Welcome

What a month it has been. Between graduation, my job search and working on my capstone presentation I haven't had much time to blog.

I presented my capstone on Friday and it was very well received by faculty and the international students. It looks like someone might be carrying on my research after I leave. I hope to post a video of the presentation before the week is over. I'll have more about that in my capstone blog. http://www.jamiemcatee.com/blog/index.php/capstone

I have updated the design of my portfolio and posted a few new pieces. I now have a final version of the Design Research Society paper that I worked on with Prof. Erik Stolterman, David Royer and Selvan Thandapani. http://www.jamiemcatee.com/port.php?ID=19

I have also added two short papers the first is a design critique of vacuum cleaners and a user evaluation of two potential article designs for a newspaper website.

It was really interesting to find out that one of the possible job titles I could have is one Fast Company considers to be a job that people don't realize they want.

I especially liked this part of the article. "Although many interaction designers have advanced degrees in design, such a background isn't a prerequisite, says David Fore, head of consulting services at Cooper, a pioneering interaction design firm. Fore previously worked as a reporter for industry publications -- valuable experience, given that interaction designers' research requires "the skills of a reporter and an anthropologist," according to him."

I have the skills of a reporter because of my background in the field and I have learned a number of things about studying people in my two years as a master's student.

Here is a link to the page with the interaction designer description, http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/01/ten-jobs.html?page=0%2C2.

The full article
http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/01/ten-jobs.html?page=0%2C0

The abstract for a paper I am working on with Professor Erik Stolterman, classmates David Royer and Selvan Thandapani was accepted to the Design Research Society 2008 conference. The paper is titled Designerly Tools and Theoretical Approaches. In this paper we are looking at the tools that designers use for design. In our case tools are defined as anything from theories to software. We are excited about this and are working on finishing up the paper by the April 1 deadline.

One of my friends is looking into the way people use personas in design. We had a open discussion the other night about our capstones and she asked each of us to talk about how we use personas in design.

After a bit of thinking I have found that I have adapted this concept in a way that I find useful. For my capstone I have an idea of a few people I feel could benefit from what I am designing but I haven't written the details down about this person.

Also thinking about the CHI project we had a persona at one point in time but she didn't really end up being an exact target of our design. In this case we were designing for a group not one person.

Personas are a good way to introduce user centered design. I am not sure if people who have embraced the idea of user centered design and understand who they are designing for need to stick so closely to the persona tool. Does anybody else have thoughts on this?