Collaboration

New Release: Beatrice Learns to Dance

| Binaebi

BLTD_Cover_spread_bbp

It’s been a while! Things have been busy around here, switching jobs notwithstanding,  but I wanted to give a shout out that my new children’s book, a collaboration with Jorge Eduardo Sanclemente, is now available for purchase! You can read more about it at Bright Bird Press, in the press release, and at the Lulu product page. I’ll have a portfolio page up soon.

This project began as a short story I wrote back in November 2011. It was a cold evening, and I was in my home office listening to a Powerpuff Girls cassette tape, and a Fats Waller cassette tape I had bought at the Central Ohio Jazz Society. It was the perfect mix of happy, fun, bouncy music that sparked my child-imagination.  I jumped from my desk and busted out some solo Charleston moves, or pretended I was Beatrice and wriggled around like I was five.

I’ve been told Beatrice looks like me, and there might be a reason for that: I posed for her dance moves. During our lunch breaks (Jorge and I were co-workers at the time), I demonstrated different Charleston moves. Jorge did a fantastic job capturing the energy of the dance, and the infectious enthusiasm of Beatrice. His process began with drawing sketches in pencil, then scanning them into his computer for clean up and coloring in Photoshop. Aren’t you loving the watercolor style?

I couldn’t be more proud of this little project.

I’d suggest this book for readers aged 5 and older. 5-years-old children probably need help from a parent, guardian, or older sibling. 7-years-old children can probably handle this on their own.

We decided to publish on Lulu because they allow for split royalties… making for much easier taxes if this book takes off. Unfortunately, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Blurb, etc, don’t allow for split royalties so if you collaborate with someone, you have to pay out and hope everyone is honest with each other about that 50/50 split.

Gather Round for Story Time

| Binaebi

I mentioned I’m working on a storybook with my coworker, Jorge, and that I would share a teaser with you. Today is that day! For some background, back in August 2011 I was talking to Jorge about my collaboration with Charlene McBride on the Sketchnote Field Guide. He mentioned he has always wanted to illustrate a book, and that we should work on a project together if I was interested.

Well, of course I was interested! I promised Jorge we would start the storybook when I was wrapping up the sketchnote collaboration. We decided we wanted the book to be for ages 5 – 7, which according to the how-to books, meant no more than 1000 words for the written story.

It is a story about Beatrice, a little robot who is good at learning all sorts of things but can’t figure out how to learn how to dance. We are calling it Beatrice’s Possible Impossible. I emailed the story to Jorge, and he was so inspired he emailed the sketches I’m sharing below. Aren’t they ADORABLE?




And as a teaser for the prose…

Beatrice was proud of all the things she could do now that she couldn’t do before. But one day, she saw her next door neighbor, Melvin, do something she still didn’t know how to do… dance!

“Mom,” Beatrice said at breakfast the next morning, “I’m going to learn how to dance.”

“That sounds like a fun thing to learn! How are you going to learn how to dance?” Beatrice’s mom asked.

“I found a book,” Beatrice said, holding it up so her mom could see it. “I’m going to read how.”

Really excited to see this project move forward!

Sketchnotes Field Guide available now!

| Binaebi

Sketchnotes Field GuideHello friends!

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings…”

Ok not really. I’m not talking about shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages, or kings. Nope, I’m talking about sketchnotes. Very excited to announce the Sketchnotes Field Guide is now available for purchase!

We have a print version reasonably priced at under $7, and the PDF version is free this first week in January. I hope to sync the two editions together so if you order the print edition, you automatically get a free PDF, but this is something I’m working out with the distributor.

