Before I started studying on the Multidisciplinary Design course, to be honest I did not quite yet know what kind of a designer I wanted to be. Towards the end of my undergraduate course on the Interactive Multimedia Design I found myself working more in the development, and that I was perhaps working more so as developer than a designer. My mindset has all changed since that, largely due to masterclass session with Christoph Zwelleger.

Christoph Zwelleger

Christoph deserves a lot of credit for helping me shape my thinking as a designer, and his insight on Art and Design was awe-inspiring and a very nice man to talk to. During our masterclass with Christoph, he spoke of how designers — “have a desire to improve the world”, and artists — “have a desire to understand the world”. He also talked about how both of these statements are connected as in my scenario as a designer, I believe that we need to understand the world so that we may be equipped to improve the world.

I asked Christoph during the session about personal identity, in that how do we describe our role as a designer or artist to others? Christoph asked each of us to write down how we would describe ourselves in our practice. For me I thought of words such as web designer, web developer, iPhone developer, user experience designer, user interaction designer… the list goes on. The list of words all describe the things I can do but didn’t describe what kind of a designer I was until Christoph suggested — User-centred designer, a lightbulb went off in my head and the idea of translating my long list of buzzwords under the umbrella name of user-centred designer fitted my profile as a designer perfectly.

Networking

I had started to design some new logo icons as I wanted to design a new business card and brand myself as a user-centred designer. I have noticed from other Masterclasses with Kris Turnbull, and sessions with Andrea Montgomery that the business cards played a pivotal role in networking. I should be using events such as Refresh and Build to help get my name out there among the community.

Tutorial

I had a tutorial with Chris Murphy, and I was able to show him some of the ideas I had for my new logo. I had quite a few and I was undecided how I should take my ideas forward. Chris suggested to create 50 unique icons, and after that I could possibly take my top icons, and use the 10 icons as my logo. The idea of having a dynamic icon was really nice and unique to me. I then started to look into braille, as I like the shapes and the idea of it encourages you to touch to understand the information.

I was able to catch Chris for a follow up tutorial, and he really liked the idea of using the braille, and in particular going with the braille equivalent of my initials DT. So next step was to begin designing the business card. Chris and I discussed about using the idea of designing the business card in the shape of an iPhone icon. I wanted the design of the card to be something different and away from the normal shaped business card, something that once I hand over my business card that that experience is something different for the other person.

Printing

I was originally thinking of using Moo to print the business cards, that was until Chris McClelland (@chrismcclelland) from Ecliptic Labs gave me one of his business cards. I was really impressed with the quality of the card and the UV Vanishing was a nice touch, and Chris got them printed by Print100.com. Print 100 offer a impressive range of options and especially at a great price. They have a diecutting option if you wish to shape your card differently, and this was exactly what I was looking for. So I have placed my order with Print 100, and will post up some pictures when the business cards arrive hopefully before Christmas.

The Design…

Shortly after finishing off the User Interface for Oblique Strategies, a great opportunity presented itself at one of the master-classes organised by the Multidisciplinary Design staff. We were to asked to work in groups of three, and to collaborate our creative thinking and present these ideas back to the class. The great advantage of working on the Multidisciplinary Design course, is that their is a wide variety of design disciplines, and working together on the project was a lot fun and the ideas we came up with were fantastic. In particular one idea that emerge from the group was the Virtual Concierge iPhone application.

Concept

The concept behind the Virtual Concierge is to target the 5 and 6 star hotels, who are looking to create an experience of exclusivity among their clients. One of the most important roles in creating a positive experience amongst the customers is down to the Concierge. What the Virtual Concierge will do is take that experience to the next level. It will allow the customers of the hotel to have access to the best knowledge around the area and on the history of the hotel. I have some more ideas in the pipeline to continue to develop the product, but for the moment I have drawn up three visuals that I believe will make this application desirable amongst the hotels clients.

