Art / Fida / Family Archive / Meerkat / Tuba / TellTable / Other Brother / SketchStorm / Autonomous Presence
As a designer you often find lots of inspiration from products, applications, concepts, ideas that are already out there. Things that when combined, iterated upon, re-interpreted or re-designed allow for unique new possibilities to arise. Often inspirational content from online repositories, like Bing or YouTube, is being used to stimulate creative thinking e.g. during a brainstorm session or individually, developing an idea behind your desk. Apart from making their own (offline) libraries, designers often search these online repositories for inspiring content (e.g. images and video) to make collages or to simply paste and copy this content into programs like Paint, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. However, this always is an indirect process in which actively has to be searched for content that could potentially inspire the ideation around a certain topic. In a way already creating the mind-set concerning a specific topic.
Within this project Xiang and I are exploring new ways of stimulating the creative process by using and presenting web-based content in novel ways. With SketchStorm users are able to select a certain ideation topic to start with; after which more inspirational content unfolds and dynamically presents itself during the process of sketching ideas. The illustration below shows an initial sketch of a possible UI for SketchStorm. The centre provides a drawing plane to start a sketch or brainstorm session. This area is surrounded by a ‘membrane’ with some basic interaction functionality; an input area for a search query to start the ideation/ brainstorm process, selection possibilities to in- or exclude particular media (in this case pictures, video or both), the possibility to reset the number of result layers surrounding the membrane and an indication of the search queries preceding the current one (which slowly fade out over time). (Selection possibilities for different pencils, line thickness, a colour picker and eraser are still missing in this sketch)
In this second image you can see how the membrane deforms during the creation of the sketch as one approaches the side of the membrane, resulting in the generation of new content around it. (One could imagine part of the content changing, e.g. the area that gets deformed, or the complete selection). In addition, you can imagine that apart from the change in content/the upload of new content through sketching, the user could also use a ‘hand’ tool to grab the membrane manually and drag it further away from its original position to explore new content.
The design of the deforming membrane really emphasizes that the content is ‘dynamically growing’ along the way. Furthermore, its simple and minimalistic design tries to distract as least as possible from its main functionality: stimulating ideation and the creative/design process. One could even imagine at some stage switching the content presentation around the membrane off, or even changing the opacity to end up with just a clean sketching sheet.
Apart from feeding the creative process, the presented images and videos can be traced as well in order to aid the sketching process. In the example below you see how the earphone image is being manipulated and used to trace a specific part of that particular image. When content is being used in the sketch area it’ll always be depicted behind the actual sketch to provide an optimal tracing possibility. When grabbing content that surrounds the membrane, e.g. for tracing purposes, a copy will automatically be made which after finishing the trace can easily be deleted using the same eraser that erases sketch lines as well.
The image below shows the possibility for multiple people to start exploring a sketch or idea in multiple directions during which the membrane will deform in multiple directions adding new content, in this case, to these two areas. Especially for brainstorm sessions this particular property of the membrane becomes interesting as it’ll deform in multiple directions and when recorded could provide a ‘dynamic review map’ to document the session. So apart from being able to run this software on a pc or tablet, projecting the interface on a large whiteboard compatible area or using a smart board seems interesting as well.
Furthermore, next to the possibility to trace content, the image above shows a few additional program features. By making simple cut-outs one can very easily use images or parts of images within their sketches, either as a complete part or e.g. as a colour or pattern fill.
The final image shows a stage in which multiple result layers surround the membrane, two in this particular case (the number of layers can be adjusted using the little arrow buttons next to the media selection icons). In order to stimulate the creative process one could imagine the results within the second layer being less directly connected to the initial search query to inspire a wider range of different topics influencing/stimulating the ideation process in a new way. Especially concerning brainstorming there is a large variety of different strategies available in order to inspire creative thinking which potentially could be reflected within different layers, as one layer could e.g. show contradictions or deviations of the initial search query.
