I worked on the Here I am Campaign for the Open Society Foundation designing and developing a website for the campaign as well as other designed assets for the International Aids Conference ( July 23-27th 2012). The campaign’s primary goal is to support the funding of The Global Fund by sharing self filmed videos of people who have been helped by the Global Fund. The campaign tries to encourage visitors to take action to make sure the Global Fund remains fully funded.

I also designed print assets for the Aids Conference including a modified logo, banners, and postcards.

Introducing: In Flight Enablers

In Flight Enablers are a set of devices/ objects that enable passengers to engage in in flight relations. Because it is very difficult to have an intimate moment in private on an airplane, In Flight Enablers give passengers a little help by either creating more privacy, or invading the limited private spaces on the plane

Lavatory Enabler

The Lavatory Enabler gives two passengers an extra eye to enable successful sneak entries and exits to the lavatory. The camera can stick to the outside wall and the screen goes on the inside to monitor activity on the other side.

The Snuggy Enabler

The Snuggy Enabler  allows a couple to get frisky in the comfort of their seats. The Snuggy is rigged with a decoy arm that allows the other arms to wander free without exposure.

Because I was traveling a lot over the break, I decided to collect data on my longest flights from New York to Istanbul and back. Airplanes can be very similar in their layouts but subtle differences can often make a huge difference in the comfort of the flight and the interactions that take place. Airplanes and flying can cultivate many different experiences, emotions, and interactions depending on certain variables. The size, shape, and color of the chairs, the width of the arm rests, the availability of pillows and blankets, the audio/visual options, etc. Airplanes also house people from many nationalities, motivations for travel, and destinations. They are possibly one of the most complex spaces for social interactions. To start off simply I tried to count as best as possible the number of group travelers, couple travelers, and single travelers.I wanted to try and get an idea of how the travelers might interact with each other on the plane. I also took data on the some parts of the planes like the general measurements of the seat spaces. Then I tried to find other variables like how many people were using pillows and blankets all with the thought about how people interact on planes in mind. Another thing I counted was how many people were watching the same movie in my section. In conclusion,  airplanes are weird.

Curating as a Social Practice: Georgia is the website that I built to document both cities, and both workshops.

We used Arduino and Processing to make the switches and control the audio.We used buttons and elastic painted with conductive ink to get the volume and pan ranges. We 3-D printed the buttons with the Makerbot and placed LEDs behind them to show when the audio tracks were on.

Check out our user testing

Presentation PDF

Create a series of sketches that illustrate different physical devices and gestures that individuals or groups can interact with a piece of music.

Prototype 1: Audio Ball Blaster

6 cups are set up, each with a photocell. The photocell acts as a switch, so that each time a ball hits the button on the cup, the audio is turned on or off. For this prototype, we only have one cup configured.

Proximity of the person to the line of cups controls the volume.

Proximity of the person to the left/right sides of the playing field controls the audio pan.

Prototype 2: Audio Blastin’ Blazer (working title)

6 buttons on the jacket control the audio samples.

2 piece of elastic (coated with thermochromatic & graphite ink) each control the volume and audio pan. Elastic is attached to the armpit area of the coat so that user must raise his/her arms to adjust volume + pan.

I was chosen among four other students as an Open Society Foundation (OSF) fellow for information design. The fellowship allows Parsons Design and Technology students to support NGO’s  in developing effective media and communication strategies by sharing expertise ininformation design and media production. More information about the fellowship here.

I was sent to Baku, Azerbaijan for two months to work for an NGO called the Social Services Initiative. 

The Challenges

Since its start in 2008, SSI has positioned itself well with the key government and non-government partners and stakeholders. To further strengthen its organization’s mission and goals, SSI wanted to strengthen their communication strategy by revamping their logo, a re-design of their information pamphlet, and designing and building an official website. With these improvements SSI hoped to reach out to both a wider and targeted community and to enable the exchange of information to better equip potential advocates, partners and stakeholders.

