The coolest set of designers and devlopers you'll meet

Before there was math, there was faux table creation. Since we weren’t entirely sure what we were supposed to be doing, as none of us had touched a projector before, we decided to create our table using found objects. Our projector mount was Steph and Matt who graciously volunteered to lie on the floor for an extended period of time.

The makeshift table beginnings

The floor was fairly dirty

If Steph and Matt were the projector ...

While we didn’t solve anything that day, and had to come back the following day with mirrors, engineers, and math, we gave it a college try.

Objectives For 2/9/10:

Today as developers we discussed:

1. TUIO/Touclib Vs. CCV
- Touchlib has better documentation
- CCV is newer however,
- CCV is also more convinient and user friendly (at the outset).
- The difference seems to be minimal, however we have decided that we are going to go with ccv. If however for some reason CCV doesn’t work out, they are
interchangable (for the most part) and do work on the same interface (TUIO). They both communicate with flash in the same way (FLOSC – flash open sound
control). A way to broadcast protocol info to flash. CCV has flosc built-in, touchlib you have to open a flosc server…although it isn’t that complicated
(its just a java file). Once you have opened FLOSC and whichever touch interface we want to use they are very similar.

2. SVN client
- tortoiseSVN – we are probably going to go with this one, because some of us have used it before. We could try to host this on googleCode if we cannot find
a server, however this would mean that our code is open source…which is not as desirable.
- SmartSVN
- Syncro SVN

3. Flash Vs Flex – Flash.
4. Meeting times – Friday at 4 @ NM Lab in GCCIS

To be discussed next time (FRIDAY AT 4PM @ NM LAB IN 70):

5. Presentation
6. Meeting Minutes
7. Simple menu implementation
8. Demos

creativity is ambiguous

The first chapter he talked about not just the user using the product, its how the

experience is created. For instance cheese from the fancy store that he goes to. With fancy paper, and untying it, and eating it, and its like a present but better. They go the extra mile to create a good user experience.

The other example used was the old school book store. Instead of just a bag they wrapped it in paper. The author was really impressed with this experience.

The other experience he listed was about the nightmare at 30,000 feet. The old guy couldn’t find the volume button. Unfortunately the volume was on the touch screen. And he kept poking it. Why create something that doesn’t make sense?

The airlines decision to not add a remote was based on monetary gains/losses. They put more weight on this than the users experience, which we felt was a mistake.

Constraints:

Their client gave them this impossible task. Something about loading or memory space. At first they though about how they couldn’t get it done. But then they did get it done. Even they didn’t think they could do it until they tried, and they were creative in their way of getting it done.

There is something about a pencil. The pencil is a true testiment to good design. We can perhaps apply these principles to design. The airplane wasn’t intuitive, because the old man couldn’t find the volume button. Need to design for people who are both tech saavy and not tech saavy. Try to keep things simple for our product. Make it about the experience and not the technology. Building the table isn’t the project, its about other things.
How to apply this to the project. Its going to be difficult to do this for imagine RIT because we don’t know our audience as well. We have kids, families, old people, etc. Perhaps we shouldn’t worry about our project in the atmosphere of imagine RIT. They will want to see the project as opposed to the old man in the story. Plus we’ll be there to the story.

Philisophical questions:
What is coffee? What is a table?

The Technology chapters the book talks about how Brendan Dawes comes up with his creative ideas.  Dawes explains how he sees the world and how that helps his imagination to think up ways that current technologies can be used in different ways than they were made for.  This tinkering allows him to create some really interesting projects.

One day he asked himself, “Why should DVDs be viewed only through DVD players?”  Dawe’s uses technology for things that they are not made for.  Sometimes he is surprised by the results of his tinkering and even though it was not what he expected, the results gave him new ideas.  His thought process allowed him to past the normal limitations of DVDs, the fact that they should be played on DVD players, and he decided to see what they would look like if they were played on more unconventional players.  For our project, we need to be able to look at things in new ways.  We cannot do our project in the “conventional way”, we should have something from a perspective that few people have thought of before.

Dawes sees everything as a numbers.  With this perspective, he can use the numbers to graph anything that he wants.  One time at an airport, he watched people walk by the gate, turned it into numbers and graphed it to see what the intervals of walking were.  From this example we can take away that even everyday normal activities, such as walking, can be quantified and put in visualizations.

From this chapter, we can take away a few thoughts.  We should be getting our inspiration from everywhere.  Whether it is as common as people walking down the street or as crazy as thinking what we can do with something by deviating from the directions by the manufacturer, we should keep these ideas in the back of our minds.

Even if we think something is a bad idea, we should keep it anyways.  Dawes keeps notes on all of his ideas, even if they seem outrageous or incredibly stupid.  Revisiting old ideas can allow you to come up with some new ones and ideas that had seemed outrageous in the past may have been around long enough that technology has caught up with what you wanted to do.