly, we are processing how the ID experience is affecting change within ourselves and how it will bring value to our future selves. Each of us is building our story — where we came from, what we are doing here, and where we are going. Predicting the future might be out of our reach, but having the skills to build that future is not.

By Amber Lindholm

Beyond RecruitID

As part of the registration process for recruitID this year, students had to agree to the following disclaimer: “I recognize that recruitID is an opportunity to meet companies. RecruitID does not guarantee my employment. Furthermore, I accept responsibilities to meet all deadlines and I accept all consequences and implications of not meeting these deadlines.”

David Ofori-Amoah, recruitID co-chair, said “the disclaimer was more about reminding students that getting a job still takes action on their part. RecruitID is just a start.” In fact, many students find great jobs outside of traditional recruitID interview requests. Alumni Joyce Chen and current students Alex Cheek, Laura Franek, Sarah Jones, Irene Chong, and Alexis Baum give advice and anecdotes about finding an internship:

recruitID…Breathing Down Your Neck!

By Scott Mioduszewski

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/ji5bWSK553g" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Spring recruitID will be here soon, whether you like it or not. But I thought for those who haven't been to one before, I'd post the video that we made of the fall event. Matthew Gardner, Travis Durbin, and I ran around shoving cameras in anyone's face who didn't run away. Over the winter break I finally had time to put the video together. The point was to not only document the event, but also show companies who haven't been here before what it's like (although with only a couple minutes, you really can't get the whole experience). Also, we thought it would help potential students see what kind of companies come to recruitID and what they are looking for in employees. So, here it is.

Preparing for recruitID 2008

 By Eric Niu

Looking for a job is one of the most exhausting things we have to do every Spring, especially squeezed between Insight Matrices and Cultural Probes.

Our rockstar RecruitID team (Amy Batchu, David Ofori-Amoah and Amy Seng) has been working their butts off to pull together a smooth and compelling event this season. In just over two weeks (on Feb 27-29), RecruitID will be here. Between now and then, we need to polish up our portfolios and get our stories straight. That's a lot to do, but there's still plenty of time to get ready.

Foundation Memories

Foundation year is a time of great intellectual and personal growth for most students who go through the program. It is a period of time when one attempts to learn everything he or she can about design. Students from a variety of unique backgrounds come together to immerse themselves in foam modeling, sketching, InDesign, photography and other digital realms.

Below are a series of quotes and anecdotes, as well as the number one photo from some of this year’s foundation students (class of 2010) having recently completed their first semester: Nikki Pfarr, Van Vuong, Daniel Erwin, Ruth Nechas, Matthew Swift, Ann Hintzman, Scott Mioduszewski.

Foundation is crazy, but in a good way. It's exciting to see my own design skills and techniques improving as classes progress, and I'm developing an entirely new approach to solving design problems. I really enjoy the curriculum, and the icing on the cake is the great group of people who are in the program with me - I love my classmates' enthusiasm and humor.
- Nikki Pfarr

Foundation memory:  I guess the greatest part of foundation for me is
having instant friends.  I moved here without really knowing anyone, and having friends who were instant lunch buddies was extremely comforting!! Also, telling our life stories over and over again, I think we all know everyone's story by heart and at this point we have all distilled our stories down to one sentence bios.
- Van Vuong

My favorite experience last semester happened just about every time I walked into a bookstore. Thanks to Tomoko and Greg's class, I am no longer intimidated by the racks of art and design magazines - now I could put almost any of them to shame with nothing but a dull razor and a box of crayons. And because of the constant stream of critical evaluation that Grimes and Mike Beebe drilled into my head, I find myself thinking, "Waaaaat!? What is this?" when I'm looking at the store's imperfect architecture, interior design, printed collateral, products, and business model. It's not that I like to see these retailers fail - bookstores are among my favorite places. I like this experience because it's comforting to think that the value and meaning of things I create won't get lost behind a veil of myriad shoddy details.
- Daniel Erwin

Before I even attended a class, I was terrified by the rumors that foundation would be my hardest year at ID. Then -- a few months into the first semester -- I was at a white board working on my third iteration of “taco salad” for an intense game of Pictionary and I noticed a few of the first years in the Systems class on the verge of tears. I guess it’s all relative.
- Ruth Nechas

May my gravestone bear an immaculate grid structure.
- Anonymous

As many instructors have already pointed out, one of the many strengths of ID is the diversity of the student body.  I would be hard pressed to articulate this diversity more clearly than referring directly to our class discussions.  We have an uncanny ability to engage in tangential dialogue.  Similar to ideas during a brainstorm session we do not discriminate against unusual or irrelevant comments during class discussion.  This description really should be extended to include our instructors as well.  There is no way of telling what lessons we will learn by the end of a given class.  Most likely we will learn a majority of what our instructor has intended as well as whatever random topic surfaces during our discourse.   Going to class really is a bit of an adventure as you never know what to expect.  In the span of a few minutes the critique of a photograph of a marina can and will transition to a discussion regarding the origin of the terms abracadabra and hocus-pocus. It can be confusing and at times frustrating, but for the most part it is just fun and awesome.
- Matthew Swift

