Shark Truth is a not-for-profit consumer awareness campaign that seeks to engage consumers in a collaborative discussion to find alternatives to shark fin soup. We are dedicated to promoting awareness around the irreversibly detrimental effects of the shark finning industry, specifically working with (and not against) consumers.

My friend Claudia Li co-founded the effort with Vivian Kwong in the summer of 2009. Along with a great team of volunteers, they have been working hard to make Shark Truth an effective and engaging campaign. The team realized that existing campaigns (such as
WildAid’s Shark Conservation Program and Sea Shepherd’s Defending Sharks campaign) were not creating a dialogue with the Chinese community about the practice of shark finning. While these campaigns and others have done a great deal to raise the profile of this issue, they have mainly focussed on the supply side of the situation. Shark Truth, by choosing to focus their efforts on the demand side, have a chance to develop awareness amongst the culture and community that constitutes the largest market for shark fin. As Chinese Canadians, the team’s sensitivity to both the cultural and ecological facets of the problem provide them with an opportunity to effect real change. They know that another attack campaign full of images of blood and gore is not going to reach the Chinese community, so they are instead seeking ways to collaborate with the consumers of shark fin soup to find alternatives.

As a city, Vancouver represents the largest market for shark fin soup in Canada, and a major proportion of Canada’s Chinese population: 75% of Canadian Chinese live in either Vancouver or Toronto. Shark Truth’s organizers hope to make Vancouver the first step in a broader campaign. They have begun both Personal and Wedding Pledges to “Stop the Soup”, and have provided information on the website and other campaign materials (including Shark Truth info in fortune cookies!) about the unsustainable and inhumane practice of shark-finning.

I have been interested in the campaign and their unique approach since I first heard about it. In order to assist, I undertook the development of the Shark Truth website. In collaboration with the team, I designed and implemented a custom look and feel for the website, using WordPress as the CMS, and developed identity materials to match the existing logo. In addition to this role, I advised on web and social media strategy, and consulted on technology selection and maintenance.

The campaign is off to a great start. The Launch Event at Wild Rice was sold out, raising over $2000 for the campaign, and featured a presentation by world-renowned marine biodiversity researcher Dr. Nick Dulvy, IUCN Shark Specialist Group Co-Chair. Since then, we’ve had lots of interest from the community, including a pledge to not serve shark’s fin soup at a 1000 person wedding! That’s a lot of sharks who get to keep swimming a little longer.

It’s been a pleasure working with the team, and I fervently hope their passion and perseverance will help to slow and eventually reverse the demand for shark fin. Sustainability requires a thorough reassessment of how we use our planet’s limited resources. Sometimes this means slow changes. In other cases, such as this, change must be rapid and resolved in order to make a difference, else we risk losing one of Earth’s oldest and most beautiful predators, and with them the balanced ecosystems that have sustained our oceans for millenia.

Team North will design and deliver North House, a compelling, marketable solar powered home that makes use of the latest in high-performance architecture and mobile communication technology, while building Canada’s next generation of leaders in sustainable engineering, business and design.

This October, after a two-year development cycle, our team traveled to Washington D.C. to compete in the US Department of Energy‘s Solar Decathlon on the Washington Mall:

The Solar Decathlon joins 20 college and university teams in a competition to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house.

The architects and engineers on the project did an incredible job: combining leading-edge technology, modern aesthetics, and innovative materials to produce a net-zero solar powered home that is viable for the Canadian climate. After a challenging two-week competition, we placed 4th overall! Full results can be found on the Solar Decathlon scoring page. We were pleased with our performance, and feel proud of the achievement we’ve made with the house. Full details on the specifications and innovations of the house are available from the team website.

SFU’s contribution to this undertaking involved the development of a control system for the North House, and the design and creation of a suite of web-enabled applications to provide feedback, control, and community networking to the residents of the house. My role on the project was comprised of contributing to the design team for each of these main pieces of the interactive system, and then undertaking the development of each with a small team of programmers.

