A few weeks ago I spent two days at the Archives Center of the Smithsonian’sNational Museum of American History. It was a dream visit, merging my interests—design, anthropology and photography—in one whole experience. (To add to the excitement, I had just finished reading Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, so you can imagine how cool it felt to do research in DC.)
As I arrived, two seventh-grade girls did as well. I was instantly impressed with their excitement, formal communication and eloquence as they interacted with the archives’ staff. With a to-do list, a legal pad, and pencils in their hands they were keen on finding primary sources for a school project on nuclear energy. They were prepared to do some serious work, but were soon caught off-guard when the archivist asked: “Did you do a Google search?” Read the rest of this entry »
Last friday and saturday I attended NC State’s Biennial Graphic Design Graduate Symposium: Design, Community & the Rhetoric of Authenticity. From the get go, know that it was a top notch event, executed with the care and precision of a full-blown international conference. Read the rest of this entry »
When I thought my final project process at NC State University was finished, this morning I had an unexpected surprise when I realized that my research investigation has already been catalogued into the library system. I realize this is a trivial thing… but I have to say it made me smile.
Last semester I taught a seminar course at NC State University’s College of Design where I asked the students to identify, as part of a weekly assignment, two instances: one where design thinking had thrived and another where it had failed. Towards the end of the course, students had collected a series moments that proved that only a simple nudge was required, many times at no extra cost to anyone, to set a series of problems right. Recently, I came across one such example.
Last week, due to the birth of my nephew Gonzalo, I got to spend some time in the maternity wing of the Auxilio Mutuo Hospital. It was indeed a short time, yet most of it was spent waiting for the baby to make its appearance. I had time to look around. A few things came to my attention, but this particular emergency door stood out the most out of anything else that caught my eye.
An Emergency Door in the Maternity Wing of the Auxilio Mutuo Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The subject in question is located on a hallway directly across from the nursery of newborns. As you can imagine, a lot of people congregate in this area. Upon further investigation, four things were of interest to me:
1) The standard, internationally used emergency exit sign; 2) An ink-jet printed sign which informs that this door does not provide access to the ground floor; 3) The familiar red sign that indicates to use this exit in case of an emergency; and 4) A photocopy which explains, in paragraphs, what to do in case of a problem.
Can you imagine what would happen, God forbid, if there was an emergency in this space? Read the rest of this entry »
Recently, a few people have asked about the work I carried out in graduate school. Part of my time in the last few weeks has been spent formatting the work to share it online. Today I am happy to share:
You can visit and see a selection of some of the larger investigations carried out, many as part of larger collaborative groups. The final project is the only one not up yet. It will be coming soon.
At the end of every spring semester the College of Design hosts a Student Awards Ceremony for the current graduating class. This is an opportunity for each of the departments to hand out a series of awards to both graduate and undergraduate students.
The graphic design department has traditionally handed out the Book Award. The basic idea is that a faculty member in the program awards a student with a book that will be of benefit in life after graduate school. This year, I shared the graduate book award with Rebecca Tegtmeyer and Marty Lane. Each of us was awarded a different book by a faculty member… I was given The Design Dictionary: Perspectives on Design Terminology (Board of International Research in Design). :)
During the graduation ceremony of the College of Design I was awarded with one of the three Wings on Wings Dean’s recognitions. Better than explaining what it was all about, I have included the original text as read by the College’s Dean, Marvin Malecha, FAIA:
On occasion there are individuals who stand out among the graduating class for outstanding citizenship in the College community and academic excellence. For this reason I have established the Dean’s Award known as Wings on Wings. It is inspired by the constructivist painting of Natalia Goncherova depicting the Archangel Michael, the good citizen angel, astride Pegasus, the ancient symbol for opportunity. It is a fitting symbol to recognize individuals who have taken advantage of the opportunity that the College presents and acted as a good citizen.
It is the practice of the College that nominations come to me from the academic units and since it is the dean’s award I make the final choice. There have been ceremonies when no award is made, very infrequent thankfully, but our usual custom is one, maybe two recognitions. Perhaps I am becoming soft this year because I could not make one, or even two choices. I have chosen to recognize three outstanding individuals from our graduating class. This is a reflection of just how good our students are!
