With SXSW right around the corner I think it’s time to dust off ye olde blog. We’ve been through some rough times around here the past couple of years, from losing my original domain at xinroman.com to almost losing the second one (turns out that the customer service people at GoDaddy are actually extremely helpful – who knew?). But I figure it’s not too late to resurrect some old posts and finally get around to writing some new ones.

For those of you who don’t know me or know why you’re here, my name is Christin Roman and I am a User Experience Designer in NYC. I started this blog 5 years ago as a place to document my research, thoughts, and projects, and to experiment with some web programming and blogging tools while I was a graduate student at ITP. In 2007, I graduated and have had a variety of gigs doing information architecture, interaction design, experience design, user testing, project management, planning, and strategy consulting for start-ups, non-profits, and other types of companies. For the past year I’ve been working at Blenderbox, a home-grown 20-person interactive agency started by husband-and-wife team Jason Jeffries and Sarah McLoughlin. I’ve designed ecommerce sites, interactive sites, media sharing sites, museum sites, educational sites…you name it. My passion is doing design research, and creating that fully-formed picture of the people who I’m designing for.

This blog was named for a quote I once heard Red Burns – the founder and still chair (over 25 years later) of ITP, and an incredible woman – say to my class when we were first-year students. (I should mention that she is in fact known for her bluntness and sometimes surprising off-the-cuff remarks.) She said “I hate robots”. With a 100 confused students looking back at her she continued. “I hate artificial intelligence. I don’t believe in artificial intelligence, I believe in artificial augmentation.” What she hates is the idea that technology should be used to replace people. So instead, she inspires her students to develop technology that will help people.