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?

Today, I had a long list of things I wanted to cover with Chris. Firstly, I wanted to ask Chris about potentially going to UX London (User Experience Conference), and possibly volunteering as means of attending the event. Chris suggested some great books that I could read especially on interaction design (Designing Interactions) by Bill Moggridge, who is one of the many impressive speakers at the conference.

Personal Identity

Next, I wanted to discuss about my personal identity icons, and how I could narrow it down from 50. We both liked the idea of Braille, as it encourages the idea of the finger interaction, and the feedback from the feel of the Braille texture. I also wanted to develop the brand icon into a unique business card design. So we talked about possibly designing the business cards in the shape of the iPhone icon, with the gloss and rounded corners. I thought it would be nice if the Braille icon could be embossed to encourage others to touch and interact with the card, and let this act as a touch point, and therefore leading to a conversation starter.

Semantic Presentational Style

Chris also gave me some feedback on my mock presentation I did the day before. One interesting point was the idea of using semantics in the design of the slides. So we talked about designing the slides as if it was an iPhone app, and with a progress/loading icon to indicate the time allocated to each slide, as a way of visually connecting with the audience.

Action Agreed

We agreed to work on the personal identity icon and develop a business card. Also to design and create a semantically designed keynote presentation for the Viva assessments in January.

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

Firstly, we began our tutorial session with me showing Nicklas Persson my new personal website and blog. I had developed the new site in HTML 5 and CSS3, so was quite interested to hear what Nicklas thoughts of the design and code of the new site. He was able to give me some pointers to more or less optimise the site further, with changing the images to PNG-24, and adding some whitespace to the overall design of the site.

We also discussed whether to stay with Cufon for the font rendering or to experiment with @font-face, but then we discussed the licensing issues with both approaches, and the downside of image replacement for screen readers.

Nicklas had an Oblique Strategies App on his iPhone, but for some reason that application is no longer available on the App Store. Nick had passed on the information of the company responsible for the application (Far Out Labs), and agreed it was a good idea to contact them, to find out the reasons why the application was pulled.

Sketchbook of Apps

Towards the end of the tutorial session, Nick suggested that I should have a sketchbook of iPhone Apps, just rough sketches just to get some concepts down on paper, and it didn’t matter if the application concept was weak that it would be a good experimentation to go through the process. I remember looking at the Things Blog when I was doing some research for my Major Project last year, and this is a great visual tool for getting those ideas out on paper and develop the concept further. Also a great excuse to use iPhone Stencil Kit .

Action Agreed

We agreed to contact Far Out Labs, in regards to the reason(s) why their version of Oblique Strategies is no longer available on the App Store. To add some minor touches to the design and code of the new website, and to continue reading.

Friday 9th October, I had my 2nd Tutorial with Chris Murphy, and fellow Masters student Mr Brian Burns, as we discussed setting up a new venture together under the name of DubbleTap. We talked about the strategic planning of DubbleTap, and a few potential iPhone Apps that we would like to develop down the line. In particular we agreed to start building our first App based on Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

Action Agreed

We agreed that my role would be the iPhone Developer, and by week 6 to have a working prototype of the Oblique Strategies App. That gives me 3 weeks to finish my reading on Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, and to start building my first iPhone App. Looking forward to the challenge, and with the development of DubbleTap we can let you know more about what we are doing, and how we are doing it.

My first week back as a student after graduating from Interactive Multimedia Design (IMD), I had my first tutorial of the new course as a Multidisciplinary Design student, with Lecturer Chris Murphy. Chris already knew a lot about what I was looking to do on the course, iPhone Development and User Experience research.

Recommended Reading

During the tutorial, Chris recommended that I should read Don Norman’s book on “The Design of Everyday Things”, as a good starting point to help me improve my skill sets in relation to the User Experience (UX) Design. So I have ordered my copy from Amazon and waiting for delivery.

Over the Summer

Chris had encourage me to over the summer months to start doing some background reading on the technical side of iPhone Development, and I came across a great post on 43 iPhone Development Resources. The number one resource on the list was a book on Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche – http://iphonedevbook.com/. Another book Chris recommended that I read over the summer was a book by 37 Signals, called Getting Real. So far I have thoroughly enjoyed reading both books, one from a more technical viewpoint and the other more about the process.

Action Agreed

At the end of the tutorial, the action agreed was over the next few weeks was to continue to read Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, Getting Real and Don Norman’s book on “The Design of Everyday Things”.