All posts tagged ideation

• October 23, 2013

  Abstract > Concrete project work

  

  For our next project in studio we need to help explain and visualize abstract objects in a concrete way. The final form these explanations will take is a 1-3 minute video. I’m really excited to use this project as a way to explore a new design style and work on animation.

  My initial complex topics were:

  1. Fukushima. The brief history, the after math/clean up attempts and failures, and the future implications. Pretty big, I know.
  2. WordPress.org vs WordPress.com as you go to set up a website. This is something I have explained (or attempted to explain) several times when volunteering and when helping out other people. I feel like to first time website set-er-up-ers it’s a really hard system to grasp. I thought it would be helpful to make something remotely in my field.
  3. Patents. Specifically, the problems in our current patenting system when companies have broken away from the spirit of the system as a way to protect and encourage creativity (not just make a bunch of money).

  These topics were fine and dandy, but after reading some of the other student’s topics they were approaching and what I wanted to do with my own topic, I re-thought it a bit. I wanted to do something more light-hearted to try out a different illustration style (I naturally tend to make things clean, crisp, and simple). These topics aren’t necessarily best represented in a light-hearted manner.

  So I sat back down at my desk and pondered my dilemma, trying to think of topics that I knew at least something about and that I really enjoyed knowing about. Miraculously, I remembered a conversation I had with my friend Grant almost a year ago about New Zealand birds.

  Context: I also really love learning about science and animals and had stumbled across an article about kakapos in National Geographic which reminded me of this hilarious video of a kakapo I’d seen earlier. I told Grant about it because he has studied and is interested in birds and actually did a research project in New Zealand. He ended up explaining to me why the animals (birds and lizards primarily) of New Zealand are so unique. Basically it’s because the islands broke off earlier on leaving the birds with no natural predators. For more details, you’ll have to wait for my end project.

  In the meantime, please enjoy this recorded lecture by one of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams, in which he talks about his research with some unique island animals (including the kakapo, of course). Basically, I feel like the kakapos is one of the most delightful birds.

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• October 1, 2013

  Prototyping: Everyday task

  Project 1:

  For the first project we had to think of an every day tasks that were are “professionals” in. As in, sure do things every day, but we had to be really familiar with the process and know it in and out. I had been chewing on this for a while trying to pick something manageable. I knew later we would take the task flow we developed from this task and making some sort of technology to help this process.

  The initial ideas I had didn’t seem right for various reasons:

  • Emailing: This was just a huge beast that seemed like a lot  to tackle.
  • List-making: There are so many technologies that already do this and I personally like the process of writing lists in pen and paper anyway.
  • Taking the bus: This would be nice, wouldn’t it? But it deals mostly with trying to get the buses to have technology to tell you when it comes. That’s as simple as it is: you have that, and you’re happy and you don’t need an app that does 100 other things.
  • Reading articles and bookmarking: The problem I have is wanting time to do it, not the way I do either.
  • Using my alarm clock: I need something to wake me up and keep me up. But if I was completely honest an alarm clock is not going to make me happy about waking up and I don’t want to work on a project everyone is going to hate. (“But Jacklynn! You can make it a more enjoyable experience!” No.)

   

  

  I decided upon recycling as an option.  I am silently frustrated with my the way my housemates recycle and as the new person am not prepared to step in an lecture 6 strangers about the proper recycling technique. Especially since I’m new to Pittsburgh. Simple things like not trying to recycled soiled paper or most pizza boxes. That’s right, pizza boxes! The oil in the cardboard is difficult if not impossible to clean and the box is unusable (according to past hearsay and confirmed through recent research). I know they mean well, but it’s juts hard to stay on top of information like this and I thought it would be helpful for their to be an app that can easily tell you what’s recyclable in your area or not. For instance, Pittsburgh is the first city I’ve been in that can recycle the hard plastic of bottle caps. It makes me worry about how much recycling is just thrown away because of contamination.

  I decided I wanted my app to…

  1. Tell you what can & cannot be recycled in your specific area. Recycling plants would have incentive to send their information to the company since it would be helping them at no extra cost.
  2. Have products be quickly searchable to see if it’s recyclable or not, or even if certain parts of it are. My housemates will frequently through saran wrap into the recycle bin and I’ve just never considered that recyclable. (I’m not sure about this though)
  3. Has a list of common myths. Short and digestible. Also just interesting information about the recycling process and best practices. Like cleaning out your containers before throwing them the bag.

  In my research I stumbled upon an app called iRecycle which actually did a pretty good job with many of these points (especially having local data!) and it was pretty well designed. It was so functional, in fact, it made me kind of think I should look for some other every day task….

   

  To be continued :). 

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