Design For Emotion book site launches

After a several months of development, I’m pleased to announce the launch of Trevor Van Gorp‘s new book site, DesignForEmotion.com. Based on the theme from AffectiveDesign.com, I helped Trevor redevelop it with a new style and theme while still maintaining the visual connection to AD.

The backend is still WordPress, and works around the same concept as the AD theme, with a few improvements here and there. A number of recent innovations in WordPress will come in handy for next time round however. Featured images help simplify associated a thumbnail with a particular post or page, and content types allow you to separate calendar dates from blog posts within the UI.

One thing I noticed first on this particular WordPress install was that Dreamhost likes to turn off post versioning (presumably to save on database storage, and since disabling it inside wp-config.php is hidden from the user, most people would never notice its absence). However, when you are looking for post versioning and can’t find it, double check that it’s not disabled in your wp-config.php. You might want to turn it on now just in case!

Be sure to check out the Design for Emotion for details on the book and your chance to be involved in the creation of the book.

Wave II underway

Remember the McLuhan TV Wall? That was part of a larger interactive installation project that is now making its way out to the Edmonton International Airport. More on that soon, but more to the point: Wave II (TV Wall was Wave I as I liked to call it) is now underway.

Wave is an interactive installation project with the goal of encouraging inter-departmental and inter-disciplinary involvement, as well as to celebrate the centennial of Marshall McLuhan‘s birth, a Canadian communication scholar who was born in Edmonton 100 years ago. The final project will be unveiled on June 23 at noon in the atrium of the Enterprise Square (old Bay building) downtown as part of the Media Ecology Convention 2011.

The final design is still under heavy development, something I’m very excited to be a part of. I’ve been working with Cezary Gajewski in the past few days, setting up our shipment of equipment and new toys in our development lab. Here’s a few images and stats on the project.

Equipment:

• 1x Mac Pro (8 Core)
• 1x Mac Mini
• 1x MacBook Pro (mine)
• 2x Sharp 60″ LCD TVs
• 2x Acer monitors
• 8x KRK Studio Monitors
• 1x M-Audio ProFire 610 audio interface

University Departments involved: Drama (Tech), MACT/Extension, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Industrial Design, Music, English

Number of alphanumeric displays to be manufactured: 300 (by hand)

Video after the jump.

More

Upcoming: Portfolio Show 2011

It’s been a quiet time for me on jole.ca the past couple months, but I wanted to let everyone know about an upcoming event at the University featuring work by some of my cohorts as well as a special project I’ve been working on as part of the University of Alberta Portfolio Show & Silent Auction.

Portfolio Show is mostly geared towards the BFA Design students that us Techs and SM’s work with throughout our 4 year program, but we will have a few things to showcase as well, and my experiments with the Kinect platform will be incorporate as part of my official title as “Projection Designer” for the show. I’ll be posting about that project soon after the show goes up.

So when and where?

Where:
Second Playing Space
Inside the Timms Centre for the Arts
University of Alberta,
87 Ave & 112 Street

When:
Wine & Cheese Reception
April 6th 7pm-10:30pm

Gallery Open
April 7th 2pm-8pm
April 8th 2pm-8pm
April 9th 2pm-7pm

Silent Auction
April 9th 7pm-10pm

What:
A showcase of Theatre Design work from BFA/MFA designers, with work from BFA Tech and BFA Stage Management from the University of Alberta.

I hope to be around during the opening on April 6th if anyone wants to come by to say hi and talk tech! Hope to see you there! (I’ll post any FB events as they are available)

EDIT: Facebook event here!

CSN Website Launched

Reading week is just wrapping up in my world, but there’s been a flurry of activity to get a new website out the door for the Canadian Society of Nephrology (CSN). It’s been an interesting journey for them, as they’ve been working with Blackbaud, a huge SaaS provider targeted at non-profits and fundraising outfits. 

The product they’re using is called Kintera Sphere, which provides CMS and member/donor management in one. They’ve had the member management working quite well for a while now, but the website kept getting delayed because there wasn’t a lot of time or know-how to get all the information into the CMS for them.

My task was just that, and overall it turned out quite well. Much of Kintera’s management is a bit antiquated, with some interesting interface quirks, and many traces of legacy code that isn’t quite in line with modern standards. The separation of theme and content also wasn’t quite well developed, which meant it was hard to output content in a logical way.

I did however manage to figure out a few of the many tools the CMS offered, and use them to my advantage. The launch was relatively smooth, and now the job of optimizing, tweaking, and keeping the site fresh over the months begins. Congratulations CSN on your new website!

Visit CSNSCN.ca

Duck Podcast 15 & 16 Uploaded

Duck Podcast 15 & 16 have been uploaded to the Duck Podcast website this afternoon.

Duck 15 was recorded back in October 2010, and consisted mostly of an impromptu teleconference that has a few twists. Simon Kully makes an appearance in this one. Finally uploaded here, I really can’t remember what was discussed, other than that part of it was recorded while I was driving home.

