In my class with John Cain "Readings in Experience Modelling", every week he assigns us readings that challenge what we believe about design. One of our readings for this week was a paper "Cultural Probes and the Value of Uncertainty".

 "The Probes simultaneously make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, creating a kind of intimate distance that can be a fruitful standpoint for new design ideas. They produce a dialectic between the volunteers and ourselves: On the one hand, the returns are inescapably the products of people different from us, constantly confronting us with other physical, conceptual, and emotional realities. On the other hand, the returns are layered with influence, ambiguity and indirection, demanding that we see the volunteers through ourselves to make any sense. This tension creates exactly the situation we believe is valuable for design, providing new perspectives that can constrain and open design ideas, while explicitly maintaining room for our own interests, understandings, and preferences."

http://bit.ly/dsxNWJ

This paper made me think about the value we are losing as we try to get verifiable and justifiable research results. By working in teams and requiring an agreement on a lowest common denominator of interpretation of research results, are we losing the value of personal interpretation in design? 

I have been thinking about this for a while. Today, I thought, I'd stick my neck out and say it.

I believe we are in the midst of another huge bubble - the advertising bubble. If you think about how many industries today are dependent on advertising as their primary source of revenue, the list is quite long. The web, television, radio, increasingly music, smartphone apps...

On the other hand, we are increasingly becoming immune to advertising because we see so much of it. When was the last time you clicked on a banner ad?

I believe that somewhere in the not so distant future, the advertising bubble will burst and many industries will have to rethink their business models to survive.

Link to PowerPoint source file: http://db.tt/QDUoDXns

Hello everyone! A very happy 2012 to all. After a rather long hiatus owing to finals week, my Dad's trip to the US and then my super awesome NYC trip, here is the second in the series of appliance illustrations. I have used these simple line drawings to convey ideas in various projects over time. Today we have the coffee machine and the washing machine. And there are still a few more to come.

Link to PowerPoint source file: http://db.tt/g78IV3PH

This is the first in a series of appliance illustrations I have created for various projects over time. Today we have the microwave and the split air-conditioner. There is more to come.

If any of you have done similar work which is open source, please share links in the comments. Thanks in advance.

Link to PowerPoint source file: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23114815/fire-safety-instructions.pptx

This illustration came about as part of a personal project creating visual fire safety instructions.

All the elements are created using native PowerPoint shapes except the clouds. I'm not very sure where I got those so use those at your own risk.Everything else is free for use.

PS: The crawling man was featured in an earlier post.

It is well known that visually conveying ideas is extremely powerful. As a designer, it is almost mandatory.

Given my non existent sketching capabilities, I have found a survival tool in PowerPoint. I have been using simple PowerPoint drawings to quickly convey ideas and I find this very efficient and quite powerful too. 

 I am starting a series of posts sharing these simple illustrations and their source files with two objectives:
1. to opensource these illustrations 
2. to act as small tutorials for the illustration technique itself.
Feel free to use them in anyway you see fit. No source acknowledgement required.

Today's Illustration: People and hierarchy

So here’s a big development... for the last one month I have been in Chicago at the Institute of Design.
I have had 3 weeks of classes so far and they have been absolutely great. Here are some of the highlights so far:

Diversity: I have fellow students from France, Italy, Brazil, Japan, China, South Korea, Colombia (thanks Jorge for pointing out the typo), Canada, US... pretty much all over the world. This has been for me, one of my biggest dreams come true. I had always dreamt of studying in a multi-cultural environment.

Breaking things down and building them up: This has been one important learning for me in the recent weeks. Through a series of classes on problem framing, analysis and design planning.. the school teaches us how to effectively break down problems into their component parts, ideate at that level and then synthesize new solutions.

Projects: I am working on some really interesting projects. One of them which I particularly like is a project looking at how evaluation can be built into the education system itself rather than being a separate activity. The premise is that in our learning before and after school (eg walking, cycling, our jobs), we evaluate ourselves as we learn but in school testing is separate from learning. Is there a way to integrate the two in school?

Design Research Conference: I have volunteered for the 10^th edition of DRC which is between Oct 24^th-26^th. I am really excited about it because I will have a chance to meet people who I have previously only read about and watched on the internet. You can follow drcX at @drctweets. I will be live tweeting from the conference or you can follow the tag #drcX

I will keep posting updates on this blog and my twitter account as things progress.

Working on a project in the education space here at ID (more on that later), we were talking about learning and evaluation. A thought struck me. In today’s age where the likes of MIT Open Courseware, iTunesU and Khan Academy have made high  quality education available to everyone for free, the role of teachers should move to curators and facilitators of education rather than actual instructors.