Welcome to Informatics411

This portfolio represents professional work covering the last fifteen years. As this work aimed at real-world things, Product Briefs, in the menu to your right, takes you to them: Products 00-04, as Lists and Stories, come first; then Products 05-13, as Simulations, Virtual Realities and Tools – come next. These Briefs note the products, their teams, and the creative hats worn (project manager, theorist, interaction designer, editor, author, etc.) in making them; they also link to more details, sometimes to out-of-portfolio on-line stores.

Creative, collaborative, iterative processes brought these products into being (or sometimes close to it); Process Slides 1 • Informatics and Process Slides 2 • Publishing arrange the 13 featured products by “field.” When on those pages, if you move your mouse over a product’s slideshow, the prototypes and some user study details can be quickly glimpsed. So, you can see the development cycle for each project from the Process Slide page. When you click a slideshow, you will be taken to it its Project pages where you’ll find more complete information: design rationale, target group(s), trade-offs, lessons learned, and insights. Projects have their own menu “wings” for all of this: Project Homes, Project Theory, Project Presentations, Prototypes and Usability Studies.

As a “how to read” these pages: what’s important comes before you have to reach for the scroll bar, most of the time. Trained as a writer, and then having worked in lay-out design and publishing, and having spent most of the last seven years in interaction design, well, this kitchen has too many cooks. The writer wants to “get it all down” (the chef). Yet the (fast-food) designer knows you don’t need it all, or may not have time. Where an illustration might save 1000 words, and the time to read them, this portfolio gives you both. So feel free to escape the text whenever you’ve reached your fill. (Another cook might insist that providing information only through narrative and illustrations still drastically underestimates neurodiversity; yet interaction design reminds one that products involve trade-offs...).

Professional Journey

I began by earning a Masters of Arts from the University of Notre Dame for completing a manuscript of publishable quality. (Four more books would follow.)

In the midst of the writing, a publishing cooperative formed with friends and two other writers. Firetrap Press was based in Chicago, and began in 1996. We never expected to publish paperbacks: such were the times before the internet bubble burst, as they say. (We published 18 e-books, paperbacks and 2 issues of an ejournal, many of which are available on-line). In those heady times, the e-books then on the market promised to revolutionize reading.

Yet they didn’t have the basic tools which graduate students learn. So I worked with a Chicago patent attorney for five years to gain an e-book patent. The journey moved towards interaction design and software development.

Writing a book about psychology and spirituality around this time grounded me in the field of cognitive neuroscience (I was working a day job in a medical office, and some of the physicians kindly lent me their textbooks). As I contemplated how to turn the book into seminars on life change, I was also working on the e-book software patent. The two continuously cross-pollinated in my thoughts, and I began another five year journey to design and create psychology software. Or, more correctly, neurology-based software.

This interdisciplinary research project spanned many disciplines: cognitive neuroscience, psychology, the history of science, evolutionary biology, physics – to name a few. I became a member of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and a avid reader of its journal, Science, training myself in the lexicons of current scientific practices. Yet, I never forgot my roots in intellectual history and literature. The American poet William Carlos Williams had a motto: “No ideas but in things” – it seems like a good constraint on a psychological endeavor: no psychological ideas but those actually found in a given brain.

This effort led me back to graduate school where I worked on a Masters of Science in the School of Informatics at Indiana University. Process Slides 1 -  Informatics, mostly highlights the work from Indiana University, building on previous theoretical developments. Methods which can capture cognitive data also mean algorithms which better understand users. This especially attunes me to User Experience and Usability Testing; you’ll find a slew of ideas for creating new, high-resolution quantitative methods. The outlook this gives me on Interaction Design and Usability, is found in a series of pages starting here.

Process Slides 2 - Publishing covers the period before turning towards Software: web production, e-books, print on-demand paperbacks, corporate branding, advertising. The Product Briefs pages show a synthesized pathway through both professional incarnations, emphasizing an organization of work developed while thinking about Informatics: the Informatik Framework. It is tied in to more familiar language about Usability on the page called Trade Tools – yet another  organization of products here, in a table.

Informatics411, my Informatics-focused blog, explores the strong interconnections between writing and its technological counterparts in software development, interaction design and user experience.

There are CVs attuned to both the fields of Informatics and publishing.You can get back to this page by clicking Portfolio Overview, or the Informatics411 logo.

Thanks for visiting!

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From Writer to Author, Book Publisher to E-Book Software Designer – then Psychology Software Designer to User Experience & Interaction Designer

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