You know the saying, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”? Well, with one semester of foundation under my belt I officially have a little knowledge and with that am unable to plan my wedding.  The big items left on my to do list are invitations and a photographer.  Before foundation I would have happily selected whatever worked within my budget and not given it a second thought.  Now I am haunted by voices saying things like, “Is it better with that bright thing on the edge?” and “Why did they put that in a box?” My budget is no bigger, but now nothing is good enough.  Tomoko and Gregg have instilled in me an aversion to swirly fonts and center alignment that eliminates 90% of invitations; and as any Grimes disciple knows, weddings and anything eight-year old girls are rumored to like are just not the subject of a good photo.  I wish I could go back to the days when I didn’t know what leading was and thought sunsets were pretty, but I guess I’m going to just have to hope that second semester makes me good enough to do it myself.
- Ann Hintzman

Intro to Photography: my introduction to John Grimes
The work was definitely challenging, and each class had its own persona, like a crazy cousin that you like to be around because he’s fun, but need to get away from after a very short amount of time. But Intro to Photography is a particularly interesting class. All Foundation alumni can probably agree that it can tax a student’s brain like no other. Sure, it teaches the fundamentals of composition and color strategy; it introduces us to the seedy world of user observation by having us sneak around taking pictures of unsuspecting people on the street.  It even teaches us how to take a product shot for something we may want to put in our portfolio, but the most important thing the class taught me was being a student of John Grimes.
Professor John Grimes is a notably colorful character that roams around ID teaching classes, advising students, and apparently climbs onto fire escapes to take architectural photos. But any incoming student will eventually come into contact with him, especially considering he is the Foundation advisor. Every student will get to know and love professor Grimes in their own way and will eventually have their own “Grimes-Story” (I could totally make a TV show with that title and it could just be a half hour of John Grimes telling juicy anecdotes).

John Grimes:

Used to eat butt steaks with pressmen
Knows microphones by sight
Can tell if a photo has been cropped 9 times out of 10
Is fashion-forward (he can spot a cheap suit a mile away)
Was frozen to a tripod in 1968
Hung out with famous photographers
Will make fun of any photo subject, even if it’s himself
- Scott Mioduszewski

New Course: Story in Motion

It has been a while since there was a film class at ID. But Sal Cilella's, of neighbor Gravity Tank, new course "Story in Motion" has filled that gap in curriculum by avoiding many of the technical and cost issues that eventually sunk the original ID film program. Taught in two parts and split across  A and B session, the course focuses on pre-production and post production, leaving out the tech and time intensive production of actually shooting original video. However, in both classes, the core is storytelling.

The pre-production course had IDers bring a story from a previous class that needed to be told. From there, they followed industry practices of formal critique writing to advance and refine the projects. In the end, rather than creating videos from existing footage, each student created and animatic, or animated story board using their preferred animation software. The stories ranged from vignettes depicting ethnographic research to use-case scenarios for new design concepts.

Watch an example Animatic from the A-session course Bazooka and the Cigar Shop By Gabriel Biller

The second course half of the course looked at the other end of the process. Rather than bring a story, Sal gave the class a reel of unused footage from a previous research project. From there, with about 25 minutes of interview and observation, the class split up to try and find the story threads that could be brought together into a coherent short video piece from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on the requirements of the story.

I sat in on the preview screenings of the final videos and was pleasantly surprised. The clips were entertaining, and I loved seeing the extreme variety of stories that cold be pulled from one interview, but the students' critiques were even better. I asked Sal how he fostered such a good culture of critique in the class he told me that his strategy was to put people into pairs early to force them to verbalize the editing decisions they were making as well as to simply produce a lot of iterations and solicit feedback.

Finally, I asked how the students thought that going through this process would change they way they work in other projects. It is quite a different focus than most projects in other classes. In a design planning class you try to find the best and smartest way to approach a topic. In this class, you can only tell stories that are latent in the footage from research. I think that made an impact on at least a few students.

"I will think more about how I will need to communicate my research as I plan and conduct it."

This is the answer I expected.  It seemed that becoming more conscious of the process would lead to more planning and strategizing. But it was another comment that piqued my interest.

"I will shoot more video and pictures than I think I'll need."

This was a great answer because it is so simple, but so effective. It reminded me that the story is always there in the research, and that research is the capturing of raw material where the story is found, not created.

Unfortunately, examples from the second half of the course cannot be posted since they are made from footage from private interviews.