The Moonlighting Student

Approaching User Experience

February 5th, 2010 7:41 am —  5 views
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As we reach the 1/3 point of this semester, there isn’t much let up. It’s going to be a lot more exercise problems, reading, group meetings, and paper writing.

In between school and the whirling dance of complex interactions that is software development, I find myself making connections to things I’ve studied during the the last 7 semesters1.

Whether I’m talking to a classmate, sharing insights on group dynamics, or discussing how to implement new features in an existing product interface, the principles, questions, concepts, and lessons learned on perception, cognition, architecture, collaboration, design, and innovation all come to mind providing me with words to better articulate or question.

So that’s a long winded way of saying that this school stuff might really work. Education isn’t a tangible thing. Sure, there’s a piece of paper that can be framed and hung on a wall somewhere, but that piece of paper doesn’t solve problems. Education, besides expanding the mind by exploring the depths of the world, builds in our minds a lens that can be used to find new ideas.

The lens in my mind has been focused on how people use technology to get things done. Fundamental to using technology is the interaction, the engagement, the experience of it.

To understand experience is to understand multiple perspectives and circumstances. Insights can come from watching the experiences of others. It can also come from experiencing something oneself. Experience resulting from interactions with products and services all happen within certain constraints. The establishment and modification of these constraints is one side of the innovation coin. The other is finding those ideas nobody else can see.

And that’s where the lens I mentioned comes into play.

Time for me to go to work. I feel a little like I have a cold starting to form in my sinuses and throat. That’s not cool.

Image: Took this in the lowest level of the U of M Law Library while searching for a bathroom. The place is freaky huge. And lots of green carpet.

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  1. 7 semesters = Fall 2006 – Spring 2010 [↩]

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Co-Creation and Dependent Arising

January 20th, 2010 7:27 am —  13 views
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Here it is, 3 weeks into winter semester. I’m driving into Ann Arbor more than I have in a couple years. At least 3 times a week, at most maybe 5. Feels like I have a part-time job on campus.

The two classes promise to educate and awaken my brain. In one class I’m learning to summarize and describe comparative relationships among relative events and in the other I’m learning that relating people to events involves interaction and value. Create an experience. Recognize and cultivate the relationship.

What is the probability that a person will develop loyalty and become a proponent and user of a particular product or service if those creating the product or service involve them in its creation and use?

It seems intuitive. It could be compared to tending a garden. Learn to recognize a thirsty plant and you’ll know when to water it. Watch the conditions in which your plants grow and watch the plants themselves. They communicate their needs in ways that require study to understand. They can’t text our phone to tell us they’re thirsty or that beetles are eating all their leaves and they need help. Those are just technical problems that can be solved by creative computer engineers.

Which brings me to the title of this post. It occurs to me that the notion of co-creation1 bears resemblance to the idea of dependent arising in Buddhism and its perspectives on cause and effect.

Granted, one is about value and efficiency, the other about dealing with the suffering associated with being an intelligent and aware species. Then again, maybe their underlying goals aren’t so dissimilar.

Recognition of quality is critical to survival and adaptation. Quality and value are closely related. We must learn to see what matters and what needs attention.

Image: A picture of the coffee stop I stop in on my way to class in the mornings. I took pictures periodically while walking to class yesterday, a montage of sorts.

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  1. …as being taught by Dr.Ramaswamy in a similarly named course. [↩]

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The January Cold and Lonely

January 11th, 2010 9:56 pm —  24 views
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It’s pushing ten o’clock on a Monday night near mid-January. I’ve been studying how to use the program “R” for the last hour and a half.

Today was cold and miscellaneous. Lots of things working to get traction, most things slipping and gripping for purchase.

As I wind down my studying, I can’t help but miss that cat that used to lie on my desk pushing pens and pencils around, biting at stuff. I looked through pictures of him (a mistake) and now I’m sitting here, tears pouring down my face, pissed at the futility of it. It happened so fast. And I knew I’d miss him particularly bad once school started. He was a nice study companion.

