levitated flash experiments in motion

sea.thing slowly undulates across the screen like a leviathan, twisting and turning in its element. click on a segment and it separates from the rest to move separately.

legged.creatures collide and engulf each other.

falgellum are creepy worm-like creatures with a very realistic way of moving.

orbiting.networks - spheres of sizes made by time of mousedown create orbits with their neighbors.

the trema. generator - fills the screen with various sized blackdots.

isoblocks grows a grid of cubes in a background-like space.

cylinder .image.display is a more practical thing, a rotating cylinder of tall images that can be selected and enlarged.

Tim Hunkin clock for the london zoo

Tim Hunkin made an animated clock for the London Zoo that has a whole range of things happening. it seems like a great way of making narrative from moving parts.

flash sound tutorials

Kenny Bellew has a good tutorial for using sounds in flash.

snapz enlarge tool demo

this smapz tool demo shows a moving window that shows an enlarged area of the screen directly below the cursor. I am not exactly sure where this would fall within the area of movement and info yet but I believe it has relevance to the topic.

transitoins in yahoo design pattern library

it turns out that Yahoo has a site with different kinds of transitions for web design. some of these are perfect for my catalog of movements made within interface and some of them do help in understanding what is going on in the interface.

the pause that refreshes

this article in UXmatters deals with transitional elements in an interface. interesting points in the article are the ideas of a pause or transition allowing a natural rest period in an interface. there are several examples of transitional elements that allow someone using a product to understand something that is happening.

Jason, if you sent me this link and I'm not crediting you, I apologize ahead.

transition as interface

Jason said:
I have been thinking a bit about visual morphing and how everything between a and b in the typical morphing process is just fluff (yes, I know I am a weirdo). Anyway, the word "transition" kept popping up in my head.

Transition can be a meaningful form of animation. It serves to communicate the crossing from one thing the next and almost always requires some form of motion. I think in your case you are not interested in motion as transition but motion as stand alone form of communication. However, you can't have motion (or animation) without transition and vice versa.

Sorry for the babble, what I am really getting at is perhaps you could frame your study as "transition in interface" and then nobody starts thinking about bugs bunny or text on wheels. Animation represents all kinds of things you don't care about, transition in interface seems way more appropriate.:)

-Jason

then he sent a link to this web site talking about transition as an interface element.


and I answered:
good points. I did realize after class on thursday that I didn't emphasize that my interest was movement in interface. I think I am correct to use the word movement rather than animation, regardless of what other people think about it because animation is the enabler for movement but it's the idea that the movement can contain information that I am interested in investigating.

the examples on that article page are really good ones. I haven't been thinking about transitions as simple as these and I think they are strong. thanks for the thoughts.



and don't let me forget that the eagle has landed.

quicktime video of mac os user change

on the Snapz Pro X web page you can see a video (made with Snapz Pro X) of the Mac user change screen. it rotates a cube-link image from the desktop of the first user to the desktop of the second one. there are a lot of other interesting video captures on this web site. they are there to illustrate the capabilities of the screen capture program but they are interesting in themselves.

learnin is phun

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

you can download this game and play yourself. it is a physics sandbox where you can easily create objects (2d), endow them with properties and they react and respond. the video shows lots of examples of building and setting properties for different objects and how they work together afterward. there is also a link to the game you can download at college humor.com. oops. too bad, windows only.

informational movement from Ocean's Eleven and some type

In this animated video using text and part of the script from the movie "Ocean's Eleven," movement of the text objects on the page also gives an idea of the caper they are discussing. The object of this animation is to entertain but part of what it accomplishes is also some visual ideas of the space they are talking about.

I know the video won't show in the aggreator so here is a link to the video on You'Tube.

defrag hard drive - good use of movement to provide information

this screen shot of a hard drive optimization (Norton Systemworks defragmentation tool), is the first good example I have found of movement that exists to contain information. it's interesting that it's also a very old idea.

link to the iraq war map

The Iraq war fatalities ma is here.

and here is a good critical assessment of the information value of the map from my friend Andrew Gilmartin:

The one element I don't like is that there is no direct representation of deaths over time per region. I understand that this information visual is an animated one and so is intended to be "watched" rather
than "seen" but, being old and gray, I like my information visuals to have a conclusion or a summary and this one does not. So, while each death is marked by a dot and the density of dots does indirectly
represents deaths over time but where deaths are geographically close together then the dots overlap and so the density is less than what it should be. What constituents a region is hard to define; place names
are important for orientation but they might not accurately reflect regionalism. I am sure there is some math that could be used to cluster deaths.