I want to thank my collaborator, Charlene McBride, for making this project an absolute blast. Huge thanks to everyone who supported this book in one form or another (in no order whatsoever)…

Derren Hermann, Erin McCain, Erik Stolterman, MJ Broadbent, Denise Philipsen, Heiko Maiwand, Eugene Siew, Adrienne Dye, Stefani Bachetti, Anjana Thirumalai, Amanda Lyons, Micah Gideon Modell, Boon Sheridan, Lydia Whitehead, Jen Myers, Shirley Tobias, Lynn Dombrowski, Mike Rohde, Austin Toombs, Vidya Palaniswamy, Grant Carlile, Amantha Lott, Jingyu Wu, Jeremy White, Shay-Jahen Merritte, Christian Long, Brad Nunnally, and Brien Tate.

Now go forth! Empower yourself and others to sketchnote just in time for conference season!

Living the Dream

| Binaebi

Forgive the radio silence!

I’ve titled this post “Living the Dream” because I think it’s important to note that even though I love being a user experience designer, it was never my dream to become one. Not my childhood dream, anyway.

Honestly, I’m not sure any child dreams of becoming a translator, as it were. A professional who facilitates projects via their soft skills and documentation to ensure features within a holistic system benefit and hopefully delight customers.

My childhood dream was to be a writer. I have wanted to write books for as long as I can remember.

  1. Historical fiction books
  2. Picture books
  3. How to books.

I wanted to create content and have people read it, enjoy it, and feel inspired to make something themselves. As of last Friday, I can now say that I am in the process of doing all three: children’s book, historical fiction, and how-to. I am living my dream.

I keep saying it because I want to remind myself. I am living my dream. How many people can say that?

Before I talk about the new project, first let’s get you updated on the project I last blogged about.

The How-To Book

The Sketchnote field guide book is coming along really well! The beta readers are liking the context and structure; they have great feedback and I’m feeling really encouraged about this project. I have to say, without Charlene McBride’s collaboration, this project wouldn’t be nearly as strong as it is. The survey people filled out for me back in August is what brought Charlene to me, and helped us focus the book.

I’m so excited to share it with people! It will definitely be on Lulu (they allow royalty splitting), and maybe on Amazon.com. We still need to figure that out. Keep your eyes peeled, though. We’re hoping to release it in January, just in time for conference season.

The Historical Fiction Book

Under my historical fiction pen name, I started a book four times before I felt like it was something worth writing. This fourth start has around 24k words, which is about 30% of the final word count. I’ve stopped writing because I realized I needed more research… ergo me dragging ten books home from the library about Ohio and the Civil War.

The Storybook

The new project I keep hinting at is a children’s storybook. I’ve loved the process of checking out thirty children’s books at a time, consuming them at a leisurely pace and asking 6yr old Binaebi what she liked about each one. I’ve loved reading the how-to-write for children books, learning the nuances between picture books and storybooks, the intentions of each, the intended age groups, and the parents that buy books for their children.

I’ve loved chatting about the project with my illustrator and collaborator,  who suggested we write about robots (because he loves them). I’ve felt inspired by his supportive enthusiasm when I insisted it be about a girl robot, and that it have something to do with dancing (because we both love dancing). The main character’s name is Beatrice, and that is about all I’m willing to share at this point. Maybe later I’ll leak some the sketches my collaborator has been sending me. They’re so adorable.

Anyway, at the risk of sounding like a broken record (does that idiom even apply anymore?), I just wanted to share that I’m living my dream. Why? I don’t know. I guess in the hopes that you might feel inspired to do something tonight or tomorrow that gets you one step closer to living your dream.

Artifact Analysis at Rate My Steampunk!

| Binaebi

I do, in fact, have 75% of an artifact analysis (a detailed analysis) waiting in the wings. In the meantime, I’ve dumped the other artifacts I’d like to study into a public blog.

If you have some free time, help me categorize and rate the Steampunk artifacts at Rate My Steampunk!.

I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for you. I’ve put up a rating system, and I’ve installed a plugin so you can use your existing social networking usernames.

Help me, oh mighty internet addicts. You’re my only hope.

