During my time at Emily Carr I was assigned a number of textbooks and coursepacks, most of which were really excellent and worth the cost. For the most part, though, my instructors used Moodle to distribute coursework and links for online readings. In my last two years of school, the majority of my coursework was done online and I don’t think I bought any textbooks. For that, my bank account is thankful.

I know that my education wouldn’t have been complete without help from a few hard-copy sources. I’d like to introduce you to a few who have helped me to expand my world:

Before University: Nicolaides -  The Natural Way To Draw

This book belongs to my mother, and she used it during college. Though it was written in the 30′s, the information is current and the teaching methodology is sound: it’s all about the experience of drawing, and creating with all of your senses. Even before I started University, I learned that creativity is not about working from divine knowledge, or a special ‘gift.’ Creativity is learned, and practiced, and that your style is developed from your experience.

Foundation: Tufte -  Beautiful Evidence

In my first semester, my drawing teacher dragged me by the arm to visit the design school and introduced me to some of the instructors. At some point, Tufte’s name was mentioned and I decided to embark on some independent research. This book is incredibly good propaganda for encouraging young people to decide their major.

Second Year: Hofstadter – I am a Strange Loop and Turkle – Evocative Objects

I bought Evocative Objects on the suggestion of a communication design instructor who used it as a textbook for her design core class. The book was also one of my first introductions to MIT’s Media Lab, and became a motivating force in the development of my grad project.

The impulse to read I am a Strange Loop actually came from an xkcd comic. This might seem almost entirely tangential, but I’m not lying when I say that the book is the leading motivating factor behind being willing to navigate the infinitely silly complexities of bureaucracy at University. It’s the tome that taught me how to keep a smile on my face.

Third Year: Sowa – Conceptual Structures

There is nothing more important in design school than being able to justify and defend every decision you make. I didn’t buy this book solely for its practical components. You can get an O’Reilly book if you want to learn how to program. Conceptual Structures contains a philosophical and scientific defense for programming and knowledge representation. Design can learn so much from this kind of critical and analytical defense.

Senior Year: McLuhan – Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and Buxton – Sketching User Experiences

There is one paragraph from Sketching User Experiences that I want to highlight:

“…you must foster an overall culture of creativity within your organization–one that not only has good ideas, but also understands them, is receptive to them, and knows what to do with them. Otherwise, you will lose both the benefit of the ideas that you paid for as well as your most creative people. Good ideas are not sufficient and innovation and creativity cannot be compartmentalized.” (p. 223)

That says it all, I suppose. This book is about much more than teaching the designer new ways to sketch.

Admittedly, I read Understanding Media well before my senior year. I would suggest this book to everyone, ever, and think that it should be mandatory reading for anyone who has ever used technology. It wasn’t until my senior year that I began to apply the learning from this book into my work, and I was delighted to watch my designs grow and change rapidly with the advent of each new medium.

- – - – -

Each of these books is special to me, in ways that are more profound than what I’ve described. I wouldn’t call this list definitive, nor would I ever guarantee that these books would help a design student to become a better designer. I really believe that your education will only become what you make of it, based entirely on your willingness to learn and grow. Books help, though- whether digital or hard copy, they contain the ingredients for learning.

I’m graduating on May 1st, with a Bachelor’s of Design (BDES). You should really join the party, and check out the work done by my grad class. We’ll be exhibiting our work from May 1-16, and the Industrial + Commercial Design work is being exhibited in the South building on the Granville Island campus.

I posted this on my Grad Project blog, but I’d like to re-post it here for the crowd who hasn’t been following my schoolwork. So without further ado, here’s Gezellig:

How it works:

The quilt is made up of pockets with buttons, and static squares. One of the static squares has been outfitted with an array of LEDs, and one of the button pockets has been stitched with conductive thread. I sewed a circuit onto a separate piece of fabric, which leads into an Arduino that’s been embedded into a secret pocket in the quilt. When the button pocket is closed, the circuit is completed and the Arduino is programmed to tell the LEDs to pulse softly.

The button pocket.

Pulsing LEDs behind one of the static blue pockets.

How it helps lonely people:

The intent of the Proof-Of-Concept is to show how a ‘traditional’ medium can be updated with technology, and send a message to its users without being obtrusive or tacky. Quilts are, in my opinion, one of the best examples of a comfort object, and they tend to be treasured artifacts that carry a family’s story through multiple generations.

In context, this project would be kept in the home of a lonely, elderly person. When updated through social media by their family (that element is going to be detailed in the next semester), the quilt will be able to show a visual message to the user that they are being thought about, and loved. For people who are separated from their families due to distance or disability, having a visual reminder of their family can be a powerful motivator. The creative element of the quilt (putting photos or other nostalgic items into the pockets) should also help the user to get into a creative mood, sharing memories of their family with others and contributing to the personalization and customization of their quilt.

What’s next?

