Design Limitation

In doing so, we tried to approach the design with the most realistic expectations in mind. Train tickets have their info printed at (relatively) low resolutions. The colors, if any, needed to be simple and survive a low-grade 4-tone offset printing in mass production. Finally, the tickets needed their information arranged in a physically protective manner to account for wear and tear.

Goals

We approached the new tickets with very specific goals in mind:

• No understanding of the native language should be necessary to comprehend the ticket
• It should be easy to discern critical information in one glance. For example, one glance while sprinting towards the platforms.
• The ticket should not only accomodate passengers’ needs, but also those of conductors
• How to validate the ticket should be blatantly obvious

Design Elements

Some design element we would like to highlight are:

Origin and destination information: Graphical depictions eliminate the need for understanding the language the ticket is printed in. In addition, the clock hands reflect the time for quickly referencing times at stations with old-fashioned clocks

Where your seat is on the train car is displayed with an arrow, telling to whether to board at the front or back of the car.

Validation instructions: One of the most confusing aspects of having a train ticket is knowing when and how to validate the ticket. Again, a graphical depiction as well as distinctive color draw this information to the attention of the passenger. We’ve included a notch in the full size mockups in order to prevent users from entering the ticket backwards into a ticket validation machine.

Purchase and other information is concisely represented with a tamper-resistant background.

Design Process

Below are images of design iterations and other thoughts we had during the process.

Visualizing the flow of interaction

Listing the necessary information to show on the ticket

Blocking out information in three different ways

Iteration I

Iteration III

Iteration V

Final Mockups

These simulated “trees” were generated using a randomized fractal pattern, and are responding to “wind” based on a Perlin noise generator. This unique visualization can be tied to a diverse range of input data, which can affect the formation of the trees and their movement in the simulated breeze.

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• Folds up into 1/4 of a shipping container
• Solar distillery provides fresh water at no cost
• Housing for 100,000 fits on one container ship for fast deployment
• Floats on 6 pontoons, or sets up on the ground

The SHRIMP (Sustainable Housing for Refugees via Mass Production) is an attempt to bring housing and other relief to large displaced or homeless populations, especially those who have suffered in a natural disaster. Providing shelter to a family of four, it folds up into 1/4 of a shipping container for efficient deployment. (cross sectional model pictured above)

Massive Deployment

Taking cues from IKEA’s flat-packing furniture, this shelter starts its life as a 10′ x 9.5′ x 8′ box, or exactly 1/4 of a “hi-cube” shipping container. Because of this standard size and self-contained design, the SHRIMP can be dispatched in extreme quantity; Maersk container ships, for example, can hold 6,400 containers. That equates to housing for roughly 100,000 people, on a single ship. Need medical or administrative centers, or even schools? Every 100th or 1000th SHRIMP can be a specialized unit, creating a complete mobile community. And using the solar distillery on the SHRIMP’s roof, fresh water needs are significantly reduced.

Pack It Up

The SHRIMP has pontoons which automatically inflate, using compressed air canisters – assembly takes minutes, not hours. Because many container ships have cranes, this eliminates the need for docking infrastructure – units can be unloaded anywhere there’s water. As standard-sized shipping containers, the SHRIMP can also easily be trucked across land. In addition, the simple wooden interior is modifiable with tools available in most places, allowing units to be customized or even converted into more permanent homes.

Sustainable Living

SHRIMP units can be refitted for reuse, and use sustainably farmed wood (see Forest Stewardship Council). They can also be retrofitted out of shipping containers, which are piling up in the US: “It costs $2,000 to ship an empty container back to its source, he said, but China can build new ones for $1,200,” writes the Virginian Pilot. The SHRIMP draws upon that waste stream, providing both humanitarian aid and waste management.

The DoubleSpace kitchenette caters to those with a taste for unique, compact living. People living in crowded cities such as New York can appreciate the value of flexible, efficiently used living space. This roomy easy chair converts easily into a countertop with two electric burners.

SMALL IS THE NEW BIG

“After more than 30 years of steady increase, the size of the typical American house appears to be leveling off,” reports the New York Times. The average American home rose to over 2,300 in 2001, from 1,500 square feet in 1970. Across the Pacific, Japanese families live in homes that average only 1,000 square feet, according to Azby Brown, author of The Very Small Home: Japanese Ideas for Living Well in Limited Space.

You’ll never sit and cook at the same time

It’s so true that Vestal designers overlapped the two functions to create a new kind of convertible. (Safety features include not being able to turn on the burner while the DoubleSpace is in the chair orientation.) A carefully placed axle allows the perfect sitting height to swing upward to become the perfect cooking height. Such designs can make it easier for people to take up less space, as well as use less energy and raw materials.

Vestal’s Diego Rojas Bandini and Jeffrey Warren developed the Shufflr in Adobe Flash in just three weeks. Also see the PodTech Media Player

The Writebird.com system offers the ability to produce additional advertising revenue, to provide more frequent and dynamic content, and to expand readerships. The features currently include a multi-level author/editor system, image uploading, PDF article conversion for download, and a variety of elegant built-in layouts. The system will soon have a subscriber list, online image-editing, a blog, sorting and email notification, a search engine, and online advertising.

Vestal Design is not simply a design firm; we’re active in developing of new, innovative web services in a variety of different domains.

Edifice, artifice. The time has come for cakes to rise to ever greater heights. I have seen the future of Confection, and it is Crenellated.

For centuries we have walked a fine line in both our culinary creations and our aedicular aspirations. Our collective tendency to live in our food, whether literally or figuratively, begs the eternal question: Are we eating it or is it eating us? Reformulated: why do our cakes demand to be Inhabited? Why do they so often, so irrationally, look like buildings?

