Recently in Projects Category
I recently had a great opportunity to work with the brilliant minds behind Help Remedies - who have created some beautifully designed healthcare products. T&E of LittleFury did the branding/identity and packaging.
My little contribution to all this can be found in the bored section of Help's website - where I created a handful of pieces of what can best be described as fun.
Really looking forward to seeing more from Help, and can't wait to find some of their products in my medicine cabinet (or displaying them on my shelf to impress visitors - they're that good looking!).
I'll be going to a few interesting events in the next two months:
April 26 GoRuCo (Gotham Ruby Conference)
from the site: "A technical conference aimed at highly motivated programmers interested in all things Ruby."
April 30 Visualization Day at CUNY
This looks really interesting, with presentations by Ben Schneiderman and other HCI & Visualization notables. The conference is free, which is always a plus.
May 12 - 14 Where2.0 in Burlingame, CA
I've been wanting to go to this conference for a couple years. Always a great line-up of speakers and lots of interesting people and projects. This year's Where2.0 should be excellent - with all the LBS apps and platforms that are launching.
May 17 Smart/Models (AIGA/NY Biz Conf)
AIGA/NY has put together a great looking conf featuring a diverse group of designers and producers discussing... the biz. I'm especially looking forward to Jason Fried's talk on 37signals' approach. There has been a lot of talk about new business models in the creative space, and this looks to be a great round-up of some super intelligent people with highly innovative ideas and methods.
Hacked together a little Lifestream aggregator the other day. Super raw, but it aggregates feeds from Last.fm, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Tumblr, WeRockNYC, Flickr, and Dodgeball onto a single page. Next step: cleaning up the UI, piping it all out in a single aggregate RSS feed, and building a few little widgets (an excuse to play around in Flex???).
I've renamed my ITP thesis project Polarizr... since PolarWeb just sounds... stupid. The website and Firefox extension will be made public [well, it will be in exclusive, invite-only alpha] this weekend.
I've been working on a couple link visualizations for the browsing history network dashboard section/functionality... here's a sneak peak:
I'm not sure if the original PolarFox extension will be ready by next Wednesday May the 3rd (Has my 2 years at ITP gone by this fast? Crazy), though I will continue development [albeit slowly, gotta pay rent].
Check out the slides for my final Thesis Class presentation [with Nick Law].
The midterm presentations for Nick Law's thesis seminar went smoothly for all. The guest critics were great, and provided some excellent feedback.
My Presentation Slides [pdf]
PolarFox, my thesis, now has its very own domain. Please thank johnny internet squatter for the silly .info instead of a normal .com. Such is life.
What in God's green Earth is a PolarFox, you might ask? See below for most recent elevator [to the Moon?] pitch.
The average person's media consumption habits are predictable. Individuals tend to reinforce their current beliefs, at most expand the scope (in a rather limited fashion) rather than explore completely new areas, biases, territory. This concept is called polarization - and I think media polarization is a bad thing on the individual level, and a terribly dangerous thing on the group, the aggregate, the societal level. The staggering wealth of information and resources available to the average media consumer does nothing to help them avoid media consumption polarization - in fact doing the exact opposite, even limiting the average consumer to mainstream media (MSM) distribution channels.
My thesis (PolarFox) will explore a number of issues surrounding media consumption biases and polarization. PolarFox will provide a tool to allow individuals an opportunity to escape from the stagnation that can often arise from polarization. The proposed app requires no abnormal action from the individual using PolarFox - the process is transparent and pervasive. PolarFox will force individuals to consume media content that they would otherwise be ignorant of, or consciously [or unconsciously] ignore. This introduction of diversity is paramount in the current climate of information saturation. The future will bring about more and more tools that enable people to search and parse through the vast wealth of available information. The current trends of recommendation systems do not allow for true exploration, they provide links to content that would be of interest - both in subject and bias. These systems place a premium in banality. Revolutionary content is only found in passing internet memes, a powerful but unreliable and unpredictably subjective distribution method.
here [pdf]
