Well hello. It’s been a while, but my hands have not been idle. I’ve been joined frequent collaborator Tristan Cooke at his design blog Humans in Design, and I’ve rearranged this site, which now exist both as under its old url, irvinenelson.com and now as tomnelson.co — that’s right, .com with no m.
The Humans in Design stuff I’ve been working on is really great. Check out this mortgage statement redesign we did:
How can we help doctors wash their hands more often? from Thomas Nelson on Vimeo.
My friend Tristan and I are going to be working more under the moniker Humans in Design. Tristan’s done a great job building Humans in Design as a blog and Twitter presence, and I’m happy to join him there.
For this video, we looked at how we might help doctors remember to wash their hands frequently. We used a Purple Path Behavior model from Behaviorwizard.org to guide our design process. Put simply, we believe that doctors just need better, more personal reminders to wash frequently. Let us know what you think by emailing humansindesign[at]gmail.com.
Globemasters from Thomas Nelson on Vimeo.
I worked on this project with two other University of Queensland masters’ students, Mike Brand and Dave Harper. It’s an exercise ball mounted in an old Ikea table with an old trackball at the bottom. Users physically move the ball to manipulate the display. When they stop, the system calls information from the CIA World Factbook and Flickr and places it on the surface around the ball.
It was fascinating to see people interact with our project when we first displayed it at The Edge last week. People approached the globe expecting a multitouch or a gesture-based input. Users were excited when they discovered the tactile feedback created by physically moving the ball. Some users immediately moved the globe to their home country; others looked for the smallest country they could find.
My friend (and frequent collaborator on other projects) Tristan wrote something very perceptive about why this globe has a strong element of fun and playfulness on his blog:
You’d very quickly start to understand countries because rather than memorising something that is flat you explore something that is round.
We’ve been very pleased with the response to this project; keep watching for further updates.
I am enrolled in a course that teaches 3D design. I have to admit, I am not terribly interested in 3D design — unless you’re working on a very high level, output always looks a little too plastic. I usually feel like if there’s something I want a picture of, I can photograph it or draw it on paper or in Illustrator. But this course is required for the degree, so I have to ignore my negativity and try to learn at least a little about these damn programs.
Right now I’m supposed to be learning 3D Studio Max, a program I used a little bit as an undergraduate in 2004. Back then, it was available on Macs and PCs, but it’s since been bought by AutoDesk and become a Windows-only software. I haven’t bothered installing Windows, VMWare, and 3DS Max on my MacBook Pro yet, but this afternoon I started playing around in MudBox, another AutoDesk software that is cult-of-Mac friendly. I made the wrinkly old man on the right, since as with drawing, aged masculine features are the easiest for me. Mudbox is a neat program — it works using additive and subtractive brushes and it runs quite fast. It took a little getting used to, but overall I am liking the software better than I thought I would. It makes me want a 3D printer. Next steps: hair and open eyes.
For the last several months, I’ve had the privledge of working with a smart guy named Tristan Cooke, a Ph.D. student studying human factors and mine safety. Tristan found a fascinating crowdsource design challenge asking participants to develop methods to reduce maternal mortality in poor countries using mobile technology. Its sponsors are OpenIDEO, Nokia, and Oxfam.
Tristan did some great research and found solid numbers about the actual causes of maternal mortality and the mobile technologies that are already common in the target countries.
Together we came up with the idea for three connected media that would reach women of any literacy level, and could be delivered to even the most basic mobile phone. A diagramatic flip book would show women important health skills; a trusted voice (we called her Mother Mita) would walk women through childbirth with a pre-recorded voice call; SMS messages would keep women in contact with health information in the pivotal days following childbirth.
I’m proud of our idea, and we got good feedback from other contributors to the project. Yesterday, our idea was selected as one of 20 finalists to be refined and considered for implementation. Check it out and let us know what you think!
I had never gone on vacation alone before. Every trip had been with someone or to visit someone. I even moved to another country completely alone, but had never checked into a hotel without family or friends. But I needed a break and a change of scenery, and I had to remind myself that solitude is noe excuse for inaction.
So I booked myself a plane ticket and a hotel room in Melbourne, Australia’s cultural capital. It’s a city unlike any other I’ve ever visited. It’s got a great visual texture with many buildings from the guilded age through the interwar period still standing, and even housing thriving businesses. Each turn down an arcade or a laneway felt like turning up the magnification on a microscope.
