Purdue RxA

To set the scene, my Grandpa on my Dad’s side of the family owns a small water park called Pine Lake, which is about 25 miles south of Fort Wayne, IN. My grandparents live on the side of this lake, and there is a small log cabin right next door to it. This cabin is a vacation home of sorts for our family and provides a nice bit of respite when school or work gets a little too chaotic.  The cabin is tucked away in a small forest, very rustic. No central heating/air conditioning, just some box fans and a wood stove. Typically, our family only stays there during the summer when it’s warm, for obvious reasons, but my parents discovered this year that the wood furnace paired with a couple of space heaters can keep the cabin warm down to temperatures of around 25F. So, we decided that this would be a nice, cozy place to celebrate Thanksgiving. My mom put together a “mobile feast,” complete with all of the Thanksgiving essentials like turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, pu...

How a paid-subscription news app saved me from being sucked down the black hole of polarization and endless information. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” says the economic proverb. Everything has a cost, and when things seem like they don’t have a cost, it is simply a cost you haven’t seen or realized. The Internet is full of content that seems free. Smartphone games, social media platforms, even Internet browsers themselves, such as Google, are all free to use. The net worth of these companies show they are, in fact, making money. Google and Facebook are currently 11th and 46th on the Fortune 500 list, respectably. Anytime a user interacts with the internet, they are most likely engaged in some sort of give-take agreement. Google and Facebook, for example, profit primarily by selling user’s attention to advertisers. Advertisements pervade almost every almost every function and space of the Internet to give the illusion that it is free. News services are perhaps one of the more...

An exploration of what the newest iPhone update means for my attention, usability, and the future of personal technology. Recently, I watched the new Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which depicts former Silicon Valley engineers and designers discussing some of the unintended ethical concerns raised by the technology they created during the early years of Big Tech. The documentary explored how the business model of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram has evolved to retain user attention as long as possible by targeting their interests. Longer retention allows the companies to sell more advertisements. This system has many negative effects including social media addiction, hyper-polarization, and large-scale spreading of misinformation. Many users, including myself, worry that this addictive, attention-rewarding business model does not consider the well-being of their users. Watching the documentary, I began to wonder if Apple’s iPhone design benefits from a similar model. After all...

Design surrounds us. But it is not always seen—instead, it is experienced. And that can be for better or for worse. Truthfully, we tend not to notice design (i.e., the immense intentionality behind everyday experiences) unless there is an overt design failure drawing our attention to the matter. In which case, of course, we suddenly all become engineers and architects full of constructive criticism. Who the hell designed this? Purdue engineers would never — I remember thinking that exact line, nearly two years ago as I was heading to the airport with a 25-pound suitcase in tow, across bridge after bridge in Venice, Italy. It wasn’t until I was approaching the airport, though, that I reconciled with a surprisingly modern bridge that elicited the worst frustration. Because that surprisingly modern bridge—let me tell you, it had no business being so poorly designed. It was tiered with miniature, step-like fixtures every two-to-four feet on the ascent. So I simply couldn’t roll my sui...

A simple, stupid little tool helps me contextualize and reflect on the future of ubiquitous, user-centered design. To say an object’s design is ubiquitous is more than saying it is merely "widespread." Ubiquity, in design, means to be so submerged into a culture's collective subconscious that its presence is almost never questioned or realized. As a kid, I was told how the person who invented the plastic stands found in the center of carry-out pizzas became a millionaire for their patent. Then, I mocked the stupidity of someone getting so rich over something so simple. Now, I consider "pizza savers" a ubiquitous design. The three-legged plastic stand is almost universally found at the center of pizzas ordered via delivery or take-out. They support the weight of boxes stacked on top of each other. I see this device all the time, and yet I still had to search its name. Even through the vastness of the internet, it was relatively difficult. I never give pizza saver...

No matter how dependent on technology we become, I think that everyone can agree that getting mail is very exciting. Snail mail and packages undoubtedly brighten our days, even if we ordered it ourselves. However, the process of receiving these goodies can often be complicated by the mail delivery service. My own apartment’s mail delivery system manages to work wonderfully and horribly at the same time. As a newly renovated apartment complex, it boasts modern features such as the Amazon Hub locker. This allows tenants to collect their packages from a secure location without being restricted to the leasing office’s working hours. Although designed for Amazon and Amazon orders specifically, the lockers at our complex are also used as the drop location for any other package that is small enough to fit in them. Some of key design elements of the Hub lockers that benefit the users are how it notifies recipients as soon as a package has been delivered and the locality of it in the apartment ...

In the modern 2020 world, terms such as microaggression, implicit bias, and intent vs. impact have becoming increasingly common. But how can we get our teams to see these terms as more than buzz words? This task can be even more daunting outside of business settings where the lines of professionalism are more blurred. This semester I am serving as the President of Purdue’s chapter of Alpha Phi Omega, a national co-ed service fraternity. As a service fraternity our culture differs greatly from other Greek organizations, in fact, we operate more as a club than a PanHellenic house. Our fraternity is governed by an elected executive board, who I’ll refer to as my team for the purposes of this blog. As president, I work with 10 other active members to curate events, curate educational pledge programs, and oversee our organization’s day to day operations. This past week we received some unfortunate feedback about our pledge program and what they described as a general air of disrespect and c...

