Experience, design & technology.

Posts tagged “interaction”

Engage

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Posted on January 11th, 2012

Yesterday I jotted down a few thoughts about the apparent and impending future of YouTube. One thing I neglected to mention specifically was the one thing I was actually writing about in the first place – brand engagement. It’s the special sauce that makes things like YouTube run. Forget your utopian dreams of sharing videos or things between friends, this place is where people engage with the brands they love. Or something. It seems to be everywhere, lurking just beneath the surface. Awareness, market saturation, x is better than y, we seem so happy to play along. It’s appalling. Take a moment to read Maciej’s post about the uncanny valley and do what you can to avoid stumbling through the godawful plethora of online…

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Non 'design' disciplines

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Posted on December 1st, 2011

I was digging through a few old drafts and this one emerged from 2009, having never before seen the light of day: Lately I’ve been thinking more on the different pieces of knowledge required to pull together an interactive project / visualisation / installation / design, especially one which needs to be in some way demonstrable in front of a live audience. Yesterday I was speaking with Stephen Viller at the OzCHI conference, about the difference between IT/ICT and Design education methodology. It seems that (any maybe this shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was) that those in the computer sciences or IT streams of education don’t have much call to give verbal account or critique of their work. As…

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pachube coffee and gps

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Posted on April 14th, 2010

Below is a small experiment I’m currently running; very informally I’m updating a pachube feed (‘cups of coffee today’) with the current location data. It’s a bit of an odd experiment – I’m not really always drinking coffee, but once I set it up (using the pachube iphone app, which is pretty simple to use) I discovered that it logged the location of each coffee cup consumed. Not so exciting I know, but I’m interested in the notion that my daily activities and movements can be logged, tracked in some sense and collected to form an image – be that automatically or manually logged data. It’s by no means new territory, but I’m keen to see how it all works out. There’s a chance…

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fluid updated

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Posted on August 12th, 2009

I’ve spent a bit more time cleaning up the fluid blobs examples I made last week, this time limiting the Region of Interest and fiddling with the fluid interaction.  Also newly included is a smarter way to interact with the blobs (in the code, i mean), pulling out more precise locational data.  I’ll be looking to mine this one a bit more extensively than I did with the filtration fields installation – and since I seem to be getting better now at things I was attempting before – this should be a lot more fun.In the mix still is some video over network action, as well as potentially a database record of the motion over time.  I’d like to develop this as an interactive…

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Janus

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Posted on August 6th, 2009

As part of the Smart Light Sydney Festival, May 2009, Tom Barker (Professor of Design, Architecture and Innovation at UTS) and Hank Haeusler (Post-Doctoral Researcher at UTS) were commissioned to design and produce an interactive light sculpture to be exhibited on the light walk in the Rocks.  The piece conceived by Tom was called Janus and was pitched to the SLSF body as; a giant floating human face in The Rocks..inspired by Janus, the Roman god with two faces, Barker and Haeusler’s installation is part of their ongoing research into complex and non-standard media facades.  Janus uses social media and new technologies to engage the public and influence its art. Photovoltaic cells are used to power the installation. The concept for the project was…

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Filtration Fields

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Posted on August 6th, 2009

Recently Joanne and I were given the opportunity to exhibit in the DAB Lab Research Gallery at UTS, in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty building, as an opportunity to refine and showcase our collective research into realtime responsive architectural environments.The filtration fields exhibition in the DAB Lab gallery was a realtime interactive installation using simple camera tracking to measure daily activity within the DAB courtyard.  The exhibition was as a prototype test for ideas on the overlap of surveillance information and participation in architecture by its’ inhabitants.  Our premise for the installation was that the architecture of the DAB Lab gallery and surrounding courtyard space would be given eyes and ears, a brain to consider and a mouth to speak its’ mind.  The…

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Computational Environments'09

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Posted on February 23rd, 2009

Gearing up for the first week of class for Computational Environments, the Master of Architecture design studio Joanne Jakovich, Bert Bongers and I will be teaching at UTS.Last time round the studio culminated in the Skinform project, see below;From tomorrow onwards we will be launching into a new semester, complete with a new brief, renewed vigor and an even greater expectation.   We will be setting up a platform for the students to share and explain their work, so keep an eye out for that – I will post more details when they are at hand.Looking forward to an exciting, thought provoking and intensely productive semester!

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The Street as Platform

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Posted on November 22nd, 2008

The Street as platform – a street rendered in data. November has been a busy month! Along with Anthony Burke, Dan Hill and Mitchell Whitelaw, I’ve been running an intensive masterclass studio in the Master of Digital Architecture program at UTS.  The masterclass is based on one of Dan’s earlier posts called The Street as Platform, in which the notion of the static street in contemporary urban planning and architecture is discussed as an anachronistic idea and one in dire need of reform.  The street as platform talks about the dynamically linked nature of the modern street, where mobile communication, ubiquitous computing and traditional number crunching merge as a new kind of informational street ecology that exists just outside of our normal consciousness.As students…

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