Sketchatune is my IxD graduate thesis developed in collaboration with Gillian Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor during my Visual and Multimedia Communication programme at IUAV (University of Venice). The wish to build Sketch a tune comes from my personal experience with the radio and in particular with a programme called Eclettica. Somehow it was so nice to understand how in a certain way a media becomes able to shape our behaviour, control our mood as well as  stimulate our imagination!

DEFINING THE PROJECT

Who is it for?

DJs as well as radio lovers.

What am I designing?

An interactive web site for a radio community. A sort of showcase of radio lovers emotions. An unrepeatable environment that combines music, graphic and speech all together. An everyday playlist as a common soundtrack to share. A music trend map through short visual notes. A composition of senses that comes from a daily podcast listening. Basically a fancy tool kit for listening to radio music.

What does it do for them?

The DJ will be able to know what his audience wants to hear, or at least predict trends and feelings. Finally radio lovers can share their emotions with each other and discover the importance of a personal medium like a DJ! The radio finds its power even among today’s amazing tech-stuff!

Function

The Sketch a tune project wants to encourage contacts within a radio community and, in order to do it, they have a common but untraditional space where there is the possibility of listening to the radio programme and doing something more at the same time. Just because this is the point: How do we listen to music? What we do during a radio programme? Where are all the listeners’ emotions going? How can we avoid the awful and anonymous list of podcast data in our computer folders? Is there still someone who believes in the role of the DJ as a filter of our listenings? So thanks to Sketch a tune each radio lover can manage an imaginative world full of feelings, a dynamic environment driven by fantasy, a digital space that allows different interactions: to play with words as well as images and shapes, and mix them with music and movements. The final landscape is a kind of snapshot that changes each time someone encloses a new “emotive tag” in it, like a kind of live media performance to be “looked” at! Sketch a tune is a gentle forecast data (different from scrobbling) useful to the DJ in order to get some feedback. It is not a simply a music aggregator because here the multiplicity coming from music becomes a singularity in connection with each radio lover!

SYSTEM DESIGN

Interface elements

The Sketch a tune website, an experimental interface for a radio community, was developed according to some important points:
- many to many broadcasting model
- avoid that awful podcast list or piles of folders spread on our computer screens as well as the common behaviour to a mechanical downloading of mp3
- dynamic simple “desktop-like” interface: dragging, scrolling and browsing data
- visualised radio experience: WYSIWYG-editor
- a customizable radio: personal user diary/common spaces to share with the all radio community
- social networking
- timed tags concept: posting comments and other kind of media at specific points within the radio segments
- experimental music player
- audio editing console for the DJ: podcast and streaming.

Links and downloads

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DEFINING THE PROJECT

Brief

MAKE A PUBLICATION: DESIGNING INTERACTION
Part I ‘What Is Interaction Design?’ Explain what it is and what interaction designers do.
Part II ‘A Critical Evaluation’ Compare the designs of devices or services interactions: What are their plus points and minus points?

Function

I made Designing Interaction book for my Interaction Design Theory 1 exam assignment (IUAV). The goal of this book is to explore the concept of interaction design in human experience through a variety of traditional and new media, exploring differents subject matter, methods, techniques, tools and balancing little theory, practice and production (thinking/doing/making). Picnic Interaction Book consists of one big fabric carpet printed with an IxD chart where some transparent pockets contain little booklets. These last summarize the design process in particular the following subjects: notation - make an interview; method - quick and dirty; design - good and bad (stickers)…

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Secret Garden is a site-specific interactive installation in Venice. I developed it during my Interaction Design Lab 2 at IUAV. In order to set up Secret Garden project, first I looked for gardens all around Venice. For an entire month I was monitoring all kind of people’s experiences inside the garden (the public ones) after while I was trying to get more feelings from that kind of secret gardens behind closed doors!
Since I found a nice rounded window on the wall of one abandoned garden. For his peculiarity this last was one of the few windows I never saw and I am sure, not by chance, following his shape, someone painted it with an eye! From that moment I started working with the idea to break the wall of secret through a simply glance!

