Interaction design is one of the reasons I chose to come to SCCA. It’s important to me that Seattle Central is so in tune with emerging technologies and what is valid in the real world now.

We have had many weekly assignments but our final project is a 5 week redesign of the Seattle Library iphone app.

The first day, we redesigned a Toshiba remote control which was fun to nerd out on — especially since I designed a couple audio remotes when I was doing graphic design for a speaker manufacturing company.

What the balls is the “Recall” button anyways?

Another assignment was a sitemap. Our instructor provided us with a bunch of terms that were pages on a website and we had to organize them in a way that made sense to us.

sitemap

Yet another assignment was to redesign the iTunes homepage. As our instructor would say iTunes has become “bloated” and is used for so many things other than music. The design has not seamlessly upgraded with the added functions.

Here is my iTunes redesign

Another assignment I enjoyed was taking a wireframe and designing a “look and feel” for it. It was a general “photo sharing” iPad app.

top is what was provided for us, the bottom was what I designed in Photoshop

At first I was a bit crabby pants about designing vector graphics in Photoshop since I was always taught they should be done in Illustrator, but the reality is a lot of people design in Photoshop. Also, I feel a lot more comfortable designing and editing within Photoshop.

In Jill’s design class, we have had one graded assignment. We had to use a 2″ x 2″ design we made and duplicate it many times to create different shapes. We had to create a stable piece and a dynamic piece. Then we had to take either one and use it to inspire us to make something inspired by Gestalt. You still with me?

stable // dynamic

Gestalt inspired by dynamic composition

I did enjoy the absence of the computer. This was all done with a good ole fashioned copy machine.

Here are some more Gestalt examples:

An easy way to put it is you are indicating something is there that is really not . . . if that makes sense.

In an effort catch up on the school year, I going to do a class by class run-through.

In Jason’s Production class, I’m pretty sure I learned more in one class than I have in 5 years.

Our first graded assignment was to take abstract terms and distill them down to the simplest possible solution. The pairs I chose were near/far, slow/fast, and organized/chaos.

near/far
slow/fast
organized/chaos

Our second assignment was a graphic translation of any object of our choosing.

Typewriter

I wanted to do something mechanical and intricate — I knew that it would be difficult, I just didn’t realize how difficult. The hardest part was knowing how much to simplify it. I’m happy with the final product despite how long it took.