Wikipedia on sound + interaction design:

Sonic interaction design is the study and exploitation of sound as one of the principal channels conveying information, meaning, and aesthetic/emotional qualities in interactive contexts[1][2]. Sonic interaction design is at the intersection of interaction design and sound and music computing. If interaction design is about designing objects people interact with, and such interactions are facilitated by computational means, in Sonic Interaction Design sound is mediating interaction either as a display of processes or as an input medium.

For our next round of AIGA Breakthroughs webinars, I’ve received enthusiastic approval to run a segment on emotional design. Which has me thinking about sound. In my own user experiences, I’ve had a few emotionally-rich sonic interactions lately:

First, I had to reinstall the OS on my iPhone recently, consequently downloading some new tones. In the iTunes store, there’s an R2D2 “happy” tone. I set it as my default text tone. Every time it goes off, I smile, in spite of myself at times. That is good emotional design.

Second, I have a friend at Apple in San Francisco. I used to see him everyday when we worked together at NPR, but over the past couple of years, my interactions with him are exclusively pixelated type on a screen travelling 3,000 miles over Instagram or IM. During my recent haitus in Seattle, however, I talked to him over the phone for the first time in a while. When I hung up, I was struck by how very nice it was to hear his voice. Tone, pitch and inflection make a conversation so much richer. That is good emotional design.

Third, there is a new baby in my life, inspiring me back in time to resurrect wonderful Caldecott/Newbery/literary things like Meryl Streep and George Winston narrating The Velveteen Rabbit, a staple of Seth and Michaela’s childhood. This is one of the most beautiful audio experiences I have ever encountered. Soothing, calming, zen. That is good emotional design.

Bria. Photo by Callie Neylan, March 23, 2012.

Sugar Darling, you are my sunshine. No,
moonshine. Intoxicant, swooning.

Down where the wild things grow and the
slit comes to life with a flower of flesh and bones and innocence

Lost when he found you, lost when he stole you. Detested he is but
loved you will always be.

Sugar. Darling. Dolce. Sweet and tempered with
lavender bitters.

Je t’aime mon ange ma douce ma jolie fille.

A poster explaining the six positions of the fetal head as it moves through the birth canal. Designed by Callie Neylan, March 10, 2012.

AskNature.org is an online source for biomimicry inspiration, a place “where biology and design cross-pollinate, so bio-inspired breakthroughs can be born.”

Speaking of births, there’s an impending birth in my family, one that could happen any day now (no, it’s not me. I AM NOT PREGNANT). There was also a birth in my family yesterday, but on a yesterday 25 years ago. So, childbirth and pregnancy and uteri are on the brain. So much so that I designed a poster around the topic for The Hello Poster Show, given that the theme this time around is “Forces of Nature”. What better example of a force of nature to draw from, really? Especially when considering the wonder of the female body when expulsing a baby, as relayed in this biomimicry inspiration from AskNature.org.

Similarly, the uterus of female mammals must expand and contract with gestation and birth, often an order of magnitude (ten-fold). The hooped fibers of chitin in the locust are paralleled in the interior circular muscle fibers of the uterus. Of the three layers of the uterus, the central myometrial layer is responsible for the expansion and contraction of the uterus. It is composed of connective tissue, mainly smooth muscle fibers with an external layer laid longitudinally and an internal layer laid circularly at the base which then spirals in both directions around the uterine body (which might even be a logarithmic spiral…).

AMAZING. Then, this:

The lessons from these ‘hooped’ chitin fibers and spiral muscle fibers could be incorporated into a polymer packaging material, thereby allowing for expansion and contraction of the packaging depending on the size of its contents. The result of packing multiple items into a shipping case would be the absolute minimization of air space between objects created by the packaging alone. Additionally, the same packaging product could be specified for a large variety of object sizes, i.e. the bag holding the baby shoe would be the same SKU as the one holding the basketball shoe or the soccer ball.” (Biomimicry Guild unpublished report)

Design is everything. Everything is design. Hurry up, Little Bria. We can’t wait to meet you!

Made by Hand / No 3 The Beekeeper. Via Made by Hand on Vimeo.

First I wanted chickens. Now I want bees. I don’t have either yet, but…maybe this summer. Will and I have been learning about wonderful things in our research on sustainable agriculture. Things about biodynamic farming, about the reasons behind different colored chicken eggs, and about how farming is a lot of long, hard work.

I also had my interest in beekeeping piqued after an interview with Denzel Mitchell of Five Seeds Farm. We drove half an hour to his farm in upstate Maryland, talking for a while at a long, stately wooden table in a light-bathed room. Then we meandered a mile or so down the road to his fields: me, Will, Denzel and his delightful daughter, followed by the long February sun. Even if you’re not a country person, you would have loved it out there. I just know it.