Breakdown and Breakthrough

| Binaebi

So tonight in capstone class we discussed the content of our sketches. Because my capstone is a research capstone, I based my sketches around my design framework. Essentially, I want to make a snazzy infographic that makes people point at my framework and say, “Yes. Definitely. Yes.”

Before I went to capstone class tonight, my framework for designers who want to create artifacts that empower the user to appropriate was as follows…

  1. The artifact should allow users to capitalize on their existing knowledge
  2. The user should be able to interpret the artifact’s function
  3. The user should be able to alter the artifact’s interaction
  4. The user should be able to adapt the artifact’s aesthetics
  5. The user should be able to explore their creative freedom

My sketches tonight were working around the relationships between points 1-5. For instance, I thought 1 and 5 are the most important, because this is where the user makes the decision to (and how to) appropriate an artifact. After speaking with Jay, Heiko, Joe Y, and Thalith, however, I realized that this entire “framework” is from the end-user’s perspective, rather than for my user, which is a designer who wants to make an artifact that suggests it can be appropriated.

It’s late and I’m very tired from the long day, otherwise I would have uploaded photos of my sketchbook to show you what I mean. Suffice it to say that

  1. Tonight’s design session helped immensely and
  2. I’ll upload the images later and also,
  3. It’s always best to have three items or more in a list because it feels right.

Speaking with these guys showed me a glaring problem with my “framework,” namely, that it might not be a design framework at all. It might be a design model, or a set of design guidelines. I wasn’t keeping my user group in mind, but my user group’s user group. If that makes sense. So with this in mind, I’ve changed my “framework” to the following.*

DESIGNER    -> creates artifact that
 empowers
USER to     -> interpret, alter, adapt artifact

I don’t know if this is a design framework, or a design guideline, or a design model. I do know that I feel like it’s much closer to what I want to say than I have previously, which is good. Tomorrow morning, I have my first user interview, which I’m sure will alter this… thing… again. In the meantime, I’ll keep sketching about the relationship between these verbs until I come up with something I can present.

I like to think this session tonight was my first pilot study on whether this design framework would actually work for designers. I learned that it definitely wouldn’t, because everyone was confused about how the designer was supposed to know how to “capitalize” on the user’s “existing knowledge.” So it’s back to the drawing board for this girl, and boy, is she excited to see what comes out next!

*This really would look better as a sketch, but I’m far too tired, as mentioned above.

Light-bulb Moments

| Binaebi

Things have been pretty hectic around here, but somehow I still manage to make progress on my capstone. I love having conversations with the people in my program because the most interesting points come up.

Creativity isn’t consistent

I had lunch with Chad Camara one day, and we got into this conversation about creativity. He mentioned that even though we are both creative, he sees our creativity as being very different. Mainly, that mine is extremely personal. I write stories that reflect some deep belief or question that I have. I paint, draw, dance, sing, sketchnote, and create objects from clay.

I write this because it seems that my intrinsically personal creativity is a huge part of my self-perception and identity. If I can’t be creative, I feel lost. In the same way, if I can’t appropriate something into my world so that it feels personal to me, I don’t care about it. So that’s food for thought.

Getting push-back

I had a design session with my roommate, Lynn, and she had the brilliant idea of looking at how people look at objects. She made the point that I see everything as a potential building material to make something else… which she simply doesn’t do.

Nov 5, 2009: Lynn Dombrowski suggests that I do a design exercise where I take people to Goodwill, etc, and ask people what they would do with the objects they find. Will they see built/”finished” materials as components of new projects?

It has since occurred to me that not only do I learn from what they choose, but also what they don’t choose. As in, what do I see as building materials, and why don’t they see them that way?

Nov 8, 2009: Rachel Bolton asks me questions that stump me, only because all my information is stuffed somewhere in an inaccessible part of my brain. Her questions, however, start a subtle thought-chain which eventually lead me to my light bulb moment.

