My time as a MFA candidate in the
Design and Technology program at
Parsons The New School for Design.

This past Wednesday I presented the work I’ve done so far on the Methodological module. An extremely birds-eye view. Way too broad and unfocused in my opinion. Need to double down now.

So for the Writing & Research class that I am enrolled in, we are tasked with writing six “design briefs” over the course of the semester. I’ve written two so far. #1 is here; #2 is here.

Yesterday (Friday) I presented the research that I’ve done for the “Social Module”.

A project that keeps coming back to my mind is one that I saw at the RCA exhibit. Tom Stables’ “Jane Vs The Remotes” is a project about mapping television remote use. As he says,

The way most people watch television now could be compared to the gate to my house; it isn’t broken, you just have to have the knack to open it. Using remote controls to watch television, there’s a knack to it. That knack often involves pressing multiple buttons across multiple remotes just to turn on and start watching. It uses a language that does not refer to, or transfer to other systems in everyday life, making it difficult to work out. It makes even less sense if you are elderly.

The product is a customized plastic tray that holds the user’s TV remotes. Different instructional cards are then placed on top of the remotes. These cards are remote and task specific. They help guide the user through tasks such as turning on the television, playing a dvd, and using the on screen TV guide.

This addresses what has been a known issue for some time – the proliferation of manufacturer and device specific remotes. It’s also conventional wisdom that TV remote interfaces generally just don’t make a lick of sense from the user’s perspective. I myself am relatively savvy when it comes to electronics and I still get lost trying to wrangle the remotes at my father’s house.

I love that this is a simple, analog interface adapter. Instead of designing a new remote or protocol, existing remotes have been designed around. While it would be fantastic if all TV manufacturers agreed upon a well studied, designed, and tested format for remote controls, we would be years away from such compliance taking place. And this still wouldn’t fix all of the existing remotes out in the world.

On top of it all, Jane just seems like the sweetest person.

I began compiling information on assistive tech such as use, categories, applicability, examples. So far, I’m pulling from one source, Assistive Technology: Essential Human Factors by Thomas King. Here’s the first version.

Digital Ground, Ch1 – “Interactive Futures”, Malcolm McCullough

I thought this chapter read as a manifesto of tempered expectation – if such a thing is possible. Through all of our cheerleading and denigration of technology, this comes as a welcome shot of reason. McCullough offers a reasonable attitude on how digital technologies should be integrated into our lives. His writing is a rare mix of pith and near aphorism and left me responding in solidarity over and over again. “You don’t have to distrust technology to want it kept in its place.” His desire to find technology’s “place” in our lives and society resonates with me in that I have personally had a knee-jerk reaction to all of the talk about how transformative computing and networking will be. And I particularly like the “place” that he finds – the service of people.

The Computer for the 21st Century, Mark Weiser

It’s interesting to have read this article after the McCullough chapter. While there are similarities between some of the calls made by the two authors, the distance between the publication dates speaks volumes. Weiser is writing in the early 1990s, during the ramp up to the Dot Com boom. McCullough is writing in the early 2000s, after the boom. Both writing on either side of tulip mania. While Weiser shows the same concern that McCullough does for making technical ecology fit within human ecology, his descriptive day-in-the-life narrative of ubiquitous computing shows his hand. That his example focuses on an employee in Silicon Valley is telling in that it means this engineer is thinking as far ahead as his own peer group. Additionally, it is still an office environment that he describes – hardly the level of ubiquity that we are now ascribing to ubiquitous computing nowadays. On the other hand, here is someone who actually dealt at the level of hardware and software development in these early attempts to realize where ubiquitous computing could go.