May 3-7, 2005
Thesis Presentations
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| SleepNotes | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Akio Wada | |
| Instructor: | Barton, Jake | |
| Class: | Final Project Seminar | |
| URL: | http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/~aw658/thesis/ | |
| Keywords: | ||
| SleepNotes is an online visual scrapbook that supports communication in the early stages of dispersed fashion design projects. | ||
| SleepNotes is an online sharable visual scrapbook for fashion designers. In the early stages of fashion design, like other design disciplines, designers discuss and develop design ideas utilizing visual sources such as drawings and photographs they have collected in their daily lives and other situations. The goal of SleepNotes is to support such image-based communication among dispersed designers, allowing them to easily upload photographs from both the desktop computer and the mobile phone, directly annotate them with drawings and comments, and manage and present their online scrapbook in a manner similar to paper-based collage. | ||
| Personal Statement: | I often encounter occasions to work remotely using emails and attachments in group projects at ITP, and independent website or graphic design projects. There are even more informal situations. For instance, my girlfriend had to learn how to sew kimono, so she had to ask her mother in Japan. They mostly communicated via emails, but she had great trouble understanding the glossary about the parts of kimono. Likewise, I often use an auction site, and feel awkward when I have to ask questions about the photographs in the product descriptions. In these cases, I believe annotation-based communication would be of great help since it allows for direct access to the point to be specified in the content.
Moreover, recently there has been a trend for web-logging and social networking based on it, and some tools support photographs as a medium for sharing. In fact, Flickr allows for online tagging to the shared photos, which I suppose shows a potential for annotation-based communication. | |
| Context: | In fashion design, like other design fields, its initial stage where no concrete idea is fixed plays a significant role in the whole process. Generally, designers develop the design through rather informal, usually face-to-face communication, implicitly utilizing combined media such as spoken language, text, graphics, facial expression and gestures. In fashion design, many designers also keep a visual scrapbook for their idea sources, and it is quite usual that they communicate through such visuals as well as drawings early in the design process. However, dispersed design projects cannot take advantage of such traditional face-to-face communication, and thus have suffered from communication problems especially in their early stages. While networked software technology including Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has addressed the issue from various perspectives, there are still unsolved problems of usability and effectiveness in media-mix communication, most typically the text and image. In most applications that try to support such communication, text as a primal communication channel and images are displayed in separate places of the user interface. This implies that text notes refer to an image itself, but a communication problem occurs when the user wants to refer to a specific part of the image. Explaining only with text is time consuming and misleading, and would spoil the informal communication that requires quick responses. Rather, embedding notes directly onto the image could ease such a communication load. | |
| Audience: | The target user group of this project is fashion designers who collect photographs in the street or other contexts of their lives for their idea sources. They may take photos of people or other objects they find interesting, in their daily lives or perhaps while traveling, but such contexts matters to the designers when they try to elicit design ideas from their visual sources. | |
| User Scenario: | In early stages of a design project, fashion designers often explain to other participants about their still abstract design ideas using their visual sources they have collected. When meeting in person, they can easily present their feelings that are contained in the content of their visual sources as well as the context of them. However, in a dispersed design project, it becomes tough for them to exchange their ideas in the same manner as above due to lack of shared visual sources, and above all, face-to-face communication.
This project supports such informal communication among fashion designers that happens primarily in the early stages of remote collaborative design projects. The platform is a Web-based environment that stores sharable online visual scrapbooks for the members and allows for asynchronous communication around the scrapbooks. In order to foster smooth scrapbook entries from outside situations, the environment also provides an uploading interface for mobile camera phones. | |