I’ve tried to avoid mentioning it. I think about him every day. So does W. We try not to talk about it. Time is helping, but the pain just doesn’t go away. It sits there, lurking, ready to surprise you when you forget about it for a second.

I can’t speak for anyone else. I can only imagine there are others feeling a pain similar to mine. The pain of losing of a loved one, a beloved pet, or something you treasured that will never happen again. We suffer because we become attached to things. It happens.

During the lonely and cold days of January winter, while I’m studying in my cold basement with a space heater barely keeping me warm, I think about things that aren’t frozen and miss things that were warm and fuzzy. I know missing and mourning is normal and will weaken eventually. It still sucks.

And I study statistics, and plotting, and R. Things like: sqrt(sum((weight – xbar)^2)/(length(weight) -1)). Soon I’ll be studying and probably writing paper for a class on marketing and the co-creation of value for businesses. Not sure what that’s going to be about, but it sounds interesting. The first class isn’t until this Wednesday evening.

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Puzzle Piece

December 29th, 2009 7:06 am —  10 views
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It’s early morning and I’m up with my cat, keeping him company. He’s hungry but I can’t feed him until after his visit to the vet today. I don’t like it any more than him. He paces, rubs against my feet, declaring his need for attention and food.

Amidst the blizzard like conditions of yesterday, we searched valiantly for a vehicle that will last ten years, has enough room for my head and legs, ample cargo space, and fits in our garage. We drove two vehicles home from the dealer to find out they’re too long.

Over the last few days W and I solved a 7501 piece puzzle. I haven’t spent time solving a picture puzzle for ages. W did most of it, sitting at the table in silence with a cup of coffee next to her. I set my camera on a tripod and took pictures at various times while it came together. I’m hoping to put them together in a time-stop animation.

The process of solving a puzzle was interesting and made me think about how the approach to puzzle solving lends itself to so many situations. It requires certain attention and focus. Demands intense study of all pieces. Breakthroughs comes by studying patterns, shapes, relationships, etc., from all the pieces. There’s a lot of cognitive processing involved.

In similar way to putting pieces of a puzzle together, W and I sat on our couch last night and worked on the new vehicle puzzle together. With an HGTV show in the background and our laptops, we worked collaboratively in a Google spreadsheet putting together a table showing comparative vehicle lengths, head room, leg room, etc. She was aghast at how nerdy it was2. But convenience and ease of use is undeniable.

Winter semester starts two weeks from today with an 8:30 AM class on introductory statistics and data analysis. I’m bracing myself for what is sure to be unrelenting and intense sessions of complex puzzle solving over the next 15 weeks. My brain will be better for it, it hopes.

Image: The missing piece of the puzzle, still missing. Sometimes that happens.

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  1. It was actually 749…note the missing piece. And a corner of all things. [↩]
  2. Though later admitted she had the same idea. [↩]

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Holidays approach, family valued

December 20th, 2009 9:24 pm —  23 views
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For generations families have been celebrating holidays in varying ways with amounts of tradition. Over the years you meet at different places, see familiar and new faces, chat, eat, drink beer, then you go back to your life.

As the years pass, more faces become familiar and you can’t help but notice the maturing. The weathered eye, the momentary aching gaze, the grin, the laugh, the sigh. The innocence, the expectation, the ignorance. You feel it yourself. Experience it daily. The maturing, the learning, the realizations.

So easy to go wandering in memory, remembrance, reflection. Blog posts centered on reflection make you want to puke.

It’s not like you aren’t trying to think of new ways to approach the world, to voice things in a way that unites, encourages, stabilizes, secures. All the while knowing such a thing can’t be voiced. Realization adds a few more yards to the long stare of your weathering eye. You press on.

“The Mad Men held captive the minutes,
where elsewhere the minutes fly past.
Minutes held captive are thick and warm,
gone are the minutes of last.”
~Brown

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