Duck 16 was recorded yesterday morning (Feb 25), probably the first time we’ve recorded an episode early in the morning (and after having slept). We cover the latest MacBook Pros, telecom, and many other topics. Check out that episode here, and set aside some time, as its definitely a new record length, consisting of almost 3 hours of straight tech talk!

 

McLuhan TV wall installation

If you’ve been following along on my YouTube channel you may have picked up on a few clips of a recent project of mine involving a gigantic pile of old TVs.

The purpose of the installation was to explore Marshall McLuhan‘s theory, “the medium is the message.” A group at the University of Alberta is developing a larger interactive installation entitled “WAVE” to be setup at the Faculty of Extension in celebration of the 100th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth. Our TV Wall was setup, with guidance from the WAVE Group, at a reception to raise awareness about the project.

So what is it exactly? The setup consists of 11 Television from 1960s onward that are tuned to play different channels. In one corner of the room we had an antenna connected to a high-end RF Modulator capable of outputting 3 different video sources on any channel. These three sources were from DVD players all at a different point on a media disc. In short, we setup a trio of our own TV Stations in the lobby of the Art Gallery of Alberta, and the results were pretty spectacular! Most of the TVs were from Kevin‘s personal collection, along with the VHS Reporter Video Camera that was feeding a few of the screens, and a few of them were acquired from a few Facebook call-outs and dumpster diving.

Embedded is a video of the final setup, and clips from its development are available here and here.

Bearbook breaks 4k users, begins FB Ad Campaign

Congratulations Bearbookers, you’ve done it again! Exceeding all our hopes and dreams, we now have well over 4000 installations of Bearbook on Facebook. It’s been great to see the timetable updates roll in from existing users in preparation for Winter semester as well.

In other Bearbook news, we’ve been playing around with Facebook Ads for a day or two. I found some free startup credit online, so if you aren’t already a Bearbook user, you might see it show up on your Ad bar.

Yuri has been hard at work bringing Bearbook into iframe world (we love Facebook…), and we hope to push it out in January. Coming up after that will be some great new features, so stay tuned! Hope you had a great semester, and best of luck on all your exams U of A.

LTD Promo Video

Hoo-boy! Has it ever been a busy month. I’ve been super busy with shows, websites, conference management, tech support, and of course some video thrown in for good measure. (Oh, and did I mention Old TVs?)

Here’s a “quick” video I put together for my home camp of Gull Lake for their LTD Program. Although I was never in the LTD program, it was great to hear what it’s all about! I say “quick” because we started with about 2 hours of footage and banged it all down to 2 minutes, so the editing process was far from quick.

Enjoy!

Bearbook brings demo back!

After attending Edmonton’s DemoCamp for more than a year now, I was extremely excited to present Bearbook in front of Edmonton’s tech community tonight alongside chief programmer Yuri Sulyma. DemoCamp was one of the main reasons why I really felt motivated to develop Bearbook, in the hopes of someday presenting it alongside the awesome projects that came before me.

Going into tonight, Yuri and I joked that we would be bringing “demo back” by just giving a straight up demo of a project we’d been working on, minus some of the business jargon that seemed to have crept in over the year. (And I quote: “it’s a social media engine!”)

We got an absolutely amazing response both immediately on the twittersphere and afterwards at the meet-up. Here were some of our favorite comments:

@kenbautistaI like these Bearbook guys. Keep it simple, get users.

@kevin_swan I could see Bearbook scaling across tons of universities and colleges if expanded beyond the U of A. 5 Retweets

@BranigansLaw Great presentation on BearBook. Very unique idea, pure tech inspiration, embodiment of #democampyeg

@danaditomaso BearBook app for Facebook is really well done, kudos!

@dserink Bearbook definitely the best demo so far tonight – to me, this really embodies the spirit of #democampyeg

@outinc Ok #UofA students. If you haven’t checked out BearBook on FB, do it. I’m not a student and I want to be on it. #verycool

I also kinda saw this one coming as soon as I started logging into BearTracks…

@outinc Dude’s password is like 25 characters long, the entire room was impressed. #democampyeg

So thanks democampers, it was a really great experience, and it’s a huge encouragement to keep going and develop more projects to share. Hopefully we brought a bit of “demo back” too!

Migration to Flickr

So, in an ultimate move of irony, I’ve decided to migrate my photos to Flickr. About 5 years ago I started there, but was too bothered by the need to pay for a Pro account just to store my photos. I haven’t bought a Pro account yet, but will likely in the coming weeks. I’ll keep organizing the sets over on my Flickr Page, and you can enjoy the nicer UI, geotagging, sets, and other features that never really materialized in the (officially defunct) flickrer.

The move comes from the desire to simplify my workflow, while making the interface to various destinations simplified. Without a doubt, this move to Flickr will mean it’s one-click to get my pics from iPhoto to the Web, and simplify the integration of my photography into WordPress and jole-v3.