For the control system, I worked closely with Chris Brandson of VerTech Solutions. He wrote custom drivers for each of the house’s hardware systems (lighting, shades and blinds, HVAC, retractable bed, etc.) and configured them to communicate with Embedded Automation‘s mControl. I then developed a Ruby on Rails application to interface with mControl using SOAP. This allowed the design team to develop a custom interface for the residents of the home instead of relying on an off-the-shelf solution. The controls were then presented on three embedded touchscreens: a 17″ display mounted in the western end of the kitchen backsplash and two 8″ displays at the north and east entryways. The central panel provides digital controls for all of the house systems, while the entry panels provide local controls for nearby lights. Additionally, from each control point residents can put the house into user-configurable Presets such as Home, Away or Sleep. These presets represent configurations for various activities or times of day that can be activated with a single button press. The control and monitoring system we developed was noted as a standout by software developer Patrick Smith in his Survey of Home Monitoring & Control Systems at the Solar Decathlon.

I worked with closely with interaction designers Kevin Muise, Jenny Thai, and Jin Fan on the web application. These talented designers delivered high quality HTML, CSS, and image assets that I then incorporated into the Ruby on Rails application and populated with dynamic data and enabled with interactive behaviour. The house data was made available by Rob MacKenzie’s datalogging systems. Along with this contribution to the project, his invaluable talents at network administration, hardware procurement, and his knack for pulling off last-minute hacks can’t be overlooked!

Finally, Kevin Muise and I completed the Mobile application together. He led the development with nearly solo design and prototyping work. I then developed the final version based on his prototypes and integrated it with the Rails app and control system. The mobile application provides access to a subset of the features of the desktop web application, including graphing utilities, house controls, and community networking.

Interactive demonstrations of the web application and iPhone application can be found on the Team North website under Interface Demos. Also, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by David Gura from NPR for a brief segment about the iPhone application that aired on All Things Considered during the competition. The segment is available online.

The competition and project as a whole were intense and challenging. The difficulty of channeling the talents and perspectives of students and faculty from a range of disciplines across three universities and two timezones cannot be overestimated. Over the course of the year, I clumsily learned to speak the languages of architects, engineers, computer scientists, and project managers while participating in many teleconferences and email exchanges. I learned how important priorities can sometimes be missed when working in large geographically distributed teams because each person and team thinks someone else is doing it. And I learned a great deal about what not to do (…and less of what to do!) in software development. That being said, everyone on the project undertook their part with such enthusiasm and determination that we were able to overcome these obstacles and successfully deliver a house that is beautiful, powerful, and viable.

My sincere thanks to everyone on the team for their dedication and determination over the course of the project. It’s been a truly memorable experience. Also a huge congratulations to all the teams and great people that participated in the contest, especially those I met from Germany, California, Louisiana, and Cornell. In the coming year, I’ll be applying much of what I’ve learned on this project to my ongoing research into information visualization and tools for feedback on energy consumption.

Other media links:

• Globe & Mail: North House Waves the Flag
• CBC News: The National (October 8th)
• SPIE: Students shine at the Solar Decathlon (video)

The general idea of the last iteration is carried over: minimal structure with the focus on the presentation of the photos. However, by avoiding the use of Flash, the site is made both more accessible and better performing. The ‘lights out’ feature and scaling images are achieved with JavaScript in this version, while the content is again managed with an XML/PHP backend. A new cross-browser font replacement technique called Cufón was used to enable the use of a non-standard font for the site, maintaining the look and feel of the mockups in the translation to a dynamic version.

I think JD’s photography, Lukas’ design, and my development work have come together to make this latest iteration of www.jdhowell.ca minimal and lightweight, while effectively communicating JD’s unique brand and style. As always, the primary emphasis is on the photos, with the design and functionality serving the work.

Everyone at the conference was very welcoming, and gave valuable feedback on various aspects of the project. Thanks very much to Brent Nelson, who was the primary organizer of the conference at University of Saskatchewan, and to everyone who attended the session.

