ideatree design & why I spent my summer at Olin

This summer, as you may already know, I stayed at Olin to work on a "project" of mine. Well, here's my quick explanation of IdeaTree Design, (also: "project.")

IdeaTree Design started with one of the 'activist' groups on campus called Olin Students for Awesome. In an attempt to further the positive social impact that this group could have in the local community, founding members of IdeaTree came up with the idea of a non-profit, socially conscious, student-led design firm "where everybody wins!" The plan is to take advantage of technical expertise from Olin students and students from neighboring colleges (yay interdisiplinary design work!) and allow them to spend time getting professionally design experience (and research/academic credit) working on projects for non-profits who normally couldn't afford to pay a design firm for their design needs (what we call "The Non-Profit Gap"). That's the short and sweet version of what we're doing...Here's one example of what kind of work we'll be doing.

There is a home for the mentally and physically disabled in Chicago where wheelchair-bound residents are ensured about 10-20 minutes a day to get pushed around the nice facility. The problem is that this takes up a lot of the caretakers time, so we were asked if we could design some sort of wheelchair coupler to allow motorized wheelchairs to tow 1-2 other wheelchairs behind them so that residents could have more time to go around outside, time that caretakers currently can't afford to offer whenever residents would like it... In any case, several students would be assigned to the project and by the end of the semester we would have a functional version of a wheelchair coupler (or 10).

This summer I spent a lot of time working on setting everything up for this non-profit, from getting research credit to finding projects, getting incorporated, writing a business plan, laying out a website, etc...all the sort of business nonsense that we won't have time to do during the year.

some observations about social perception and behaviors in public places

This post is taken from notes I jotted down on my computer on March 18th while waiting to board a flight back home to San Diego. I spent a lot of time second semester thinking about how an individual's perception of the world is completely dependent upon their own experience, something that we talked extensively during the "Diversity" section of the MetaOlin independent study I was a part of. "Stepping into someone else's shoes" is often very difficult because many times links between and understanding of other people is built from shared experience. If there are very little commonalities between individuals or groups of people, understanding can be very difficult.

In any case, while sitting at my gate, waiting for my flight to begin boarding, I stopped doing whatever it was that I was doing to observe everyone around me. It struck me how there aren't many places where every walk of life collides. Many groups of people are hardly ever seen at an airport, because they have no reason to be there. Parks, schools, malls, and other public places are frequented often by a specific class/type of person. The less fortunate don't often stroll around inside a Nordstrom, for example, or even a mall with a Nordstrom in it, because there is no reason for them to. Well, an airport may not necessarily be the best place to "see all walks of life," but it was still interesting to stop and think about my surroundings.

To my left was a mother with her three children and their grandmother. Two of the children were little girls about the ages of 9 and 12. The other child was still an infant, and was being carried by the mother to keep it from falling asleep before boarding the plane. The two girls were on their cell phones/ipods non-stop. They complained once to their mother about how the other was not letting her charge her cell phone long enough, and when they weren't on their phones or occupied by their phones they were asking their mother if they could buy something to drink from Starbucks. Finally the grandmother gave in and said she'd go to Starbucks. Well, as much as the girls wanted to go, one was talking on the phone, which was apparently more important than getting Starbucks. As a result, the girl then lowered the phone to give her grandmother specific instructions about what she wanted before resuming her vivid phone conversation. While this is just a short anecdote, by the end of my 30-40 minutes or so of observation I laughed to myself, thinking that if I tried I probably couldn't spoil these children more than they already were.

Another clump of people was a bit further away from me--a bunch of 15 year old guys all wearing different sporting equipment. They all dressed, acted and talked alike so much that it was easy to tell even from their normal clothing that they were all a part of some baseball team coming home from a tournament. Most sported backwards baseball caps, gum, hoodies, baggy jeans, maybe even a chain or two. I laughed to myself, thinking that I was looking at the quintessential target audience for most hip hop music. (Something like 80% of rap music is bought by young male caucasians.) Stereotypical, maybe, but after watching them for a while it was amazing how they operated as a unit with one or two prime/leading individuals. Everyone sort of fed off of a handful of the people in that group, and it was scary how much their behavior resembled that of a living organism...weird...(30 min segment--NPR: A Look at Hip-Hop, 'Beyond Beats and Rhymes')

There are other examples, but those two are the ones I remember the most about. In any case, I'd also noticed after a while how little interaction there was between different types of people. There was the little boy who ran around until he saw another little boy, whose parents then started talking to the first boy's parents. There was the elderly couple who had a short exchange with a young couple who seemed a bit confused about where they were. All in all, most people kept to themselves, despite any connections/commonalities they might have shared. So while there are some examples of people reaching out and talking to other people, for the most part college students didn't randomly start talking to other college students, or anything like that. What was interesting was the way that most interactions started, regardless of whether or not people were similar in age, ethnicity, or gender.

