ITP Logs

It's not quite a game, and it's only sort of art, but it's kind of neat. I created what could generously be called a map creation tool - working on a grid that resizes itself to your screen, the application will randomly generate a map out of three tiles - mountains (gray), grass (green), and water (blue). It will then do a second pass, at which point it will replace any mountains or water not immediately adjacent to any other tiles of the same kind with grass, cleaning up the look somewhat and making it look less scattershot. It still looks pretty scattered, but it's cleaner than it would be otherwise. Some screens: I weighted the selection in favor of grass because it looks better. The tiles themselves are individual objects, which hold their color/x/y values within themselves, as well as draw functions. Full code: https://pastebin.com/YTtQAABX https://pastebin.com/YBJYKiQS

...is the best name I can come up for this strange interactive computer contraption I've hacked together. Full demo: To start: I made a p5js sketch which would do several things. 1. make triangles onscreen on a certain input 2. set colors to each triangle 3. randomize the position of each point of each triangle, the color of each triangle, and the background color on a certain input 4. interpolate the movement of the triangles and the color changes from one random point to another 5. allow the user to control the rate of interpolation (speed) This was, as it would turn out, the easy part. I got it running in no time. Then, I got an Arduino interface working which would return values from 1-10 for a pot, as well as separate values which I decided to label "11" and "12" for two separate buttons. Code here: https://pastebin.com/qciFiYec I got it returning the values needed to a serial port in no time, as well. Circuitry: I then ...

This is a bit of a rant more than a measured response. The balance between aesthetically pleasing and eminently practical design seems to be tilting dangerously towards the former these days. There's no doubt that "attractive things work better", but these days, I'm noticing a trend (generally in web and software design more than anything else) when, for example, I load up a webpage and have to scroll down several full screens worth of overly-animated Squarespace bullsh*t just to find the appropriate information I've been searching for. It's not pleasing, it's frustrating. That being said, I'm not sure what Norman wants us to take away from his article, Emotion & Design. (http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/emotion_design_at.html) He makes a good case for pleasing interfaces, and how they significantly improve overall usability, but he also insists that we not sacrifice it for "facade design". Of course, it's ideal to balance the two.  But...

https://pastebin.com/1wk5BnMW A little toy of sorts that creates four dynamic rectangles which go off in cardinal directions. The rectangles themselves start slow, then get faster, then slow again. The length of the rectangles is determined by their speed, which achieves a stretching effect. Users can either click to get the "sparklers" on click, or press Enter to toggle random sparkles. This was tougher than I thought it would be to get to work. I implemented all sorts of weird spaghetti things and trees of conditionals I probably could have optimized better, had I not placed undue time constraints on myself. I still encounter an issue where, if there's more than one "group" of sparklers onscreen, all of them will be deleted when the first one gets deleted. Which is strange, seeing as how they're all working on individual destruction flags and timers. So, for "random", I just spawn one at a time.

The first thing I did in p5js on my own time was a chance operation. For whatever reason, I lost the code, or may have inadvertently deleted it, but I created a small wave of left-moving bars which went slightly higher or slightly lower than the previous, creating a sort of constant series of waves moving across the screen. I love chance operations, but I found it hard to keep interested in the art-history crash course that Reas' talk ended up being, at least for the first 25 minutes. I was enjoying seeing all the abstract pieces and the means by which they were conceived, but I would have liked to see a bit more than just two-dimensional images. The randomly generated sculptures interested me the most, as did his own simulation of the small creatures moving toward or avoiding light. When he began to discuss the Procesing programs, I started to get interested again. It was particularly interesting to see what adding symmetry did to the images, and how it created Rorshach blots ...

Who doesn't like pushing buttons and seeing lights appear? This was mainly inspired by various real and fictional cockpits of various vehicles, at least, in theory. In Star Wars, Han Solo flips a bunch of switches and pushes several buttons, with corresponding lights appearing on the console, before jumping to lightspeed. There's an inherent satisfaction in watching that interaction, and even more of one in performing it. It's certainly helped by having more satisfying switches and lights than the ones which came in my Arduino kit, but that's a limitation I'm willing to accept for demonstration purposes. The central conceit of this dumb little machine is that it "powers on" with the pot, signified by a red LED, and then can begin the "launch sequence", which consists of pressing both of the two buttons next to the pot. Each button lights more green LEDs, and when everything is lit, the blue LED lights up, signifying completion of the sequenc...

http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ Certainly a terrifying vision of the future. Black Mirror and the like would have us believe we're doomed to be holding small flat screens in our hands for eternity. I have a lot to say about this. Reading (and subsequently being completely swayed by) his posts, I began to think about two things: 1. How user interfaces will be designed for the inevitable AR takeover, and 2. How video game controllers fit into this paradigm of interaction. I'll go in order. We'll all be wearing AR glasses at some point in the next twenty-thirty years, likely less. We'll have our own heads-up displays, seeing all sorts of fascinating things, either invisible to everyone else or created as a shared experience, some kind of communal hallucination. This could potentially provide the seismic shift required to shake interaction designers away from Pictures Under Glass, and instead figure out how to make use of these hands...