The third recipient is graduating with a Master of Graphic Design, Mr. Alberto Rigau. In the nomination Professor Denise Gonzales Crisp observes, “Alberto has been a tireless contributor to the design community as a T.A., a teacher at the College Design Camp Program for aspiring design students, as a designer for the Student Publication and for the University undergraduate information publication The Brick. His enthusiasm is responsible for new curricular ideas in the Graphic Design Program. He was a student leader in 2007 for the Graduate Graphic Design Symposium, Option-Shift-Control. He has consistently had papers accepted at professional conferences around the nation. Most recently, he has won the first prize at the NC State University Graduate Research Symposium for the Humanities.” Alberto, please come forward to accept your much-deserved recognition.
On May 4th 2009 I carried out the last of three formal presentations related to my Final Project at NC State University’s College of Design. Even though the step is a required component of the academic requirements at the graphic design program, I enjoyed the opportunity to share some of my interests, ideas and research with faculty, students, and other members of the community.
The presentation was a 25 minute summary of the research and work carried out on my final study at the graduate program: Design as Choice Architecture: informing consumers about debt-related behaviors. The following video is a recording of the original May 4th exposition.
In retrospect, having worked on this final project felt more like a rite of passage than anything else, signaling a transition into a deeper and meaningful design life. I am happy to report that all requirements for graduation were successfully met and I have been granted the degree of Master of Graphic Design. :)
In May, Marty and I worked for the First Year College to design The Brick, a 120 page book to welcome and orient the 2008 incoming freshman class into the university. The rest of the summer, Rebecca joined us as we worked for the College of Design on Collective Intelligence, Collaborative Design, the college’s research publication.
Last night, our work was recognized with two Merit Awards from the AIGA Chapters of Charlotte and Raleigh in their Fifth Biennial Design Competition, BOOM! Read the rest of this entry »
Myself in front of my research poster. Photograph by Rebecca Kirkland.
As I have written before before, this past week was the Fourth Annual NC State University Graduate Student Research Symposium. Marty Maxwell Lane, Deb Littlejohn and I were asked to present our current research at the event. In retrospect, it was just like presenting for judges back in one of my high school science fairs… Presentations were made with the aid of posters. We participated in the Humanities and Design category, where I am happy to report that I was recognized with a first prize for the current research I am carrying out with my final project. :) Read the rest of this entry »
The University Graduate Student Association and the Graduate School hosted the Fourth Annual NC State University Graduate Student Research Symposium. The goals of the symposium were to showcase the outstanding quality and diversity of graduate-level research at NC State, and to share it with state decision-makers.
Marty Maxwell Lane, Deb Littlejohn and I were asked to present our projects at the event. We each made posters, like mine shown at top, to share and explain the goals of our investigations. We participated in the Humanities and Design category, where I am happy to report that I was awarded the first prize. :)
In the morning I had the opportunity to share my current research with the accepted candidates for next year’s incoming graduate graphic design class. The presentation, a shortened version of my Orals Presentation, went really well.
In the evening, I volunteered to present at the 2nd annual Intercom Research Exchange at the College of Design. The event had two ways in which we could share our research with the university community: via a poster where the research was presented in a printed format (you can see Rebecca Tegtmeyer’s poster here), or via a Pecha Kucha styled projected presentation.
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This is a self playing movie, but please click on it to get it started. The first 14 seconds are static, so be patient. This is the Pecha Kucha version of my final project presentation
Marty Maxwell Lane also did a Pecha Kucha style presentation to share her research on the way teens understand visual content online (it’s much more than that, but that my version of her project in a sentence. I am sure she will kill me soon over this butchering… ;)
As second-year students of the NC State Graduate Program in Graphic Design, our final semester is dedicated to the work on our final project. As part of the process, we are required to make three major presentations.
The first presentation serves as a public unveiling of our interests to the entire graphic design department. At this point we are supposed to have an initial idea about our interests while we are still negotiating with all of the research that we have so far collected. This point also helps the first-year students, for it allows them to get an idea about what a final project investigation is all about.
The second, the Orals Presentation, occurs the week after Spring Break, half-way between that first exposition and the conclusion of the investigation. At this point, there should be a cohesive argument that makes sense. A design project should exist. The final project must be on its way… and this is the presentation that I recently made.
This post includes the slides of that presentation. You will see notes underneath each one, but the morning of the event I decided not to read any of them. I presented using my train of thought. Of course, what I eventually said is rooted in these notes, but I really did not have time to cover these and read them over. The full development of my ideas will be expressed in the final written document, which will be the core of the third and final presentation coming in up on May 4th.
