Sep 09

7in7- day5

Today, I wanted to explore Javascript which I am not used to use the language( actually, this is the first time to code with Javascript except making “hello world” thing.)

I wanted to make a e-book cover with small animation for “The Little Prince”, which is one of my favorite book. This is a prototype, so if I have a time to iterate this, I want to build some illustration that has animation effects that can affect reader’s senses.

 

Screen Shot 2013-09-09 at 1.02.22 AM

 

If you load the page, one of stars will across the screen like a shooting star, in addition, a shooting star will appear in a different location on the page when you reload the page.

 

Screen Shot 2013-09-09 at 1.16.01 AM Screen Shot 2013-09-09 at 1.16.49 AM

 

Sep 09

7 in 7, fifth day!

Today i use Photoshop to create a flashing icon, it has three colors in three work status, blue, red and black, i create the texture into surface of this icon, it can make it to be true. and i set a light on this icon, it will make the people to feel that this is just light switch in a part of a wall.
闪烁

Sep 09

7 in 7(day 05)

Today I finally made a short animation of “Woody the Chick” which I mentioned yesterday (so happy to fulfill my promise :D), and of course, this time I used After Effects to do it. To make this animation, first I took a short film of my desk and used it as the background of the animation, then I went to Photoshop and drawn the chick’s movement. And imported all the PNG images to the After Effects.

aaaabbbbbb

 

Check out the final video:

http://youtu.be/7UYrwTJ8rBM

Sep 09

7 in 7-Day 5 Texture Distortion

Given our recent readings on sketching and prototyping, I wanted to create a prototype for visualizing and changing texture using an optical tool. My constraints are still to use an organic subject matter, in this case an orange. I first made simple sketches of the cross section of an orange to depict the difference in its internal structure when cut along a sagittal and transverse plane. I then distorted the perception of its texture by applying two optic filters: a glass filled with water, and my iPhone lens. The way I perceive the object has now been transformed.

 

sketch

 

 

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Sep 09

Week 3- Reading response Week 3- Prototype

As a former industrial design student and a product designer, prototype is not a fresh concept for me. During the time when I was in another master program in California and my internship in southeast Asia, I have done so many kinds of prototypes: foam model, sketch model, commercial use model and models that were made by different physical materials.

Screen Shot 2013-09-07 at 7.47.36 PM

This is my ergonomics class assignment for making a model for peelers when I was in Industry Design program in California. From the sketch, we can easily see how those peelers work, but we still lose the user experience to feel how it is held in our hands and how comfortable it is to work with our fingers.

By reading the article” What do Prototypes Prototype” showed me to a wider concept of what prototype do; how it leads to the final design, and what the basic elements are for a prototype. The most impressive aspects in this reading for me is that it makes prototypes explain the design from a more general concept. In terms of industrial design, prototype means building a physical model to give a user, designers and clients early first-hand visual experience and physical user experience before it leads to the final design or be produced for the market. From this article, I have learned that prototype can be used for Mechanical and electrical engineering, Electronics prototyping and Computer programming/computer science.

In the end, I want to add another experience about prototypes. A prototype is also a very popular marketing strategy for a lot small and medium size companies in the electronics industry in China. When I worked I a small company in Guangdong province, China, they went to several international trade shows to exhibit their products. They can usually make tons of prototypes with different designs, colors, materials, and sizes for similar functions. Then, they get feedback from their international buyers and start to produce certain popular products. In this case, a prototype can help small companies save a lot money and help them to pre-test the products before it is taken to the market to avoid the unnecessary cost.

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This is the prototype of usb card reader when I worked in a electronic company in south China.

 

Sep 09

Reading Response- Prototyping

Reading these articles have shown me that prototyping, sketching, making mock-ups, all exist to fulfill a unique role in the design process. In “What do prototypes prototype”, we learn its three purposes are showing a product’s role, its aesthetics, and its implementation. In “Experience Prototyping”, we see that this study fits in closely to understanding a product’s “look and feel” from the user’s perspective. I relate the term “mock ups” very closely to prototyping, as opposed to sketching, because there is generally a more concrete object that is the subject of the testing.

In my past experience in research science, we come across prototyping and design more often than a non-scientist would think. Essentially, all scientific experimentation is a prototype to predict how similar experimentation would affect a human subject group. Due to ethics of human experimentation and difficulty in testing, we use other mammal models when designing risky medical trials. If the experiment requires speed and high turnover, we’ll use simpler animal models such as sea urchins, fruit flies, yeasts, or single-celled bacteria. Because so much of our genetic information is conserved between humans and simpler species, it makes sense to experiment on what is cheaper, easier, more efficient to grow in the lab, as long as the functions being tested remain the same. In designing experiments, one must consider how much time you have to accurately get results, at what cost, and what deadlines you’ll make. Often times, experimenters will make prototypes of more complicated experiments in order to get quick results to present. This is just a brief example from my past experience showing how prototypes and design process exist in numerous different fields.

