01. Business of Interactive Media: Interactive Media & Fashion Industry
An example website for online customized clothes design
An example of augmented reality for Virtual dressing
New media & fashion industry: Most of the traditional fashion websites are basic and boring. It is the right time for us to think about how to use new media platform and technologies to engage online shopping experience and increase the sales. The big issue behind this business idea is that how to take advantage of new media strengths to develop and improve fashion industry in this new media age. I believe that the interdisciplinary field between new media and fashion industry is full of potential business opportunities for us to explore.
Business idea: Online clothes shop: A re-invention of the clothes shop where designs are projected onto blank fabric clothes that you wear, you choose and they process and make the order immediately and deliver it to your home
Brief Description: Online clothes shop is for young generation who prefer unique and customized design. It enables customers to design their own clothes and try it online by using webcam and body gesture. Imagine you can get your own custom clothes in any color, pattern and style that you want. Fashion is more exciting when you can be your own personal designer. Virtual dressing and motion capture application lets you try on clothes you find online. It allows to be keyboard and mouse free to select between items and styles. By using new media technologies, this high level of interactive and intelligent online clothes shop can obviously enhance online shopping experience to increase the sales. What is more, the online clothes shop also offers a series of integrating online product and services that concentrate on the entire fashion clothes sustainable chain ( material supply, customized design, online shopping, second-hand clothes sharing, material returning and recycling, booking and delivering service, etc.) in order to pursue the maximum profit with less energy and resources cost.
Investment & Benefit: This online clothes shop would benefit for three aspects of stakeholders: It is an online product for customers to enjoy customized design experience and service. It is a space showcase for individual designers to display and sale their unique design. It is also a social-communication platform for fashion design studios to connect their customers as well as expand target audience group. The first year plan aims at enrolling at least 1000 individual designers to become members and charge them 10% of their sales, co-operate with 20 fashion design studios and charge them £10,000 per month for online advertisement. In that case, I could run the business successfully and earn £100.000 at the first year, and the profit would be raised at £700.000 at the third year. I am looking for investment of £50,000 and in return for 20% of the business.
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02. Interactive Narrative Project ( Iphone App )
Project: non-linear interactive narrative in real space by using IPhone App.
Project Reflection: The non-linear interactive narrative is surviving between virtual and reality world. 2D virtual experience is convenient and comfortable by using computer at home. The following question is that if people can receive all the information and watch the non-linear narrative interactive story on 2D screen, why they have strong desires to enjoy outside experience? On the other hand, the city is a stories based city and non-linear narrative stories happened everywhere. The real human face to face communication is an amazing and advanced interaction. People can share stories, explore themselves and communicate with others in real space interaction or receive information through traditional media, why they want to rely on mobile device telling them stories?
I believe that there is a trend to bring non-linear interactive narrative into real space. because of the real 3D user experience. The authors create stories allows to be keyboard and mouse free to make participants explore themselves or experience other’s stories in real world. So, it is essential to create a non-linear narrative story more attractive enough that deserved and suitable to put it into real space. Otherwise, people would lose interests and motivation to go out. The story itself needs to be pleasure, meaningful, valuable or interesting that make users have the increasingly motivation to explore more and immerse themselves traveling the story in real space.
Furthermore,it is essential to create some stories not only based but beyond real life. Firstly, In real life, individuals can not jump his own timeline to watch his non-linear narrative stories, everyone in the world can just live in now and there is no 4th D (timeline) to flash-back and flash-forward in real life. Secondly, imagination is another virtual layer beyond the real locative-base architecture, so that it is advisable to tell a virtual story based on real space. Thirdly, human can combine and receive the multiple sound fragments simultaneously, but we do not have the ability to experience others’ multiple non-linear narrative which is parallel with their own stories. So, enjoying others stories and experiencing other’s life by playing an character can become an interesting point.
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03. Sustainable New Media: Enable Solution for Local Food-growing co-ops
project proposal: organic food co-ops management system
Objective: propose an enable solution to support sustainable development of local food-growing co-operatives by using new media platform and technologies.
Local Community Research & Design Requirements : Based on local community research, I noticed that the local food co-ops lifecycle meets the sustainable development bottleneck. Although organizers use mobile and email to contact local families, they also has a website for advertisement and introduction, few families interest to visit the local farm and take action. The main reason why local families hard to become members and persist the organic food growing co-ops is that most of them do not have enough time to manage their allotments, and the traditional communication and management way lacks of efficiency and sustainability to support whole lifecycle.
Sustainable Solution : The enable solution is to set up a digitalized organic food co-op management web application in order to build a close association between families and local farm, attract more families participate in food co-ops and make organic good growing co-ops management approach more efficient, intelligent and sustainable.
