The research phase is half of my design process. For me it is important to spend as much time
as possible visiting participants in their environments where you can observe them and their
everyday behaviors and interactions. Conducting quick interviews in their daily environments
also helps get participants comfortable to open up to the interviewer. This proves to be
invaluable to the design researcher in that insight into their daily lives become more obvious
when seen through this lens and is a methodology I incorporated into my thesis work from an
early stage.
Mock Inquiries
During my second thesis term I set off to become an insider to the world of archives. My day pass as a researcher let me get closer to the tools curators, archivists, collections and research reading rooms afforded me.a
Bring Your Archivist to Work Day
I was much more interested in the access and output of archives rather than the input or accessioning side. Late in my second thesis term I also worked for a day as a junior archivist at my college's archive. There I processed old and new incoming objects to the collection. This let me know the backend of what needs to happen in order for the researcher to be able to find whats in their collection. This better informed me to what needs to happen at the point of access.
Thinking through making: rapid advanced prototyping & demonstration
I began my thesis investigation a year ago interested in a terrain that included preservation and
access, location and artifact, media and rendition device, playful search (serendipity, grazing,
browsing, targeted), playful access, and screen-based interfaces versus physical interfaces.
From the beginning, I wanted to make something every week. And not just a sketch, an image or
even a video, but a working interactive model that would communicate the idea I had just
imagined.
Interaction designers spend a lot of time with sketches, wireframes and paper prototypes. This is
a quick method for communicating interaction design options. I’ve grown a thirst to take these
further and to make models as close as possible to the intended way people would use them.
Often times this includes finding new technical hardware and software shortcuts to pull off a
visual slight of hand. Using these methods helps the iteration process advance at a faster pace
and pushes the paper prototype towards the interactive advanced rapid prototype.
An advanced rapid prototyper is a designer who can build working models in the quickest,
cheapest and most efficient way in a couple of weeks or even a couple hours. But he or she is
equally a demonstration expert. For it is in the demo where the slight of hand, wizard-of-oz tricks
with technology can communicate an idea that otherwise would require a team of engineers,
programmers and industrial designers.
As a media designer I employ these techniques across a variety of media and designed
experiences. The role I play in the conceptual process is one of thinker and maker whose
iterative approach with working models opens the door for new questions to be asked faster and
more often.
Archive Positioning System
This was a project in Bespoke Futures, a class where we as designers were asked to design a
future we would actually want to live in. This helped to establish my early investment in archiving
and accessing knowledge. I took the assignment with the thought of where we currently are in
knowledge aggregation and development, production of culture, interaction and interface. In the
end I designed an imagined scenario incorporating Marblegarten and the Archive Positioning
System (APS).
Since the movie Blade Runner, all images of the future have been either of utopic societies in
futuristic cities wearing white jump suits, or distopic societies where humanity lives underground
and fights the robots that rule the decomposing earth above. Our present day society can not
grasp the idea of choosing a future we would actually want to live in. A question surfaced
asking: “is the future already here, but just distributed unequally globally?”
This elective class tasked us with designing something that we would want in a future world.
Looking at current trends in technology it is easy to see that the exponentially growing archive of
information will continue to expand and grow increasingly harder to navigate. In the last 100
years, human beings have recorded more data than all the previous years of human existence
combined. What would happen if you had a way of easily navigating this growing wealth of
information in a quick and easy way. What would that afford you? How would your life be better?
This is what prompted me to work on the idea of a type of Archive Positioning System. GPS
systems help us navigate the physical geographic world, so maybe an APS would help us
navigate the enormous ever-expanding global archive?
I proposed an interface to such a system would take the shape of something as simple as a
marble. This small device could be given to everyone, promote sharing of wisdom, and be
instantly accessible. Instead of Kindergarten, everyone would receive their marble on the first
day of Marblegarten. Pedagogues would change encourage experience over gaining knowledge
through memorization. Click here to view my final presentation of the APS.
Interactive Archival Box
This is just a quick experiment to show what if any container could spill out it's associated digital contents onto any surface from a typical interaction one would have with such an object...say opening a box.
Stack Serendipity
This is a short video of a proposed interactive project for my thesis work. It involves a human participant walking past a row, aisle, or collection of media—in this case CD albums. As he or she walks past a row of albums, they trigger each album to play its contents.
3-Object Interface for Archived Playlists
This was a quick iteration to show how one can use objects in space to manipulate or move through different sets and nodes of information—in this case music playlists. Each ball is identified as representing a different song. They can also be reassigned on the fly. The center object toggles playback (track playing or stopped). When the user picks up the center object, raising or lowering allows them to move through other playlists to see the relationships of which other tracks the current song fell between.
Excessive Educational Outcomes: Art Center's Unwitting Graffiti
Graffiti artists leave a “tag” on their particular environment. This signature is a mark which says: “I was here.” At Art Center College of Design we leave many marks on our school’s environment. Our specific learning processes include some unintentional outcomes—consumption.
Immemory
This is a short piece about the existing problems facing the practice of archiving vs. new media and interactive art using Chris Markers "Immemory" as a prime example.
Interactive Archival Box (2)
Archive Tray
Similar to curated trays of artifacts found in Wunderkammers in the Baroque 16th and 17th centuries, this is my take on a type of tray that when placed on any surface transforms it into a projected display of curated objects from disparate archival collections.
This demo is missing substance but I just wanted to capture and visualize the idea of placing a frame of a tray down on ANY surface and having archived artifacts show up. This is strictly a rough advanced rapid prototype/demo.
Archive Tasting with a mobile device
An Archive Tasting Room is a space in which users—both scholarly or casual—can sample a curated selection of past researchers' experiences and inquiries at
archives around the world.
Archive Wall
I'm in the process of designing a kind of Archive Tasting Room where users can enter and play and investigate a previous researcher's inquiry at a particular archive. These archived sets in themselves will be hand selected by a sort of Archive Somellier and offered up for experiencing. This experiment was done to see what it might feel like if you could bring up one of these archived set embodied in an object, and by using that object be able to navigate around.
iPhone Archival Access
By using a multitouch mobile device, a user could "taste" or "sample" a few different researchers' captured inquiries from their time spent researching at an archive. The device would control output on an alternate screen. Here I am just using a monitor as a display but it could very well be a projected image on a wall or surface, a large flat screen, or even a table-top surface.
Archival Flip & Rotate
This is just a quick experiment today to test a flipping interaction between a multi-touch handheld device and a larger multi-touch screen—such as an Oracle Multi-touch able. Right now I am only demoing it on Flash on my laptop.
Embodied Playlist Access
This experiment is the first iteration of a physical and visual interface for tangibly accessing archived sets of information—in this case using radio station DJ's playlists.
Larger objects are embodied with a specific DJ's playlist. These are meant to simply illustrate that one could use any object and associate it with an archived set of information. The smaller sliver-like objects are meant to represent and embody the search "node" or information you enter with. These can also be reassigned on the fly.
