Posted: October 27th, 2010    By: Ayla Newhouse    0 comments

When you’re designing an identity for a relatively young company like Normative, you have to consider not only the present, but also the ways in which the company might extend itself. Our new style guide is built around the Normative assertion: it’s how things should be. Rather than a prescriptive brand document, I’ve created a Normative Evolving Manual of Style that acts as a living document. The image above is a sample collage of elements from the full document, which also includes a writing style guide. 

Sharing the writing style guide internally has already had an impact on both the way we present ourselves and the way we work. In particular, we’ve been quoting the “4A’s and 4 Anti-A’s of Tone” to legitimize or critique each other’s casual comments in the office (to great comedic effect!)

Every design decision – from our simple folded corner (“remember this, it’s important”) to our almost-primary colour palette and contemporary sans typeface (the incredibly flexible Effra) – is designed to make sense within the system of parts. Because our work spans across multiple media (web, devices, print), we needed to find a balance between cohesion and flexibility in our branding. For example, print documents require a die cut corner, while digital media can use a fake folded corner for similar effect. Specifications for typography are also different for each media.

Within the Normative brand there are currently two sub-branches: Normative Design and Normative Labs. Each of these three entities required its own identity, and there had to be room for new branches. Beneath the overarching branches, identities for things like Normative’s lunch hour Design, Data and Devices (DDD) talks become further abstracted and playful, but without losing consistency with the rest of the brand. We’ll be adding more soon!

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Posted: October 19th, 2010    By: Ayla Newhouse    0 comments

The Idea
There are many popular “design decks” in existence today. However, most of them are inaccessible (expensive, require shipping, hard to find). To address this market/user need, we have begun to develop an app platform for iPad that makes many types of decks available to designers in one convenient “table.”

Our Process 
Lindsay and I spent some time with a stack of sketch paper, ipad stencil tools and a physical copy of Normative Design and Torch Innovation’s Design Research deck. We set a timer for 5 minute sketches on our own, but after presenting our first sketches, we forgot about the timer and started discussing pros and cons of our sketches, combining elements and posing questions: What would happen if we clicked here? What if I wanted to save a card? Which view would be most useful in a studio context? As we sketched and chatted, we developed a set of constraints to evaluate our designs: create a navigation system that would allow users to sort the cards and view them in multiple ways, save their favourites, and quickly see which cards related to each other (a constraint to this particular deck). 

We also filtered our sketches through the iPad Human Interface Guidelines, especially “Metaphor: When possible, model your application’s objects and actions on objects and actions in the real world” and “Direct manipulation: [make] people feel they are controlling something tangible, not abstract.” In the end, we found ourselves arriving back to many elements of our original sketches. 

The resulting design (above) is a version of our sketches, edited slightly. For example, in sketching, we had the idea to use both right corners (top and bottom) as navigational elements. Once I got it into Photoshop, it seemed more intuitive to show the actual cards behind the one you were viewing (top right). You can now click on the edge of the coloured decks behind to sort any deck at the front.

Next Steps
As we work through development, we’d love to hear your feedback. What decks would you like to see available? Do you have a deck you’d like to make available through our platform? 

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Posted: October 19th, 2010    By: Matt Nish-Lapidus    0 comments

(@emenel)

I’m happy to announce a new event we’re starting here at Normative Design.

Design, Data and Devices (DDD) is a brown bag lunch held every second Friday at Normative Design. It aims to bring together a diverse group of people to seriously discuss the future of designing for data and networked devices. Each session consists of a 20 minute presentation followed by 40 minutes of group discussion. 

At the inaugural DDD Matt Ratto presents a definition of The Internet of Things in his talk entitled The Internet of Things: a new vision for ubiquitous computing. 

There are currently 4 spots left for the event, so act fast if you want to come!

Register here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/956146861

We really hope you can join us.

About our guest speaker

Matt Ratto is an Assistant Professor and runs the Critical Making lab in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. He is also director of the Designing Digital Media for the Internet of Things (DDiMIT) public-private consortium. His current research focuses on how hands-on productive work – making – can supplement and extend critical reflection on the relations between digital technologies and society. In particular, Ratto’s work addresses the movement of digital media and information from screens and into the material environment. This trend, known as ‘ambient’ or ‘ubiquitous’ computing, or more colloquially as the ‘Internet of Things’, is the primary focus of his work and builds upon the new possibilities offered by open source software and hardware, and the developing technologies of 3D printing and rapid prototyping. Since 2007, Ratto has carried out workshops in ‘critical making’ in Amsterdam, London, Canada, the US, and Scotland.