Main Function Definition of online management system
* Online planting & harvest: Family members can check their plant and harvest schedule and arrange time to go to local farm. Ty can visit their virtual garden to plant and harvest online. Their online behaviour is a matephor requirements that would be transferred and responded into the real local farm based on remote data transformation platform. On the remote local farm, the organizers receive the data and ask local farmers help them to manage allotments. Virtual garden is the virtualized and visualized metaphor for the real local farm , members can know the real farm planting situation at home instead of go there.
* Online food exchanging & sharing: Members can visit other families’ virtual gardens and exchange food online. the organic foods are shared between families instead of buying. Based on this management web application, members can choose a family to book and deal the exchanging online conveniently and efficiently without using traditional tools to communicate.
* Online booking & delivery: Families in the local community book organic food online, and weekly delivery can reduce CO2 emissions transportation supplier, transportation, manufacturing, packing and disposal,etc.
Benefits: The visualized “virtual garden” can attract more participants enjoy planting, sharing and raising interests for organic food co-ops in their everyday life. Local people can have greater access to healthy, natural and seasonal produced organic foods. Furthermore, this digitalized web application offers a new platform to build the strong connection between local families and farmland in a virtual network, which aims to transplant the strong association and solidarity group into real organic food co-ops. This enable solution totally changes the traditional food co-ops management approach in order to make whole organic food co-ops lifecycle more sustainable, intelligent and efficient.
Technical implementation
* Platform: The product will be based in two platforms, web and mobile phones. The website is divided in three main sections, the blog, the augmented reality application and the homepage.We can consider the blog like the most sustainable way to communicate information, as all the customers –or in this case families- taking part on this food cooperative will be able to know all the news in just two clicks –or just one if they are using a RSS feed reader-. Furthermore it can be considered like the easiest and fastest way to administrate and organize information if we compare it with a normal website. New information is posted every time at the top of the blog showing the latest news to the user. The users of the webpage can comment this posts providing, as feedback, more useful information to the administrator and other users. Also we can consider this product more sustainable than a normal webpage as no technical skills or knowledge is needed to be able to add new information on it.
* Software: To create the webpage we used Adobe Dreamweaver: fast design and best application for websites creation. Adobe Flash for the virtual representation of the allotment : best way that we know actually to have a clear and fast representation of the status of the different plants. Dashcode to create the web application on the iPhone. JDE (Java Development Environment) at least version 4.7 (20$) to use advanced functions of the BlackBerry Storm as the touch screen.
* Programming languages: The database with all the information of the allotments will be based on a MySQL server, using PHP (in fact phpMyAdmin language) we will let the manager to add all the inputs on the database in a easy way.
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04. Reconstruction of Mac OX Desktop: Social Networking Desktop
Project Objective:
Identify the issues surrounding the existing desktop metaphor of Apple OS 10.5.x . Deconstruct this interface and understand its strengths & weaknesses. Design a completely new desktop metaphor – producing a final mock-up of your alternative but not necessarily fully functioning one. This desktop should take the form of a personalised “portable” desktop .
Project: social networking desktop
1 New media logic
Social networking and new media culture
The social networking desktop pushes target users and their relationships as a central focus in order to offer services to meet their requirements. According to analyzing behaviors of target user group, the main finding is that users have deeply rooted needs and strong psychological desires for self-expression, sharing, connecting and interacting with others online due to the lack of face-to-face communication in lonely world. This social networking desktop offers users a playground for self-expression with multidimensional and multimedia depth, and providing a variety of modules and functions (email, message, online gaming, chatting room, etc) for sharing information, interacting and improving relationship with others, as well as encouraging them to extend social connections on virtual community without social boundary.
What new media faces today is that it pays more attention to human relationship and social culture rather than inforamtion technologies. The new media desktop brings down the access barrier of knowledge, technologies, resources and capital expenditure to build a fair culture that everyone can participant that makes sure the new media product is truly, broadly available.I believe that social networking is the mainstream of new media which attracts thousands of users online and influences their online behavior, attitude and dominants their life. It also rebuilds and reshapes the logic relationship between individuals both real world and virtual community. Furthermore, it deeply influences new media trends and social culture through linking individuals into the whole community and making the huge world becomes a small village.
