1.Outer space real estate

My first screen-based mashup is to gather all information online of selling lands on different planets. This was quite a fad that people tended to buy a piece of moon for their lovers, seeming quite romantic in a way telling the story ” I bought you the moon!”. Since the lack of knowledge of universe, the website also mash up the wikipedia and other scientific sites to be references. Defending the consumers’ rights, this website can give them a clean and legal deal through the entire purchasing process. download the presentation

2.real pet App

Mashing up both physical and virtual application, the pet society game can become reality. My main pursuit of this design is to let children or office workers who are not permitted to have pets but at the same time want to experience it with different limitations. For children, this App can be a stepping stone of learning how to raise real animals, and can retrieve pets back if they are mature and responsible enough. For office workers who don’t have time to feed pets at home, they can take care of their pets remotely and have them on their little screens of smart phones at all time. This project might be impractical, but it still gives us an option to think about how we are going to play with pets and learn knowledge and responsibility of nurturing them.

I was very impressed by the work demonstrated in maker faire. It was out of my expectation! Just as Katherine said in class, this is really a place giving people a chance to explore concepts that might ahead of other sophisticated works out there. Although some of the works here could be rough and impractical comparatively, I was still excited to see all of the ideas come to live and we could play with them.

This was one of the funniest design I saw that day. There were few kids stood there to play with those racing cars so I could take a sneak peek of how this worked. Instead of using cool styles of cars or challenging tracks, this design sticks to simple interfaces. But it attracted so many kids there, which reminded me the fact that not pretty or stylish designs drive people to be part of the work but the user mental experience. The water swing was also one of my favorite that if I were 10 years old I would definitely climb on it right away! Being on the air and at the same time surrounded by water drops, imagine how fascinating it could be!

These two designs of using wheels to control music was the biggest inspiration to me that day. The whole thing was to create DJ style music by using rounded objects. The designer who made this showed us how this was originally built as well. I thought the interactive character of this design gave users the most control and also in a very modest way. This piece of work was so fun to play that I might implement the idea into another class of mine this semester.

The last piece I introduced here was so hilarious that I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw it in Maker faire. The fish attached on the car were constantly moving their tails according to the music beats played by itself. The whole scene was so creepy but full of black humor. I was really amazed by such works allowing people to think in a blue sky way. Overall, Maker faire was a really great event and gave me a better sense of what interactive design really is and should be look like.

My 7-7 assignment is focus on the psychological process of international students and people who just get into a new environment. In order to fit in and try to get better in all relationships, we are scattering ourselves into pieces and then collecting back. This scattering and collecting phase, which is the title of my project, is actually a metaphor that everyone exposed in an unfamiliar situation must go through at different levels. I am here trying to raise a question that if this is inevitable, how are you going to deal with it? The answer you come up with won’t be right either wrong, but it gives you a chance to know yourself better through the thinking process. my website