The Short & Simple Story of the Credit Crisis - Visit the Project Website »

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The Crisis of Credit Visualized distills the economic crisis into a short and simple story by giving it form. It is also argues that designers have the ability to see a complex situation, then turn around and communicate it to others. By giving graphic form to the credit crisis, it becomes comprehensible. Not only do economic activities take shape, but new relationships can emerge between these shapes.

My interest in the project stems from 3 primary sources: my simple desire to understand it, diagramming work I conducted at UNICEF, and my earlier motion design work. Initially, I researched printed news and spoke with several friends working in investment banks. However, I began turning more and more to audio and video sources for information. These sources contained an editor’s narrative which greatly enhanced my understanding, often by putting the crisis in some sort of larger context. But I still could not find a holistic or concise explanation.

In the summer of 2008 I was awarded a fellowship to join The Innovation Team at UNICEF in New York. There, while designing global storytelling and media platforms, I began creating system diagrams. The diagrams served to make crazy ideas understandable, and served as a tangible object when presenting these systems which hadn’t yet be built. I felt that I was onto something when the technical project manager informed me that the diagrams had helped him significantly with the system architecture.

After returning from New York, I realized that the earlier motion designs (see Harper’s Index in Motion & Tangible Interactions) I had done were in a sense glorified, moving diagrams. Moving mediums allow for richer narratives. But what really intereseted me was when I gave form to an idea in the diagrams, I was able to draw connections on an entirely new level—and communicate more effectively.

I’ve also created these print spreads from the video’s assets:

Scenes from storyboards

Research sketches

Two excellent This American Life broadcasts proved valuable sources:
Another Frightening Show About the Economy
The Giant Pool of Money

Multi-Touch Tables Drawing Connections Between Visitors

Designed for Acura, the Interactive Oracles are round, multi-touch, multi-user tables that draw connections between visitors as they touch the surface. The Oracles were built by George P. Johnson (GPJ) for Acura’s 2008 International Auto Show Exhibit. While originally built in 2007, the interface failed to fully utilize the multi-touch capabilities of the tables. GPJ lent one of the Oracles to the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design for students to explore new interaction design concepts. The bar-like padded lining seemed to induce a very casual and leisurely approach to interacting with the table, and the round shape invited many user but did not structure their relationships (i.e. the is no “head of the table” at a round table). Based on these observations I designed an interface required little investment to use (no reading or watching), but created a “wow” once a visitor touched the surface. Graphics and sounds flourish out of visitors fingers as they play with the surface. Graphics connect between hands and sliders along the edge of the table can be tossed to other visitors.

The exciting aspect of a project like this is designing an application that can be used by a dozen people simultaneously. It is a big departure from designing for a single point of input for a single moment (i.e. a mouse). The designer needs to consider how to serve up to 5 finger tips on each hand, each of which can remain pressed down on the surface for varied amount of time.

GPJ brought me on board to implement my interface and consult on the interaction design of several other projects. The final interface can be seen here or in the video above.

See the comprehensive project website here »

Simulating the relationship between power and control.

Demonstration

Wave your arm across the wall to create a giant flourish of light. OverPowered uses accelerometers to amplify your conjuring gestures into magical displays. But beware your fervor, if you strike too hard, you will destroy the system. OverPowered is an exercise in controlling power.

Swinging your arms to command herds of stars: the stuff of Fantasia. Using accelerometers, I wanted to recreate the experience atop the mountain inThe Sorcerers Apprentice from Disney’s Fantasia. The Sorcerers Apprentice is the premier story about the ambivalent nature of power. It is derived from the ancient story of the golem: an inanimate figure brought to life by magic to serve its creator, but the creator soon realizes that he cannot control his creation. Power and control have an intimate and often inverse relationship, where the greatest power cannot be controlled.

While working on OverPowered and The Credit Crisis Visualized concurrently, I began to see a similarity in each project’s narrative. While the apprentice (Mickey) created the broom to haul water out of the well for him, so similarly did the captains of Wall Street create derivative securities to haul profit out of bad mortgages. Both lost control. To use Tom Wolfe’s term, these Masters of the Universe used their incredible power to create the very situation responsible for their downfall.

In relation to the project Process as Drawing, OverPowered began to explore the idea of harnessing creative energy and wielding it on a level approaching that of destruction. Destructive action creates incredible amplifications, like the shudder of a finger tumbling a house of cards. The epitome of destructive action is the imploding of a building, with one push of a detonator, an entire building collapses in several awe-inspiring seconds. Magic is a synonym for this awe, and has always referred to the ability to control amplifications like this, especially in the creative direction. What if you could “magically” create a building in a matter of seconds?

New technology allows us to create experiences closer and closer to magic, financial or otherwise. We continue to test these powers to their limits, resulting in our continuous boom-and-bust cycles.

Presentation

Testing

Mock-up

See more videos of the project:

OverPowered Video Galley »

What Happens When Everyone’s Phone Rings at the Same Time?