I am getting a bit nervous. The calendar dates keep progressing and my making seems to be resting stagnantly. Nonetheless, major progress was achieved this morning through the discussion and appreciation of smaller details. These procedural wireframes have begun to seriously integrate much of the research, expressing itself through a series of functionalities.
As it can be anticipated, my system has already changed again, but here I present what I showed in the meeting today. Read the rest of this entry »
After the most recent discussion about the progress of the final project, I decided to stir things a bit… and materialize the sketching. I’ve devised a usable paper-prototype that allows me to explore the possibilities for the interface and its contents. Read the rest of this entry »
As you can imagine, as the oral defense presentation gets closer, the perception of the world around me is slowly shifting. The apartment is no longer home-base, my chair is my best friend, and my desk the center of all of the world’s operations… again, of all of the world’s operations…!
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Visual exploration by Robert Ruehlman
Why is it that this moment always comes?
You know… When you wish you were doing everybody else’s project but your own? Don’t get me wrong. I am immersed and excited over what I am working on, but there is always that little instance when you just become extremely jealous of the inspiring work your classmates make. I mean, how can I not be?
Marty Maxwell Lane is doing these amazing explorations that still have me speechless. Rebecca Tegtmeyer has created these gorgeous compositions that provide structural cues to her content. Robert Ruehlman works on animated typographic explorations (like the one at the top of this post) aiming directly at my past with Spirographs… and Kelly Murdoch-Kitt, the cyber-hippie who sits in the back, would not even share her super-secret thesis blog… which kills my curiosity now.
The body of work of these individuals serves to remind me of the right choice I made in coming to this particular program.
A few days ago Rebecca Tegtmeyer sent a few friends an email with a challenge to do something like this. It was not until today that I was able to see the link, and to be honest, I just found it too fun to ignore. Since last night I did not get to sleep much, my productivity today was very low, so I decided to give this a shot.
By now, I have shared the video with a few friends which have pointed out many crucial missing moments like the photography from the Option Shift Control Symposium, from our class trip to DC, the Design Band, and others. With all the missing parts I might have to consider Meat Loaf for the soundtrack… hehehe. I will update the file, probably after the Final Project is done. But for now… I hope you enjoy…
At the end of last semester the graduate class came together to work on a calendar for 2009. The project, headed by Caroline Prietz, Liese Zahabi and Lauren Waugh, was hand letterpressed and distributed to our family and friends. Each of the months was divided among the participants. To show the process to the faculty, I made this short video which pretty much tells the story of that one particular weekend when thinner became our therapist and biscuits were king.
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Two nights ago, while my friend Cady Bean-Smith was trying to work, I made it a point to let her know that I needed some attention… hahahaha. This projection was part of her Interface for Interfaces project that she designed and I decided to come play with.
Power-Hog is a power consumption metering piggy bank designed to sensitize kids to energy cost associated with running electronics devices. Plug the tail into the outlet and the device into the snout; feed a coin to meter 30 minutes of use. Read the rest of this entry »
Mitch Butler and Josh Landis examine the current crisis now facing credit card companies, who have faced recent difficulty trying to sell off consumer debt to investors.
Next month I will be presenting the progress of my final project at the NC State Graduate Research Symposium to be held in the McKimmon Center on Wednesday, March 18, 2009. What follows is the abstract of the submission, which is still highly speculative since visual making has only just begun.
—–
Alberto Rigau
Graphic Design Master’s Candidate
College of Design
Advisors: Meredith Davis / Martha Scotford
In what ways can design address consumption induced behaviors and provide a set of tools to help consumers manage, control, and personalize fiscal activities?
Credit cards have become an essential financial tool for individuals and families. In 2004, the Census Bureau reported that there were more than 1.4 billion credit cards for 164 million cardholders—an average of 8.5 cards per cardholder, out of which 115 million carry a balance at the end of the month. In the pre–credit card era, households used a pay–as–you–go accounting system. Today, if there is no cash to fill up the car, there is always the credit card. Such a reliance on this payment method generates experiential patterns, more than often translating into family debt. This investigation studies behaviors and patterns associated with credit card use to identify moments in which design intervention can bring about reflective thought about spending habits.
Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang, in The Unmanageable Consumer, argue that our actions and experiences as consumers cannot be detached from our actions and experiences as social, political and moral agents. They claim that the fragmentation and contradictions of contemporary consumption are part of the fragmentation and contradictions of contemporary living. It is not the case that at one moment we act as consumers and the next as workers or as citizens, as women or men or as members of ethnic groups. We are creative composites of simultaneous social categories, with histories, presents and futures. The authors see consumers as central characters of stories, many times exhibiting varied behaviors, such as those of explorers, choosers, communicators, identity-seekers, hedonists, victims, rebels, activists, or citizens.
This research focuses on evaluating some of the ways in which design can address these consumption induced behaviors and on proposing a set of tools to help consumers manage, control, and personalize fiscal activities.
The final project is underway, and as such, visualizing is also in the process. This is the first stab at the “Rubix-Cube Metaphor” towards an ecological understanding. Let’s see where this takes me…
***Update: The strategic idea did not last the night. Already exploring other paths… ;)
At the end of the fall semester I made a presentation to publicly share with classmates and professors my thoughts, process, and ideas of what I will make my final project to be.
What follows are the slides of such presentation, and the text after each slide are the notes of what I said on each one. This represents my moving forward on this final project, which I hope to conclude by the end of the semester. Read the rest of this entry »
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which I will call… the final semester.1
Last December, in preparation for the work of the next few months, I prepared an end of semester presentation which I used to share thoughts and ideas about my final project. This presentation, in a way a rite of passage for my graduate growth, provided a stage to externalize some of the ideas, thoughts, and possibilities of my immediate present, while simultaneously opening a moment to reflect about my time in graduate school.
In my original application to graduate school, I questioned if propinquity to my father’s practice and friends had influenced me by injecting an architectural way of thinking, one way or another dependant upon formal, stylistic or structural considerations. At the time I was afraid that was a bad thing, thinking there was a particular way that graphic designers had to think. Today, three semesters into the most immersive design experience of my life so far, I highly value this multidisciplinary background from which I come from. Having been surrounded by an intense and competitive group of people committed to culture and the arts, I now marvel at the common thread that binds them all constantly, whether in conversations or debate: a relentless search for an eloquent expression of order within the reaffirmation of each individual’s particular outlook of the world.
Not deluded by any belief of being able to find my own answers on the subject at such an early stage in my career, my sojourn at NC State has granted me the opportunity to meet, challenge, and be challenged by my peers to elucidate better what I must make the future to be. Here at NC State I have enjoyed the company of a few key people that have had something to say about the world around them, and I have embraced an all-encompassing understanding of the culture of design.
I now have the responsibility of reaching closure to this experience at NC State through my work of a final project, which may prove to be an unthreaded path to venture into at a later stage in life.
1 Text adapted from the original narration of the opening credits in Season 1 of The Twilight Zone television series.
Last semester I worked to understand how an online community can be brought together through an online experience. The final project, a prototype of many versions and iterations, tries to bring together students learning software with their peers and faculty members. I already posted this earlier, but now I am able to show how the interactions were an essential piece of the experience.
The panel, moderated by Lily Maya, graphic design faculty member at MICA, included:
Transforming Programming into “Fungramming”
by De Angela L. Duff, Assistant Professor, Multimedia Department, The University of the Arts
The Language of Motion
Jan Kubasiewicz, Professor, Dynamic Media Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston
and my presentation, Understanding Interaction through People, Settings, and Scenarios
This was my first presentation at an AIGA event, and as such, I wanted to follow all the guidelines that had been set. The most important one, as you can imagine, was a 15 minute time-limit to my presentation. I followed it, but had to write, re-write, ask for feedback, re-write, and write one more time what I was going to say. Even the night before, at 1am, I was still in the lobby of the hotel touching-up on the final details (Thanks to Cady Bean-Smith for her company and support in those wee hours of the morning).
What is the best part of having done all that? Now I can share with you exactly what I said since I have a slide-per-slide script, but before moving into the presentations, I want to thank Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Marty Maxwell Lane, Cady Bean-Smith, Lauren Waugh and Caroline Prietz for all their support, fun times, photos and memories from this conference.
(from top left to bottom right: Cady Bean-Smith, Ryan Clifford, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Lauren Waugh, Caroline Prietz, Marty Maxwell Lane and Alberto Rigau.)
In the lobby of the event, there was small setup with an iMac running the Photobooh application, so that we could take pictures with our friends to create a visual guest-book of the conference attendees (I so wish we had thought for our symposium last year).