The Solutions

Logo

Their current logo, a native tree of Azerbaijan, represented nurturing and protection. It was clear that they had spent some time on the concept of the logo but the execution did not quite represent all they had hoped. They all agreed the logo should represent growth, protection, equality, and strength, but some were in favor of a more literal representation over the more metaphorical tree. After looking at the three different logos I created, the staff agreed they wanted to stay closer to their original tree logo and avoid any graphics of children. The new logo reinforced the concepts of equality, protection and nurturing. The typography was changed to ensure the logo could translate in English and be consistent in its look. A serif font complimented the curves and lines of the tree. The final result was much more sophisticated, refined, and consistent.

Website

We discussed the goal of the website and the users they envisioned would use the site. Through discussions, SSI collectively decided they wanted to reach a broad audience on both a local and national level including potential sponsors and partners down to local families and educators. After we discussed who would use the site and what information they would seek out, we spent time breaking the site into sections and talked about how each section would provide the appropriate information. I chose WordPress as a content management system as it is the most widely used CMS with a huge support forum and extensive codex. I built a custom theme in WordPress with a number of custom functionalities for SSI. My main focus when developing this site was not just about the front end, but very much about making the backend as easy to operate as possible. The final site provided SSI with a strong professional online presence that presents very specific information to a targeted audience in an aesthetically thoughtful manner. It was built for longevity and sustainability for SSI and they are able to add, edit, and remove nearly all of the information on the site. The site is also highly integrated into the social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter enabling SSI to reach an even broader audience in an extremely efficient way.

Pamphlet

SSI had an information pamphlet made awhile back but unfortunately they did not have design resources. They had an standard letter size pamphlet that gave a brief description of each of their projects, but it did not effectively reflect the style of the new site and their overall identity revamp. The final result was a redesign of the original pamphlet that focused on organizing the information in a more thoughtful way and adding hierarchy to the text. I maintained the energy the colors provided in the original, but in a way that did not distract from the information but rather added to the organizational hierarchy. The pamphlet will be in both Azerbaijani and English.

Do your fingers ever get tired of scrolling through all of those Facebook and Twitter feeds? Auto Pilot was made just for you! Autopilot scrolls your infinity pages for you! Just drag the logo into your bookmarks and use it on any website. Watch the video for instructions.

With a group of seven other fellows, I helped develop a Web course curriculum for the Parsons MFA Design and Technology Bootcamp 2011. The course served as an introduction to basic website creation. The basic learning outcomes  the ability to create websites using  html5 and css compliant development, including a working knowledge of html tags, file structures, scripts, stylesheets, and browser/debugging tools. I implemented the curriculum through daily lessons that spanned 15 two and a half hour classes over three weeks. For more information please look at the syllabus and my students work at the Bootcamp 2011 site. 

Moving forward we would like to include more of a gui interface for users to easily upload their own movie and music files from their hard drives. We would also like to push the fft reaction to be more organic and noticeable to the music.

I wanted to play with audio and particles so this first one is just an experiment with audio input effecting the inward and outward forces of the particles. If the volume is less than a certain level it moves in, and when the volume gets louder the particles move outward. There is a line tracing the particles path that retracts after it reaches a certain length.

code

FFT Vector Feilds

I used code from the example FFT to change the forces in the vector field. The FFT is also effecting the radius and alpha of the particles. There is a second for loop of oFPoints that are creating the lines connecting the particles.

code

I used some code from the guys over at VHX and their speed project showmenonstop to get the constant stream of video in the background. Fun times in databases!

take a look

I spent a lot of time trying to get the fireworks to set off and look really nice, but for some reason had trouble getting them to fade away properly. Besides the fading, I think it looks pretty nice. Using and image really changed the look and feel.

code

Sparkles

I used the same image as the fireworks to create this galaxy looking effect. Using sin and cos to draw and move the particles around the screen. This was mainly a product of tinkering, but it ended up having a sort of natural look to it.

code

Non-circular Partilce

I was just messing around with the particle object for a long time and this took a lot of different forms. I finally had to just stop and end with this. I tried to get it to xeno to the mouse to make it look more natural, but I could not make it work. Will have to keep working.

code

Looked at the flickr API this week. Here is a little experiment with ajax and flicker. You can search for images and it saves your searches so you can look back through them without reloading the page. I used a script called masonry to lay the images out. Working on the cached image layout. See the in progress here.