Nice to meet you Miguel Cervantes
Where are you from?
Born in Mexico. Raised in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood (so sort of like being raised in Mexico). And there are bits of my heart in rural Minnesota and Paris (not Texas).
How did you end up at ID? Where were you before?
No other school would take me. Kinda. I have a B.A. in Anthropology with a French studies concentration. Naturally, I found a job as program director for a Chicago nonprofit that offers educational opportunities to under-resourced middle-school students. Nonprofit budgeting made me really resourceful, so I often found myself designing everything from event flyers to the students’ academic experiences. I enjoyed this and wanted to do more of it. Turns out that what I was doing was part of something called Design thinking, but I had no traditional design background. ID offered all of that and then some.
Tell us quickly about a project that you’re working on now that you’re really excited about.
Taking photos that John Grimes won’t crop, color correct, or straighten. I’m 0 in 3. Oh, and if you come to my presentation I’ll tell you about other side projects that have me tickled pink.
What do you do in your spare time?
Attend classes at ID. On my busy time I do my homework for said classes.
What would you do with 20 million dollars?
Pay my grad school loans. If I had anything leftover, I’d go on a gastronomic world tour.
What super-power would you most like to have, and why?
The power of staying awake for 24 hours a day. Because then I could attack super villains while they slept.
What are the websites you could not live without?
In no particular order:
www.thenewidiom.com
My music blogs.
google maps (I like knowing where I am and where I’m going)
Is there anything you would like to say to ID?
I have never encountered a more diligent, apt, and quick-minded group than I have here.
Fire up the App Store - IDEO just released a method card app →
Has anyone had any experience using these cards? If so care to comment?
So your looking for trends. Perhaps you are doing a trend analysis. For this example, lets say you are studying organic food. First stop, Wikipedia.
And you learned a few facts about the history, its definition, and maybe you caught the un-cited fact, “since the early 1990s organic food production has had growth rates of around 20%.” Great, but this is a pretty vague trend.
Try the Google News Archive. Wow, did you see that? There is a significant spike in 1970, then again in 1990, and then steady building for the last decade. We can see the historical moments of significance, and by closer examination understand the important events at those times. Clearly, organic food has gone mainstream in recent years, at least in the news media.
So what about in the populace? Does news reflect the general vibe? Checkout, Google Trends. Unfortunately, Google Trends only goes back until 2004 when the database begins, but we can get a very close look at the contemporary picture. In this case, there are two main take aways. First, searches are flat while news is up. We can’t draw major conclusions from this, but it is counter intuitive. Second, at least among Googlers, people searching for organic are English speakers. Again, don’t take this to heart. The word organic is English, so obviously people searching for the idea will use their native term.
Putting these tools together can help you spot and understand trends really fast.
http://www.google.com/archivesearch
http://www.google.com/trends
http://en.wikipedia.org/
Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products” →
Interesting read.
Define IA
The Information Architecture Institute is holding a competition to define IA visually - http://www.flickr.com/groups/explainia/
The deadline is today Feb 11 (i just found out yesterday myself!) but you can participate by leaving comments about how great my entry is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/58228665@N00/4349673260/
Nice to meet you Amber Lindholm
Where are you from?
Here’s the quick version. I was born in Bossier City, Louisiana at Barksdale Air Force Base (both my parents were in the Air Force), and then moved to Okinawa, Japan until I was five. We came back to the States and followed jobs around, moving almost every year. I lived in a bunch of different states: Florida, New York, Arkansas, Ohio, Missouri. We moved to Chillicothe, a small town in central Illinois, when I was starting high school.
How did you end up at ID? Where were you before?
After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I moved to Chicago and worked as a graphic designer for Rotary International. I was keeping up with changes in design and knew there were some skills that I wanted to build on top of my traditional design education. A woman I worked with, Reiko Takahashi, was in the MDM program at ID and recommended that I go to an open house. A week later, I sent in my application.
Tell us quickly about a project that you’re working on now that you’re really excited about.