As a team of Professional Writing students, our mission is to discover how the Professional Writing major is evolving and share how and why experience architecture is making its way to the forefront of the field . It is our hope that readers of this blog — whether they might be current students, past students, prospective students, or professors — learn the ins-and-outs of the major and begin to see how the worlds of writing and design intertwine.  Professional Writing is currently a fairly popular major among universities, but one of the most interesting things about the field is that it’s always evolving. So what is the Professional Writing major anyway? When it comes to a major like this one, there isn’t a set plan of study among universities. In fact, the course requirements and the definition itself differ from school to school. Because of its natural diversity and constant evolution, Professional Writing doesn’t exactly have a clear future. If design and usability are becomin...

Bad design tends to be my excuse now for everything that I can’t figure out. It’s true, really, that if it’s not obvious how to use something, then the product is probably poorly designed. The best example of this that I can think of is my combined oven and stove. The apartment I live in has quite an old oven/stove appliance, and I want to take you through why it fails the user miserably. To begin, I’ll set the scene. I’m in my apartment with my three other roommates, and we’re all in the kitchen making dinner. It’s a small kitchen, so imagine a bit of chaos. I preheat the oven to 400 degrees. That part seems simple. I just hit “Bake” and then push the buttons with numbers. What’s confusing is that once I hit “Start,” there is no feedback indicating that the oven has been started. There’s no light and there’s no switch. To make it worse, it doesn’t even show me the current temperature that the oven is at, so I can’t check to see how much it has heated up. The only signifier to show me ...

A world in crisis is irresistible, so long as it remains abstract. I want an egregious headline in the news... and you do, too. But in order for it to satisfy, it must flow out of our consciousness before losing that initial hit of intrigue. Which, up until recently, was par for the course. Because for most of America, the news did not dictate our reality. The news could be interesting, but it remained far from relevant. Day-to-day life could go on. This was a privilege I didn’t know to recognize, though—I longed for my moment in the sun to be written about. Long before I ever read anything by Ray Bradbury or CNN, things were read to me. I grew up on things like The American Girl series, Doll Hospital, and The Magic Treehouse, where the characters would experience the specific moments and events that exemplified an era—and did so in a way that contrasted the rawness of human experience. These close narratives of the past felt beautiful to me, no matter what the turmoil. I wanted to be ...

From a very young age, my parents noticed that something was a bit different from me. I had trouble sitting still and paying attention. After they talked to my pediatrician, she diagnosed me with ADHD. When I was old enough to understand what ADHD was and how it affected me, it bothered me, as it would for any child. But I figured it was the hand I was dealt, so I might as well just deal with it. That said, I have taken medication for it pretty much since I was diagnosed; however, medication doesn’t alleviate all of the symptoms, and in my case, helps primarily with the hyperactive aspect of it by mellowing out my personality quite a bit. That said, pretty much everyone I know understands I am far from being a mellow person, even while on the medication. As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve come to see ADHD as a superpower of sorts. Sure, it has its negatives, like not being able to hold trains of thought for very long and struggling to pay attention to anything for more than a ...

How it all began. For many of us in the US, the world felt that it came to a screeching halt in March of 2020. Professionals stopped going to the office, students stopped going to the classroom, and our neighbors began buying concerningly large quantities of toilet paper. Most of us took up a semi-permanent residency on our couches and passed the day doomscrolling through our news feeds, waiting to see if we would get tuition reimbursements for the school that was not happening, if we would still have jobs tomorrow. Amidst one of the largest times of uncertainty I can remember, Zoom rushed in and promised that it could help. Why Zoom? Zoom quickly became the go-to application for web-based lectures, although many people, from elementary students to tenured professors, were asking themselves, why? “... Zoom really is easy to use, so much so that I’m impressed. I’ve gotten all sorts of people to use it with very little friction. People whose ideal app would have only one button, and tha...

What every college student dreads the most is something that I like to call the “What’s your major?” conversation. It usually picks up around the beginning of each school year, around holidays with extended family, or around the end of a college career. It’s not the “What’s your major?” question that is difficult. It’s the question that almost always follows. This is usually how the conversation goes: “Oh, you’re a junior? That’s cool. What’s your major?” “Data Visualization and Professional Writing.” “Oh, wow. So what do you want to do with that?” It’s a great question, really. In fact, I’d love to know the answer too. Sometimes I think it’d be easier if I chose to study engineering because then I would simply use my engineering major to become an engineer. Instead, with my combination of majors, it isn’t that simple. There are so many career possibilities, making my decision-making process both relieving yet confusing. I don’t know what my plan after graduation is, but I do know that...