Rebecca and Marty begin with Cady Bean-Smith’s rubber band typography.
Rebecca Tegtmeyer and Marty Maxwell Lane represented the NC State Graphic Design Masters Program at the MFA panel on the last day of the conference. They did incredible.
The presentation, following a format that I do not remember the name, lasted for 10 mins. In that short time, Rebecca and Marty were able to speak about the pedagogical approach of the NC State Curriculum, explain the structure of the program, delve into projects briefings, and they still managed to show 2 fully developed investigations, culminating in the marriage of everything that had been explained before into well executed pieces. Read the rest of this entry »
It was a great conference on many accounts, but most importantly it gave some of us the opportunity to share with students and academics from other institutions.
Having learned my lesson during the Boston conference (where i did not take my camera), I can now tell a selected visual story of the event. If you are interested for a detailed account, see Louise Sandhaus’ blog where she has some very interesting and detailed notes of many of the sessions, panels, and lectures. Read the rest of this entry »
If you would like a set, send me your address and information. I will send out a complete one to the first 50 email requests at alberto[at]estudiointerlinea[dot]com ***UPDATE: All 50 sets have been assigned. Stay tuned to the blog. I will be giving out more design related buttons soon. Thank you to those who wrote.***
Tired?
All nighter?
Falling asleep?
No need to worry… just… CHOOSE YOUR CRIT FACE
and let the feedback roll in!
This is the first button set I’ve designed. The idea for it came from an inside-joke with Cady Bean-Smith, Sidney Fritts, Marty Maxwell Lane, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Lauren Waugh, and Liese Zahabi, graduate classmates of mine at NC State University.
***Update: Thanks to Armin Vit for having Quipped the buttons in Quipsologies, Vol. 23, November 2008.
***Update: Thanks to Michael Bierut for Observing the buttons on Design Observer.
***Update: Thanks to Matt Aubie for picking up the buttons on the TGS blog.
***Update: Thanks to N Silas Monroe for commenting about the buttons on the Walker Art Center’s Blogs.
***Update: Thanks to Jamie Rose for blogging about the buttons.
So the big question after getting the button machine was: what was I going to do as a first button set to share with others? I decided to make a gift to my classmates, and I made a button out of every single one of the Design Thinking Posters that we each made for this semester’s studio class. The set has all 16 concepts represented.
Swipe… review… sign… pay later [repeat?] Understanding Martha Augustinos’ and Ian Walker’s approach to schemas and how it can aid a designer frame reflexive behaviors during a consumer experience.
Reflect about the purchases made in the last few days. Did any transactions involve checks, money orders, cash, or even a visit to the bank? Most likely the quantitative answer to this question will be low, if not zero. Physical currency no longer plays a major role in commercial negotiations. Items, information, and services can be acquired, and sometimes are required (try to reserve a vehicle without a credit card), through the use of credit-based-cards in lieu of tangible currency. The benefits of such a system are hard to deny: a credit card is often faster than paying with cash, avoids having to deal with change, offers an ever-present source of funds in case of an emergency, minimizes economically-based social judgments, and serves as an element that grants certain social power.
American critic Frederic Jameson, in Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, wrote: “Any return to the haptic and tactile… seem to hearken back to… the “late modern,” when building materials were expensive and of the finest quality and people still wore suits and ties. It is like the transition from precious metals to the credit card: the “bad new things” are no less expensive, and you no less consume their very value, it is the value of the… equipment you consume first and foremost, and not of its objects.” (Jameson, p.99) The credit card is not only a means to consumption, but it now represents consumption itself, and as such, it has developed its own set of appeals. The credit card is now a must and there is no turning back. Read the rest of this entry »
These are some images of the installation that was part of our first semester studio project where the class attempted to define design thinking in terms of a series of thinking strategies and cognitive frameworks. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently there has been much talk of corporate cultures —and other disciplines— engaging in the practice of “design thinking“. Such announcements are usually paralleled with ideas of creativity, innovation, and user-centeredness; associations that sound cool and hip but many times result in superficial, inaccurate, and vague information. Wether we like it or not, the buzzword of design thinking is everywhere.
On a recent article in the New York Times, Unboxed: Design Is More Than Packaging, the author, Janet Rae-Dupree, makes an effort to unbox “design” by concentrating on this thing designers do called design thinking. She says: “…design thinking usually involves a period of field research —usually close observation of people— to generate inspiration and a better understanding of what is needed, followed by open, nonjudgmental generation of ideas. After a brief analysis, a number of the more promising ideas are combined and expanded to go into “rapid prototyping,” which can vary from a simple drawing or text description to a three-dimensional mock-up. Feedback on the prototypes helps hone the ideas so that a select few can be used. The results can be startling.”
