Rules of Six

Mixed media installation

• Client: Aranda\Lasch
• Exhibition: Design and the Elastic Mind, MoMA
• Responsibilities: Software Development

About

Rules of Six is an exploration of self-assembly and modularity across scales. Through a large wall relief, an algorithm running live in the gallery, and blown-up images of nanostructures, the project presents an experiment in material formation through simple rule-based growth and interactions of six-sided symmetries common to the molecular lattices of many materials observed in the lab.

I worked on this project with Aranda\Lasch, a design studio based in New York and Arizona. They were commissioned by the MoMA to create a piece for the exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind and enlisted my help to develop software for the installation.

Details

The algorithm used to generate these structures implements a series of cellular automata to represent rule-based growth. The cells in each layer are scaled and rotated precisely to ensure that all the cells in the system lock into the underlying grid and generate the fractalized behavior.

Although we used a specific hexagonal faceted block for the panelized wall relief, any expression that is designed in relation to the unit hexagon can seamlessly plug into a lattice based upon that cellular geometry.

In the animation that accompanies the physical panels, we explore multiple geometric expressions in 2 dimensions to underscore this idea of modularity. The animation cycles through these various expressions, observing the same rules of growth, but producing wildly different outcomes.

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Beacon

Reimagining the New York City payphone

• Client: LQD
• Responsibilities: UX Design, UX Prototyping

About

A communications hub designed to replace the payphone, Beacon began as a response to a New York City design challenge, and evolved into a startup that was ultimately acquired by Verizon in 2016.

Phase 1 : Competition

In late 2012, New York announced a competition called Reinvent Payphones to generate ideas for how to repurpose the city's payphone infrastructure which was set to expire in 2014.

A team of us from frog submitted Beacon, which made it to the final round of judging where it won the award for Best Visual Design and User Experience. Beacon received some great press coverage, including here and here.

On that competition team, I helped ideate and brainstorm concepts, and then developed some rendering tools for use in the production of our video submission.

Phase 2 : Product

Post-competition, our concept was pushed forward in the city's RFP phase by a consortium led by LQD, and although New York ultimately selected another vendor, LQD was undeterred.

They purchased the IP from frog, rebranded the device as Palo, and continued working s to develop both the industrial design as well as the UX. In that phase, I developed the earliest working version of the UI, and helped produce the on-device content for this promotional video.

LQD was acquired by Verizon in 2016.

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HOP Lane

Airport ride sharing platform

• Client: Bandwagon
• Resposibilities: UX Prototyping, API Development

About

The HOP (High-Occupancy Passenger) Lane enables taxi-sharing at airports, train stations, and other venues where taxis congregate. LaGuardia Airport in New York City asked Bandwagon to pilot and run a taxi-sharing service during periods of peak demand.

I joined the project as a User Experience Consultant, to work through early interaction concepts and develop an iPad prototype that could be taken into the field. In the process, I also worked on the API layer that enables the app to communicate with the ride-matching server.

The utility of the prototype was immediately apparent, and the team decided to make the iPad a key touchpoint of the experience, operated by a Line Manager who would facilitate the share once the software suggested a favorable match.

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Wall Panic 3000!!!

SXSW Interactive experience

• Client: frog (internal project)
• Responsibilities: UX Prototyping, Software Development

About

Wall Panic 3000!!! is a Kinect game which debuted at frog's SXSW party in 2011, not long after the first Kinect hack was released as a library to developers. This video recap from the party features the game in action:

Backstory

In early 2011, frog's New York studio was asked to contribute a Kinect Hack to frog's SXSW party that year. A group of us in the studio who enjoy making things were up to the task, and in 7 weeks, Wall Panic 3000!!! was born.

The game is inspired by the Japanese game show "Human Tetris" as well as the 8-bit video games of our youth. Players are randomly assigned challenges in which they must contort their bodies to pass through a "hole" in an approaching "wall".

As the software developer on the team, I chose to implement the game in openFrameworks, a creative coding framework written in C++. I had been wanting to experiment with oF, and this project afforded me the perfect opportunity to do so.

The game was a big hit at the party and some attendees from Microsoft invited us to Las Vegas later in the year to show it onstage at MIX11 as part of their Kinect showcase.

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Reactive Glasses

Custom electronics installation

• Client: Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA)
• Event: Dining By Design
• Responsibilities: UX Prototyping, Hardware prototyping, Software development, Fabrication

About

This set of 10 drinking glasses was commissioned for Rockwell Group's installation at DIFFA's Dining By Design 2008. Each glass contains a capacitive sensing circuit that causes it to glow when a guest picks it up.

I helped to design and prototype early versions of the circuit for the glasses, and was then responsible for soldering and assembling the electronics for the entire set.