At one point the intercom made an announcement telling passengers that they're flight would be delayed another hour or so. All of a sudden different people who all were on that flight started talking to each other! First one person would ask someone else if they could repeat what the intercom had said, just to make sure they'd heard correctly, and then they'd talk for a minute or two. From then onwards they were a lot more likely to say random, spontaneous things to those individuals. For example, at one point after the announcement the mother with the three children told the elderly couple sitting to her right: "Well, I was going to try and keep (the baby) him awake, but now that we have 2 hours..." Then the elderly man chimed in with something about their own children and how putting taking them on airplanes was always difficult or something...

Now, you may think I'm being silly by saying this, because of course people with shared experiences/something to talk about are more likely to talk! But what is interesting to me is that this tendency is completely a cultural phenomenon. Having lived in Mexico for most of my life, I can attest to the fact that interaction for the sake of interaction is much more common in Mexico for cultural reasons. What is it about the United States (and other places, presumably) that makes us want to isolate ourselves into little groups while in public places or even in our neighborhoods?

One final note worth mentioning is something I realized as I stopped writing my notes, closed my laptop, and pulled out my headphones and book. Where did I fit into the social fabric? Here I was, a college student with more electronic equipment on me than is probably necessary, sitting around typing notes in my computer after checking my email, calendar tasks, and blog feeds only to stop doing those things and re-immerse myself into another solitary activity: reading. Well, there's not necessarily* much you can do about who you are and where you fit in within any given group of people, but an awareness of how you relate to your surroundings is valuable.

*I say necessarily because many times an awareness of say, the fact that you're being a prick or something should be rectified. What I mean about not being able to change who you are within a group is that you can't change the fact that you are a college student, with tons of electronic equipment, waiting to either fly home for spring break or to school from home after spring break. What you can change is how you let these facts affect your behavior and interaction with other people...

That's all for now folks.

Olin: engineering through an interdisciplinary lens (part 2 of 2)

Overview
My first post on this subject, creatively titled Olin: engineering through an interdisciplinary lens (part 1 of 2) can be found here


Last time I talked mostly about my Materials Science/Historical Analysis course last time, but this post is dedicated to an independent study course I took titled "MetaOlin." The course is the brainchild of 6 students, all of whom originally had different ideas for creating their own course that came out of Olin's curriculum revision process, among other things. The course is without a doubt the best course I have ever taken, topping even the materials science course I described before. To the right are the four guys of the group, Mel is taking the picture and Chandra is off to the left. The course was made up of six students, six professors, and six subjects. 2 seniors, 2 first-years, 1 junior and 1 sophomore. (Both seniors aren't in the picture.) In any case, I feel like spending a lot of time writing new content about this course is foolish, since I spent most of a semester awake writing things for MetaOlin. For this reason I've included some of the explanation for MetaOlin we wrote up for our final, 148-page deliverable, nay tome, of Meta-work.

MetaOlin: A Short Description
MetaOlin was an independent study taken by six students during the Spring 2007 semester. The goal of MetaOlin was to apply mental models from several engineering-related and social disciplines in order to develop a holistic understanding of how engineering and/or social problems interact and depend on each other. Throughout the semester students researched, read, and discussed appropriate material in multiple disciplines. The course was structured as a seminar-style class composed of six different modules. Each discipline-focused module of the course used Olin as a common context to understand how different approaches are critical to gaining a holistic understanding of a system. Each module finished with some form of deliverable, all of which are brought together in our final binder.

The list of modules in chronological order (and also the sections in this binder) is below, along with the professor that taught the module and some major themes from the module.

• Systems Engineering – Brian Bingham – stocks and flows, diagrams, feedback
  
• Diversity – Zhenya Zastavker – backpack of privilege, epistemic privilege
  
• Information Literacy – Dee Magnoni – exponential growth of information, lifelong learning
  
• Communications – Raymond Yim – transmitters/receivers, linear algebra, applied to pedagogy
  
• History – Robert Martello – synthesis of narrative and analysis
  
• Pedagogy – Chris Morse – active learning, grades and assessment, misconceptions

A Longer Description and Some Connections
Many of the fundamental ideas listed above are linked to one another. One possible set of connections is pictured to the right, (click on image to expand it) along with some of the deliverables connected to those fundamental models. Try to follow along on this flowchart while I explain the connections as best I can...We start on the top left, with "Linear Algebra."
(NOTE: This entire explanation is very general and low in detail, so I may lose you a couple of times.)