On another article in the Fast Company website, Design Thinking… What is that?, its author, Mark Dziersk, defines design thinking as consisting of four steps: defining the problem, creating many options, refining selected directions, and picking a winner for execution. He says: “At this point enough road has been traveled to insure success. It’s the time to commit resources to achieve the early objectives. The byproduct of the process is often other unique ideas and strategies that are tangential to the initial objective as defined. Prototypes of solutions are created in earnest, and testing becomes more critical and intense. At the end of stage 4 the problem is solved or the opportunity is fully uncovered.” He concludes the article with: “Design thinking describes a repeatable process employing unique and creative techniques which yield guaranteed results — usually results that exceed initial expectations. Extraordinary results that leapfrog the expected. This is why it is such an attractive, dynamic and important methodology for businesses to embrace today.”
While these two examples, noble in their intentions and approach, describe a bit of what design thinking can be in terms of a traditional object-oriented approach where processes conclude in tangible objects, they do not elaborate on how design thinking operates in this contemporary landscape of information and ever-changing job descriptions. Read the rest of this entry »
As conclusion to the week… a small exhibit of all student work was made for parents to see and for the students to pick up their projects to take them home.
A little afternoon break… Since students basically worked on the poster from 12:30 – 4:00pm… around 3:00pm I had a little exercise where we sent airplanes over into the landscape architecture area. Landscape never retaliated… hehehe
• The poster had to announce a new feature of the CAM museum
• Each team member had to be traced onto the posters
I was very happy to see how this project got groups working together almost instantly. The engagement level was very high and the atmosphere just felt positive all time around. Read the rest of this entry »
These are some of the DVD Covers designed by the students during the last three days of camp. Half of the samples are scanned directly from their work, while the other half is photographed inside a case (you know, to give it a more realistic look). Most of the movies should be easily recognized, and those that are not, may just need a bit of a creative push… :) Read the rest of this entry »
In this new version of my camp session, students now designed the cover for a DVD of their choosing. It was very interesting to see the movies that this generation cited… (I felt a bit old) Read the rest of this entry »
about the time that I sensed that making the students work individually was not working perfectly, this particular group ended the exercise ahead of time. I had an extra hour with them, so we carried out an exquisite corpse exercise. Some of the notebooks ended up looking amazing! Read the rest of this entry »
At the end of every work day, once the posters were ready, I would ask the camp counsellors to take the students out on a walk for 20 mins. During this time I would scan in all of the posters and prepare them for on-screen projection. When everyone came back, I would hold a small feedback session were each student explained what they had done. At the end of their explanation, we would have a small chat about how graphic design can be re-purposed from one media to another, and as a fun example, I would project their posters onto themselves.
Pedagogical reasons for this decision? Design lesson? More than anything, all I wanted was for the students to understand that graphic design is not only about photoshop or computer work. It is much more. With this exercise I hoped to at least introduce such idea into them.
The idea behind this poster was art that could be interacted with by the audience.
Here some examples of the posters that various students from different groups did during the first two days of me teaching the exercise. The originals are 8.5″x11″. Read the rest of this entry »
After the ideation session… (during the first two days of me teaching the exercise), I divided the groups to work on their posters. It’s a bit confusing (and it involves math… hehe) but this is how it worked:
• Every office was made up of 4 students, and all of them participated in the ideation session together. (The less engaged groups must have come up with about 20 ideas, while the more engaged ones generated over 60).
• Students where then asked to pick the 2 ideas that they liked the most from all of the post-its and which they thought would work best for the museum. (Remember, some of these were pretty wild… like anti-gravity chambers to experience modern art.)
• The 4-student groups were then divided into 2-student teams, and each of the subgroups had to work on one of these two chosen ideas. Each student made their own poster, so in the end, we had two posters on every idea.
At this point is where I committed the teaching mistake for the week.
For the first two days of the week, after the ideation session, I divided the students to work individually on their posters. In retrospect, this was a bad call. The momentum that I had gained with the office and ideation exercises was suddenly completely lost. Students still made posters, and actually some very good ones too, but the energy level dropped substantially.