New method of Information communication and application service:
A. Seamless Information sharing and unlimited data storage
B. Portability and mobility of information communication
C. Custom information services and Self-sufficient system
D. Efficiency and integration application services
Based on cloud computing technology, the new social networking desktop offers target users an easy accessible web platform for online data sharing and storage by using any internet-linked mobile device without geographical position boundary. All the data stored on the remote unlimited cloud server and run on the huge shared data center. The new approach of information sharing and storage improves the portability and mobility of information communication. Furthermore, comparing with the traditional mass media, the social network based new desktop offers custom information services for individuals, and builds a variable and flexible personal dynamic medium that users can customize information and online applications, which updates automatically and continuously depend on their particular requirements. Meanwhile, the information communication can be self-sufficient due to pushing end-users into the dominant position for information flows and encouraging them to contribute to the whole community. Based on Multi-Tenancy system of cloud computing, the new desktop provides online full-blown applications for thousands of users share simultaneously instead of hosting software locally, which leads to the integration of technologies, applications and web services as well as the usability and efficiency improvement of application services.
2 Interactivity
A. UCD: user centered design
B. Multi-tenancy for multi-user interaction
C. Active and Multiple formats dynamic interaction system
D. Efficiency and user friendly of HCI
E. Natural way of human interaction
The social networking desktop aims to put users and their relationships at the center of interaction design. Online communication behavior between human and computer is not just a simple and signal approach of feedback or reaction, but a complicate “Butterfly Effect” or “knock-on effect” of multi-tenancy and multi-user interaction, which is happened between thousands of users and influence themselves. By comparison of the linear mass media, The social networking desktop creates an active interaction environment that requires participants interacting in a two-way conversation rather than passively enjoying second-hand experience. It offers users multiple modules and formats to approach interaction broadly with a multidimensional and multimedia depth. The desktop is a variable and dynamic interaction system that can self – regulating, self-sufficient and has its “own life”. Which means the interaction result is unpredictable and endless. The new desktop hides the complex software task flows (using user-friendly online applications and integration web platform services) and overload information (Custom information services) in order to improve the efficiency and create user friendly Human-computer interaction.
Computers are tools that we control for information communication, social connection and applications services. Human-computer interface is a surface for displaying interactive system behind. The social networking desktop based on human-computer interactive interface, but offers a platform that aims to recover the natural way of human relationship and human to human conversation and interaction, as well as build a friendly relationship between the human, computer and the social cultural environment.Through analyzing the social networking desktop in terms of new media logic and interaction theory, the social networking desktop based on new media and interactivity theory, also focuses on the future new media trend. I believe that the it is just a tip of iceberg to show human society would be totally changed in a multitude of arenas by the third paradigm shift.
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05 Interactive Installation & UED Research
Physical technological considerations & Functional Affordance: In terms of Physical technological considerations of the interactive installation, I need to take more attention to human behavior, ergonomics, physical materials properties, safety and healthy problems, as well as the sustainability, usability and effectivity. Smart design needs to have really good functional affordance, the viewers should know how does it works and what kind of feeling the designer attempts to communicate with them. It is vital to improve the functional affordance of interactive installation and let it say something itself with less explanation and guidance.
Arduino Coding Approaches: In this interactive installation project, coding process was separated for 4 steps: A. “analogue” interactive architecture / B. Coding logic structure / C. Prototype for coding Functionality Testing / D. Final coding
The Art of Interactive Installation:
* Tangible & touchable multimedia: By using physical computing for information communication, the electromechanical installation allows people to recover the dimensions of physical feeling and interact physical objects directly for receiving dynamic interactive output. The physical computing-based interactive installation also offers people a chance to have a manipulable and perceptible physical interaction in tangible and touchable world with a more electromechanically and digitalism-rich level, which indicates to explore the seamless multimedia interfaces between human, digital information and physical environment as well as expand the connection between virtual and real space.
* Real 3-D Environmental interaction: Compared with traditional virtual space interaction, the electromechanic interactive installation is aimed at encouraging people escape from the 2-D mouse & screen-based virtual space and recover real 3-D environmental interaction.It challenges the traditional thinking about HCI, and offers a feasible approach to make any touchable object or even invisible atmosphere to become interactive interface, which largely expands the scale and format of human information communication and improves the quality of interaction.
* Multi sensory immersion experience: Furthermore, human sensory has been deprived and restricted by traditional virtual interaction. However, physical computing can enable enhanced modes of communication by creating multisensory immersion experience both the physical and emotional aspects in real 3-D space. The audiences may become positive participants in this kind of attractive immersion experience. They would interact physical installation with an arising interactive enthusiasm due to making use of human sense ( see, listen, touch, smell, taste, feel and body motion) to stimulate unexpected and variable responses with imagination expectation and surprise.
User Experience Design: For my personal point of view, the user experience based interactive installation is about designers create multisensory immersion in real environmental space to communicate the meaningful concept and valuable interactive experience for audiences. So, concepts and ideas are the foundation of the whole installation, and creating valuable interactive motivation and attractive multisensory immersion is the main purpose of user experience design. The successful user experience needs to have-fun, entertain, match human sensory imagination and desires, satisfy with human intentions and curiosity.
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