Hard to believe but, yes it was exactly ten years ago this month that I ventured into the world of graduate school and interaction design at Carnegie Mellon. It was an incredible and life-altering move, forever shaping my approach to design, and providing a base of knowledge to draw from. I emerged from that program a far more self-reflective and critical designer overall, without question. <\/p>\n
And so, as it turns out, a fellow designer at my current client Netflix just left this week to enter the same program at CMU, pursuing a master’s in IxD. Her departure for CMU made me reflect upon, albeit nostalgically, about all that has changed, yet stayed the same since then. <\/p>\n
For instance, ten years ago…<\/p>\n
* There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no iPhone, no netbooks nor any “cloud apps” or “cloud computing”, etc.
\n* IM wasn’t that popular on campus; and few folks had cell phones.
\n* Cell phones had no cameras in them!
\n* No iPod! However Rio introduced a portable MP3 player which I bought for $250 with only 256 megs storage.
\n* There was no Adobe Creative Suite per se…it was all still separately released products and versions.
\n* Director (and lingo) was still king; Flash was rising fast to soon eclipse Director.
\n* Web graphics were all either GIF or JPEG, some animated GIFS too, and some “image maps” and “roll overs”. No transparent PNG’s yet.
\n* Web was very 1.0, no Ajax or popular rich interactive patterns yet.
\n* Remember “Shockwave plug-ins”? Ha!
\n* No Google! Well, it was just starting, but no Google Maps or GMail. Alta Vista was the popular search engine, with Lycos and Yahoo.
\n* Netscape Navigator 4 was battling Internet Explorer 5 in the “browser wars”; there was no Safari or Firefox or Chrome!
\n* Standards-based CSS\/html was just a blip on the radar, I recall.
\n* No Tivo I think
\n* Amazon sold books primarily and just started expanding to other items. Forget if there was Orbitz or Expedia back then? Hmm…
\n* DSL (and broadband) was just beginning really. Most people still had modems. (like me! I remember “dialing in” to CMU’s network from home)
\n* They were just rolling out “wi-fi” on CMU campus when I was there, 99-2000 year.
\n* Everyone (ie, the media) was freaking out over the infamous “Y2K” bug!
\n* WAP and WML were the “hot” ways of doing websites for a mobile device (like a Palm Pilot)
\n* Macs still ran OS 9 on Motorola chips. And Apple sold “Powerbooks” (I had one!)
\n* IBM still made Thinkpads. (I had one too!)
\n* I used Eudora and Pine\/telnet for email.
\n* Blogs? What are those?? :-)<\/p>\n
But regardless of technologies and digital expressions\/forms, the principles of designing for audience\/context\/activity remain in full effect, with evolving constraints that shape the multi-disciplinary conversation, towards meaningful embodiments that provoke positive emotional and productive responses. Who knows what shall emerge ten years hence? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hard to believe but, yes it was exactly ten years ago this month that I ventured into the world of graduate school and interaction design at Carnegie Mellon. It was an incredible and life-altering move, forever shaping my approach to design, and providing a base of knowledge to draw from. I emerged from that program … Continue reading “10 years ago…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}