Here are the slides that I presented:

And the Demo video from the slides, put together by Stéfan Sinclair:

A video of my presentation (forgive the camera angle). This is posted for posterity, and as a record of my very first academic conference presentation (on my birthday nonetheless)! It’s about 33 minutes long including Q&A:

Finally, the poster that accompanied my presentation (click to view larger):

For the past few months, I’ve been working on and off on a redesign and interface overhaul of Bitstrips, a social comic creation and sharing application launched by Toronto-based Core Matrix this past spring. Bitstrips allows anyone to create great looking comics and characters with easy to use tools, and share them with their friends and others in the Bitstrsips community. After launching their initial beta, the guys behind Bitstrips wanted to improve the look and feel of their application. To this end, I was hired on to create some design mockups, sort out browser compatibility issues, streamline and improve the site’s HTML and CSS (and push them into line with best practices), consult on the information design and navigation flow of the site, and put together and polish lots of the interface graphics. The latest version takes Bitstrips out of beta and incorporates these and a huge number of other improvements to both the backend functionality and frontend user interface of the site.

Since the site’s successful launch at SXSW, the Bitstrips community has been steadily growing, with over 70,000 comics created so far, and has gained a buzz with numerous mentions in Wired magazine (1, 2, 3), on blogs around the web, and a feature interview on CBC’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi. For their part, the Core Matrix team has been tirelessly adding new content and artwork, fine-tuning their comic, character and scene creation tools, and passionately giving their all to the Bitstrips community.

Bitstrips is free and fun. The best part is creating characters of your friends and putting them in awkward situations in your comics! I’m excited to see how the site grows and develops over the coming months, as the community gets bigger and more involved. The guys at Core Matrix are putting on a Best-of-Bitstrips Awards Party in Toronto on July 16th, so if you’re in town, check it out! Unfortunately, I won’t be in the area, but hopefully I’ll be there for the 2009 edition.

Digital Texts 2.0 is an initiative to experiment with applying the principles of Web 2.0 to the realm of electronic texts. We intend to preserve and expose all of the existing qualities of digital texts (rich hypertextual associations, refined encoding practices, analytic affordances, etc.), while enhancing them with additional characteristics provided by Web 2.0 and social networking.

[Therefore,] the Digital Texts 2.0 project is a preliminary attempt to better understand the phenomenon of social networking and how it might be adapted to benefit the ways in which humanities scholars interact with electronic texts.

Read more at the Digital Texts wiki.

As described above, Dr. Sinclair is interested in applying some of the interesting features of current web trends (social networking, folksonomies, web service mashups, ajax interfaces, and an emphasis on interactivity) to the realm of electronic texts. The primary focus on social networking led to the Facebook Platform being chosen as a good starting point for the project. Early prototypes that I wrote in PHP were thus aimed at learning the integration points afforded by the Facebook interface and scaffolding some of the basic functionality. After this brief stage of experimentation, I restarted the application in Ruby on Rails, and linked it to the Facebook Platform with the RFacebook ruby gem.

Since then, successive iterations of the app have been released every 2 to 4 weeks, as new functionality has been requested or imagined, flaws have been identified, and new features have demanded new interface design patterns. Current functionality allows users to:

• Create, edit, and share Texts, Authors, and Collections
• Join Groups organized around a particular theme or topic
• Tag everything in the application
• Comment on Texts, Authors, Collections and Groups
• Browse other Readers profiles and records
• Generate statistics based on records in the application (generated with Google Charts)
• Search and browse search logs
• Lookup and add information from Amazon, Google Books, and soon Freebase

Future versions will further integrate application activity with the Facebook Platform, link records in the database to other web services and resources (libraries, text analysis tools, etc), and offer a suite of import/export tools for managing larger data sets. Additionally, Dr. Sinclair is interested in experimenting with hybrid searches that would allow data drawn from the overlapping properties of authors, texts, and readers to be explored. For example, what are the relationships between the age, gender, education level, nationality, and so on of readers and the authors of the texts they read? What does this information tell us? These and other questions will be explored.