DEFINING THE PROJECT

Brief

AND WALLS HAVE EARS
Design and prototype an interactive informational installation in Venice or its Lagoon.

Function

Secret garden project raises questions about public versus private space in a urban context like Venice.
The main project’s aim is to focus on the possibility to getting enough people to partecipate in the discovery of those kind “of missing links/hidden signs” in a mysterious city like Venice. The garden is the first step in this perspective… Almost the all project works with the idea of illusion. What happens to the viewer has to be a way to catch a glipse of something. First of all a glimpse of the secret garden then…
A ghost? A monster? A fantastic object? The mirror of themselves? Let’s see…

SYSTEM DESIGN

Prototype

In order to simulate a visitor’s vision through those litlle windows spreads all over Venice, for the final prototype I used an optical box (with a web cam) where an hole was inviting to look inside. I made it using BlobDetection from Processing library and Pepper’s ghost illusion. This last is an optical effect which produces a shifting scene of real things, illusions, imaginary fancies and deceptions. That’s why through the window you can see the mirror of yoursef afterwhile, detecting your movements, the web cam gives to you the possibility to play with a “wind flower”, but…if you are so curious and you are looking too much closer…a garden monster appears!!!

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I realized this video during the Digital image processing course by Massimo Ciammaichella at IUAV. This course  introduced fundamental technologies for digital image/video representation taking inspiration from Vespertine the Björk’s album. Topics included digital image/video editing (using Final cut), morphological transform (using morphing software), 3D model reconstruction (using Cinema 4D). The video story goes through the similarity between a snowflake, a skirt designed following a snowflake shape and the lily flower.

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DEFINING THE PROJECT

Brief

SMART BIENNALE
Design and prototype an interactive information system for visitors to Venice’s most internationally important event: the Art Biennale. The system must be accessed by mobile phone.

Function

The Biennale is always a big appointment with art. And what it is art if it not a way to share feelings and to experience differently every day life? That’s why yourBiennale project is focusing on users and their point of view within the event. Is the user only a spectator or something more? Is there a possibility for them to live the Biennale in a more social way? To experience the Biennale in a more Venetian mood? Is the possibility to enjoy the space and feeling the community that is growing all around? The community could be more interesting it it has an identity and it is not only a mass of visitors!

SYSTEM DESIGN

Interaction

Through simple passages the user will be able to make an own virtual island:
1 Login to the application: choose a nickname, one focus area between painting, sculpture, video and installation then create your island
2 Explore the sea landscape and its inhabitants, move your island where you like more
3 Get information from the Services Island: search other users, change your buddy icon, localize your position in the map
3 Interact with islanders: send message
4 Interact with islanders: give an invitation
5 Arrange your house stuff: video, photo and text inside a bubble gallery (link).

Interface elements

The interface is using typical icons from Venice: for example when one users would like to send a message to another one on the screen appeare a mail-boat that starts from your island directly to the receiver. Or when I decide to join with someone else appeare a bridge that links my own island with the other one. We also use the Venetian “briccola” to make boundary among the different art area within the landscape. Each island has an own house and somehow this last began like a private gallery (especially for who is an artist).

Prototype

We made a working prototype (in Processing) of the system able to be shown on a computer screen.

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During the 2004 I have attended an Erasmus exchange at the faculty of Art and Design (TAIK) of Helsinki
in the Department of Visual Culture/Fine Art.
There I was deeply involved in project like these:
Environmental Art: Ultimate Space in Kilpisjarvi and Human in space in Inkoo
(in collaboration with Pia Lindman)
Installation Art course: Space-Sight beyond Art object (in collaboration with Lauri Astala)
Folklore and Fashion Design: Ecology, Tradition and Design (in collaboration with Marjatta Nissinen)

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(In collaboration with Nina Stalzer)

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Download a pdf

Mock-up

Images database on flickr

Inspiration tools

Images database on vi.sualize.us
IxD links on Tumblr
Notes on Evernote

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