Having gone from group to individual was not a good call. For the last three days of the exercise I changed it a bit… and had them work as teams, which not only kept the energy levels going, but also produced larger scale work.
One of the biggest challenges of my design camp experience circled around getting teenage strangers to work comfortably with one another.
I remembered how hard it was to speak and share ideas with others at that age, specially others whom you not know (not that it is really easier now, but at least I’ve gotten better at hiding the awkwardness). In order to attack this problem, and in anticipation to the larger project of the afternoon, students were divided in groups, pretending to be offices, and in five minutes they had to come up with a name and gesture sketch to serve as their logo.
At first, I was skeptical of my own strategy. Part of me thought that separating them into offices was to be received with critiques of being lame or stupid, but actually, students surprisingly engaged very well at the opportunity of creating a name and a mark for themselves. I gave them only one rule: anything was allowed other than pornographic. I even joked with them a bit to get them loose. I gave them an example: if they had be dumped this past weekend, they could call their office I Was Dumped Design. It was impressive to see how they came up with names. Some of the ones I remember were taken from: the brand of the pencil they were holding, the initials of their names, their favorite foods… to name a few.
After their office inauguration, I gave them a wall, which became their work space for the day, and the first exercise was a moderated ideation session. During this portion of the day, I gave them a topic (always related to the CAM museum) and they wrote ideas on post-its and placed them on the wall. This session was high energy and moderated a bit crazy, to get them thinking wildly about museums. Some of the recurring ideas were a petting zoo in the museum, water slides, night parties, coffee shops, better shopping stores and more do it your self art.
I have to say that this was a hit. It may not have generated a pool of realistic ideas for the museum, but it got all team members talking and working together.
After the t-shirts were made and various ice-breaking games were played, it was time to get started. In addition to all of the visual materials available on the walls, students had a photocopier, stencils of many kinds, color patterns, different color cardboards, black and silver sharpies, crayola markers, x-acto knives, glue sticks, elmer’s glue, scissors, post-its, and (only later in the week) glitter paint.
The official start for Design Camp, once it has done the initial orientation, really happens once the students separate into their groups to customize their camp t-shirts.
This year I was particularly proud of the t-shirt design for the Camp since it was last fall’s Practicum GD 400 class that I TAed with Santiago Piedrafita who designed the content for it, while it was Stewart Bean and Nick Schlax from the sophomore Imaging Class I taught this past Spring who actually produced the final piece. I was very involved in the whole process, which produced a great feeling once I got to see the actual shirts.
The shirts are customized with spray-paint, cardboard templates and sharpies.
I was originally planning on framing a collaborative project around collages, texture, stop-animation photography and visual depth. Factors came into play that led me to re-structure the project, the most crucial: now I had to teach the program by myself. (Gretchen you were missed!)
[In retrospect though, it was a good that the project was re-thought because the animation studio also used the stop animation photography technique, and the original strategy may have felt repetitive to the students. Anyway…]
In this rethinking process, Santiago Piedrafita gave me some advice. He suggested I provide the students visual content from the start, and not have them start from scratch. This strategy, he explained, would lead to more elaborate work. With this advice, as you can imagine, also came a solution. He loaned me copies of the Neubau Welt and Neubau Modul books, which are visual compendiums of type, icons and patterns that I could use on my exercise.
[If you read the post about the project I did while in Nice with Massimo Vignelli and Armando Milani, you have already been exposed to some of these silhouettes.]
Well, it turned out (and to my luck for that matter) that probably the same advice was given to Marty and Rebecca, who ended up creating contact sheets and print-outs for the students to work with. I inherited such sheets which saved my project, my week and my life. If you took a look at the classroom set-up photos, you probably noted that some of the walls were covered with icons or patterns. These were Marty’s and Rebecca’s doing. I just played along inside the great template that they provided.
This is the project sheet that the students received from me this past week. The letter-sized print-out was distributed as part of a set of five briefs, each describing a soon-to-be-carried-out project. My presentation is succinctly explained, purposely skipping over details, just so that I could still surprise them during the session.
Here a better quality image of the setup where I worked during the week.
One of the reasons for the stay in Raleigh this summer is my participation in Raleigh’s Contemporary Art Museum’s (CAM) Design Camp for High School Students. I will be teaching the Day Camp (week 2) of the three week program hosted at the College of Design in NC State University.
