uxmelina

I haven’t bought my own domain name, I don’t post on a daily basis, I prefer conversation over comments, I love my friends more then my followers, I don’t care about my page rank, I don’t live for the blog-o-sphere, I rarely check my blog stats, I choose human interaction over computer interaction, I may be separated by six degrees but connected closely to more then 6 people. This is me right now maybe not tomorrow…stay tuned.

I thought I should post that, since I’ve clearly been neglecting this “blog” since I’ve been busy with things in my “life-o-sphere”. Here are the highlights:

1. I got a job for the summer! I’m working as an Interaction Designer for VMware in Palo Alto, CA. I’m very excited about moving there!

2. The OLPC project is coming along nicely. I will post some stuff here soon.

3. The Disney project (and the OLPC project) has me bogged down learning flash, if you have any great links to tutorials please share.

4. Explorations, an event I help plan and organize with other 100 volunteers and 1200 visitors was a great success! The event invited the public to the University to encourage technical careers to kids in grade 6, 7, and 8!

This week I signed up for Twitter. It’s big in the US but not so much in Canada. I’ve added the RSS of my tweets at the side (I’m working on getting the blog application). In case you can’t get enough of me, feel free to “follow”. The whole concept is a bit odd, I’m still trying to figure it out, but it seems like fun times so far! They have an official blog that just talks about everything twitter, including this plant that will send you a tweet when it needs water!

How nice, if only my lone bamboo plant sitting on my desk had this technology…..

The main reason I started this blog was to write about the thing I LOVE the most in school, my design projects! In Systems Design the class gets pretty open ended design projects pretty early in the program. We are free to pick the problem, design a solution, build a prototype, etc. I am really excited about this term, because my team is a really strong group of people who are all very interested and skilled in user experience design.

So what’s the project? Well, we are very pumped to be entering Disney’s ImagiNation Design Competition. The competition encourages students or new grads from all around the world to design, build or create anything they think will enhance any of Disney’s many facets. This is a competition, therefore blogging about the design well before its submitted probably isn’t smart. The risk of reducing the “wow” when it’s finally presenting may not jive well with my other teammates. So, you won’t be hearing about this project until sometime after the March 7th deadline! My apologies. But fear not! We design other things in my program, including a software user interface for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. I will introduce that project and explain more in my next post!