Participated in a few events in SF Design week for the past two days. One of the studios I went to on Tuesday in the Open Studio Crawl was Cooper Design, which is known to be one of the leading design agencies in the States.
I wish I had more official training in design, so when I hear all these big names in the design field, I would have the same kind of response as if I am hearing the names of social science scholars like Edward Hall or George Mead. But i guess it's okey, cause that way, I didn't go into these famous design agencies with my preconceptions. To me, they are all new, exciting and waiting to be explored.
Chris Noessel, one of the principal interaction designers in Cooper gave a 30-minute presentation named "Make it so." The presentation was on how sci fi has been influencing design all along. And my dear blog readers, you know, all my focus throughout that 30 minutes was on some amazing slides he was showing. In fact, at the end of his talk, the first question he received was "how did you make your slides?" Apparently he or maybe Cooper Design has got some secret pre-programed presentation software that they get to use to make slides. But he did mention about Prezi (more info on Prezi), as a commercial software that people can use to mimic the effects and transitions in his presentation.
I tried to search for his presentation and the slides online when I got back home. However, the only video I could find about this talk was back in 2010. Chris and his co-author gave a similar talk (on the same theme, but the content was not exactly the same) in the UX week 2010 organized by AdaptivePath. The slides were, although not exactly the same, designed using a same style. So I guess it's still valuable to have some take-aways from this 2011 video. I took most of the slide screenshots from the video, so bear with me the low quality of the slide images.
------
So this is the first slide of this 30 minutes presentation, very sci-fi-y, with just the topic and the presenters' names. Just like this is some kind of display screen on a space shuttle. The simple blue circle's sort of indicating that was the original point, where everything else needed to begin with.
------
So here's the cool part, in the rest 30 minutes of this talk, the only thing the two presenters did was just to enlarge part of the "design - sci fi" ring, and showed those connections one by one. As shown below, I placed the slides from the presentation in a way so that you can clearly see, in the inner circle (the darker one), those slides are just parts of the original ring. This is indeed very similar to the concept of Prezi, as you zoom in and zoom out to focus on your content and at the same time, don't loose your audiences in the parts, still let them see the whole picture once in a while. In the outer circle (the ligher one), that's the additional information or examples attached to the slides from the inner circle. Since this talk was about science fiction movies and how they could inspire design, so the majority of those examples were short clips from those sci-fi movies.
So the flow was: (1) center image (whole structure) -> (2) inner circle (key points) -> (3) outer circle (examples) -> (4) Back to center image (whole structure);
It's hard for audiences to get lost in a well structured presentation like this, cause audiences would know their way in and their way out.
The image below is the last slide from the whole presentation. With all those images filled out in the rings, it indeed looks like a dashboard on a spaceship, especially with the dark space background. I guess this also shows a big difference between Prezi presentation and this particular "make it so" presentation, that is, when the whole view zoomed out, slides in Prezi might not such a comprehensive and super well-organized view of the whole presentation. The key in Prezi is to lead audience "step by step," so as long as the flow is logically structured, that's fine; and the zoom in/out also often happens at each step. In this "make it so" case (which I think was actually a particular case of a Prezi presentation), the comparison between "Design" and "Sci-Fi" is the structure, so instead of a multi-stop trip, the presenters were trying to convey a two-point knowledge system to audiences. As the information here was non-linear, the traditional way of "story telling" might not be the best way to organize the presentation here. To show the whole structure of the presentation in such "info-graphical" way might be more effective to emphasis on the comparison and connections between "design" and "sci-fi". The zoom in/out happens on each of those comparison and connection was definitely a more appropriate use here.
So i guess the bigger meaning for us to go through this presentation lies in, to organize presentation content that does not have a clear "storyline", content such as an information infrastructure or a knowledge system, zooming in and out on a info-graphic might be a solution to organically organize and deliver the content.
------
So here's the cool part, in the rest 30 minutes of this talk, the only thing the two presenters did was just to enlarge part of the "design - sci fi" ring, and showed those connections one by one. As shown below, I placed the slides from the presentation in a way so that you can clearly see, in the inner circle (the darker one), those slides are just parts of the original ring. This is indeed very similar to the concept of Prezi, as you zoom in and zoom out to focus on your content and at the same time, don't loose your audiences in the parts, still let them see the whole picture once in a while. In the outer circle (the ligher one), that's the additional information or examples attached to the slides from the inner circle. Since this talk was about science fiction movies and how they could inspire design, so the majority of those examples were short clips from those sci-fi movies.
So the flow was: (1) center image (whole structure) -> (2) inner circle (key points) -> (3) outer circle (examples) -> (4) Back to center image (whole structure);
It's hard for audiences to get lost in a well structured presentation like this, cause audiences would know their way in and their way out.
The image below is the last slide from the whole presentation. With all those images filled out in the rings, it indeed looks like a dashboard on a spaceship, especially with the dark space background. I guess this also shows a big difference between Prezi presentation and this particular "make it so" presentation, that is, when the whole view zoomed out, slides in Prezi might not such a comprehensive and super well-organized view of the whole presentation. The key in Prezi is to lead audience "step by step," so as long as the flow is logically structured, that's fine; and the zoom in/out also often happens at each step. In this "make it so" case (which I think was actually a particular case of a Prezi presentation), the comparison between "Design" and "Sci-Fi" is the structure, so instead of a multi-stop trip, the presenters were trying to convey a two-point knowledge system to audiences. As the information here was non-linear, the traditional way of "story telling" might not be the best way to organize the presentation here. To show the whole structure of the presentation in such "info-graphical" way might be more effective to emphasis on the comparison and connections between "design" and "sci-fi". The zoom in/out happens on each of those comparison and connection was definitely a more appropriate use here.
So i guess the bigger meaning for us to go through this presentation lies in, to organize presentation content that does not have a clear "storyline", content such as an information infrastructure or a knowledge system, zooming in and out on a info-graphic might be a solution to organically organize and deliver the content.
