New additions to the website. Check em out!

Experimental Form
A collection of things made this past semester.

Box Office Revenue
First published piece in the New York Times.

Listening History
Official portfolio page for the Last.fm Listening History diagrams.

Daylight Calendars
A series of posters done to visualize daylight patterns for different areas of the world.

Stream Graph Paper
An academic paper on the aesthetics of stacked graphs, written with Martin Wattenberg.

My independent study for the second half of the past semester has been augmented stage craft. Using an infrared camera, a high-power projector and a custom app I’ve built using the fantastic openFrameworks I am creating an interactive scene of flora and fauna for the actors to become a part of.

Matt Gray and I have been working hard over the last few weeks to produce a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream using this augmented stagecraft. It’s being edited together at the moment and will be up for public consumption as soon as possible!

It’s been much of a learning process for me. I’m doing my vision using the powerful IPP libraries which, if you’re a student, are quite affordable. I’ve probably learned more about lighting than software with this endeavor. Setting up good lighting is more important than writing good software, and when it comes to capturing from a live stage, that isn’t so easy.

Our senior design project group (Caitlin, Don, Scott, Kasey, Hallie and myself) just finished working on redesigning the visitor experience of the Tropical Forest Complex at the Pittsburgh Zoo. In the first 2 weeks, we were in and out of the Complex surveying visitor behavior and performing our own heuristic evaluation of the atmosphere and information systems.

The following video is a conglomerate of our research, based entirely on overheard dialog, and pitched in a manner meant to connect to the zoo staff.

This blog is usually all about things I make and do, and I’ve been doing a poor job of documenting active work lately – things are rushed – I promise a lot of updates over the next month as projects wrap up, NDAs expire and I transition out of school.

I can’t believe it’s been four years. It feels like just yesterday we were making shoes out of cardboard and drawing cubes, yet when we look back we look so young. Mike put together a slide show of superlatives to honor our graduating design class, enjoy.

If you’re looking for more nostalgic bliss, check out the full 20 minute slide show http://www.vimeo.com/986784