Heather Rasley @ ITP

What is your biggest weakness in the design process?

Because I’m not completely comfortable with any software / programming environments or with any hardware, I tend to stay in the realm of the conceptual for as long as I can. I am much more comfortable thinking and writing than I am actually building. I justify this to myself by saying that when I do finally build, my concept will be solid. But often I get to the building part far too late, and end up with an incomplete or subpar project.

What kind of project/process could help you solve these problems? Describe in detail what you hope to achieve through this project, and the steps that you think are necessary for you to take in order to succeed.

Sticking to one project and creating a set of small deadlines for it will help immensely. Also, collaborating with someone will help give me the support I need to push through to the building part. I think the way Flo and I have set up the game controller project (see here for description) has the potential to get rid of the issues I’ve been hindered by so far this semester.

Through this project, I hope to achieve a better understanding of the time it takes to craft something by hand. Good design has to be a part of the building process for me. Not just in this class, but in anything tangible that I create. That’s not always seen as part of the process at ITP. I don’t yet have a good idea of how long it takes to pick out materials (that are both practical and beautiful), create a prototype, test, rebuild, etc… As a former editor who’s used to thinking in deadlines, it’s really frustrating for me not to have that knowledge. This knowledge can really only be gained by creating several prototypes, which I plan to do for this project.

I also want to have a clear understanding of how to create an object/function with very logical user interaction. This is particularly key for a video game, where latency and poor logic become painstakingly clear and frustrating for the user. My hope is that the end product of this project will have a fun and intuitive user interaction that will make people want to play it more. I’m sure this will take many iterations where that’s not the case, and I’m up for the challenge.

I’m collaborating with developer/game designer/ nice guy Florian Hufsky via telecomm from Vienna for my Designing for Constraints final.

Initially, the goal of the project was to design a controller to work with his pre-existing Puit Wars game. It has since become a mutually collaborative project to develop a new version of Puit Wars that centers around a marathon, and a controller to accompany it.

Here’s the graphic mockup:

More to come…

I’ve combined my Dynamic Web Development midterm with my final for Marisa Olson’s Sousveillance Culture class.

This project, titled Tell Me All About Me, is an exploration of online identity.

How does the information I self-publish combine to create a kind of biography? How does that information relate to the person I consider to be “me”? Am I successful in my own attempts to manipulate my personality online? What is over-represented? What is missing?

It’s my hope that by inviting anonymous users to submit info about me, and then sifting through these submissions, I can come close to answering some of these questions.

I’ve launched a very-alpha version of the interface and would appreciate your help testing it @ Tell Me All About Me.

There’s no tracking built into this, so feel free to be honest.

Here are some places to start digging up dirt:
Google results
Heather-Rasley.com
Vimeo
Flickr
Soup
Medicine Films
Facebook

Puit Wars controller

(work in progress)

Controlling friend Florian Hufsky’s Puit Wars game through a modular switch system (also used for M/W ON/OFF).

Tentative model: Walk your fingers left for left, walk right for right, jump back to shoot.

M/W ON/OFF

(work in progress)

Hidden switches trigger Flash animations of adjectives beginning with the letter M or W, depending on which way the letter is flipped.