Room Call is an installation in a room with a terminal at the door and a few abstract posters hung on the wall. Visitors enter their name and phone numbers at the terminal then examine the posters. The content of the posters in not important, because after a minute, everyone’s phone rings at the same time. After the initial confusion, visitors answer their phones, where they begin to find that everyone in the room is connected to a conference call with everyone else.

The experience highlights the potential connection that exists between everyone in the room (or any room) through their cell phones and the nearest cellular tower. Although it is invisible, this connection exists all the time. By calling all the visitors’ phones simultaneously, I hope to illustrate this connection in an unexpected and delightful way. Inspired by my earlier projects exploring new ways to depict networked objects (Stuff Keeping Track of Itself & The Bragging Chair), I’m interested in finding new ways to depicts networks—ways different from the tired web and cell diagrams.

I managed to rig up Skype conference calls by manually entering the visitor’s phone numbers, but the next step I want to take is configuring an Asterisk server to completely automate the installation. Anyone interested in collaborating please contact me.

Presentation of Room Call at my Thesis Review

A 30 Minute Drawing Each Day, Recorded & Condensed. Videos » Illustrations »

I set about to do a quick illustration, in 30 minutes, each day. I gave this exercise to myself to get in the habit of producing work in larger quantities. One day I decided to record the drawings. I took the screen-capture video and condensed it into a 90-second video. What I found was that the process of illustrating, as captured in the video, became as much an object as the finished illustration itself.

Inspiration for this exercise came from my participation last year in the Cut&Paste design tournament. Cut&Paste puts designers on stage in front of a live audience, where they compete in 15 minute rounds. In this format, the designer’s process becomes the focus, as their designing becomes a performance for the crowd. This got me thinking that the process of designing could be used in ways that add to the finished design. Or, to taking it further, what if the process became the primary object and the finished design was the addition? These illustrations mark the beginning of my interest in this idea that I will continue to explore.

In relation to the project OverPowered, these videos begin to explore the idea of harnessing creative energy and wielding it on a level approaching that of destruction. This is because destructive actions create incredible amplifications, like the flick of a finger tumbling a house of cards. The epitome of destructive action is the imploding of a building, with one push of a detonator, an entire building collapses in seconds. This same building took years to build. But know, we can watch it built in a matter of minutes through time-lapsed video. Watching a building assembled before your eyes is quite an impressive sight. Miraculously, something has been created where there was once nothing. This awe-inspiring effect is a reverse of the awe of destruction. I believe this is one of the main appeals of time-lapse video.

As new technologies continue to enable awe-inspiring acts of creation, in what new ways will we use them not just for effect, but for production? How will designers utilize them?

See all of the videos and illustrations:

Process as Drawing Video Gallery »

Process as Drawing Illustration Gallery »

Spreading Personal Stories to Youth Around the World

“If stories come to you, care for them, and learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”
—Barry Lopez in Crow and Weasel

In the summer of 2008, I was fortunate enough to be selected for the Designmatters Fellowship and spend 4 months working with UNICEF’s Innovation Team in New York City. During my time there, my primary project was a conceptual redesign of the Our Stories Project. (See video of my fellowship as well as my documentation and personal essay »)

Project Description:
The Our Stories Project collects, preserves, and shares young peoples’ stories around the world. Bringing together the collective effort of UNICEF, Google, One Laptop Per Child, and StoryCorps, the Our Stories Project aims to leverage emerging and existing technologies to create a global platform for storytelling. These are the voices of young people everywhere, in all cultures, all languages, at all times. These stories matter because taken together, they enable people to communicate locally but be heard globally.

The project collects audio stories locally and over the website. The primary way these are accessed is through a Google maps mashup organizing stories by the location of their telling: OurStories.org. My proposal was to push the platform to become more accessible to many of the areas of the world that we wanted to hear from most, but where an interactive map is not practical.

I had spent a week visiting with youth journalist organizations in Guyana and Suriname in my previous semester. While I was there I noticed how these groups were excellent at adapting content from emerging technologies into forms that were available locally, often television, radio, and mobile phones.

While organizing stories on a Google map is one great way to do it, why limit the project to one mode of access? Why not stream the stories though and open API, one that allows policy makers, advocates, and designers to tap into this stream and create their own interfaces that are appropriate and accessible to their own audiences?

Kids with high-bandwidth access can browse the Google map, but kids in rural and underdeveloped areas can hear the radio broadcast their local DJ is transmitting—that he downloaded as a podcast. The idea is that there isn’t one right way to make stories accessible, but many right ways, as many right ways as there are listeners. By feeding the stories out in an open manner, they can be adapted in different ways in different places that make the most sense for each local audience.

See the proposal document describing this approach »

I also explored a visual language to compliment this approach. Our team visited the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Laboratory to work with kids to co-design the project. There I noticed toys of basic geometric shapes that each child would assemble in their own unique way to tell their story. I chose tangrams as universal shapes across languages and cultures. The tangrams represent stories that, while universal, can be assembled in ways the vibrantly describe the land from which they came.

See the world in tangrams »