Inspiration for interface design

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Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path slideshow on where interface design inspiration comes from. some of the text is too small to read but it's still worth looking at.

Star Wars Sweded

Sweding the classic. Take a break from that frantic writing and have a laugh. The dogfight is awesome.

1:47. I don't know how to get the video to show in the aggregator but it's on my blog page at viacamp. maybe a link to youtube?

Interaction-Design.org HCI encyclopedia

this is a web site dedicated to collecting terms of interaction design, complete with an online citation maker. there is an invitation to write entries for terms that you suggest. so if you get some good info under your belt you may be able to have it published here.

Jacob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics

here are 10general principles for usability on useit.com.

and as long as I'm at it, here is a blog discussion linking the 10 heuristics to real life zen haiku

I eat beef to get even

quoted by a cowboy talking about his job working with cows. thought it was funny.

stream of consciousness 1

3 feb 2008

I like interface.
To the point of obsession
And other stuff too.

my interest in interface is strong. there is no doubt of the direction I think and have always thought I would take for a thesis project. I think it's a good idea at this point to explore some other ideas before committing, though. what I'm not sure of is how to approach a period of experimentation in other interests in the context of this project. two things concern me at the moment: I don't want to get behind on the serious work of the thesis for one and I do want to spend some time thinking about other things that I think I would find to be interesting additions or other options to the thesis but I think that approach will want some kind of limits or structure to keep it from becoming an unwieldy distraction rather than a chance to open my horizons.

some of the things that always have interested me are visualizing information (really a subset of design for interface) and using animation to communicate information. the final presentation last semester also brought up some ideas that could prove to be fruitful directions to explore: interest in the hand-drawn scans in my presentation had me thinking for a while. I don't really think it is feasible to consider that as a thesis research but contemplating the difference in the freedom of design using traditional tools against the refinement of what is accepted as professional work done with the current tool set, mostly adobe products, could be a wonderful concept to bring into a more widely defined project. also, I started making the movie for the sound project using photos I took and by overlapping them in photoshop I started getting effects that fascinated me. I have not done much work using photoshop as an image editor so the whole experience opened my mind to ideas I have never had before. putting those images into a movie was also interesting. it's possible that the movie making and animation to communicate ideas are somehow linked together in their general direction.

I've also been paying some attention to dreams this week and some messages are coming through. one night I dreamed of something that had to do with something from a long time ago in my life. odd, but it seemed to do with arranging living space. not sure how that fits. there were more dreams but lost now. I'll pay more attention later.

another area I've liked to play around with is creating stuff using some kind of code. I've never been able to focus on that kind of work to any degree. there has always been some kind of distraction in terms of work to do or work to search for that has drawn me away. it would be good to work on ways to make prototypes of interface designs. things that don't show something working just don't do justice to the idea and could be said to fail to communicate effectively.

at a really basic level, things I find important are color, concept, contrast, structure, logic and typography. that seems like a weird grouping. I hate an application that requires training. when it's a web application that requires training I always think it's because the application is poorly designed. today, with new, interactive possibilities for web programs, that idea may be entirely too demanding. but if it is, what is the new baseline to describing how applications on the web work?

obsession, obsession, obsession, obsession.

I have questions about how changing from hierarchical file structuring systems will affect how we understand our computers and how it will change the way programs work.


so here's the split.

for interface design, I have a lot of ideas for directions project(s) can go and a lot of ideas for how to go about thinking about it.
for everything else, I am at a disadvantage. I know what I like and what I dislike and what I might consider doing and which things I would not want to consider doing. but I don't know where to start thinking about those thing or how to identify possible projects within the group.
it seems like a good idea to take a moment now to consider - explore as best I can - directions I haven't taken seriously to see if something strikes me as a likely alternate direction or as a modifier to my other interests.
I don't know how much effort would be good to put into that search for direction or how emphatically I should deviate from my expected path. should I start by researching in 2 directions at the same time to keep from getting behind? would it be better to spend a finite amount of time thinking about other things and then stop and see what kinds of things have shown up by then.

hi everyone

here I am.