In an Interactive Product Workshop with Kei Sato we are prototyping concepts to solve problems that occur in the elderly experience in activities around the hospital bed. I’ve done a lot of conceptual and high-level planning projects while at ID, so I’m looking forward to some hands-on product prototyping and experimentation.
What do you do in your spare time?
Hang out with my husband Tom and our three cats: Dewey, Zoe, and Penny. We like to hang around in our neighborhood, Lincoln Square, and go downtown to the Chicago museums. When it’s warm I get out and run, bike along the lakefront, and swim in the lake. I grew up swimming and it’s my favorite sport; now I also do triathlons.
What would you do with 20 million dollars?
Travel everywhere. Buy a house with an outdoor pool, an observatory, and a horse stable. Have a huge library of old books and an art collection. Basically, the same stuff that I used to dream about when I was a kid.
What super-power would you most like to have, and why?
Is being able to swim like a dolphin a super power? I’d love to be able to do that.
What are the websites you could not live without?
Delicious and Google. And I use Wikipedia, Pandora, and Twitter a lot.
Is there anything you would like to say to ID?
When things get really serious, take a break and breathe. Laugh with others. It’s easy to get caught up in the work and neglect what really matters. Of course, it’s easier said than done!
ˈlaːsloː ˈmoholiˌnɒɟ
As we all know, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a seminal figure of Modernism as well as our lovely school, has a notoriously difficult to pronounce last name. Furthermore, it seems everyone has strongly held opinions about the proper way to pronounce it. Within a week at ID I heard it pronounced at least two completely different ways, and not just by students. Some said Laszlo Moholy-Nagie, while other said Laszlo Moholy-Nawdge. Thus, I decided to resolve this conflict once and for all.
Naturally I first turned to Wikipedia, figuring that a name this frequently mispronounced would get some special mention. Alas, they made no special mention, saying only that it is pronounced [ˈlaːsloː ˈmoholiˌnɒɟ] in Hungarian (the ‘gy’ of Nagy being pronounced like the ‘gy’ of gyár). If I knew how to pronounce that, this wouldn’t be an issue now would it?
Digging a bit deeper, I discovered on phantomranch.net that ‘gy’ in Hungarian is pronounced like ‘du’ in the English word adulation. Forvo.com helped clarify (ahem, obfuscate) this by providing both Hungarian pronunciation by a German female and the pronunciation in German by an anonymous male. I can’t say this helped much, but feel free to listen to them if you are trying to learn Hungarogerman.
Both Infoplease.com and Dictionary.com confirmed Phantomranch.net’s Hungarian pronunciation of Nagy but pointed to a discrepancy with pronouncing Moholy as well. At least the dictionaries agree.
Mo•holy-Nagy (mu-hō’lē-noj’; Hung. mō’hoi-nod’yu)
http://dictionary.infoplease.com/moholy-nagy
Mo⋅holy-Nagy [muh-hoh-lee-noj; Hung. moh-hoi-nod-yuh]
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/l.+moholy+nagy
Turning to the art historians I found two references, which seemed to reference a single definitive interview. First, Christopher Knight of the LA Times references an interview with Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo’s daughter, that was included as part of a centennial show of L M-N’s work at the Getty Museum.
“The centennial show also clears up some confusion about the difficult pronunciation of Moholy-Nagy’s name. An edited transcript of a 1994 colloquium printed in the small catalogue explains that, although usually pronounced by English-speaking scholars as “Moholy-Nawdge,” the Americanized version that followed his 1937 arrival in Chicago has typically been “Moholy-Nagie.” The original Hungarian is actually “Mo-hoy-Neug.”
The artist’s daughter, archeologist Hattula Moholy-Nagy, does the explaining, so it’s probably definitive.” http://articles.latimes.com/1995-07-01/entertainment/ca-19034_1_laszlo-moholy-nagy?pg=2
Then I found Hattula’s actual quote in Getty Museum catalogue.
