Design for Mobility
This semester, I'm working on a team project for Design Studio. Called miLife, it revolves around designing a mobile PC.My team has a representative from each of the graduate programs here in the School of Design: Interaction Design, Communication Planning and Information Design, and Product Development. It feels like a good mix. We've set up a weblog to track the progress of our research and design--which is where most of my energies have been directed lately.
Since we're required to, we've named our team. After casting about for an idea that at all distinguishes us from the other teams, we settled on m151. It's the sum of the course codes from our respective disciplines (we're the only team with a Masters of Product Development grad). Check out the rest of the teams here.
At the end of the semester, two of the four teams will fly out to Redmond, Washington to present our concepts to Microsoft, who's sponsoring the project. I'm conflicted about this for a couple reasons. First of all, I'm not wild about being required to work for Microsoft, so I'm working through some cognitive dissonance. More importantly though, the competition has established a barely perceivable "us against them" mentality that I'm afraid will start to chip away at the nascent community that developed last semester. I guess time will tell how grounded in reality either of these qualms turn out to be.
Posted February 8, 2004
CMU Grad Studio