Art / Fida / Family Archive / Meerkat / Tuba / TellTable / Other Brother / SketchStorm / Autonomous Presence
This system, created in the Socio-Digital Systems group, examines the issue of family archiving and presents a system designed to enable families to capture, manage, create and store new kinds of digital memorabilia. The system, using Microsoft Surface as its hub, shows how families can upload photos and videos quickly and easily, and scan in physical objects, such as children’s artwork or a child’s first pair of shoes. The system enables families to view these media in many flexible ways and to create new, compelling kinds of digital objects, such as multimedia scrapbooks and even a digital piñata. The system further fits into a larger ecosystem of devices in the home. Click the following link for a short video-clip showing some of the Memory Making System's features.
With regards to this multi-disciplinary project I have mainly been working on developing ideas & concepts, UI designs & structure and the design for a detachable drawer system. The four screenshots below show the final UI Richard Banks and I came up with which was implemented by Stuart Taylor. As can be seen in the pictures we decided to go for a larger, rotatable dial on the left side of the interface to change between views (3 in total: Triage, Timeline and Family view). The first two pictures (on the top) depict the triage view which allows users to arrange, tag and store their content. For keeping and deleting content we made use of a very simple box metaphor, one located at the top right (for deleting content) and one on the bottom right corner (for storing content). Triage view also provides the possibility to import content from the scanner unit or share specific content with picture frames scattered across the home. The bottom pictures show the family view, a more creative area where users are able to augment existing content or generate new content by means of creating digital scrapbooks and piñata’s.
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In addition to working on the UI design I also put a lot of effort in the design of the ecosystem of objects to be connected to the central hub. Together with Stuart TayIor I put together a digital picture frame that can depict content once dropped into one of the little frames located on the right side of the UI. In addition, I designed a drawer for storing physical devices to be used with the Memory Maker. Apart from storing devices in the drawer; the drawer also functions as a trigger to upload content from a digital device (e.g. a camera) once put inside the drawer. The images below show the design of the drawer; which by means of a 'slide-on' construction fits onto Microsoft Surface.
The system was demoed at Techfest 2010 (an internal Microsoft event in Redmond). In order to create the right setup for our Techfest booth I designed six banners which we used to transfer our booth into a living room setting. By using shaded silhouettes I managed to keep the focus within the booth on the actual demos while creating a home like atmosphere, the context for which these technologies were designed. By keeping the banners quite generic and modular we are able to re-use them after Techfest during other demo events. The picture above shows an image of the six banners that were created; the pictures below show them in context at Techfest '10.
Explorations/design UI elements
After exploring a large variety of different UI designs we combined aspects of our early explorations into one final layout. Within the design process I mostly focused on the triage and family views; designing general menu icons, frames, digital scrapbooks and several piñata’s (see pictures below).