  1. What makes the steampunk appropriation unique… what are the
    specific implications for HCI?
  2. What makes the creative/identity rewards of appropriation
    (specifically steampunk?) different from other identity-forming
    endeavors like sports?  Is it the process, the materials, the people
    that are attracted to it?

Because I find I have difficulty answering these questions, I begin to wonder if it’s so smart to be studying steampunk in the first place. I love the topic, I find it fascinating, but really, what does it mean for HCI? I asked for push-back from Rachel, and she gave it to me, and I had no answer. Sigh.

Class Exercise

On Tuesday, Nov 10, we were required to bring our sketches in for discussion in small groups. Because I’m doing a research capstone, I was a bit stumped. I’m not sketching, at least not in the visual sense. So I brought in my pseudo-affinity diagram, pictured below.

Poster of Themes and Questions

So I threw it up on the wall with all the other sketches.

Sketching Exercise

Sketching Exercise

During this exercise, we had groups of four-to-five students. We walked to our different sketches and discussed the purpose of them, etc. My group was awesome with feedback. CJ Page admitted that he doesn’t appropriate anything at all, which just boggles my mind. I appropriate almost everything that comes into my life, in some form or another. It’s my way of engaging with the world. Which struck me as a worrying point while CJ spoke.

Light-bulb moment

That night after capstone, I climbed into bed with a frown. Something was off, I realized, in how I was approaching this entire research project. It wasn’t until about eleven at night that I had my epiphany.

You see, I had a dream about capstone. Specifically, a dream in which I realized my case study group (steampunks) don’t have to be my target user group. At first, I stayed in bed, repeating that mantra to myself: “Case study doesn’t equal target user.” I quickly became paranoid that I would forget the epiphany by morning’s light. So I grabbed my whiteboard markers and attacked my unsuspecting whiteboard for about two hours.

Sketching Exercise

I’m feeling pretty good about this direction. I feel like I have an idea of how I can apply the literature and my own experiences, compare them to the experiences of people who don’t do such things, and see what we can learn. Now if I could only find the time… and get some sleep!

What do I mean by Appropriation?

| Binaebi

This is a great question that was brought up by Nate Husted during an impromptu design session over Thai food at lunch.

(By the way, while Siam House on 4th in Bloomington is pretty good, I’m still partial to Esan Thai’s chicken fried rice. Thai curries just don’t do it for me the way Indian curries do. Yum.)

Back to business.

“What do you mean when you say appropriation?” Nate asked me as we walked to Siam House. It was drizzling, and cold. A miserable day, actually, where it wasn’t wet enough to open my umbrella, yet, it was misty enough that my glasses were rendered useless. His question was simple. So simple, that I was, for a moment, dumbfounded that I hadn’t thought to define my understanding of appropriation yet.

This isn’t to say that I hadn’t thought about it a lot, I had. I’ve read almost every paper in the ACM library on appropriation, so I have a working knowledge of how other HCI/tech researchers are approaching the appropriation research/design space. What about the general public? When they want to understand what it means to appropriate something, where do they turn?

  • Free Dictionary: (1) To take for one’s own use, esp illegally or without permission. (2) (Economics, Accounting & Finance / Banking & Finance) To put aside (funds, etc.) for a particular purpose or person.
  • Wikipedia: Appropriation is the act of taking possession of or assigning purpose to properties or ideas and is important in many topics.
  • Wiktionary: v (1) To make suitable; to suit. — William Paley. (2) To take to one’s self in exclusion of others; to claim or use as by an exclusive right. (3) To set apart for, or assign to, a particular person or use, in exclusion of all others. (4) To annex, as a benefice, to a spiritual corporation, as its property. –Blackstone.
  • Dictionary.com: adj (1) Suitable or fitting for a particular purpose, person, occasion, etc. (2) Belonging to or peculiar to a person. v (3) To set apart, authorize, or legislate for some specific purpose or use. (4) To take to or for oneself; take possession of. (5) To take without permission or consent; seize; expropriate. (6) To steal, esp. to commit petty theft.
  • Merriam-Webster: (1) To take exclusive possession of : annex. (2) To set apart for or assign to a particular purpose or use. (3) To take or make use of without authority or right.
  • Oxford English Dictionary: (1) To make (a thing) the private property of any one, to make it over to him as his own; to set apart. (2) Const. to oneself: = next. (3) Hence ellipt. To take possession of for one’s own, to take to oneself. (4) Eccl. To annex (a benefice) to some religious corporation, as its property. (5) To allot, annex, or attach a thing to another as an appendage. Obs. (6) To devote, set apart, or assign to a special purpose or use. Const. to, for. (7) To assign or attribute as properly pertaining to; to attribute specially or exclusively. arch. (8) To make, or select as, appropriate or suitable to; to suit. arch. (9) To make proper, to fashion suitably. (So Fr. approprier.) Obs.