Sep 09

7 in 7 for Day 5 Watch Ur Time

Today my project is time reminder machine.

I did this because after our 7 in 7 project , my schedule became very busy.

And I believe in 20/80 Principle. People always spend 20% time to finish 80% works.  Time went on unconsciously. So this time machine just make us to see the fact that time is flying in every second visible. To remind us to focus on what we want to do and pursuing.

 

 

http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/108633

Sep 09

7 in 7 5th Project- Save a piece of paper, Save a piece of tree.

The waste of paper napkins is not the only concern for fast food restaurants and cafes, but also it is a major concern for our environment. It seems difficult to prevent people wasting napkins in restaurants or cafes, because they are so cheap and very convenient to grab and use, unless there is some people to tell them how many trees are being cut down to make those napkins and make those people feel guilty to waste paper.

My 5th Project design is making a new package design for napkins to make people think about the relationship between trees and papers, papers and environment, also how to protect our environment by stopping the waste of napkins.

My 5th Project- Save a tree by your hand.

I use a regular napkin box and use color paper to make a tree pattern in the package, and also the keep hole (where people grab napkins) in the middle of tree crown to make people feel they are grabbing a paper from the body of a tree. Additionally, every napkin has a green leaf pattern at the corner of the paper and this leaf represents that every paper is a piece of leaf and that was enjoying the sunshine and nature; and also every paper is a piece of a huge tree.At the top of the napkins box is written: Every napkin is a piece of nature.

In this design, I want to make people feel guilty for wasting paper and to evoke people to rethink how the every waste in our life can cause problems for our environment. Every time when we start to save a paper, water, energy is not only saving us money, but the most important, we are saving nature.

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Sep 09

Reading Response Week 3

Buxton describes sketching as an “archetypal activity associated with design”. I like his remark on the definition, yet I think all designs are also at some point “archetypal”, although I’m not a fan of making the whole concept of how we think and work be overly academic or static or certain, as the open and free spirit of sketching and prototyping is for the purpose of communication and production, not necessarily for setting examples for other designers to follow, since people think and work in their own ways, but I do appreciate that Buxton states that the whole design phase is an “iterative, user-centered process”, and in theory, sketching and prototyping are supposed to be a combined unit of transition.

In the Cardboard Computers reading, the author talks about personalizing the design tool to generalize it and make it approachable by the general public. It is ideal and utopian, and problems it may create will be beyond greater unemployment, thus those “tools” that ordinary people use to create things ought to also be “designed” (Adobe?), and the difficulty level of using the tools are supposed to be at certain intellectual degree, although the idea of open source is big and online communities of open source are extremely active. It does remind me of another aspect – I’ve read some work by Walter Benjamin, and one of his famous thoughts is on the “aura” of work (especially art) losing along with the development of technological reproducibility, and I am afraid that tools that are too generalized tend to reduce the value of its creations, and people who are originally more suited doing the job (AKA good designers) are to be put in even lower social situations. However, the idea of mockups are great: humanistic and effective, going with the idea of “being archetypal”, even though mockups that are attractive and really communicate with people are still hard to make – we will be glad that artists or people who have better sense and techniques of aesthetics are still valued.

Sep 09

Week 3 Reading Response

The readings on prototypes and mock-ups were very informative. It was really nice to learn the distinction between the two because until now it has been a little bit of a grey area for me. I now understand that mock-ups are meant to be quick, disposable representations of a project which prototypes are meant to be more functioning, less disposable and a little more complete or final. Distinguishing between the types of prototypes is also extremely important. There are some scenarios where you would only want to make a look and feel prototype a opposed to a role prototype or even an implementation prototype. My favorite example of this is from the reading “What do Prototypes Prototype?” where the authors describe the prototype for a laptop computer for architects who make frequent visits to building sites. The designers created a look and feel prototype of a pizza box which they gave to the architects to bring with them on job sites. The designers’ primary goal was to make the computer easy to transport and enjoyable to include in their daily lives. In this particular case, a role prototype would not suffice because at this point in the design process they were not concerned about the actual functionality of the device.

The example of the laser printer in the reading “Cardboard Computers”  really solidified the idea that prototypes can be an inexpensive and non-committal way to explore iterations of a current system or device. Prototypes serve as a stepping stone in the process to produce new devices or systems.