Next semester (Spring 2010), I plan on adding to the customization of the quilt in a number of ways: First, I’ll be working on the capacity of the user’s family to update the quilt via social networks such as twitter, flickr, and facebook. I’d like to aggregate information from the APIs of those services, so that family members can trigger reactions on their grandparent’s quilt through something as simple as tagging a photo, or using a #hashtag on twitter or facebook.

Second, I’ll be working on the visual elements of the quilt. I’d like for the static pockets to do something more than just pulse an array of LEDs. Though I felt like it was a good end-point for this semester, I’m not satisfied with the message it sends. I feel as though the message can become more complex without complicating the integrity of the quilt as both a medium and a metaphor. I’d like to figure out a way to incorporate either thermo-chromatic inks, or OLED panels so that the message can become slightly more tangible and ‘realistic’.

Third, I’d like to work on my craftsmanship and try to create an object that’s both technologically sound, as well as technically beautiful. Quilting is a timeless activity, and I come from a long line of smart women who have perfected their craftsmanship through quilting and needlework. Over the course of the next semester, I’d like to get my quilting to the point where I’m very satisfied with my quality of stitching, accuracy of layout, and create more complex geometries/patterning.

The concept is that students are given a ‘potato’ with an RFID reader and bluetooth arduino board embedded inside. Each student wears an RFID tag ring, and the potato is programmed to light up once a randomized number of tags are read. The students pass the potato around like in the game hot potato, and when the RFID potato lights up, the student holding the potato is selected to present. The student’s presentation is loaded by the computer (via the bluetooth arduino) and he presents. Afterwards, the potato is reset and the game starts over.

The project is only about halfway to completion, so I’ll probably end up making a new post with pictures of the sketch model and final prototype. It’s been a neat process, though- I love having an excuse to work with RFID, especially when I can make it fun.

Case in point: How much do you think the average New York City bus costs? I would’ve naively guessed about $90,000, and if you told me it was $120,000 I’d be surprised but I wouldn’t question you.

But if you told me the average city bus costs over a half a million dollars, I would have thought you were dead wrong. Yet an article in The Times tells us the price of a new city bus is “just under $550,000.”

MTA? WTF!

$120,000? And this guess was coming from someone who routinely writes for an industrial design supersite? Eek. Let’s get back to reality, here. The cost of one New Flyer trolley bus in Vancouver settles in at just under $900,000, and the city has purchased over 200 of these vehicles in the past four years. This puts our pricetag at somewhere around $198,000,000 CAD. Hmm, spendy.

But! There’s no reason to be surprised by the cost of these machines- and, yes, the price is justified even if it sounds exorbitant. Here’s why:

Nearly every city in the world has an individualized, regulation-specific system of municipal transportation. The bus system in Philadelphia is vastly different to the one in Portland, which is in no way similar to the ones in Seattle or Regina. The MUNI trains in San Francisco look nothing like the SkyTrain in Vancouver, and were built by a completely different corporation- and to top it all off, three different companies have built SkyTrains, which means each company has been forced to come up with new designs just to ensure that the trains all fit the same elevated rail system. These systems are like a fingerprint- every city has a different feature.

The lack of standardization is mostly to blame for the extremely high price of city buses, and because no two cities are going to come to a conclusion on regulations for emissions, consideration for people with disabilities, fare collections, etc., this means that new designs must be created to fit the guidelines set by individual transit companies. Commissioning a company to build a bus that is city-specific is a massive undertaking, wherein every detail has to be submitted to maintain consistency among the fleet of buses, and meet new regulations that change on a regular basis.

As an example- prior to the inclusion of the New Flyer buses in Vancouver, not all bus routes were accessible for wheelchairs. Now, every bus route in Vancouver should be accessible- but this also means that the new bus design had to incorporate a wheelchair lift system, and security restraints to keep the passengers safe. All of this added to the cost of manufacturing the buses- every design change leads to the manufacture of new parts, of which only a short run would be made. Unless another transit company decides to use the same wheelchair lift system, these parts become part of a limited production run and the manufacturer can’t sell more to reduce the production price.

‘hipstomp’ goes on to complain but not really offer any solutions:

… the freaking M42 Crosstown is worth two Lamborghini Murcielagos … you’d almost think it would be cheaper for the city to pay for all 8 million of us to take taxis everywhere!

Here’s a few solutions to the problem: standardize regulations for public transit. On a continental scale. Manufacture closer to home, so shipping costs aren’t added to the cost of production. Consider using industrial design practices when creating new regulations for the system, such as co-creating with the public so that usability problems can be solved before they even become an issue in practice.

Governments that spend taxpayer money have a responsibility to make intelligent financial decisions with money that isn’t explicitly theirs. Canada could hold a large-scale conference in which a publicly-elected council can determine the requirements set on the systems. Imagine what would happen if any city in this country could swap buses with any other city and have them all run, without fail, on the same system. The production and manufacturing costs could decrease to the point at which our buses might actually cost the same as one Lamborghini Murcielago, instead of two ;]

edit: Who knew that ‘buses’ wasn’t spelled with two S’s? Whoops.