User Interface

The Virtual Concierge is still a work in progress, but I have very much enjoyed working on this project, as it has been very exciting so far to hear such positive feedback from tutors and class mates. I would love to hear your thoughts on the Virtual Concierge?

Fellow masters student Mr Brian Burns posted a tweet a few days back, letting the world know that he was soon to become a proud of owner of an iPhone 3GS! Although he never does much work anyway! lol only joking, he tweeted the following:

Fully expecting to get no work done tomorrow. Finally taking the plunge… iPhone in the post. Any must-have-app recommendations?

Mr Brian Burns, 22/11/09

Brian got a lot of responses from the Twitter Community, but I thought I could take it a step further and list my personal Top 10 iPhone Apps. I could easily have made it 20 but thought 10 was a fair enough round number considering I currently have 98 iPhone Apps. How do I consider which app is better than the other? That is a difficult question to answer as everyone will have a different opinion on their own favourite applications but I chose mine on terms of how often I use them and of course how beautiful their User Interface was designed. I have organise my top 10 list in reverse order keeping the best to last .

#10 – Tea Round

#09 – Birdbrain

#08 – Bloom

#07 – Postage

#06 – Little Snapper

#05 – Voices

#04 – Tweetie 2

#03 – Weightbot

#02 – Things

#01 – Convertbot

What are your top 10 apps?

What are your top 10 must have apps? It would be great to hear what apps you are using?

Dear Mr. Brian Eno, if you do happen to fall across this web page, we’ll be contacting you shortly. Over the past month I have been working and developing on the User Interface (UI) design of the very first application built by DubbleTap.

DubbleTap — we build apps

DubbleTap is a tiny iPhone & Web Development studio based in Belfast. It is a collaborative project by two Multidisciplinary Design students, Brian Burns and Danny Turley. We have several app ideas in the pipeline, that we are hoping to roll out next year, so watch this space…

What is Oblique Strategies?

For those of you who have not heard of Oblique Strategies before — just as I was only a month ago, I have taken a quote from the interview with Mr. Brian Eno about Oblique Strategies:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios – tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case – it’s just the most obvious and – apparently – reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”

The first Oblique Strategy said “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” And, in fact, Peter’s first Oblique Strategy – done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that – was …I think it was “Was it really a mistake?” which was, of course, much the same kind of message. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards. At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he’d kept those in a notebook. We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know…there was a complete correspondence between the messages. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did; we published them as a pack of cards, and they’re now used by quite a lot of different people, I think.

Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2/1/80

Pen and Paper

My iPhone Stencil Kit came in handy and was fun to use when I started my design process off with some paper mockups. When starting any new project, I believe it is essential to start the design process off with some old pen and paper, whether it may be simply making some notes, brainstorming, or sketching — it really does focus your thinking, and helps develop your ideas.

The UI

User Interaction Flow

Feedback

If you any thoughts or comments, I would really like to hear them and to get some feedback on User Interface of Oblique Strategies would be great! Thanks

I am big fan of Twitter and every now and again I come across some amazing things, and I would consider myself a bit of sneezer (according to Seth Godin, Purple Cow), and I love trying and testing out new things. I came across a tweet from @danrubin about an iPhone Stencil Kit from Design Commission. My first reaction was this is cool, I must get myself one of these to help me sketch up some quick prototypes of iPhone Apps, so I did.

My iPhone Stencil Kit arrived about a week or so of placing my order, and I am looking forward to experiment with the kit. I quite like the some of the touch-points from Design Commission by including a pencil and their business card. From the website you can download the letter or A4 sized printable template to quickly start your mockups on.

Links of interest…

When I come across something really cool that has been specifically designed for the iPhone it goes straight into my bookmarks, and below I have listed some links that I have recently bookmarked and think they are well worth checking out…

• http://appsketchbook.com/
• http://notepod.net/
• http://iphonemockup.lkmc.ch/