Dirty Secret Facebook App
Posted: September 1, 2007 Filed under: development, facebook, user experience | Tags: ashley tisdale, dirty secret, facebook, vanessa hudgens Comments OffDirty Secret is a Facebook application that allows users to spill the beans about their friends anonymously. Users can browse secrets within their friend communities, within their “networks”, or for everyone, including strangers.
Each secret has a comment board and a voting system attached to it where users can debate the veracity of the claims being made. Only The person about whom the secret is told has the right to delete it.
Dirty Secret screen
Dirty Secret screen
Subway Status Facebook App
Posted: August 20, 2007 Filed under: development, facebook, user experience | Tags: applications, design, development, facebook, new york, strategy, subway Comments Off
Subway Status is an application for Facebook that allows New Yorkers to post updates on the status of the subways, meet their neighbors and read service announcements pulled from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Web site. Users can check for delays, complain about local transit issues — such as the campaign for an F train express — and keep track of weekend changes, all without leaving their social network.
By combining the New York transportation experience with new forms of social networking, Plastic Past is augmenting the normal subway experience and bridging the boundaries between online and offline activities.
IN THE PRESS
“A Site Where Riders Can Compare Notes (And Complain, Too)“, New York Times, August 23, 2007
“Facebook To Reduce Rage, Increase Hookups On Subway“, New York Magazine, August 22, 2007
“Even the Subway’s on Facebook“, Metro NY, August 28, 2007
“The subways are in your facebook, upadatin’ ur transit alerts“, Second Ave. Sagas, August 23, 2007
Click to go to Subway Status on Facebook
Blockr Book Publisher
Posted: February 13, 2007 Filed under: development, user experience | Tags: blockr Comments OffBlockr is a web application that makes it easy to design, publish, and sell books. Part social network, part design software, part book publisher, and part e-commerce, Blockr required an analytical mind to pore over their business plan, the initial creative ideas, and convert those needs into an effective and practical design or a web application that could be developed in time for impatient venture capitalists.
Having worked with Blockr CEO Jamie Rosen in the 90′s as part of his Comet Systems startup company, Plastic Past President, Amos Bloomberg, felt comfortable tackling the job. We designed and launched a full-featured yet easy-to-use web application that attracted the first early adopter user community, and eventually lead to further financing for the fledgling company.
The digital equivalent of a napkin sketch outlining the flow of the entire application
User flow comparison
The book editor wireframe
The image picker interface
Sitemap
Esprsso News Reading Platform
Posted: February 3, 2007 Filed under: development, experimental, user experience | Tags: esprsso Comments OffEsprsso.net brings together two of our favorite things: news reading and conversation. While sipping the proverbial cup, users of Esprsso can read news originating from virtually any news sources or blog, while engaging their peers in discussion.
Esprsso works in much the same way as other news aggregators, such as Google Reader and Daylife. However, Esprsso makes sharing of news as simple as a single click. Each article has a discussion board where readers can leave comments. Additionally, readers can rate articles, bookmark articles, forward them to friends, and organize articles into custom “Channels” of news to which others users can then subscribe.
Links
Review in the New York Law Journal, April 17, 2007
M2M Mobile Museum Guide
Posted: June 1, 2006 Filed under: experimental, mobile, user experience | Tags: amnh, museum Comments OffThe M2M Mobile Museum Guide is a proposal done in collaboration with Jared Lamenzo and Shagun Singh to allow visitors to the American Museum of Natural History to augment their museum experience using Sony’s Playstation portable console.
Due to space constraints, the museum is only able to display limited information about any exhibit. Furthermore, at any given time, only a small fraction of the museum’s collection can be displayed. Through a partnership with Sony, the M2M Mobile Museum Guide will create rich interactive experiences that bring to life the valuable artifacts in the museums possession in a way that engages and enhances the educational experience latent in each exhibit.
Visitors will be able to delve deeper into the topics touched upon in the exhibits. With the M2M Mobile Museum Guide, students can play educational games with other students, like treasure hunts in the museum’s collection, take fun quizzes that cover the core topics of each exhibit, bookmark favorite artifacts on display and later retrieve that list of favorites with links to more information about each artifact on the museum’s website.
Needies Interactive Robotic Plush Dolls
Posted: January 1, 2006 Filed under: experimental, physical computing, user experience | Tags: needies, physical computing Comments OffNeedies are interactive plush dolls inspired by codependent, high-maintenance relationships. Each Needie has a custom-developed electronic nervous system that they use to talk, sing, and feel hugs. Needies communicate with each other verbally and wirelessly.
Totally attention-starved, they compete with each other for human affection — or, getting touch, as they like to say.
When you give Needies touch (by hugging and squeezing them), they will return your kindness with songs and shameless flattery.
But remember that Needies always know when other Needies are getting touch! If one Needie is getting touch while others are neglected, the unloved Needies will conspire to take its place.
Kelly holding Mossie
Links
Popstick Reality Star Power
Posted: October 13, 2005 Filed under: user experience | Tags: aol, popstick, reality star power Comments OffWorking with Popstick on a proposal for a new online reality show for AOL, we developed the concepts for a pitch revolving around an online social network of game show participants. Visitors to the site could vote for their favorite contestant, and any visitor to the site could participate to become one of the select few featured contestants.
Reality Star Power home screen
Reality Star Power latest episode screen
Reality Star Power contestant profile screen
Natalie Jeremijenko’s Robot Ducks
Posted: July 15, 2005 Filed under: experimental, physical computing | Tags: dublin, natalie jeremijenko, physical computing, robot ducks, save the robots Comments OffNatalie Jeremijenko contacted us one week before the opening of the Save the Robots festival in Dublin. She had been commissioned by The Ark to create a series of Robot Ducks that festival goers could use to communicate with the real ducks in the pond at St. Stephen’s Green in central Dublin.
Working under duress, we express-ordered plastic decoy ducks used for hunting, and then set about re-purposing them to become vehicles for greater duck-human communication. Using small audio/video transceivers, we embedded a camera, microphone, and speaker inside of each duck that could be viewed and controlled wirelessly from laptops in the park. Users could also use a handheld remote-control motor system embedded inside each duck to maneuver it around the pond. This turned out to be a big success in Dublin.
Robot Ducks featured in Res Magazine
Duck picnic before departure for Dublin
Permit this family to drive ducks
Robot duck playing hard to get in Dublin
Autoimage Self-Organizing Self Portraits
Posted: March 1, 2005 Filed under: development, experimental Comments OffAutoimage is a self-organizing self-portrait.
Based on a model of how the brain learns to recognize faces, each pixel in an Autoimage portrait learns where it belongs in the image as a whole based on the activity of the pixels around it.
Autoimage brings the age-old medium of the portrait into the era of the network. Self-organizing portraits respond to the modern metaphor of life as the sum of complex interactions among many small independent agents.
Pac-Manhattan
Posted: April 1, 2004 Filed under: experimental, mobile, physical computing | Tags: pacmanhattan Comments OffPac-Manhattan is a large-scale urban game that utilizes the New York City grid to recreate the 1980′s video game sensation Pac-Man. This analog version of Pac-man is being developed in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications graduate program, in order to explore what happens when games are removed from their “little world” of tabletops, televisions and computers and placed in the larger “real world” of street corners, and cities.
Pac-Manhattan revolutionized the field of location-based gaming. It has been picked up and played by teams across the globe.
Links
The official Pac-Manhattan site