Project management has been handled with Trac, extensive release notes, a dedicated mailing list of beta testers and collaborators, and lots of notebooks. Learning to be a part of a very smart team of people while managing a technical project has been really interesting. The practical side of things has also emphasized the quality and breadth of the open source community as a resource for these kinds of projects. Of course, Rails is open source, but I have had the pleasure of using over a dozen other open source projects during the course of development, from free icon sets to JavaScript snippets to Ruby gems to Rails plugins. All of these have made development more productive, more fun, and the end result more polished and powerful. As an academic project without funding outside of a grant, open source has offered the savings in time and sophistication needed to create a professional application in a relatively short period.

The ongoing project has been a fantastic experience for me. I have had the opportunity to work with a great team of beta testers, explore the Facebook platform, and integrate a Rails app with a variety of web services. I’ve also had free reign to iterate over a series of increasingly sophisticated interface designs. I will continue to contribute to the project until August, and hopefully beyond.

If you’re interested in the project, or would like to become a beta tester, feel free to add the Digital Texts 2.0 app on Facebook.

Working in Flash allowed us to implement some cool features – background ‘lights’ that turn on and off to suit the photos in each collection, subtle animation that brings the navigation to life, automatically resized images that scale to fill the browser window, and a header and menu that fade out when inactive. All the features are designed to showcase the photos, and keep distractions to a minimum. Check it out!

Welcome Page

We adapted the Portfolio interface to suit the Wedding photography, keeping things consistent, minimal, and graceful. Each Wedding that JD adds appears in a list on the left, with a representative thumbnail from that event appearing on the right on rollover. Clicking on either the menu item or the thumbnail then takes the user to an interactive contact sheet of shots from the Wedding.

Weddings Interface

Susan & Angelo Wedding Index

The shots are gorgeous and touching. Having a regularly updated selection of Wedding shots online will help to promote this aspect of JDH Photography & Imaging, and will give clients a broad idea of the quality and scope of JD’s work.

Thanks for another great project, JD. To the rest…book early!

Since the 1990s, there has been an explosion in the availability of “nostalgia” compact discs. Nostalgia CDs are reissued compilations of pre-rock ‘n’ roll era music, especially recordings by swing bands, dance bands, singers, and small jazz combinations. Because this repertory was originally recorded on 78 rpm records, which held about 3-1/2 minutes of music on each side, the producers of nostalgia CDs make numerous aesthetic, practical, and even curatorial decisions as they select, remaster, and package their products. These decisions are also at play for the increasing number of CDs featuring off-air recordings of historic radio broadcasts. The modern technologies of digital recording and the World Wide Web have helped make old music more available than ever: this website addresses the role that CD reissues play in shaping understandings of popular music history-and historical memory more broadly.

In order to bring her research and data to a broader audience, and to develop a set of tools which would facilitate further research, Dr. Baade and I worked together to build Swinging Nostalgia into a fully searchable, highly editable web application. At the site, researchers as well as casual users can search the database to find information about the Artists, Labels, Collections, and Songs from this era, each collated to the others to indicate the popularity, relationships between, and relative importance of each as it pertains to the genre of “nostalgia” releases. Additionally, readers can keep up to date with and contact Dr. Baade as she continues work on the project.

Swinging Nostalgia Home Page

Search Form

Search Results

The site was developed by Creative Creature using the Ruby on Rails web development framework. It also includes a number of features to improve user interaction and ease of use in the administration of the site and application data, including significant use of AJAX techniques, and a cohesive, communicative interface design.

Contributors to the project can add Artists, Labels, and Songs to the database, and associate them through Collections, which in turn contain multi-disc Tracklistings as well as Album Artwork. This data can then be edited and manipulated as the project grows. Furthermore, each element can have Notes and Documents associated with it, to enrich the data with the researcher’s own thoughts and connected materials (links to external URL’s, PDF documents, images, etc.). The result is a dataset which is flexible and powerful enough to offer researchers a venue in which to ask complex questions and develop answers in collaboration with one another.

Administration Interface

Collection Creation View

I hope the site is a useful research tool for Dr. Baade and her colleagues, and a good resource for those interested in learning more about Swing music. I also hope it is the first of many Ruby on Rails web applications I have the pleasure of working on!

