beck ux

Some Thoughts on Purpose

I’ve been skimming a wonderful article written by Per Galle called Philosophy of Design: An Editorial Introduction. You can find it in Design Issues Volume 23. Put simply, Galle’s agenda is to explain what is the philosophy of design and what it’s good for. The section I’m about to (briefly) rant about does not in any…
On Writing Papers

In the interest of writing more posts, I’m going to try constraining myself to just a few hundred words or less for each entry. We’re talking 250-ish words. I need to get better at jamming lots of meaning into a few words instead of saying a lot without actually saying much. This came into sharp…
Feeling a Good Presentation

I can feel a good presentation, and I can feel a crumby one. I’ve been ginning up a presentation of a segment of a paper co-authored with my advisor, and there are some choice sections (of the presentation) where I’ve been able to pull in a few personal anecdotes to illustrate the points made in…
McCulloch and Pitts’ Logical Calculus

Prompt: Several days ago, a Professor assigned us a reading. “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” This is not the kind of reading I’m used to doing. It’s science. It’s (shudder) math. Nonetheless, I dove in with an agenda. We were asked (as a preface to reading) to “discuss the implications…
The Time Paradox

Please note: This is a more free-form brainstorming piece done in anticipation of a fuller paper surrounding a new idea in interaction design. Out of context, it may not translate well. I simply needed to get the idea out (publicly). The Time Paradox gave me an interesting Aha! moment. In its section on the benefits of…
Experience Design | Manipulation | Perversion

I’ve been thinking about morality and manipulation since class today especially as it pertains to experience design. I get the impression that when we talk about manipulation we generally do so with an implied value judgment: manipulation = bad. But when we were talking today about theme parks and movies, aren’t we talking about places…
Design and the I Function

I was re-reading an essay I wrote about The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function several years ago. Currently, I’m in the process of becoming a designer and part of that process entails thinking about everything — or at least trying to think about everything — in a designerly way. In this case,…
Is Clarity the Path to Enlightenment?

While revisiting the notes I jotted down when I read Buxton‘s Sketching User Experiences I stumbled across this line of text: Clarity is Not Always the Path to Enlightenment It’s the chapter heading for a few pages that describe the ambiguous nature of sketching in design. I especially love this idea: ambiguity is evocative. (Buxton 115)…
Growth as a Designer

**reblog…I wrote this entry as part of a reflective journal in my first-semester graduate interaction design class at Indiana University‘s SOIC** Bill Moggridge’s book Designing Interactions was waiting on my desk when I got home tonight. After taking care of a few lingering project 4 tasks from the day — and after eating a late dinner —…
HCI Study Journal

Last week brought with it a slew of activities: project submissions, presentations, and exams. The weeks in this program end soon after they begin. It’s wonderful. Our third design project for the semester centers on time, and I find this apt because — even before the design brief was released — I had taken a step…