Denzel runs an apiary as part of his urban farming and my interest in bees was piqued. So I did a little research and came across the beautifully shot video above, and this article in The Guardian. In case you didn’t know it, bees are in trouble. But there’s hope that maybe, just maybe, cities can help save them.

I heard David Simon speak at MICA tonight. “To end the War On Drugs,” he said, “nullify the jury“. That is all.

From Mapping Home: Learning a new city, remembering the old. By Aleksandar Hemon

I returned to places I had known my whole life in order to capture details that had been blurred by excessive familiarity. I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and its physiognomies. I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseperable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul. Physically and metaphysically, I was placed.

I’ve befriended many cities in my life, both large and small. Here’s to the more significant ones and how they’ve shaped me, for better or for worse.

Durango, Colorado; 1974. I learned that life goes on, even when people you love don’t. Snow and mountains are beautiful.

Denver, Colorado; 1979. I learned that roller coasters are therapeutic and that being there in spirit will just have to do.

Albuquerque, New Mexico; 1988. I learned that there’s nothing like cherry malts in a desert summer. A mother’s love cuts while it caresses and sisters are to cherish.

Seattle, Washington; 1995. Big, urban cities aren’t that scary. Rather, they’re like beautiful boys you fall in love and have affairs with. Cities are like people.

Aix-en-Provence, France; 1996. I learned that people are the same where ever you go. And that lavender fields smell good.

New York, New York; 1998. I learned that the world fascinates me. I can’t get enough of it.

Rome, Italy; 2005. I learned to never back down. And to drink grappa before noon at least once in your life.

Washington, DC; 2008. The city is an interface. I learned that Margaret Mead was right when she said: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Baltimore, MD; 2010. I learned that broken cities beget broken people beget broken cities. And that the East Coast hardwood forests are my favorite. Warm velvet night, seduce me.

Dublin, Ireland; 2012. I fell in love with the word “diaspora”. And discovered that one can come home to a place where one has never been.

All images are screenshots taken from Google Earth queries.

Looking down Dame Street toward Trinity College. Dublin, Ireland. Photo by Callie Neylan, February 2012.

What I love about cities is everything. What I love about traveling to other cities is how it expands and challenges ones mental models. As Charlie Munger expounds, having multiple mental models is a necessity for wisdom:

Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does…

It’s like the old saying, ”To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple models. And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

While visiting Dublin, I compiled a list of mental models challenged while there: cars driving on the wrong side of the road, leaving me shocked when seeing there was noone in the driver’s seat and causing near fatal steps into crosswalks when I failed to look in the relevant direction toward oncoming traffic; bathrooms with tiny, water-saving toilets and no handicapped stalls; bilingual signage, Irish then English; pubs every half block – there’s really no equivalent in Baltimore, but in Seattle, it’s coffee shops; language and dialect – while the Baltimore accent grates and annoys, I’d assume an Irish one in a heartbeat; branding and visual communication design – for me, looking at candy aisles and respective packaging in convenience stores is a litmus test for the visual culture of a given place; currency – the Euro is so much more beautiful than the dollar; flora and fauna – plant life definitely speaks volumes about a city, providing geographical reference via sight, texture, and smell. And lastly, the people. As a general populace, Americans originating from the East Coast of the United States are neither congenial nor happy. The Irish, jolly and optimistic, were a cheery breath of fresh air.

Interestingly, many of these challenged mental models, while on the one hand so different, are simultaneously, fundamentally unchanged from the ones on which I base my American existence. Which attests to the humanness that we all share. We are all so different on many levels, and yet so exactly the same.

But in these differences lies the power of the subtle, slight, shift. Which, when multiplied over instances and time, can produce profound changes in our thinking and the ways in which we perceive and respond to the world.

Fields near the Cliffs of Moher. County Clare, Ireland. Photo by Callie Neylan, February 6, 2012.

My maternal grandfather’s name was Frederick Leslie Leopold Neylan. O’Neylan before he emigrated to the US from the Emerald Isle. I don’t know why he left or exactly when, but being in Ireland for the first time, seeing red-haired, pale-skinned, fair-eyed people like myself, was a comforting experience.

My mother was adopted. Frederick was her biological father. My oldest brother, Seth, was also adopted. From an orphanage in Dublin. One of my sisters once told me that my mother chose baby Seth because his biological mother also bore the Neylan surname.

In light of its recent hard economic times, Ireland wants the Irish back. Quoting In Tough Times, Irish Call Their Diaspora via the New York Times:

The visitors came at the invitation of Ireland Reaching Out, an organization that just put on its first Week of Welcomes after a year spent tracking down the descendants of Galway exiles and preparing for their return.

