benarent.co.uk

I have recently been featured on MBC-TV the equivalent of BBC in South Korea.  I had a great time making a small working demo of the energy tree and its been a great experience to exhibit in the Hague and be broadcast on national TV.  This truly shows the power of having your portfolio on the internet.

Thanks to Gina and her team for letting me put the video up here.

Energy Tree on MBC-TV

A key part of any design profession is the Crit. Crits are normally in an open forum and give everyone a chance to give feedback on your work.  I have created this blog post as a place where people can give me positive and negative feedback on my portfolio.

P.S. In regards to spelling and copy, I’m currently working through my site.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is the latest book I’m reading.  The book is very well written and is a easy read.  Dan explains how humans make irrational decisions that aren’t irrational at all, and are in fact that irrational behavior is predictable.  Dan uses MIT research studies to prove this.  I would highly recommend this book to designers, and experience designers as by understanding irrational behavior you can convert a great percentage to the perfect usage scenario.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

As a working interaction designer I’m always looking for inspiration that I can extend to the rest of my work.  This is my first UI’s in Movies section, and I hope to go back through and pull the best user interfaces from the world of movies.

All of the UI design was done by MK12, I’m always impressed by the high quality of the images, and the detail that goes into the interface.  Personally I didn’t like the use of multitouch, but did like the use of a tangible user interface that allowed the agents to display different type of bank notes on the table.

I most liked the video wall  [Screen shot taken from the TRS] , which worked very well as a multi user collaboration and search tool.  The natural interface, and flow though screens was very nice,  I hope to be doing some high spec tangible interfaces later this year.

I have contacted the designers at MK12, to try to find out more about there design process, I’m really interested as to how i can fit this into my workflow.

As part of my work as an ‘interaction designer’ I have found that in I’m having to do a lot of interactive prototypes and have found flash as the most versatile tool for development.  While I already had some ActionScript experience I found that I had reached a wall with my coding.

I have found these three books a great addition to any flash designer, If you can afford it, get it all. But if you can’t I could properly loose the design patterns but its a good long term investment in long term code re usability.

Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential).

This is a great book that covers EVERYTHING and all of the smaller detials of the ActionScripit Classes.  If you were to only get one book, I would get this one.

ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers

This book has loads of useful code snippets.  This is definitely one to have by the best for when you need to do a specific task.

ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Object Oriented Programming Techniques (Adobe Developer Library)

This book is written more towards developers, but I have found it good practice to design code in a reusable and structured manor.

This is a second update.. I’m aware that things around here have been pretty quite for a while.  I have a bunch of content that i’m looking to update on the site.

I’m planning to make the blog more focused on Interaction Design.  I’m currently doing a lot of work that covers a broad range of interaction design issues.

Most of my current work has a certain amount of IP. Although at TRIL I’m currently working on..

• Designing a design process for the TRIL environment.  TRIL is unique because product creation is closely linked to academic research. You may see this written into a paper soon.
• Developing an interactive product using Flash (Actionscript 3) and External interface to interact with a C app.
• Doing data logging with the products I create.  I can’t say too much, but its getting some interesting feedback on product usage.
• Organizing and working with ethnographers to help develop the TRIL future.
• Working with Lawyers to help find lucrative iP in products that we create.

So I plan in the coming months, I plan to

• Update the existing content.
• Back post some news that has happened.
• Focus primarily on IP-Free case studies from work.
• Post small AS3 code snippets,
• … and generally give back to the interaction design community.

I would also like to thank all the visitors to the site.. I’m busy to update and fix all of my design conent.