The solution was fittingly named Amass: “to gather together or accumulate (a large amount or number of valuable material or things) over a period of time.” JD has selected a range of images from his archives and organized them into events he has photographed, and a group of images he calls Heart Felt. These images conjure views of a realm that is unsettling, intriguing, emotive, and which always seem to hint at more than the subject offers at first glance. Feeling that such images should be searchable by mood as much as subject, JD has tagged his images with emotive, expressive keywords, rather than restricting his descriptions to subject and composition.

Amass has been integrated with JD’s Portfolio in two ways. First, a beautiful tab has been embedded on the right side of the browser when viewing the Portfolio. On rollover, it slides out gracefully to reveal itself, and a click takes the user to Amass. Additionally, images featured in the Portfolio which are available in Amass are marked with a subtle purchase link which appears above the image in question. Selecting this link presents the user with that image’s details and purchase information within Amass. The works are available in both digital and print format.

The design of the site reflects the ‘floating’ nature of the Portfolio design, keeping visual distractions to a minimum and the work at the forefront. This is further emphasized by the minimal, muted colour palette and font treatment, all of which suit the elegance and austerity of the images.

As always, it was a pleasure to work with an artist of JD’s calibre. I’m sure this won’t be the last innovative project to come from his direction.

Hamilton audio-visual art collective, ablockparentcommunity, led by producer Rob Liston and visual artist JD Howell, asked me to develop an ultra-minimal new site for their project. The design reflects abpc’s focus on the work: imagery and sound that invite introspection and an embrace of the subtlety and beauty of the things we find around us.

In their own words:

ablockparentcommunity is a multimedia art project which attempts to explore the undercurrents of community living through the juxtaposition of musical landscapes and audio-visual snapshots. Providing a seductive mix of electronic percussion and organic melodies, producers Rob Liston and JD Howell take the audience on a soundtracked journey down Main Street Everywhere, highlighting the extraordinary within the ordinary, the beautiful within the mundane. Look a little closer. Listen a little longer. We live where you live.

The site required a way to showcase the work of the group without the need for an overly complex system of navigation. My experience of the group’s work is that they are always interested in what’s going on now, not in cataloguing their past efforts or focussing on what others have to say. Therefore, JD’s design offered a perfect, compelling insight into their process. Images may offer a diverse view of a variety of subjects, or focus on a specific theme. There may be instrumental, organic songs alongside hip-hop remixes, or just one song looping, reflecting the thread of ‘attractive repetition’ in ablockparentcommunity’s art.

To realize the design technically, I built a two-part system. All content is managed by the group using XML files which describe the content they would like to display at any given time. This data is then loaded into Flash, and is used to populate the interface that you see. Images are loaded at random from a small, constantly updated selection, and fade in and out of the view over time. Likewise, songs are presented in a simple media player which selects a song at random on launch. Besides these central elements, the site offers a simple way to get in touch, and a brief news feed, also updated via XML. The overall effect offers a minimal aesthetic which communicates graceful elegance, and invites the viewer to experience something different…yet familiar.

My responsibility was to work alongside Matt Bouchard with the design team, consisting of Milena Radzikowska, Piotr Michura and Stan Ruecker to design some JavaScript screen effects and animations to realize the responsive interface they were imagining for the Workbench. An overview and links to this work can be found on the Monk Wiki, and in the Monk client area. I also contributed the (unsolicited) logo for the event, choosing one of the many memorable catchphrases as our slogan (though “It’s more than just a red box” was a close runner-up)!

The event was a lot of fun. Thanks to the culinary wizardry of Maryanne Wynne, we ate like kings (and queens) at every meal (and several times in between). We were also well looked-after by Gary and the rest of the staff at Kramer Pond Lodge. Highlights for me included my introduction to extreme/pair programming at the suggestion of Stéfan and the steak-tearing jaws of Matt Bouchard, the hot tubs (at their varying states of ‘hotness’), and playing baseball and ultimate on the lawn. Oh, and the work was cool!

I’ve posted photos from the event on my Flickr page, which you can view as a set or slideshow. Here’s to next time!