Each number denotes a hop from one bubble on the image to another. Hopefully by the content of the numbered text you can figure out which bubble I jumped to when there is more than 1 possibility.

1. As can be seen, linear algebra, a concept used heavily in the study of digital communications can be used as a model for learning in the classroom, which is highly related to the
2. misconceptions that students have that prevents them from learning, which can be corrected by techniques such as active learning. A misconception in pedagogy (the study of teaching and education) is that teaching to “special” students such as ESL students or students with learning disabilities will only help a small subset of students,
   
3. but students are actually on a learning continuum and the teaching (which can be thought of as broadcasting from a transmitter) will reach different students with different levels of success (think of receivers, with lossy channels).
   
4. Teachers can take advantage of things such as peer to peer teaching to improve the system, and can also use the idea of feedback (also: relays) between the students and themselves.
   
5. Feedback in systems other than pedagogy can be used along with the concept of stocks and flows (taken from the systems engineering discipline) to understand why burnout happens in an institution such as Olin,
6. although we have to recognize that all models are broken. In fact, “the best model for a cat is a cat; preferably the same cat.”
   
7. We all have misconceptions that appear in our personal models of ourselves and the world. One area where we personally discovered our misconceptions during this course was in the diversity module, where those with epistemic privilege (authors and members of the independent study) showed us the areas where we were carrying “backpacks of privilege”. In other words, it is often the case that we can only see privilege when we are not beneficiaries of it, so we rely on others with this privileged point of view to kick us out of our mental models. We do this by gaining more knowledge about the world using information literacy skills, which we try to teach through a co-curricular syllabus that we assembled for our third module.
   

(This last section wasn't split up into all the bubbles it corresponds to on the image. Sorry. :/ )

In addition to learning mental models and making connections between them, we learned a number of skills and lessons with life-long implications:

• Being passionate about thinking about things can be intensely rewarding
  
• Discussing and being passionate “about thinking about things” with people with the same passion can be even more rewarding
  
• Discussing and working with people with the same passions and work habits can be very time consuming and dangerous
  
• How the transfer of knowledge between classes can be an integral part of the learning process itself
  
• Learning how to find our balance within a group
  
• Learning how to find our role within a group
  
• Learning about organizing a group
  
• Leadership capabilities
  
• Founded & Developed relationships with one another and with our professors
  
• Understanding how each of us communicates to facilitate understanding between one another
  
• Having a deep sense for each other’s mannerisms, habits, and thoughts
  
• Burnout
  
• How to communicate what we’re excited about to the professors
  
• Time Management (about it)
  
• Fame (on a limited scale)
  

That's all for Meta right now! Sorry for everyone who has seen this before, it had to be done :)

the day I will leave Olin College

It's for realizations like the following for which I am glad that I have somewhere to write my thoughts, however public they may be.

I've always loved running. When I was young my legs were messed up in a way that might have not allowed me to participate in any sort of physical activity when older, if left uncorrected. Thankfully it was corrected, and I've lived 18 years as an active person, and in high school I participated in cross country, track and soccer. I do sometimes wonder what life would be like had I not gotten injured these past four years, but it is only until now that I've realized that despite any current injuries, I am blessed more than I could have ever hoped for. Now, you may think I'm going to write something deep and thoughtful about life and who know what, but I'm not...

The reason I thought about running has to do with high school, where much of my experience was shaped by the activities I was involved with, especially cross country. In any case, the reason I remembered high school is because of something I thought about the day of my graduation from Saint Augustine High School, my alma mater in San Diego. The campus has banners alongside the football field with the school's emblem/logo, and as I was walking into the gym for the graduation mass, I remember looking up at one of these banners and realizing that I would be leaving Saints after four amazing years. I really enjoyed high school, and I couldn't imagine enjoying college more than my time at Saints....But I was wrong.

I've been here one year, and I stayed at Olin this summer as well...My time here has been amazing. I've learned more than I thought was possible given the time frame, not necessarily about engineering, but about myself and "the meaning of it all." ;) Or at least, what I define to be "meaning and purpose." I can't really put to words even how I've felt in the past few weeks alone. I could go into all the engineering knowledge I've acquired, or how much I've learned about design and starting a business this first year, but I don't believe a list of "what I've learned" would be interesting to anyone. One thing worth mentioning from this past year includes a whole new meta-perspective* that I've gained for understanding the world around me and myself. It is really hard to try and put to words how I feel, but what is really important is something I realized only a few days ago.