I wandered the streets for hours, just me and my headphones. It was a challenging experiment in self-reliance: if I wasn’t having fun, it was no one’s fault but my own. I occasionally looked at Google Maps to get my bearings, but I mostly tried to follow my eyes to what seemed interesting.
But I wasn’t completely alone, either. My friend Charlie gave me a great list of things to do, and I met up with Tara Nielsen, a wonderfully talented and interesting designer with whom I share some mutual friends in Brisbane. We ate octopus and bone marrow. It was great.
I also forgot to bring any of my real cameras on this trip. I had a moment of panic on my way to the airport when I realized that I left the one I intended to pack on the bed, and I had to accept that any photos would have to come from my cell phone. I won’t deny that I briefly considered buying a cheap point-and-shoot or a Holga or something just for the trip, but I resisted. Instead, I packed a sketchbook and forced myself to sit and engage with things for at least 15 minutes. It was especially nice in Melbourne’s art museums, where sitting and sketching revealed subtleties in shape and posing that I might have glossed over otherwise. Even my cell phone photos have a grain, low-fidelity look that feels appropriate for my somewhat solitary vacation. I wouldn’t trade them for any others.
So it’s been a week, and I promised something creative. 
I may have had some grand, slightly nebulous plans about going out and seeing the world with new eyes, but it didn’t quite happen. To be fair, I was really busy at work, but that’s just an excuse.
That’s not so say I did nothing though — my friend Mike invited me to go to a life drawing class on Tuesday. Class is probably the wrong word… It’s more like the open swim version of life drawing. We paid $10 and each to draw the models for a couple of hours.
I make no pretense about my drawing skills. I can make good representations of things, but my lines are indefinite and inelegant. My style is scribblish and cartoony and the people in my sketches frequently suffer from wrinkly faces and melting hands and feet. I always forget to carry a pencil, so their problems are set in ink.
But it’s good exercise for me. The models only do 1, 5, and 10 minute poses, so I’m forced to abandon my desire for perfection. It’s a good challenge for me to draw poses the models pick instead of the standard three-quarter portraits and profiles that appear in my sketchbooks over and over again.
I’m having that problem where I feel like I’m just taking the same photo over and over again. It’s all cityscapes and self portaits. I don’t even like cityscapes or self-portraits that much, but they’re what’s nearby. The city is just across the street, and well, I don’t have to even leave the apartment to take a self portrait. It’s a great way to avoid feeling social anxiety, but not so great for creative variety.
My job at The Salt Lake Tribune wasn’t perfect, but it did force me into behaving more confidently. I had to be comfortable taking photos of complete strangers, and I had to be able to assertively defend my work to anyone who read the newspaper. That push was one of my favorite things about working in journalism, and now that I’m away from it, I can feel my more nervous tendencies creeping up again. The other day I had to talk myself into calling in to activate a new credit card. Not good.
So, I hereby resolve to be more creative and with more personal direction. No more photos across the street; no more photos of myself. I’m going to try to post here once a week with what I’ve done.
Last November I volunteered for a study that used MRI to analyse my brain while I looked at line drawings of everyday objects. Some drawings had words imposed over them. I don’t know what the goal of the study was, but the reward was $30 and a free picture of my brain. It seemed like a good deal to me. They gave me the money on the spot, but the pictures didn’t arrive until this week.
I had never had anything like an MRI before — nothing beyond dental x-rays. So it was strange to see inside my head in this way. I’ve pored over the images, wondering if they reveal anything. Is there some asymmetry that might explain why I can remember details of every TV show I watch, but not learn a foreign language? An abnormally large cynical lobe? But of course, I can tell nothing about my brain from these pictures. I still like to look at them, though.
Charlie was emphatic that I also try Nestle Milo. Milo is sort of chocolatey and sort of malty, and it has a reputation as a classic for Australian children. It involves a very specific routine of placing several heaping spoons-ful of the powder in the bottom of a cup, and pouring milk on top. I may have compared it to a Japanese tea ceremony.
The idea is that you put so much of this in that it won’t dissolve in the milk. It floats, sort of like a cross between Ovaltine and cold cereal. I have to say, it made my mouth sore. I could see it being good on ice cream, though.
I did love the ANZAC biscuits. It’s an oatmeal cookie with a special ingredient: nationalism! Also, coconut. I have eaten a lot of them, and I feel good about it because the sales of the cookies support veterans from Australia and New Zealand — that’s what ANZAC means. I can’t help but want a version with raisins, though.