“The project is based on a very simple idea: Instead of waiting for people of Irish heritage to trace their roots, we go the other way,” said Mike Feerick, who has been leading the charge to rekindle ties between the Irish and their diaspora.

“The people who left Ireland were in some sense the best part of us,” said Stephen Kinsella, an economist at the University of Limerick. “They were the most dynamic, the most ambitious, the most willing to succeed, and we did not give them the conditions where they could succeed.”

I love you, Ireland. You’re a hearty, jolly, beautiful old country – so verdant, so green. I’ll be back.

Wayfinding signage at the Dublin Airport. Photo by Callie Neylan, January 2012.

After my first day in Ireland, I’ve decided that the Irish government appreciates good typography. Maybe it’s because they’re part of the EU? It seems that all European typography is simply better somehow….

Inspired by the beautiful signage at the Dublin International Aiport (designed by BullSigns), I happened upon this document from the IIID (International Institute for Information Design): Information Design / Core Competencies: What information designers know and can do

Noting specifically this passage on why information designers are important:

It is the same with information as it is with construction materials: for efficient design and production one requires purpose-led concepts and plans. It’s not enough just to have printing presses and “information highways” in order to create usable information, the same as construction equipment and building cranes cannot alone create usable human spaces. For optimal information creation one requires information designers the same way architects are required to create optimal living and working spaces.

and then this on understanding your subject matter and what it means to your user:

The first stage of every information design project requires the designer to unlock – with an open mind and open eyes – the information to be designed. The warning applies: If you don‘t understand it, don‘t design it.

This is a great primer on information design, articulating succinctly ways in which information design has much in common with interaction design. Points I discussed with Angela Shen-Hsieh in the AIGA Breakthroughs webinar on designing with data a few months ago. Technically, data visualization and information design are not the same thing, but they both require a human-centered design approach.

I also found this great app from the Dutch design firm Mijksenaar, on the “99 do’s and don’ts of wayfinding”. Their philosophies and approach to designing information listed on their website are also worth reading.

Multicultural typographic interpretations of the 2011 Icograda Design Education Manifesto.

In her essay “Relevance In a Complex World” for the 2011 Icograda Design Education Manifesto, Meredith Davis speaks about agility and resilience in education systems, imploring design educators to embrace change, flexibility, and modularity:

Platforms for resilience: Creating flexibility and resilience among system failures

This trend acknowledges the instability and uncertainty of today’s world and warns that methods that resist change will not succeed. The authors of the forecast call for lightweight, modular educational infrastructures that can support the wellbeing of learners and learning agents. In recent decades, design schools have added content to full programmes of study in a curriculum-by-accrual attempt to respond to new practices and technologies. Unwilling to sacrifice previously valued concepts, skills and curricular structures, the organisational logic of these curricula became less apparent and infrastructures failed under the burden of having too much to teach in too little time. The fixed expertise of faculty members in a constantly changing field where new knowledge and skills are required and the growing diversity of learning expectations for college students illuminate hindrances in older curricula. There are structural barriers to the interdisciplinary work that is demanded by complex problems. Thus, design educators must develop flexible curricular structures that can respond quickly to changing times.

As someone who has, for her entire 12-year design career, had one foot in industry and the other in academia and is therefore keenly aware of the differences in speed and response to change between the academic and business worlds, I see firsthand this “curriculum-by-accrual” attempt at programme modification and cringe. It is not unlike adding features to a bloated operating system, trying to fix what’s broken by adding more of the same. It won’t work, especially while there exist design faculty who resist all things technical and digital, clinging to outdated, irrelevant methodologies, teaching processes, and print-based artifacts. The Bauhaus and Swiss Style were (are!) great, and the design fundamentals and philosophies they codified and spread remain as invaluable as ever. But the very essence of the work that Gropius, van der Rohe, Bayer, Kandinsky, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Armin Hoffman and other founding members of these schools of thought did was in response to seismic shifts in the technology and culture of their time. They were responding to a zeitgeist. Embracing it. Inhaling it. Swallowing it. Consuming it! These movements were a response to the world we live in, not an excuse to hide in an ivory tower away from it.

Our zeitgeist is very different than the one of the Bauhaus – wow, almost 100 years ago – one hundred years! Or 50 years, 20 years, even five years. As a freshman full-time academic, I scratch my head and wonder: why are we still using an educational interface that barely works anymore? Why are digital educational components considered course add-ons and “special topics” as it were, to stale design curricula focused on print, when pixels, not paper, are the default output. When gestures, not pencils, are how we input information. Design education, like a bloated operating system, is ripe for deconstruction, reconsideration, and reassembly to reflect the revolutionary zeitgeist of our own time. We owe it to ourselves and the students we teach to consume it just as passionately, reflecting that consumption in our design methodologies and philosophies.

That’s what Gropius would do.