I happened to be running, as a matter of fact, when it happened. I was able to run a handful of times recently (my legs normally prevent that from happening), though I did hurt myself a bit on my last run. We were walking back towards Olin and I looked up at one of those Olin banners and said "I can't imagine what it will be like when I have to leave this place." I don't think the person I was with heard me, but that's ok...It would have required a long explanation as to why that banner made me think about my time AFTER Olin. I just couldn't imagine what life would be like after Olin, just like I couldn't imagine myself enjoying school more than I enjoyed my "Saints" high school experience.

Just a couple hours ago I was talking to another Olin student who said something to the effect of:

"Marco, why did we stay here this summer? We can't do this again, we have to get away from here! Otherwise what's going to happen when we graduate?! We won't want to leave!"

While I do think I'll be excited about life after Olin when the time comes, it still feels odd to think that in three years I'm done...(there's always grad school, but still). My life up until now has been focused on being involved with activities I love doing (while doing well in school on the side :D ) At least doing well enough in school to get me INTO college, that is. Well now I'm here, and I don't know how I'm going to leave! We'll see how I feel about this subject 2 years from now :)

*Oliners: sorry for using the word "Meta," though I know how much you love to hear it ;P

teaching interface design to someone in my head.

Ok, so I know I haven't really explained a lot of things about this past year, but I feel like posting about something current. Beware: This post is about 4 pages worth of text. Avoid if you're just skimming through your RSS feed. :)

This summer IdeaTree Design, the start-up non-profit I'm working for this summer is designing the user interface for an automated TB testing device being developed by another group of students on Olin's campus. As a result, I've been talking and thinking a bit about interface design, so here goes my ramble.

In order to make sense of everything that was going on in my head, I decided to pretend that I was responding to someone who has asked me "how I would teach interface design to someone else." So here I go.

Now, this is probably going to be a bit difficult to follow because I’m going to be talking about two different things at the same time.

1. First of all, I am realizing what exactly I know about interface design by determining how I would go about teaching it to someone
   
2. While I do this, I can make connections between my explanation of teaching interface design and what the fundamental concepts of interface I feel I understand are
   

Here goes. If I had to teach someone some of the things that came to mind about interface design, I would start with some background research/thought about who my "pupils" are. For example, teaching kindergarten is radically different from teaching a college student, and I don't mean content differences (because those are obvious), I mean a different approach. When teaching college students as a teacher, assuming students understand material and do the work is much more efficient than in kindergarten. You can’t just assume all students learned the last lesson in the alphabet and just move on, hoping that if they don’t understand they will just speak up. A confused kindergartener stays confused until you “extract” their confusion. College students can understand being confused by something, and can work harder or ask questions . Kindergarteners get sad or distracted if they don’t understand you. So, say I was trying to teach interface design to some subset of the population. I want to teach 30-40 year old office employees who interacted with computers on a regular basis. Now, I need to do some background research. What do these people think about on a regular basis? What’s the best way to teach them anything? Well, here are some facts:

• They are fundamentally connected to their 9-5 schedule. If you were to go in an “teach them” something, it better be relevant to what they’re doing.
  
• They aren’t students, so assuming they’ll be excited about learning about interface design is a fatal mistake
  
• They interact with computers, often they learned how to interact with computers recently, or at least they’re not as proficient with computer usage as your average tween myspace addict.
  

I could go on, but let’s see what we’ve got. Well, it seems to me that a logical approach would be to “teach” them something relevant to their job and day-to-day happenings instead of teaching them about something they won’t care about. So, why not teach them something about computers that indirectly teaches lessons about interface design? Now you’re probably asking, why the heck do they need to know anything about interface design?! Well, to be honest, they don’t. This is just a helpful way to make me think about what I know personally.