Given Ian’s long term involvement with web technologies and open source projects, web standards were an integral part of the redesign. I was able to cater to this emphasis through a set of CSS-styled XHTML templates for the top level of content, thoroughly tested in as many browsers and platforms as we could get our hands on! These templates were informed by a visual design which is fairly minimal, yet friendly and professional. After a few iterations of the design, Ian and I arrived at a look and feel we were happy with, and I worked to extend it throughout the layout, various visual elements, and logo (which would also shrink to become the favicon) to present a consistent and attractive interface.

It was interesting and rewarding to work with Ian on his site. The breadth of content it contains, which spans a diverse career as a physicist, academic, author, and now consultant, offered a challenge for me as a designer. Usually, a project has a fairly narrow focus and audience. Designing for these instances offers more obvious directions for the look and feel of a site. However, with the various aspects of Ian’s content, it took a while to arrive at a design that communicated his professional life while making lots of room for the content of the site. I think the final product represents a successful integration of these factors. Thanks for the project, Ian!

The most recent edition of the McMaster Museum of Art‘s newsletter has a segment on the project:

“Last September, the prestigious Goethe- Institut and the McMaster Museum of Art launched a website, designed to bring German art, language and culture to the fingertips of teachers and students globally. More than 10,000 unique visitors have used the site so far and it has garnered considerable praise from German, History and Art teachers.

The website and this project were the subject of workshops at the Ontario Modern Language Teachers’ Association’s annual conference in March. Educator’s comments were enthusiastic: “Loved it!”, “Very useful”, “Could be used in any Drama, Social Science Course”, “Would love a compilation of Spanish and French Art!”, “Excellent for cross-curricular involvement.”

Colleagues at the Goethe-Institut San Francisco also used the material at a teacher training session. Once back in their classrooms, the German teachers were pleased with how well the website activities and content engaged the students.

McMaster’s complementary exhibition continues until August 25.”

The newsletter is available online, and you can find out more about the project by reading about it in my Portfolio, or by visiting the site.

Over the past year, I have worked alongside Dr. Stéfan Sinclair, Dr. Madeleine Jeay, and James Chartrand (Open Sky Solutions) to develop a literary research application at McMaster University. The result is a preliminary launch of PBLit (PolyBase Littéraire) (en français).

PBLit is an experimental project that aims to develop strategies for the simultaneous exploitation of multiples databases using a single unified interface. Many resources exist for literary research, but most are only available through their own interface. This makes research across a multitude of resources a time-consuming and learning-intensive task. PBLit offers a model prototype for navigation and research across literary resources, and functions as a proof of concept that multiple resources, in different formats and containing various datatypes, can be utilized simultaneously through an integrated web application.

PBLit (PolyBase Littéraire)

http://tapor.mcmaster.ca/pblit/accueil/
ROLE: Designer, Interface Developer
TOOLS: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, Cocoon, CForms, moo.fx

My role on the project was initially as a graphic designer and interface developer, and grew to include some responsibility for the XML/XSLT development of the project (particularly in the implementation of the CForms, and in the search results display), as well as writing and debugging a portion of the JavaScript, and managing the localization of the application using i18n. Several exciting features were developed to facilitate the usability of the application, including an AJAX Search Suggest mechanism on all search fields, and an Advanced Search form which has been developed to allow for future versions of the application to offer resource-specific search fields to allow users to refine their searches to target specific resources.

I have worked closely with Dr.’s Sinclair and Jeay before on SatorBase and Hyperlistes, and as always it was a pleasure to learn from their years of experience undertaking academic projects. Also, it has been an excellent experience learning from the process and open-source knowledge of James Chartrand and Open Sky Solutions. Thanks to everyone, and here’s to a job well done!

The animated graph demonstrates the different trends (historic and anticipated) in greenhouse gas emissions in the province from 1990 to 2020, with Kyoto Targets and specific milestones illustrated. It will not be available online until after the Minister’s announcement for the new climate change plan, so I will not post it here. However, here is a screenshot.

The graph uses XML data to load in the various trends, targets, and milestones. All information regarding the statistics and presentation of the graph is included in the XML document to allow the client to easily add, remove, or edit the data as new information becomes available. This is then loaded into the Flash Player at run time, where the interface is populated with the trends, and the user is able to selectively play, show, and hide each trend on the graph.

