The Globemaster table was created for a physical interaction studio subject at the University of Queensland. It is an interactive globe that displays information about locations. The user selects a location by moving it to be under a cross. Once the user stops moving the ball the information fades in. The interaction worked quite well. Users who came by on the exhibition seemed to really enjoy playing with it and would look up information across many different countries. We had quite a few people bring their friends to come play with the table as well, which is a good sign

This was a teamwork assignment. It started out with us brainstorming different ideas, and then we moved on to sketching and story boarding how people would use it and how it would work. From here we create some prototypes of different aspects of it - some fake visualisations, and some quick and dirty 'tables'.

I helped out with the initial idea conceptualisation and table design. And then from there I was responsible for designing and coding the information information display. I initially tried to use Quartz Composer for the display, however it did not connect to the Flickr and Google Maps APIs very easily. Instead I used Action Script 3, which was better suited to the project.

For the design we had some specific constraints. We were using a projector, with variable ambient light levels, so the design had to be as high contrast as possible. The resolution was only 800px by 800px, which meant keeping everything minimalist in the design. We decided to use a simple sans-serif typeface, Futura, and the highest contrast possible, black and white (Except for the photos). We are currently working on extending the information display to involve infographics, but this won't be completed for a few months.

The Adult Diabetes Dependent Quality of Life Survey is designed to see how much of an impact diabetes has had on people's lives. The University of Queensland was using it as a research tool to test how well their diabetes education consultations were working. Originally a paper survey was used which was filled out and sent to an office somewhere to be typed into a computer. There was all of this wonderful information but it wasn't being used in the consultation because they couldn't analyse it quick enough.

I was asked to create a digital version of the paper survey by the university. Once I got to meet with the people who would be using the app it became clear that there were some small changes that could make it more effective. Namely, the consulting nurse had two iPads that she could use; It would make things easier if the results from the first iPad could be communicated to the second. The nurse also made it clear that she was not very good with technology, so I decided to use a pre-existing method of interaction that she was used to - email. The final process is that one iPad is kept behind the desk at the reception. The patient picks it up and fills out the survey on it before returning it to the receptionist. The Nurse then gets an email on her iPad that has a link to the results as a graph. It also has a spot to input the user's ID and then the data is appended to a spreadsheet that is in the department's Dropbox.

For the patient I made all the buttons quite large to fit larger text on them, since the users of the survey would skew older. Aesthetically the buttons are the only items to have colour, and they were given quite bright colours. This was to draw attention to them and highlight that they were interactive. They were also given some depth (with shadows and a light bevel) to make them look more touchable.

Overall the application was a resounding success. When I followed up with the clients they said that "on the first day in use it was handled by 7 clients aged between 40s and 80yrs.  The Diabetes Educator reported that everyone found it easy to use and all completed the survey and said that they found it better than the paper version."

Design Box.es started off as a way for me to keep track of the progress of my designs at university. I enjoyed looking back at my paper design journals, seeing ideas and their progress, but there wasn't a good way to do this with digital files. There are some solutions for this, but they don't suit my work flow - I like to group together versions of designs in Photoshop, or save separate files, or go straight from paper to HTML, CSS and Javascript. It's never a linear process. To solve this I came up with a system that was as simple as possible but still allowed for the grouping of images into projects and sub-projects (Think a portfolio website and an 'About Me' page within it). It's main action occurs when the user explicitly calls it, not implicitly in the background, this improves the signal to noise ratio. Finally it's simple to share images through Pinterest, twitter and Facebook (and a link that can be shared with clients or co-workers so they can stay up to date)

You can check out a design I'm working on right now to see what it's like