From page 87 of the Getty Museum’s IN FOCUS, LASZLO MOHOLY-NAGY:
Katherine Ware: Hattula [daughter of LM-N], you pronounce your last name differently than the rest of us have been pronouncing your father’s name-you’re saying “Moholy-Nagie” rather than “Moholy-Nawdge.” Could you explain?
Hattula Moholy-Nagy: Well, I am sometimes corrected about it! The Hungarian pronunciation is “Mo-hoy-Neug.” Hungarian is a very logical language-its orthography follows its pronunciation, but it’s different from English. So when we came to this country, we settled on the mispronunciation “Moholy-Nagie.”
http://shardsofphotography.blogspot.com/2007/05/pronouncing-moholy-nagys-name.html
Amazing! This is really shaking things up. Not speaking Hungarian, I’m willing to accept that “mō’hoi-nod’yu” is the equivalent of ”Mo-hoy-Neug.” As for the English version, ”mu-hō’lē-noj’” is clearly much different than ”Moholy-Nagie”. In fact, this is just the discrepancy I had been hearing in the halls of ID. How to resolve this? I am willing to give Hattula the final say, but can I trust a single interview, that may or may not have captured her pronunciation accurately? No.
So, I emailed The Moholy-Nagy Foundation, the group responsible for Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s estate, to get their take on all of this. I never would have guessed, but I received a response directly from Hattula Moholy-Nagy.
“In Hungarian, the name is pronounced MO-hoy NODGE. This is a challenge for English-speakers, so we are not rigid about it.”
There you have it. “We are not rigid about it.” I guess I won’t worry about getting it right, and if anyone ever gives you trouble about it, just tell them that you have Hattula’s permission to pronounce it any way you like.
If you are still wondering how to pronounce it, I suggest: the English mu-hō’lē-nogē or the Hungarian mō’hoi-nod’yu. At least these two are internally consistent, as opposed to mu-hō’lē-noj’ that is widely accepted but is also a complete fabrication. Then again, if Hattula doesn’t care, neither do I.
In case you missed it, here is the video of the lecturette from Wednesday.
The website for the book is: www.innovatorssourcebook.com
Here is a description of what was discussed:
“Dan will be discussing with us his background as a student of
entrepreneurship and what led to the creation of The Innovator’s
Sourcebook. He will also be speaking on how the business community
understands the topic of innovation and why this understanding often
leads to misguided methods for idea generation.”
Consumerism in the Wild, Wild East: What to Know About Designing for China →
This was a blog article I wrote for my company (Artefact), primarily to show that we’ve done some serious research and thinking around what it takes to design products (we tend to do consumer electronics, like mobile phones, media devices, home entertainment, etc.) for China.
The lessons/insights/points are more general than specific, but our hope was to start an ongoing dialogue with our clients, other designers, researchers, and people in the community in trying to understand such a dynamic and complex part of the world, full of dynamic and complex and diverse people!
I did NOT go to China to do any research (no budget!). It is not a user-research piece, at least not based on personal experience. It was the result of a tremendous amount of reading (books, articles, blogs, reports, etc.), and numerous phone interviews or emailing/Facebooking (some in November last year and the rest this January) with professionals in design and market research, business, product design, UI/UX, and some students. The calls were to discuss some of these claims I was making and whether or not they were true, and if they had any anecdotes to share related to the claims.
In terms of acknowledging the ID students (former and current) I spoke with, they include: Lin Lin, Nanqian Xu, Ash Bhoopathy, Pinxia Ye, Fei Qi, and probably a couple others I’m forgetting.
I also briefly spoke with Anjali Kelkar, a former professor at IIT Institute of Design, about doing field work in China.
Hopefully, some of you will have some of your own knowledge, perspective, and insights to share by contributing to the ongoing dialogue on our blog, commenting, re-tweeting, or writing your own thoughts on your own blog in response.
Thanks,
Gabriel Biller (MDes, Design Planning, 2008)