In addition to this work, I was asked to develop some ideas for how to visualize our carbon footprint. Each Ontarian is responsible for about 5.7 tonnes of carbon each year (excluding the impact of industry, which bumps each individual’s footprint to 20+ tonnes). Nobody likes the sound of this, but educators in the field recognize that such a number is not the easiest statistic for people to relate to. To that end, the following were some brief ideas or sketches which came to my mind to try to visualize these concepts. The materials are intended for an upcoming Ministry website intended for a younger audience (10-20 years).

It has been interesting and fun to work on this project, and I hope to continue to combine my work in design and multimedia with environmental education and awareness.

Interactive Matter

www.interactivematter.ca
ROLE: Designer, Blog Admin
TOOLS: XHTML, CSS

Interactive Matter is a collection of academics, industry professionals, researchers, technologists, students, writers, innovators and experimentalists concerned with imagining, creating and critiquing new interactive media: “Interactive multimedia is the new medium and we are just learning to create and communicate through it. Interactivity is not narrative, it is not image, it is not linear. It is more than an art and it is more than engineering. Interactivity is playful, it is like a conversation, and it matters to the arts, humanities, sciences and the new media industry. Interactivity matters now.”

This site is used as a hub for information about the project and its various participants and partners. It also functions as a repository for current information about Interactive Matter’s bid for continued funding from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

The Goethe-McMaster Project

www.goethe-mcmaster.com
ROLE: Project Web Lead, Designer, Programmer, Conceptual Consultant
TOOLS: HTML, CSS, PHP, Flash 8, Flash Video

“German Expressionism in the Classroom is a website aimed at anyone interested in art or German as a private individual or within the field of education. 30 pieces of art taken from the collection housed at the McMaster Museum of Art are introduced as a virtual exhibition. This exhibition is accompanied by materials in both English and German providing background information on the time period, artists, and works of art and by exercises related to the works of art, German language and culture.”

I worked closely with representatives from the McMaster Museum of Art and the Goethe Institut to develop this resource in a short period of time in August and September of 2006. On September 14th, the website went live to accompany the launch of the German Expressionism exhibit at the museum, and has since been widely used by students and teachers of Art and the German language at the high school level.

SatorBase

www.satorbase.org
ROLE: Designer, Debugger, Programmer for certain updates
TOOLS: PHP/MySQL, HTML, CSS

SatorBase is a relational database of literary topoi and their occurrences in texts from 13th to 19th century France. I was contracted to redesign the resource from the ground up, as well as to isolate and fix a number of application errors. Additionally, I worked with Dr. Madeleine Jeay, director of the Sator Society, to add in new functionality to the application.

Hyperlistes

tapor.mcmaster.ca/~hyperliste
ROLE: Programmer
TOOLS: PHP/MySQL, XML/XSL

Hyperlistes is another literary research project created by Dr. Madeleine Jeay of the McMaster Department of French. My role on this project involved translating the core functions of the project from Perl CGI scripts to PHP, and setting up a MySQL database to house the site content, as well as tweaking the functionality of the XSLT transformations.

I developed the project in two stages. First, I designed an XML schema which the client could populate with albums of works, separated into Photography and Imaging sections. Each work can be tagged with an optional Title and Description. This setup allows the client to populate and update their current works without needing to use Flash, and without the need of a developer.

Secondly, I built the interface in Flash. After importing the XML, the interface is populated with Albums, each of which holds a set of works. When an album is selected, the works within it are loaded as thumbnails, to be selected by the user. The fun part was developing the animations which are generated dynamically between image positions. First, the border of the image tweens from the current to the selected image shape and size, then the entire interface shifts to center the new image. When this is complete, the image is loaded in, resolving in from a blur and oversaturation filter. Check out the site to get the effect, as these screenshots only tell part of the story!

JD makes beautiful images, and it was a pleasure as always to work with him on this project. He had a clear vision for the site, and it was fun to work together to get the transitions and effects right to suit it.