Pangea Day
by Louie Limjap
This is a cool concept …
Where else do you find ‘Infographics’ ?
by Bun Lee
Hey Folks,
A great documentary called ‘This Film Is Not Yet Rated‘ that’s never release…. it about how MPAA rating film. A must see documentary. And most importantly, got lots of infographics in it.
here is an example:
Antonio’s work featured on partfaliaz.fr
by Bart Barlowski
Hey guys,
Just wanted to let you all know that Antonio Suarez from dd08 got a post on a respected French portfolio site partfaliaz.free.fr. Congratulations man!
Multi-touch Window Time-lapse
by Brett Forsyth
It has been too long since I have posted any news about the multi-touch. As some may know the FTIR MT I built for the program is up and running and I have started to teach how to use/develop for it. It still isn’t finished in terms of the build and definitely isn’t much to look at yet (which is why I haven’t posted photos). Several students are working on software for it this term and I will post video at the end of term when they are done.
It is no secret that I am also in the process of developing a diffuse illumination multi-touch screen. This one is going to be huge 130″ diagonal and 16:9 aspect. On Thursday I finally got it working on a much smaller scale and shot some HD footage. Here is a 1 minute time-lapse of some of the tests.
DI Multi-touch Window Test from Brett Forsyth on Vimeo.
Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote
by Jessica Clark
Oh, the awesomeness…
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
Scroll down to his head tracking post, or just watch it on youtube.
Creative Hack Seminar with Scott Berkun
by Shalinder Matharu
Creativity is something that I’m sure most of us struggle with at some point in our design careers and it would sure be fantastic to have someone come along and tell you how to generate ideas successfully. Well, in case you missed the Creative Hacks seminar on Tuesday, I thought it would be helpful to post some of the talks’ important points. Over the course of the hour and a half I was introduced to Scott’s 8 Hacks to spark my creativity, and here they are, each followed by a quick elaboration.
#1 - Journal - Keep a journal of ideas. Write down each and every idea, no matter how small or mundane or seemingly insignificant. A journal is a great place to do absolutely anything you want. It’s entirely private and yours, unless you don’t want it to be.
#2 - Escape - Get away from your desk. After you are consciously done trying to work out a solution to your problem, your mind is still subconsciously doing it for you. Taking a break will allow you to remove the pressure of having to come up with something and allows your subconscious to do its work. A shower was the example given and has high success apparently.
#3 - Invert - Solve the opposite problem you were trying to solve. We tried this in the seminar and I thought it was great. For example, if you wanted to design a new application that taught kids to draw well (ahem), then work out how to design the WORST application to teach kids how to draw well. So a couple examples would be, ‘it calls the kid stupid every time he/she makes a mistake’ and ‘the application gives seizures to 3/5 children’. Be as silly as you want to be. Now, take those ideas, invert them, so, ‘it makes the child feel like they are learning’…and solve that. This was one of my favourite hacks.
#4 - Partner - Pair up with someone whose creative process is different than yours. See how they work. Collaboration allows new ideas to surface. If you don’t like people, then find a rival. Find someone whose work inspires you and use that as a force to help drive your creativity.
#5 - Fail - Commit to taking enough risks that you fail sometimes. We’ve all been told this, but it’s hard to actually let it happen. But if you know what doesn’t work, then you’ll know what to avoid the next time around. If you’re not failing, you’re not taking enough risk or doing something sufficiently difficult. Your journal is a great place to fail in private.
#6 - Plan for Roadblocks - Commit effort to overcoming things like office politics, loss of motivation, running out of funding, uncooperative bosses. Those of you who have worked prior to coming here know how difficult it is to deal with these things, and planning for them can only help in the event that they occur.
#7 - Switch Modes - Find a new way to represent your problem. If you’re working in a 2d space, try 3d. If you’re working on an interactive app, think of it from a marketing standpoint. Ideas can be discovered visually, verbally, audibly and physically. If you’re stuck, have a chat with someone who has no idea what design is.
#8 - Do Something New - Take interest in a field of study that isn’t your own and it will guarantee a field of new ideas. Go to a conference of an industry that isn’t your own. This was another that I thought was really good because as student especially, all we think about, read about, watch is design related. So the next time your roomate asks you to go see that educational film on paper perforation, go and watch it.
So that’s it. I apologize for the length of this post, but I thought that these ‘hacks’ would benefit anyone willing to put the time into them. And finally, a few sites for you.
Tactile Design
by Jessica Clark
For those of you into tactile analogue design, check out this site: http://www.papier-couture.com/
The work is very beautiful and I find, quite inspiring…
Cheers!
J
Green Air from Apple
by Simon Haiduk
Well besides the MacBook Air being pretty nifty, I thought that some of you might be interested to see how Apple is making a strong move towards ‘greener’ technology. As an avid Apple user this makes me way more stoked on continuing my use of their products. See for yourself and read this article and thread on EcoSpace.cc >>
WAVEscape
by Aaron Bell
I’m not sure how many of you folks keep up with the activities of CES (probably a lot!), but I wanted to mention a project that my brother developed with his company, Reactrix. Originally, Reactrix was involved in overhead-mounted displays that one walks over and causes a reaction in the image projected below. However, at CES, they released something called WAVEscape, which uses some sort of system to identify objects in 3d space in front of the screen and allows people to interact with the screen similar to a multitouch display, but without actually touching anything.
All in all, it is a pretty nifty creation!
Here is a sample video:
Also see Gizmodo’s article and related video and C|NET’s article about the product and its applications.