DIFFA is an annual event for which leading designers and chefs donate their time to create unique dining environments to raise money for charity.

Rockwell Group created a knit environment (complete with live knitter) highlighted by the reactive glasses.

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Interactive Table

Hardware and UX Prototype

• Client: Coca Cola
• Responsibilities: UX prototyping, Software development

About

This project was a fullscale prototype for an interactive table that detects objects placed on its surface and responds in a dynamic fashion. It was intended to be the centerpiece of a new experience center the client was developing near their headquarters.

The table is comprised of a translucent plexiglass sheet, an infrared camera and video projector mounted underneath pointing up at the surface, and custom software. The camera tracks the location and orientation of objects on the table via 2-D glyphs printed on the underside of each object.

The software processes this positional information and updates the display, which is projected back onto the surface of the table, creating a real-time feedback loop.

The object tracking software was written in Processing, utilizing the reacTIVision toolkit and libraries. I developed several applications on top of this framework, to demonstrate the capabilities of the table, including:

• A space planning application for laying out objects/furniture in a 3 dimensional space and then enabling eye level walkthroughs.
• A presentation and diagramming tool enabling multi-modal interactions between presenter and audience.
• An interactive storytelling tool that facilitates creative play scenarios and more engaging and immersive storytelling experiences.
• A tangible interface built on top of a physics simulation engine that demonstrates fun and playful interactions with visuals that respond in real time.

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View Calculator

Schematic design tool

• Client: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
• Responsibilities: UX design, Software development, Team leadership

About

This research project was a collaboration between our graduate student team and an SOM architecture studio during the schematic design phase of a residential tower in Manhattan.

The premise that we could increase overall tower value by maximizing the number of "spectacular views" led us to develop a tool that could optimize a tower's form to create more of these views.

The software quantifies the view at points uniformly spaced along the building facade, assigning a score based on the average line of sight for a cone of vision emanating from that point. The score is weighted to take into account landmarks such as the East River, Central Park, and iconic buildings in the vicinity.

The software maps a visual representation of this view score back onto the surface of the building to give designers a visual indicator of where the best view corridors lie and at what elevations the views open up.

We explored two applications for this tool: the more practical application enables designers to analyze a particular tower design in order to understand how the views are behaving.

Our second, more theoretical approach was to generate floorplates with inflecting walls in order to maximize view quality. These composite walls perform better overall than the orthogonal walls, and effectively define an optimized "viewing envelope" that suggests tower forms which the design team might not have considered on their own.

SOM clearly saw value in this tool and has continued to use it on other projects in the office.

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Marco Polo Cubes

Networked toy prototype

• Client: Product Architecture Lab (studio project)
• Collaborator: Cory Brugger
• Responsibilities: UX prototyping, Hardware prototyping

About

A set of four cubes that communicate wirelessly over a peer-to-peer network, in a call and response fashion, based on their orientations, to trigger melodies and patterns of flashing lights.

A cube becomes the lead cube ("Marco") when it is shaken continuously for several seconds. It broadcasts its orientation to the other cubes, while also flashing a color and playing a pre-programmed melody associated with that orientation.

Each of the other cubes ("Polo") respond to this broadcast; those in a similar orientation will flash the same color and also play back the melody. Those in alternate orientations will simply flash their respective colors.

With just these few simple rules, the cubes afford numerous modes of interaction, improvised performance, and play.

Fabrication

Each cube contains an accelerometer to determine orientation, an Xbee wireless module to communicate over bluetooth, a piezo transducer to transmit sound, and an Arduino microcontroller to manage the various processes.

All of these electronics are housed in a repurposed softball display case, which we sandblasted and fitted with a custom armature to support the rig.

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Tower Form Finder

Generative design tool

• Client: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
• Responsibilities: UX design, Software development, Team leadership
• Studio: Product Architecture Lab

This project was a collaboration between our graduate student team and an SOM architecture studio during the schematic design phase of a residential tower in Manhattan.

An earlier project had identified that non-orthogonal orientations would improve the views from inside the tower, especially at higher floors. The SOM design team asked for a tool to help them analyze a range of faceted tower variations in an automated manner.

Each variation of the tower was determined by choosing from a subset of nine floorplates at each of four key heights and then interpolating between those floorplates to arrive at a faceted tower composed of three "vertical neighborhoods".

I developed a software tool that enabled the designers to manipulate several tower parameters, and then generate all possible permutations of the tower geometry within the solution space.

The software then analyzed each of the resulting towers for key metrics such as floorplate efficiency and facade-area ratio, to determine the best “performing” towers.

The designers were able to choose from the best performing towers and optimize them further with the software to maximize the square footage to achieve the target ZFA.

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