The Colloquium is a book I produced as part of my education at the University of Applied Science in Potsdam. It provides a selection of projects that engage with my personal interest in understanding how information and ideas can be made more useful, accessible, and engaging to the user. Though each one takes a slightly different approach, the four Colloquium projects address fundamental challenges of visualizing complex data sets, creating human-centric interface designs (both digital and physical), and supporting a project’s themes through creative design thinking.

The results of these experiments demonstrate a solid multidisciplinary approach to design thinking, visual complexity, interface and interaction design, GUI development, human-centric interfaces, and corporate logotype design.

A. Route Map: Visual Complexity — For this Colloquium project, I wanted to engage with the fundamentals of creating, managing, and depicting complex data sets. This route map tracked and displayed the variations and repetitions in my daily movements. I gathered information about my daily route between work, home, and school, and then created a visualization of that information. The goal was to make the complex, rarely considered, and somewhat abstract variations and repetitions in my daily routes into something both visually appealing and immediately understandable.

B. RCC Hack: Physical Interface — This project depicted the total number of users visiting the University of Applied Science in Potsdam’s official website during a span of time in a creative manner. To do so, I designed and implemented a physical interface by hacking existing technology repurposed from a remote-controlled car (RCC). I deconstructed the RCC’s motor and transmitter to create a physical interface for generating user data by assigning directional controls to the different types of visitor impressions. I then attached colored pens to the directional controls, resulting in spirographs of green and yellow that varied in composition.

C. Visualization of Steve Jobs Presenting the First iPhone to the World This playful project is an animated visualization of the speech Steve Jobs gave at Macworld in 2007 where he first introduced the world to the iPhone. I created a language of simple icons to visualize the ideas and emotions in the recording.

D. Exhibition Poster: Visual Identity —  This Identity is for an exhibition of student work that I designed. The goal was to create a logotype and visual identity to match the themes of the exhibit. The narrative in the logotype reflects the theme of the exhibit, which was about the process of transforming input into output. This narrative is carried through in my choice of a logotype that graphically depicts the concept of a new pattern of output. For the logo, the dot of the “i” in “input” is shown mid-transformation as it moves between input and output.

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