This presentation poster was part of the SIAT showcase at the Simon Fraser University’s Open House in spring 2008. I was tasked with designing a poster to present our project and ideas to the open house guests. I decided to go with try out a playful and innocent style for the graphics, a play on the Polynesian saying: “We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children”. You can check out this door-sized poster here.

I worked with the idea of having a “road to sustainability” that lead to the top. Although the poster was read top-to-bottom and going away from sustainability might seem backwards, what I wanted to convey here is that we still have a long way to go in improving our environment. I drew inspiration from Tado and went on to create my own little world on the poster.

This is a followup poster for the IAT333 Interaction Design Praxis course where we now look at our intended user group and attempt to create personas of them. Simply put, personas are fictitious characters that represent different user types within a target demographic.

This is my largest poster (as of February 2007), three posters that combine in at 54 inches in length and stands 2 feet high. I also got my first taste of Pantone colors for this project as advised by my printer. I decided to try a different approach as I normally prefer to stick with good layout and typography to achieve the visual aesthetics, and I’ve sort of built up a reputation of doing that.

Anyway, the basic idea was to show a desk that belonged to our two contrasting personas that we have developed. From there, we would decorate the desk with personal belongings from the two in an effort to portray their lifestyle. So each persona would occupy one end of the desk, with the middle reserved for a brief comparison of the two. Even though the project called for three individual posters, I felt that I’d let each poster bleed into the next to achieve some degree of coherence.

To pull it together, we placed an mood strip across where we could place photos to help set the mood of our persona. With this poster, we were able to express our understanding of the intended user group: University staff and discover opportunities for a design intervention.

A cultural probe is an inexpensive technique used to learn more about your intended user group. Most typical setups involve handing some sort of diary to volunteers (of the intended user group) to log their activities and thoughts

In the IAT333 Interaction Design Praxis course, we were instructed to conduct cultural probes with our intended user, University Staff members and analyze the findings. This poster was made to present our findings in a concise manner. When planning the layout, I needed a way to fit in all the findings from studying the returned cultural probes. As the poster would be used to present a lot of information, it needed to be easy to follow and understand, like an information model.

Taking cue from calendar applications like iCal and Google Calendar, the poster uses a table to present data in a similar fashion. Columns are marked with each individual probe artifact and the cells span across columns to indicate where each finding was made. With a little planning, the columns were neatly arranged to provide the most compact fit for the extended cells. Rather than use actual images of the probes that we have presented before, I decided to use visual icons to place emphasis on the information rather than the probes itself.

With this poster, or chart, it was easy for others to quickly learn about our intended user group. And it allowed the team to form personas based on the key findings we’ve charted.

Tangible Letters are letters that fold into different forms to deliver additional meaning and value. It is an idea that recognizes the qualities of the slow movement and intends to re-shift purposes to create new meanings. This idea incorporates many aspects of the slow movement like enhancing the experience, taking time to enjoy and resisting fast-culture.

The slow movement was born from the slow food movement, which was a cultural shift that sought to resist fast food and preserve cultural cuisine. This was a response to the shift to fast culture, where our desires for instant gratification take precedence and leads to unnecessary consumerism and waste. The slow movement entices people to step back and enjoy the quality of life instead of attempting to do as much as possible in order to live it to the fullest.

Postage mail has been nearly replaced by the ease and speed of Emails. Letters however, have a unique “hand-crafted” feel that enhances its value to both the sender and the recipient. Both parties are imbued with a strong sense of appreciation for one another from this. This would be where we explore possible ideas to expand on the quality of the experience.

Upon receiving the mail, the recipient can fold the letter like origami, giving it new form and meaning. The shape can then be “recognized” by a computer which in turn obtains additional content from the sender, be it a video or some photos.

In our prototype, we embedded resistors of varying resistance onto the paper. And thus each paper would have a unique resistor. When the resistor comes into contact with the contact plates of the reader, the we are able to identify which letter it is and load the appropriate content.

This was the final project for IAT230: Design for Digital Environments. Working in teams, our task was to refresh an icon of modern design by Enzo Mari.

Mari defined his work as an “elaborated or constructed in a way that corresponds entirely to the purpose or function“. The Timor Calendar, a perpetual desk calendar would be a statement to that. Mari brought together beautiful form and solid function together in this piece, creating something so sustainable that the calendar has been in production since 1967. Time is endless. Our task was to come up with something as comparable.

Problem Statement
In addition to the efficiency and accuracy of ubiquitous electronic calendars, the calendar we intended to design should provide elegant simplicity and joy-of-use to users with its unique style which reflects both the users’ social status and personal aesthetic value.

The first revision intended to introduce affordances into the product while continuing to keep the virtues of Mari’s concepts for modern design. Here, the user will still enjoy the experience of manually flipping dates, while the enlarged base serves as a paper tray to hold documents. I also added extra spacing below the dates as a way to let users stick notes for all those important reminders. Out of the three revisions for the first phase of the project, we were told to move on with this.

Mari drew inspiration for the Timor Calendar’s form from railway traffic signals when he was a kid. I figured that this would be a solid next step for this project, to look for something that will inspire the form of our revised calendar. We found inspiration in the slow and fragile snail and decided that it would be the perfect metaphor to lead our design.

Use of the golden ratio helps refine the ‘snail’ inspired form. The snail would be a rough representation of where we stand against time, slow in the race against time. And thus the calendar intends to remind users that we must use this precious commodity to the best of our abilities.

A rendering of the our revised Timor calendar, notice how we kept the paper tray and used the ‘head’ of the snail as a letter holder. We figured that if it’s going to take up some space on someone’s desk, it must be quite useful. And with its overly simplified form, we were able to quickly deploy a “paper” prototype…

SECRETSERVICE is a field agent who protects both the user and the drink. He was designed in response to an invitation to participate in the PaperJoes project, which aimed to sell coffee and let its customers choose their own packaging. The project was originally inspired by the designer toys produced by KidRobot, StrangeCo and the like and finally drew from many of the cute paper models found online.

I had previously helped develop the idea and template for Derek who ran the project. Starting with a milk carton concept and working our way towards a more flexible cup, or square-cup. The end result was a paper model that was relatively easy to skin, cut, and put together.

Inspiration for my character, or Paper Joe, came from many sources. I started with the idea to represent highly skilled knowledge workers to represent what we will become, and wanted to inject a feel of professionalism into my character. And then I added Horatio from CSI: Miami into the mix, resulting in SECRETSERVICE. Surprisingly, he was the quickest to sell out during the event, probably because he was a no-nonsense choice.

This is the first project for the newly formed IAT338 Interactive Objects and Environments course. Our task was to create an information model regarding the article found in the August issue of Fast Company. An online version of that article can be found here.

Our approach was simple. Condense the article into a couple of key points and revolve around one of the themes presented in the article. And all this had to be solid representation of the article, as we intended to reach out to a wider audience- not just the ones who are familiar with the article. Essentially, what we want to say is that we all have a choice when it comes to how we get our drinking water.

The information model emulates the typical water-cycle diagrams found in science textbooks. This helps us show the complexity of bottling and its environmental effects when compared to just using tap water. The colors blue and green play well with each other and also illustrate a point- blue is just water but green on the other hand has eco-friendly measures.

The image below won’t do any justice, so you should view the Full Version (PDF).

This project is an experiment to enable myself as a designer to experiment with different styles and techniques rapidly by creating signature blocks for forum use for different people. With each personality, there would be a need to develop a solution to produce a signature that they can identify with. Each signature would require experimentation between colors, images, type, and composition in order to produce a unique signature at each step of the way.