My classmates Marty Lane and Rebecca Tegtmeyer already set the bar very high by carrying out an exciting, unique and AWSOME project in the first session! (See here & here)
I posted here some photos of the set-up where I will be carrying out my exercise this week. I have to credit Rebecca and Marty, for basically I am working within their template (with just some minor modifications to the physical space). My project will be different to theirs and tomorrow I get the chance to try it out for the first time. Let’s see how it goes…
As part of the independent study, I had understand how to scale a system such as a blogging platform across the NC State curriculum. This chart presents one of the proposals suggested for a possible implementation.
As part of the independent study and seminar work, I delved into understanding more about some various communication platforms. This is a concept map developed to explore existing relationships and key players surrounding the blog.
As part of my academic charge this semester, I underwent an independent study with Santiago Piedrafita. In it, we explored various possibilities on how to develop, build and maintain a common curricular system between the different faculty members and the students of the department. What follows is just one of the many presentations since the final work is still underway.
The way the semester’s work was structured, we worked on smaller segmented explorations which lead to the final piece of interaction leading to learning. Depending on how we worked during the semester, we each ended with a complete project or with various smaller projects. In my case, I redesigned the earlier explorations to make them fit under the same umbrella. I realize that it is hard to understand what I did without undergoing the user interactions, but here I made some screenshots of the overall system which show the general aesthetics and parts.
After spending some time with the community and the information derived from the concept map, it was the moment to understand how to define an exchange of information between some of the members. This insight lead to a crucial part of the semester’s design work.
A small break from the semester work. At the end of February we played guests to the candidates of next year’s incoming graduate class. I was asked by the department to do a recap of last semester’s symposium. Read the rest of this entry »
My concept map of undergraduate students engaged in software learning.
As each of us began to research into our chosen communities, Meredith and Amber introduced us to concept mapping. We read Joseph Novak, D. Bob Gowin and Hugh Dubberly, all proponents of using this strategy as a mean to create understanding between members engaged in performing a common task.
In order to carry out the projects of the semester, we were advised to select a group or community with which we would want to work all semester long. Since I am currently a co-instructor at the sophomore level of the undergraduate program, I am particularly interested in the student’s software learning curve. Illustrated here is the charter that I devised after spending some time trying to understand this group. I found it interesting that one could look at the group solely based on the physical interactions between the members or take their online interactions into account and experience a completely different audience.
This semester is about learning communities. It’s about using interaction to bring together a group of people performing a common task.
To kick start the creative insights and interactive explorations, Meredith invited the design anthropologist Elizabeth —Dori— Tunstall to make a presentation on her work on communitas. As part of her visit, we had to select an online community that we thought could be analyzed thru the lens of the various aspects of what makes up a communitas: historical consciousness, life goals, organizational structure, agency and relationships. I chose facebook, and what follows is my study of some of the key features which bring the community together.
This semester is different, quantitatively different. The 5 month experience of spending every class with 11 other points of view now mutates into a 6 person interactive boot camp with Meredith Davis and Amber Howard as our drill sergeants. As the first activity of our new found family, we had to clean the room and rearrange the furniture. This was our initial render of what the room should come to. We tried it for a few weeks and then decided to change it again. Santiago then came to the rescue with a new whiteboard to help us in our creative transition into the world of interaction and learning communities. Read the rest of this entry »
Armando Rigau holds a degree in Philosophy from Georgetown University. Currently he studies at the M.Arch. 1 program at the School of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University. Alberto Rigau recently completed his graduate studies in Design at the College of Design in NC State University. Currently he runs a multidisciplinary design studio in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
On Thursday October 8 2009 3M Company of Puerto Rico held a fashion show to promote some of their Post-it products. For the event, estudio interlínea was commissioned to design and execute the event’s visual language… of course, all of it made out of Post-its. —— To make the video more interesting, I used the […]
Alberto Rigau designed the commemorative object that was given to the recipients of the 2009 medals in architecture. Puerto Rico’s professional college of architects and landscape architects honors individuals and/or entities who are not directly related to the discipline of architecture but who have contributed to the field in a way that can be evidenced [. […]
Alberto Rigau was recognized by Marvin J Malecha, FAIA and Denise Gonzales Crisp for his contributions to the NC State University College of Design community. He was recognized for his roles as a T.A., a teacher at the College’s Design Camp for aspiring design students, as a designer for the Student Publication and for the […]
• The poster had to announce a new feature of the CAM museum
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