So that’s a pretty good start, right? This, of course, is all impromptu research I did after Nate’s question sparked genuine worry that I wasn’t doing my job as a researcher. How could I possibly attempt to understand why people appropriate, without having a general definition of appropriation in the first place?

My answer to Nate went roughly like this:

“Well, I’ve read a lot about what the ACM community thinks about appropriation, so I guess I could talk about that. But to me, appropriation is when you take something, whether be a finished product or simple materials, and adapt them to fit you. You engage the artifact, whatever it is, and bring it into your lifeworld, as it were.

“Example… okay, so a ton of people have an iPhone, right? But no two iPhones are exactly alike, if you think about the apps that people download. Or the cases they buy. Or the other little personalizations and customizations that make your iPhone yours, and someone else’s iPhone theirs.”

“So appropriation is personal customization?” Nate asked.

“Yes, to me anyway. It’s making the object personal to you. But that’s just appropriation. I think my topic, my subdomain of appropriation, is actually about the do-it-yourself, creative aspects of customization and personalization. The extreme end of appropriation, where you engage the artifact to the point of using your creative talents to make it your own. What drives people to do that? Why do I do that?”

“So steampunk fits in…?”

“Because steampunks are all about doing it themselves. They embrace their creativity and engage the objects around them. They are an extreme of the appropriation spectrum. They are my people.”

So… okay. What’s the moral of the story? I’m sure you’re wondering. Well, the fact is this is why it’s so great to talk to people about my capstone. The fact that everyone seems interested, asking great questions… it’s invigorating. So invigorating that even though I was completely ready to sleep, having been laying in bed for an hour, I couldn’t sleep. Why? Because I kept thinking, I need to write down my thoughts on appropriation before I fall asleep and they drift away. So here I am, writing this entry at 12:30 AM EST on a Saturday night, after having literally traveled across the country, starting my day at 3 AM PST (6 AM EST, to be fair). I spent twelve hours traveling, and returned to Bloomington to partake in an excellent Diwali celebration.

I should be exhausted. I should be unbelievably cranky.

I’m sure I will be when I wake. But hey, let’s be completely honest here… What’s another few hours of late night, bloodshot cogitation to a seasoned graduate student, anyway?

Analogy for Affinity Diagramming

| Binaebi

Yesterday while at work I was copying insights from interviews onto Post-its for an affinity diagram. The undergrad intern working with us walked past, asking what I was doing.

“Prepping for an affinity diagram,” I said with great aplomb.

Of course, she had no idea what I was talking about. I explained that an affinity diagram is where you write user-generated comments, thoughts, and opinions onto Post-its. Then you take your pile of Post-its and group them based on topics. Topics with the most Post-its are high-interest, etc. This helps you determine what the person who your design is meant for finds most interesting, versus what you the designer might find most interesting.

The reason I’m talking about this is the analogy the undergrad intern used to understand the concept.

“So it’s like one of those things where the words are bigger to show more people have commented?”

Yes. That’s exactly what an affinity diagram is. An analog tag cloud. I love it.