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Posted: October 1st, 2010    By: Lindsay Ellerby    0 comments

(@elledog)

I helped run (and participated in) a Design Fiction workshop with Torch Innovation and Scott Smith of Changeist yesterday. It was a great day that was preceded by a great lecture on “Provoking the Future by Making It” from Scott. 

I love this idea of provoking the future because it communicates the idea of awakening the future, but in a rough, chaffing, kind of uncomfortable way. In all my experience with design, and now trying out design fiction as an activity, I can say this is uncomfortable work. I have been asked before “What if this makes the team feel uncomfortable” and I always reply “It better!”

What really stuck out for me at the workshop was this idea that in order to provoke the future we actually have to allow ourselves to be in the present. We spend a lot of our time thinking about the past and the (mostly immediate) future. It’s really tough for humans to “be” in the present. We practice meditation, yoga, etc. to try to achieve this and it’s practice for a reason. It’s tough work. When I say “being in the present” in this case, I mean coming to the table open minded, ready to work with the materials available, and willing to consider new contexts and constraints that previously might have not existed. It’s about flexing the muscles that allow you to clear your head in order to imagine futures.

At the end of the workshop all the participants had a great discussion about how to use design fiction in regular working practices. I noted three things that I think will help teams with the discomfort of designing futures:

1. Create a “safe” place to practice doing design fiction. Maybe it’s a neutral spot, a work room, some kind of common ground where participants can gather (away from their regular working spaces). This gives teams permission to imagine.

2. Give teams an easy, manageable way to break down the context for the possible futures they’re designing for. In the case of the workshop, we used “game” cards to set context.

3. Socialize and share the outcomes, providing everyone with new reference points for imagining what the future could be. Outcomes can come in many forms, from written stories to physical artifacts that represent the future.

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Posted: September 30th, 2010    By: Matt Nish-Lapidus    0 comments

(@emenel)

I was never very interested in math… at least, not in any practical sense. The philosophical implications of mathematics at a high level can be fascinating, but once it gets down to the actual equations I lose interest, and frankly, have never been very good at it. If mathematics was a dance, I’d be the guy that could fumble his way through and fake it well enough, temporarily.

Now I find myself in an interesting position as part of a team designing rules for a geo-spatial game. At a certain point some math was unavoidable. 

(WARNING: what follows is my limited and surface understanding of a very complex science.)

When dealing with real space in software there are a few ways to work with the data. The one I was most familiar with is simple vector based manipulation where you measure the distance between objects in a straight line, how fast they are moving, and a few other basic parameters. In our specific context, that means we would have a variety of parameters to work with when evaluating interactions between players.

The other option introduced to me recently is map algebra. In this model the physical space is divided into a grid of equal units, each of which can have a value assigned to it. It is typically used in geography to create maps that represent different aspects of a physical space (elevation, climate, water conditions, etc).

In our case, we’re looking at using it to create rules for interactions between players and physical locations. The player is located in one of those units, and the values of the units are combined with player data (character stats) to determine the nature of the interaction with other players near by. The really cool thing about this method is that you can layer grids on top of each other, giving you almost infinite values to combine, subtract, or otherwise manipulate to perfect the game play.

For example, if a player is on a grid space with a value of 10 defence, and the player has a value of 5 attack, then you can use those values to determine if that player can capture that space. If there are other players involved their values can be added to the equation. It doesn’t have to be limited to the single space occupied by the player either, it can take into account the spaces directly adjacent to the player if the action taken has a range. In this way you can build up complex and layered game mechanics.

This is a great way of representing spatial relationships visually to help design a set of interaction rules. As a bonus (from my perspective), it’s also a valid way of actually doing the calculations required to build the game if your mapping system supports it.

This description is probably wrong in some ways, as this is a very new concept to me. Anybody with their first year of geography education would know more.. but since this is a design blog and most designers aren’t likely to have encountered this before I though this would be a good introduction.

It seems hard to find good information about map algebra on the web. If it sounds interesting to you here are a couple articles for more in depth explanations.

http://www.azavea.com/blogs/newsletter/v3i1/what-the-heck-ismap-algebra/

http://www.quantdec.com/SYSEN597/GTKAV/section9/map_algebra.htm

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