Here’s what I would “teach” them. I would talk to them about things like shortcuts, and how you can get to use a computer really well without the use of a mouse. Many 35 year old office employees still find using a computer to be a memorized process, rather than second nature. So, teaching them the joys of shortcuts and speeding up their overall interaction with the computer will be worthwhile. They can learn how to access my documents without even touching the mouse. They’ll open, save, and print a quick document without even touching a mouse. They’ll shut down their computer and reset their volume controls or dim their screen as well. Then after that, I can start to show them how they can customize the computer to suit their needs. Given an example, I think they’ll see how much they can do to optimize their interaction with the computer. Applications like Launchy, Firefox (yes, some have no idea what this is…*tear*), multiple virtual desktops (I use VirtuaWin v3.1), or even things like Google Desktop widgets, Yahoo widgets, browser toolbars, and anything else can be downloaded and customized to their specific needs. The important thing is that THEY have to own their own learning experience. They have to download the programs they want (I can explain what some of them are, if necessary), decide if they’re useful for them, and customize as necessary. I can show them how neat my computer shortcuts and Firefox plug-ins are, but at the end of the day they have to do it themselves on their computer. In any case, ideally they can understand things like widgets, plug-ins, shortcuts and other things well enough to realize/accept that they own their interaction with the computer.

Many people in their situation just interact with computers as if the computers are forcing them to do so. The troubles most people in this group have with computers is often that they are frustrated that the computer won’t cooperate with them, but in reality they just need to find out how to make the computer interact with their own wishes. I know this seems odd, but approaching a computer problem logically, trying to use help and support and the internet to solve your problem is much better than banging your head against the computer for hours and then asking your kids to do it for you. The reason I chose to “teach” my imaginary office employees about computers is that I figured thinking about how I would teach someone how to better interact with a computer would help me think about interface design in general. So maybe they didn’t REALLY learn about interface design, these imaginary pupils of mine. Maybe all they realized (ideally of course) is that they can own their relationship with a computer, which is in a sense, gaining an understanding of the core value of interface design without thinking about it: making the product/device interact with the user instead of having the user interact with it.

This brings me to the second part of what I’m talking about that I mentioned a long time ago, the “connections to interface design” I would realize while thinking about my pupils. I believe that the ideal user interface is one where the device interacts with the user, not the other way around. If the user has to interact with the device, then it isn’t 100% intuitive. This is obvious, and nothing is completely intuitive right?

Well, I don’t know…Imagine the perfect computer. Instead of memorizing all those shortcuts and cool “lifehacking” (read: optimization) skills, why not let the computer do that memorizing/adjusting for you? The ideal computer in my opinion works through basic human responses and existing mind mapping of operations. In a normal computer, you move your mouse to an icon and click on it to open it. In your head, you just want to open that file, but instead of just opening it with your head you have to use your eyes to track the motion of the mouse, which you are moving with your hand towards the correct icon. Sometimes the correct file is buried under tons of folder’s worth of “organization” This ideal computer should then use speech recognition and gestures to map operations and processes. A person saying “open Firefox” should be understood and the computer would ideally open up the right application. But take this a bit further…We really like optimizing our computer experience, so naturally, you would want your ideal computer to optimize itself. In my opinion the ideal computer has little built in structure and order but dedicates most of its firepower to being able to respond to human programming.
Assume the user knows that he/she can:

• Assume the computer will learn their mannerisms and protocol
  
• Expect everything to be modifiable, and take no status quo as permanent if it is cumbersome.
  

If the user understands this, they can feel free to experiment with the computer and really make it their own. Using speech and hand gestures, a computer which scans the space in front of it to determine who the user is would learn how to recognize hand signals and speech patterns. Imagine writing an email out loud, sort of like when you are dictating something to someone. Instead of typing and using the backspace key to correct for errors, the computer would be able to recognize (eventually perhaps) the following speech:

“Hmm, Ok, let’s start with: Hi Dave, how’s your day been? I know we haven’t talked in a while. No,…that dumb. Get rid of that last bit ...Okay...let’s try again…”

So, that looks like something someone would say, but the computer would not only recognize when the person goes from dictation to “thinking aloud” as in the section: “let’s start with: Hi Dave….” The computer could recognize “let’s start with” as a trigger for when that specific user wants to dictate something, but the computer doesn’t REQUIRE the user to say that. The computer would ideally track intonation and eventually realize what the user wants. The computer would be smart enough to ask the user what they want if it isn’t sure, instead of not doing anything, and the computer should have some standard operations that users can use such as: Computer, Do X. or Computer, Open X. This way if the computer doesn’t recognize what a user means when they say “Google microbiology” or “Rocket Pitch Powerpoint,” and the user doesn’t want to bother “teaching” the computer what it means, the user can just use the standard “Open Firefox, Google Search: X” or something…

In any case, I realize this sort of thing is best explained in a conversation instead of on paper, so I will wrap this up. I know this is a very long, confusing, and bizarre “blog” post, but if you do have questions or just would like to flip out and go crazy, comment! :)