Threadless T-Rex Tee

Guerilla Ergonomics

Our world wasn't designed to be sat in correctly. That's what I learned in Galen Cranz' graduate course in Body-Conscious Design at UC Berkeley. And unless you have a few $1,000 to invest in proper seating, you're SOL. So I try to get by with something Cranz deemed "guerilla ergonomics" - but I'm taking it to the next level.

Here's the first in what should be a long series on guerilla ergonomics:

This is my friend Emma sitting in front of Ramona's at UC Berkeley. There are a few things wrong with the outside space in front of the Architecture building, Wurster. The big problem in terms of body-conscious design is that there are very few table surfaces. I could maybe understand that the space is meant as a socializing area, but people eat here and people study here. Face it, it's UC Berkeley.

So what ends up happening is that people use their laps as laptop and book surfaces. This does terrible things to the spine and neck as you curl your body down towards your legs in an attempt to get a comfortable reading distance between your lap and your face (about 18 inches for most).

Couple that with deep, deep benches along the walls which force your body into an acute, crumpled posture (one of Cranz' main arguments is that the 90 degree seat is an atrocity) and you have problems.

The chairs that exist outside of Wurster aren't 90 degrees themselves. They're actually more like 120 or 115, with the seat going back. This is all fine and well unless you want to look at something; supporting your neck when you're in a reclined position is a strain that can cause neck pain.

Here I've taken the chairs outside and stacked them reversed, using their reclining angles to create something beneficial: an angled desk. The angle brings the reading material up to better align with Emma's eyes (though this angle is perhaps too slight).

Additionally, the desk forces Emma to sit on the edge of the bench rather than back in it. This allows her to bring her legs down, opening the body and straightening the spine.

DesigNote

Last spring I took a New Product Development class at UC Berkeley and worked on a team to design a new notebook. I recently revisited the project, making an updated prototype for a friend. Here's a video:

Here are some excerpts from our final report that explain the decisions and research behind the design of the DesigNotebook as well as elaborating on two additional digital pieces of the design:

We interviewed two dozen users in a broad range of categories--professionals, artists, designers, architects, and engineers. In analyzing our interviews, we found several core user needs. Breaking them down into categories using frameworks such as CCAQ and Use, Usability, and Meaning helped us hone in on the core issues beneath specific needs as well as helping us identify different types of needs.

Sustainable design is a large part of any designer's concerns. Particularly in the field of paper products, sustainability is key. We found that our DesigNote prototype was ideal as a paper product because of its modularity; often we found that users didn't finish their notebooks. With the DesigNote, this could potentially never be the case.

Making the final DesigNotebook prototype was a matter of detail design. Choosing materials and refining the binding system and overall construction were the main tasks. We mimicked a user’s paper selection, from watercolor to graph paper, to demonstrate the variety of usages our product would have. Adding tracing paper, for example, allowed us to demonstrate that a user could draw something in their notebook and then trace that image in a single notebook. Taking inspiration from Moleskine, we found a cover material similar to oilcloth to make the notebook feel valuable. 

Refining the removable binding system was a big challenge. Our original idea was to have a removable binding attached with velcro on the front and back of the notebook, but we found that the ends of the covers do not come together when you open the book; the pages bubble out instead of laying flat. We currently have this removable binding slip into some guides on the back cover so that the binding can slide, allowing the covers to come together. This solution still needs refining, but it is a major step forward.

The final concept is a suite of three products. The modular notebook concept was one of those products. Because the notebook, the DesigNotebook, is accordion-style, each page is connected to the next instead of a back binding. This allows the user to stretch all the pages out to view multiple parts of the notebook at once. We created a system to also allow users to remove or insert paper, making the notebook fully customizable and essentially everlasting. Because the binding is no longer needed except to hold the covers together, we can move it around so that the user can reorient the notebook and use the backs of the accordion-style pages. This solves a need of having multiple notebooks by putting them together, while still keeping them separate. 

We refined our hybrid solution into the DesigNote app, featuring a notebook tagging feature inspired by Microsoft Tag that easily crosses the analog to digital gap whilst supporting the existing culture. DesigNote End of Life archives notebooks while allowing users to view all of the tagged content in the context of their entire notebook. While not entirely dependent on one another, this suite of products works best together. The DesigNotebook has removable signatures that can be easily scanned (especially through a feed scanner), and having multiple areas of your notebook open at once allows users to access much of their tagged digital content with speed and ease. We felt that these products should be relatively independent, though, because the one thing that all of our users did was design in their own unique way.

