DIMITRISGELBOURAS
UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS LONDON
interaction design
As part of my Interactive Media Master of Arts at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London,
I worked on several interactive media projects.
rEmote - The telepresence project
rEmote is a communication tool for long distance lovers who long for a more intimate and meaningful way to connect with their partner. Rather than relying on contemporary modes of communication such as texting, mobile and chat technologies, rEmote aims to create the experience of connection through ubiquitous computing.
Although theres no substitution for real life presence, rEmote attempts to bridge the gap by conjuring the presence of your loved one in a comforting and unobtrusive way. By offering a unique telepresence tool, we hope to provide a profound and memorable way to connect with the ones you love.
Web Application for iPhone/iPod
This project is about designing and making a locative application for iPhone/iPod that would be useful in the everyday life of its users. Trying to find a less common concept idea, the team came up with Guerilla Gardening.
Guerrilla Gardening is the act of gardening or otherwise improving the aesthetics of an area that has been left abandoned or unkempt and has become a general eyesore to the public. Guerrilla gardeners seek to improve these areas, usually surreptitiously, by picking up trash, putting in new plants, and maintaining the space by weeding and watering.
My role in this project was usability testing and user experience research. Finding people to test the web application about Guerrilla Gardening was quite tricky as we had to think the target group very carefully. Being in the user experience role, requires research and paper prototyype tests with the target group. The next step was to test the real application.
Design a new Operating System Metaphor
This project is about deconstructing the existing metaphor of Apple OS 10.5.x, understand the strengths and weaknesses, and try to design a new metaphor for a user group, making a mock-up of it and test it, evaluate it.
Our interface design was the tree of knowledge and the target group was new university students who have never attended university before and need a new, easy, helpful, attractive and customised to their needs interface to start with. I was assigned to do the design of the new interface metaphor.
My idea was to divide the tree into four main sections ie: student assistance, entertainment, applications, files storage. We thought this could be a new logic of customizing and organizing an interface for a group that needs it. So designing our idea, we created a metaphor where the user group (ie: new students) has an organised interface, designed by the coder and the designer. The user cannot have icons or folders unorganised on the desktop. On the other hand the user can customise this interface structure, but I am going to talk about this issue later in this essay. So, organising the interface for the user and present it as a tree divided into four parts could be a new logic, a new way of organising the operating system for a target groups needs. .