LonelyStreets.com
iMix
My team presented our iPhone application design in Shelly Evanson’s Basic Interaction course on Tuesday. I think that we were a spectacular success, and hopefully impressed Freddy Azures (one of the iPhone’s original designers), who attended by video-chat from California.
Our application, iMix, is a simple song-mixing toy for the iPhone. It is, however, designed as a native application, and so isn’t actually functional on the phone.
Here’s our full presentation, including a video and link to a functional prototype: iMix Presentation
Some things to note about the presentation:
Use your arrow keys to move forward and back through it.
When you see the “Scenarios and Flow” diagram, you can click on the boxes to zoom and see more detail.
When you get to the screen with just an iPhone showing it’s home screen, click on the iMix icon (the blue one in the lower right) to proceed.
The video isn’t ass well compressed as it might be for the web, so give it some time to load if you don’t want it to be choppy.
I was extremely lucky to have an awesome team who all worked extremely hard and were each integral to our ultimate success. So thanks to Wiebke Poerschke, Gabe Clapper, Allison Gallant, and Dave Hora. Personally, I am most proud of the demo video portion. Wiebke designed the pictured interface and put together the assets in Photoshop, and I animated them all into the video.
October 17th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Design Process, Flash, CMU | No Comments »
Last Week’s Projects
Just because I love to share, and because I’m enjoying cataloging my own design development, Here are the three projects that made last week so work-heavy.
First, and most importantly, my self portrait poster. This poster was printed at 44″ wide by 33″ tall, so you won’t be able to see it all that well in this pdf, but please take a look anyway. It’s self-explanatory for the most part, you just have to examine it for a little while. I spent a couple weeks developing this, and I’m quite fond of the results.
And next up, my ambient device. The file here is a Flash slide show I showed while giving a spoken presentation (which I don’t have the energy to type up here). Suffice it to say that This is an ambient device to help folk remember when to take their medication. Just click to move through the slides - this requires Flash Player 9 or higher.
And finally, my new MIDI controller prototype. I would have liked to actually build this prototype physically, but it was made for the Design Computing class, so Flash it was. The idea here is that current MIDI controllers have lots of different controls (faders, wheels, knobs, etc.), but we can generally only adjust one with each hand at once. It seems to me that it might be helpful to have a controller that combines a number of different interactions, allowing for independent adjustment of separate MIDI parameters simultaneously with a single hand. This control thus combines a fader, a knob, and a velocity sensitive pad-control in a single device - I know I’d use it.
September 22nd, 2007
Posted by Paul in Flash, Typography, CMU, Music and Movies | No Comments »
Digital Square
For Shelly Evanson’s Introduction to Interaction course we were told to create a digital square that invited dragging, turning, and rubbing. It took a whole lot of new actionscript and a helpful tutorial on kirupa.com, but here it is, try it out and see what you think:
In other news, I’m working on a self-portrait poster for my studio course, and am learning something about iteration. After a week and a half working on one concept, I through it all out the window last night and started with something brand new. Fortunately the deadline was just extended till next Wednesday. I’ll make sure to post it when it’s done. For now, suffice it to say that I’m logging every time I do any of about 30 tasks over the course of this entire day (such as eating, smoking, listening to music, working on my laptop, etc.).
Also, here are a few shots of my physical “squeeze it, rub it, turn it” cube from last week.
September 12th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Design Process, Flash, CMU | 1 Comment »
Days 22 Onward
As you, my dear readers, will have noticed, I’ve been a bit lazy regarding the blog this last few weeks. Continuing that trend, I will now proceed to sum up the rest of the summer course in a single post. And don’t expect me to get any better in the future - everyone keeps warning us that time will have an all new premium starting tomorrow (the first day of our first fall semester).
Starting The last day of July we had 3D interaction design with Steve Stadelmier, a well respected industrial designer. Steve was a real hoot - one of those profs who is just incredible relaxed, interested, and funny. Steve’s project for us was - get this - candle holders! Apparently (according to Steve) Eric stole the project from him, and so we did it again. The focus was different this time around though - concentrating much more on the interaction, and avoiding drawing almost entirely (yay!). Steve was full of great quotes, most of which I no longer have the impetus to type up, but here are a few favorites:
“I believe that we live in a bifurcated world. We demand much greater richness in play and our personal life than in our work.” This is obviously something to be lamented, and hopefully something that we designers can avoid and/or change.
“When we design, we must accept 10,000 years of human history and still design for new technology.” Our existence is full of already learned activiteis and ‘trained’ metaphors. As interaction designers we must take advantage of these things and use them to bring the New within the human experience, thus creating artifacts and experiences that can be learned easily and enjoyed thoroughly. That’s what I think he meant anyway.
And my favorite: “Pimp My Ride is actually another one of those resources that you shouldn’t let go by.” I have absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but it’s a helluva sound bite!
I decided to again focus on the quality of light as the aspect of a candle holder that would best facilitate interaction between diners at a dinner table, and finished with a nice little prototype that I can no longer find the photo of. Oh well.
After our time with Steve the final portion of our summer class was with Stacy again, who assigned us our final project: to pick a single word and create an interactive Flash piece and an After Effects movie which would express the meaning of the word using nothing but text. I developed the following two pieces, of which the movie is certainly the better. The Flash piece was, however, a triumph of coding for me, as I had never previously built anything so advanced. (If you die in the flash game, simply close it and re-open it to start over. If it’s a bit slow I apologize, it was not optimized for web delivery. Also a hint: don’t fall on the A’s). The movie is a pretty large file, so I haven’t put it up yet, thought I plan to later.
August 26th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Flash, Typography, Design Fundamentals, CMU | No Comments »