The app and End of Life demos were developed as a series of Keynote presentation slides. Running through the slides demonstrates a user experience. Ian made an iPhone app demo with vector-based images in Photoshop. Betsy and Darren made the End of Life demo with Photoshop and Keynote, embedding videos and media to make it look like our scanned notebook pages were really displaying the tagged media. While we have not thought about the software architecture or how to actually make these programs, the “Wizard of Oz” prototype helps us not only demonstrate our concepts, but critique them to find ways of improving the products. Indeed, sharing our concepts with some of our interviewees prompted new questions about usage.

For more information and documentation shoot me an email.

Io art piece

I just finished a piece depicting the Greek naiad Io:

The story of Io, ala Wikipedia, is fairly interesting:

According to Ovid, one day, Zeus noticed the maiden and lusted after her. As Io tells her own story in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, she rejected his whispered nighttime advances until the oracles caused her own father to drive her out into the fields of Lerna. There, Zeus covered her with clouds to hide her from the eyes of his jealous wife, Hera, who nonetheless came to investigate. In a vain attempt to hide his crimes, Zeus turned himself into a white cloud and transformed Io into a beautiful white heifer. Hera was not fooled. She demanded the heifer as a present.

Hera tethered Io to the olive-tree in the temenos of her cult-site, the Heraion, and placed her in the charge of many-eyed Argus Panoptes to keep her separated from Zeus. Zeus commanded Hermes to kill Argus; Ovid added the detail that he lulled all hundred eyes to sleep. Hera then forced Io to wander the earth without rest, plagued by a gadfly (Οίστρος or oestrus: see etymology of "estrus" ) to sting her into madness. Io eventually crossed the path between the Propontis and the Black Sea, which thus acquired the name Bosporus (meaning ox passage), where she met Prometheus.

Prometheus had been chained on Mt. Caucasus by Zeus for teaching mankind how to make fire and tricking him into accepting the worse part of a sacrifice while the mortals kept the better part (meat); every day, a gianteagle fed on Prometheus' liver. Despite his agony, he comforted Io with the information that she would be restored to human form and become the ancestress of the greatest of all heroes, Heracles (Hercules). Io escaped across the Ionian Sea to Egypt, where she was restored to human form by Zeus. There, she gave birth to Zeus's son Epaphus, and a daughter as well, Keroessa. She later married Egyptian king Telegonus. Their grandson, Danaos, eventually returned to Greece with his fifty daughters (the Danaids), as recalled inAeschylus' play The Suppliants.

I did this piece in record time. It took maybe 10 hours to design, draw, and finish everything.

This project is part of a more broad interest in Greek artwork, so my source image is, of course, from Greek pottery:

There were three things that I was interested in appropriating for this piece: the cow, the repeating floral designs, and the foliage. I think a lot of people underestimate the power of classical drawing. Simply because a thing is, well, simple does not mean that it is any less great. I think that Greek and Egyptian drawing is actually iconic rather than merely simple. Any art historian could point out baroque or rococo paintings, but pretty much any westerner could point out ancient art like this.

Anyway, the cow is great. This is my quick rendering on the cow on paper (always start on paper):

I worked out the remainder of the details in illustrator. As practice soon confirmed my intuitions, illustrator is not the ideal vehicle for the drawn aesthetic of Greek pottery. That said, illustrator made some things particularly easy.

I wanted to work with floral patterns, and I also wanted to learn how to use the software's brush options. For each pattern I designed (carefully, over many a guide line) only a single repeating section and then imported that into the "pattern brush" options. I had some problems with it, but it all worked out. Again, one thing that this misses, though, is the drawn-aesthetic. That is, all my floral designs look the same and are without human error or variation. That's something I'll look to fix in the next piece I do.

I tried to counteract the precision of illustrator with some sloppiness and the use of the 1pt oval brush on my pen strokes. That helped a little I think.

The final bit I focused on were those little bushes around Io. I followed this tutorial on art brush creation to good effect.

My final illustrator image was cool, but it didn't really capture Io in the way that I wanted it to. I felt I could fix this through colorization and texture, two things in which Greek pottery techniques exhibits limitations.

My idea was to bring the blues and greens of pastures, rivers, and the sadness of Io in her cow form, into the piece with Photoshop.

I found some textures on the great, free website CG Textures and manipulated them in photoshop. I took an image of water and brought out its blues, adding greens and gradients too. I added cracked plaster textures using the Darken blend mode to give the image deep colors and age.

Because I made this picture for a smaller print, I created a more-readable image without the textures too: