blacklog

Today I finished the second iteration of IML400 at USC. It was a delight to sit through the final project presentations and witness my students walk us through the culmination of their semester work. Most of them tried programming for the first time in my class, and managed to express themselves using javascript in the web by the end of the semester. I guess I must be doing something right.

You can check out their projects in the IML400 website for now. I have heard the Storm server gets wiped every once in a while like other academic servers (something similar happened to us at the Media Lab PLW), but I am hoping the class work will be online for a while and you will be able to check it out.

I am proud of most of my students’ achievements, but I’m going to point a spotlight on Alexander Swenson’s project: the SOOTHSLAYER ELECTRIC TAROT, a playful interpretation of a fortune-telling experience through the reading of a Tarot-like card deck. In his own words, he didn’t want to deliver a useful product like everyone else, where a practical approach dominated the scene. Most of the students chose to develop projects that could have some degree of professional value. Online portfolios, company websites, product websites, etc.

Instead, Swenson focused on play, and used his newly acquired interaction design skills to craft a user interface where mystery and chance are experienced one Tarot card at a time. The website becomes the cards, the shuffle and the fortune teller. The reason for this? To make something cool.

On the technical side, he combined RaphaelJS with jQuery in an interesting way, where interactions with his SVG based animation trigger a series of events that request and load the right card from the deck into sliding iframes, very smooth!

Next is a sequence of snapshots from the final project defense session.

Ah, we finally finished this monster, an iPad game called Superfugu by WemoLab, the digital studio formerly known as WemoMedia. I can’t really say we finished it, since it seems the very nature of digital games these days is to be in a perpetual state of flux. This makes sense, since the current state of digital media gives producers access to monitor their audiences’ behaviors, permitting for almost immediate reactions to compensate for negative outcomes. This means “I’ll change what you don’t like before you realize you don’t like it”, and it is after all, what cybernetics are about: an uninterrupted correction feedback loop.

I could spend hours comparing my recent experience of making a game with my long term experience of making movies, drawing analogies and postulating conclusions about what makes things work one way or the other, but I will only do this at a personal level next to a bottle of wine with those who are prepared to indulge me. I have never been a big fan of games the way I am a lover of movies or books, but I find the production of them fascinating from the perspective of management science. I’ve learned more lessons than ever on management —and team hierarchy/dynamics— working on a game than ever before, and this includes the time I spent in the crazy social education, innovation and production experiment called the MIT Media Lab.

I first got involved with Superfugu back around September 2012, and I have been working on it full time until today. I am responsible for the User Interface design and implementation (Unity and Ngui, eek), some character designs (especially the urchins, and all the 2D character versions), aspects of the story (and I got to make the intro comic!), the design/implementation of some features like Parent Mode, and supervising the production of important marketing assets like the Superfugu App Icon (by Oscar Award winner Andy Jones and yours truly, based on Anthony Batt‘s idea).

To me this chapter is done, and I can’t wait to see what’s next. Download Superfugu in the App Store if you have an iPad (available May 1st). Then you can tell me what you think.

Last month, I worked on the design and implementation of a system to connect mobile phones with a custom version of theBlu client that ran on the NASDAQ screen in Times Square. This was part of a celebration put together on May 4th by Wemo Media to introduce theBlu to the world. If you’d like to see how it went, Wired has published a video covering the event.

After extensive research, I chose JQueryMobile to build the mobile web app. I had never used JQueryMobile before, and I was happy to find it accessible and robust. It’s a good mobile UI framework if you ever need one.

Also, I got my first iPhone to use for development purposes (yeah right). As an all time iPad user, I always thought I would never appreciate an iPhone fully, and for the longest time pretended to be happy with vintage cellphones where texting is a task only possible for people born after 1990, but after half a month of iPhone bliss, I find myself using the iPad a lot less and texting like a superhero, using Instagram like there is no tomorrow and finally having a reasonable replacement for my lost iPod. I’m not too happy with the camera though—I think it’s a bit dumb.

@Nachotl de PaseUsted me invitó a participar en la Gira TelmexHub UNAM, donde impartí una conferencia enfocada en el tema de La Experiencia Narrativa en La Era Digital. Básicamente propuse la misma linea argumental con que participé la vez pasada, explorando la intersección entre comunicación social, teoría de la información y cultura, pero más interesado en el espacio en que contamos y consumimos historias, en lugar del espacio del arte en general. Como era de esperarse, el resultado termina poniendo más atención a la industria del entretenimiento que al sistema del arte.

Me llenó de gusto tener la oportunidad de compartir mi trabajo y mis ideas con los estudiantes de la UNAM –mi alma mater– y haberme encontrado con una Cultura Digital vibrante, llena de propuestas y preguntas.

Al igual que cuando estuve en Puebla, la Gira TelmexHub demostró reunir una buena colección de talentos, entre quienes tuve oportunidad de conocer y convivir con el educador e inventor Raul Gutierrez, el cineasta experimental Jacob Krupnik y su productora Youngna Park, y el poderoso taquero electrónico Redmarker, a quien ya conocía por cierto.

The last month and a half I’ve been working with Wemo Media in TheBlu. TheBlu is an unusual mix of social media, peripheral entertainment, virtual marketplace, and crowd-sourced digital studio. It’s a new effort in the ongoing quest to find a functional combination between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. I was called at the end of January to provide Art Direction, and to work on User Interface and User Experience Design. This means I’ve mostly been using good old Illustrator/Photoshop/AfterEffects for mockups and asset deliverables, and Javascript/HTML/CSS for prototyping and implementation. I still have to get my hands on the actual 3D part of the whole thing. I hope it will not take too long.

Max and I recently finished this video for the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. The video illustrates Chris Caplice’s talk on Scenario Planning, a brainstorming technique that helps prepare for abrupt changes in the future.

We use Boxing and Judo to compare between different planning techniques. Boxing represents the traditional approach, based on precise predictions of specific events, and Judo represents Scenario Planning, where it is more important to outline a number of potential futures and prepare for them. This way, specific events become less relevant as the effects they might produce. It makes sense, because lots of different events may cause the same effect over a given system. Preparing for this effect is a lot better strategy than the nearly impossible task of trying to predict each one of these events.

Last month I worked with BuzaMoto on a website for the MoMA Armory Show 2012. Mud made the website and I provided the content artwork for the main feature of the site: A personalized virtual BobbleHead creation tool.

These BobbleHeads are offered by MoMA as an extra token for people that buy access to the live stream of the Armory Show closing event: a live performance by mexican chill wave band Neon Indian. In addition to this, the collection of generated BobbleHeads will be projected on stage during the performance.

Aside from it being an interesting fundraising participation system, momaarmoryshow.org is an excellent example of a seamless, low-effort online transaction experience. I would probably spend a lot more money on digital content if other online stores made shopping as easy and pleasant as momaarmoryshow.org does.

I designed most of the BobbleHeads based on dead celebrity artists (Frida, Picasso, Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, etc.), together with a couple of celebrities from pop culture, one science celebrity, and a monster made from body parts of several cadavers. This flickr link features the complete BobbleHead collection in the form of a wallpaper, including a famous superhero that didn’t make it to the website for obvious copyright reasons.

Here are the two BobbleHeads I made so far:

Update: Mud’s post in the BuzaMoto blog.