All posts tagged concept

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Make Any Surface Multi-Touch

Transparent polymer film that can be applied to non conductive materials and turn them interactive. Very thin, it uses projected capacitive technology, making it possible to apply on the back of a glass and detect finger touch on the front of the glass.

Just thinking about re-imagining the interaction relationship between input and view. Right now (on a touchscreen device) you touch the thing you want, which blocks some other interface items from view. You’re also probably holding the device at the same time which makes managing all three difficult (how many times do you drop your phone?).

On the other end, keyboards, mice, pen-tablets, etc. are so rigid in their form and force the user into a certain mental and physical context in order to use them. Can applying this film to any surface open up the door to more ergonomic and smart view/interaction paradigms, such as touching directly behind the screen or on the side (to target different Z-depths)?

I can also see a future where non-traditional materials become candidates for use in technology implementations due to this film being applied (wood, fabric, etc.).

Ghosts of Old Ideas

While checking out Info Aesthetics this morning I read a piece on datamasher.org, a visualization site that combines data feeds from data.gov to provide insights into underlying data relationships.

This makes me think of a concept I had a while back called “Know Your Vote”. It’s purpose was to cull and parse congressional vote data to make sense of how our representatives were REALLY voting on issues. By cross-referencing different voting sessions we could determine when our representatives were saying one thing and doing another and get a better sense of how they felt about issues (just think of Obama during the campaign implying he would take up liberal causes, and now while in office he’s MUCH more of a corpratist that we had realized).

datamasher.org triggered the memory of the old concept because I think it would be incredibly valuable for citizens (and congressional staff) to begin to use data insights to catalyze action on particular issues that may have been hard to visualize previously. Access to this kind of data and corresponding tools to visualize it also provides an avenue to hold our representative’s feet to the flames further downstream of a news item’s public-eye lifecycle.

Either way, it’s great to see access being granted to goverental raw data for us to sift through and find meaning in.

harman / kardon

(Role: Art Director.)

A site pitch I conceptualized and designed for harman/kardon.

Old Spice

(Role: Art Director.)

A site pitch I conceptualized and designed for Old Spice.

Malibu Rum

(Role: Art Director.)

A site pitch I conceptualized and designed for Malibu Rum.

Thomas Edison Innovation Foundation

(Role: Principle Designer/Art Director.)

The Thomas Edison Innovation Foundation approached Firstborn Multimedia in the winter of 2006 to redesign their site with the goal of reminding people of the relevance of Thomas Edison’s life and legacy. In addition to reconnecting users with the idea that the foundations of modern invention largely started with Thomas Edison, we sought to increase the foundation’s donations by making it easy to submit a gift through the site.

Throughout the site, the user is reminded through abstract illustrations of the humanity and relevance of Thomas Edison. And of course, no Thomas Edison site would be complete without a light switch!

Border’s Holiday Storybook

(Role: Art Director.)

I was tasked to Art Direct and Design the follow-up to the previous year’s wildly successful Gift Mixer site for Borders. To match their existing holiday campaign with storybooks by Robert Sabuda, we brought on an illustrator, Ryan Cox, to come up with our simply-shaped but highly stylized characters. Add a little flash wizardry and voila… we have a multi-award winning site to cap off a very successful 2005!