Monday, December 8, 2008

Final Project

Impetus:
Four months of being a student in the city of New York, I have mixed feeling about living in this city. Although the diversity and energy of the city are exciting, it is way more crowded and dirtier than I have thought. Lately, I experienced the most depressed time that I have never experienced in my life, and fired complaints about this city and wished to leave it as soon as possible. I started to question whether my dislikes of New York is overwhelming my likes of New York. Thus, to express my personal feelings of the city, I would like to create a web site to show the battle between my dislikes and likes of New York. To make the site more impacting, I decide to open it to the public and allow visitors to input their comments.


Project:
Create a web site to gather positive and the negative comments and experiences of living in the city of New York. A simple game mechanism is utilized to encourage participation.


Detailed Description:
The main page of the website will present
a big graphic display “I ♥ NY”. The heart-shape will be filled by two colors: one represents the positive comments; the other represents the negative. The two colors fill in the heart-shape according to the ratio between the positive and negative comments. In other word, if the positive comments are 60% of the total comments, the color representing positive will cover 60% of the heart-shape. The color representing negative will cover the remaining 40%.

The users contribute positive comments by clicking on the pump picture, from which pops up a form with functions of inputting text and uploading pictures. The interface will look familiar to the web users for it will emulate the posting interface on most of the blogs. To contribute negative comments, the user will click on the injector picture from the main page.

As the user inputs a positive comment, it will be submitted to a database dedicated to store positive comments. That comment will return to the screen as a bubble floating in the positive portion of the heart-shape, which will increase due to the ratio change of positive and negative comments at that time. The user can click on the bubble to view the comment shown in a popup window. Users can reply to each comment by clicking on the “reply” button, which will direct them to the archive page of that particular entry and add on it as what they used to do when blogging. The negative portion will have the same commenting process as the positive one. There will be a maximum of 50 bubbles floating in total to avoid overwhelming data visualization.


Interface Design:

ma
in page















when click on "Archive" button
















when click on the pump -> pop up



















when click on the injector -> pop up




















Precedents:

I. "We Feel Fine"
http://www.wefeelfine.org/index.html

Inspiration:
I am attracted by the particle movement and the playful display of the “I Feel Fine” project. The particles paint vivid pictures of the feeling phrases from various blogs. They inspire me to create the moving bubbles in the heart-shape of my “I ♥ NY” site. Such graphic display increases the interaction and attractiveness of the site to the users.

II. "14000 things to be happy about"
http://www.thingstobehappyabout.com/

Inspiration:
Inspired by this website, I will create a game-like forum with intuitive graphical illustrations to provide incentive for the users to participate in inputting comments.

Public Space Project - Phase IV

Goal:
Build conversations on a given topic

Focus Group:
Women - b/c throughout iterations, women had been more responsive

How:
Speech Bubbles with different female body image

Design:
-posters on carousel cube
-4 body types: Skinny, Chubby, Muscular, Morbidly Obese
-large speech bubbles
-writing tools provided










Why:
-carousel cube is more inviting
-stands out more
-installable at the pier

Execution:
































































Result:
-Successful
-Women responded
-Men responded more than expected