To find the answer, let us scoop deep through the layers of our buried lives, our homes, and our daily bread, and our religion. Exodus tells of the departure of the Jews from Egypt, an icon of architectural achievement: for what? For the desert, the flatlands, a void unfilled by stone and brick! This unleavened wasteland was made habitable only by the culinary gift from the heavens: the manna, the holy bread of life, which replaced the first edifices of the Jews and was the badge of their freedom from the oppression of an inedible architecture.

Thus, when Marie Antoinette famously remarked, “let them eat cake,” was she, an educated woman, showing her insensitivity to contemporary socio-economic issues? No, I say! No! Rather, she called into question for the very first time in Western boulangerial philosophy the adequacy of bread in bearing the brunt of millenia of metaphorical meaning. Wise Marie showed us that Bread, as we had up to that point believed, was not indeed the guerdon of humanity, that in fact, we would need a richer, more structural substance for that weighty load. Hers was not an exclamation of exasperation, but an acknowledgment of the paradigm shift from the Chunk of Bread to the Brick of Cake! From the regressive C => B to the progressive B => C! Misunderstood by her contemporaries, she boldly ushered mankind from the Era of Bread to the Golden Age of Cake.

Yet somehow we have lost our way, the significance of our cakeish edifices have been forgotten, and the art of, shall we say, CAKE-ITECTURE, has been buried under the sands of a barbaric and uninhabitable modernity… we are left with only crude gingerbread.

Come now, Citizens Cake – to lead a second exodus, from the oppression of an consumptive and spaceless architecture of the present to the glories of a once and future cake!

Also unique to the system was the reliance upon social networking to organize file exchange and increase relevant search results. During extensive beta testing, it became apparent that allowing users to connect to networks of their friends provided a wealth highly relevant media to each user.

Using a web-based asynchronous Flash system, Coffeeshop offered it’s users a responsive and intuitive interface which was developed in just a few months. By using an intelligent index-caching system, search queries were executed in a fraction of a second, despite an index size of hundreds of thousands of files.

Coffeeshop was an independent project of Vestal Designer Jeffrey Warren and software developer Patrick Fitzsimmons.

Robotics for the Masses

Exploiting the markets of scale of the toy industry, specifically in the realm of entertainment robotics, the Feral Robotic Dog project provides a readymade, inexpensive and highly distributed robotic hardware platform. The “toy” robotic dogs currently on the international market provide the most inexpensive source of compatible motors, actuation, and sensing mechanisms available ($15-$200 for the dog adaptation).

Information Legibility

Isn’t it ironic that EPA reports are often illegible to those who live in the areas they address? If kids are playing in a playground built on a possible toxic waste site, they’re much more likely to understand a dog searching for toxins than a man in a white suit. Mediagenic technologies promote transparency and information legibility in an age when the problem isn’t getting enough information, it’s understanding it all.

Link to Natalie Jeremijenko’s Feral Robotics website

Design for Interaction

As part of the exhibit, encounters with real geese are captured on digital video, uploaded to an interactive website where users can annotate and define their goose conversations. Ultimately, a goose translator can be derived from the data using waveform association with user supplied definitions of the goose speak.

Design for Community

The ooz Goose is part of the larger ooz project by Natalie Jeremijenko’s xDesign Labs. The ooz project is an “inverted zoo” which attempts to improve the level of communication between animals and humans in a zoo-like setting. In a true ooz, visitors would not only view animals in actual (non-simulated) habitats, but would have more meaningful interactions than simply tapping on the glass.

A web-based community repository for searching, uploading, and playback. Audio Enclave is being developed in an extremely tight iterative design process. Audio Enclave uses AJAX, when appropriate, to enhance then user’s experience. For this project, a Vestal employee design and implement the UI and graphic design.

Problem

Audio Enclave’s predecessor, which was created in 1998, began to break in the Fall of 2004. At the same time, the user interface, while appropriate for the late nineties, had lived on long enough. Vestal Design and others took it upon ourselves to completely start over. There were several existing problems in the user interface, and additional features we wanted. For example, information was limited and poorly displayed in the old interface, and the user was limited to adding and removing songs from the queue At the same time, the consensus was clear that the remainder of the hall liked the key concepts behind the old interface- a simple front page, a minimalist design, and some humor. The site is used by the entire hall, and has speakers placed in both lounges and all bathrooms on the hall (for shower music).

Approach

Vestal Design’s employee had been using the previous incarnation of Audio Enclave every day for approximately two years when he first approached designing the interface. Since there was an excellent user base to draw on, it was decided to employ a tight iterative design process in building Audio Enclave. As soon as we felt the interface had reached a sufficiently stable level, it was immediately deployed. All code commits are automatically live-updated to the server. This allows us to employ an iterative design process which comes full cycle approximately once a day. We actively solicit input from the rest of the community for new functionality and feedback on existing features.

As Audio Enclave was being designed in the Spring of 2005, AJAX was just beginning to appear on the radar of web designers. Initially, the site was implemented without any JavaScript (one requirement was that the design have basic functionality in a terminal web browser). In the past few months, the team has gone back and re-implemented several parts of the site to use AJAX and JavaScript.

Solution

After a summer of work, Audio Enclave went live in August 2005. The interface includes sortable tables which display information relevant to the mode. Intelligent linking is used when a user clicks on information. For example, clicking on an artist name anywhere on the site automatically redirects to a page displaying all albums by that artist. Fitts’ Law is used in the design to minimize user interaction time. AJAX is employed to tighten the user’s sense of “cause and effect” in playing songs and controlling playback. Finally, the user receives graphic feedback whenever they hover over any actionable item on the site. After clicking on an actionable item, confirmation feedback is always given to the user.