Step Sequencer Car Park

Step Sequencer Car Park

Change everyday bad habits by making things more fun is always a stimulating challenge for interaction designers. Take the car parking as instance: aren’t you tired of ugly, awful and dark car parks? Aren’t you tired to turn around the downtown streets looking for a free place? And wouldn’t there be less pollution in the city if people are encouraged to park thier car outside the urban belt?
With these questions in mind me and the people at work have designed a few slides illustrating our idea: the Step Sequencer Car Park. Or else: “how to transform a car park into an audiovisual attraction”!
Take a look to the project and if you like it, until 15th january 2010, you can give us your preference!

Turning back

Yes, that is. I decided to turn back and continue writing on this blog. It’s probably a temporary decision and later on this post I’ll explain the main things that brought me to reconsider WordPress. A lot of time has passed since last post and many things happened: for first I got my MA in interaction design six months ago making a thesis on a multi-touch interface for creative software. I didn’t took the decision to delete this blog, mainly because thought that the little documentation about my experiments on interaction design at University of Venice IUAV could turn useful for many people and I wasn’t totally encouraged to destroy all. Yes, I cloned my posts on Blogger and started a new blog for a few months, that was because at that time I was obsessed by layout customization and Blogger seemed the best free platform to do it. I was wrong, at least after thinking carefully to my real needs. Then I opened my personal website, drooling to start my very own portfolio and blog, designed and developed from A to Z. But I didn’t consider that the required development time would have been greater than the available, so I switched for a short-time solution, which although has many strong pointas, now is revealing its weakness and by now there’s no more time to make another switch. Briefly I’ll try to explain all the considerations which brought me to turn back:

• Yes, you can customize a Blogger page and it’s free (contrary to many WordPress themes or extensions which a ), but don’t count to come up with good design after spending a few days studying CSS and the XML of Blogger platform. If your need is to have a fast, easy and clean place where to share your thoughts via text, video, images or merging contents with social networks, WordPress is the right choice. In nearly two years I’ve assisted to a huge improvement of its interface, insted of Blogger which still works with the old one.
• The platform I choose for my portfolio is Indexhibit, a popular cms bewteen art and design students, very powerful, easy, fast and obviously free. Probably you can’t find any better web platform if your need is to make a minimal designed portfolio in one day. It’s a bit hard to customize (requires knowledge of CSS and HTML) but there’s a good and fervent community suporting it, so you won’t have problems if you get stucked. If you’have just graduated and you want to augment you visibility through the job market, I suggest it. But, there’s a big problem if you want to run a blog: there’s only a simple news plugin with very limitated functions. Better switch to more reliable platforms such as WordPress, Typolight, Joomla, or Drupal; also, the last three, have very powerful tools to merge content from social networks.
• I really have little time to spend studying web platforms lately, but a huge need to spread my discoverings and thougths about the wonderful world of interaction design. So I keep on going with what I started here, the first place where for first i put all my serious stuff. Probably when I’ll have more time to dedicate to PHP I’ll redevelop my website from scratch, and taht’s not totally deicded. Let’s see how things will evolve.

That’s it. I hope for the best.

(photo by Slipping Away available at flickr)

Moving to Blogspot

The content of this post are no more valid. I explained all here

Yes, exams are finished, so during the weekend I had the time to sleep and, finally, to open a new blog on Blogspot:

http://fluidforfun.blogspot.com

For my needs is perfect. Allows embedding from a huge number of services, it’s easy to manage and has no “upgrading costs” for CSS personalization. Good! Now I’m gonna port all the posts archive to the new house :) but I’m also working on new args, continuing to develop the work in progress and the new blog structure, all in the next days, so change your bookmarks and stay tuned!
This one on WP is going to close, so I will leave this post on top for a few weeks.

Image by Claudia Anne

Maintenance

Image by Barelyfitz

Blog is actually down for maintenance. I’ll be back soon with new contents, updated material and a slightly revised structure. Thank you for the patience.

New Honda Civic_Commercial

A new aesthetical vision of the city is suggested by driving the new Honda Civic. I give thumbs up for this ad, which hits for its simple and tasty images, promoting the product detaching from a specific feature and looking afar other commercials of Japanese vehicles.

Also the older one is terrific!

Opening new (maybe)

Looking for a platform to post my works, thinking seriously to Blogger, which is supported by most of the services around the web (even if I’m actually focusing Issuu, Vimeo and Youtube). Stupid me: that’s what happens when I don’t listen to advices from more experienced people.

Huoratron – $$ Troopers

Dollar dollar Troopers by Huoratron.
Awesome music and terrific video by New Judas.
http://www.huoratron.com/
http://www.newjudas.com/

Dropclock

New fresh screensaver by SCR available for Windows and OS X.