Procrastinate

I have found myself lacking motivation to focus on my academics lately.  I attribute this to a sense of (temporary) closure to many arcs of my research work.  For example, my joint research on qualifying human observation accuracy was recently presented at the CogSIMA conference in Miami Beach.  So rather than get back into work that was started a while back (or work on my dissertation proposal which still needs a defined topic) I decided to create the “Son of Grumm” paper toy seen above.  Ironically he is standing on a paper that I should probably have been reading instead.

I got the template for the model from an amazing book I picked up at Urban Outfitters on sale.  Grumm isn’t the first model I’ve created, but he’s my favorite so far, especially because he didn’t have any curved cuts.  I find that putting together these models is quite enjoyable; it’s a nice combination of relaxing + rewarding (when you’re done).  My next step is to assemble the Howl’s Moving Caster model; however, I’m also reading up on creating my own models using pepakura designer freeware.  I’ll need to come up with a good idea for what to design first though.   I also think that from a usability/human factors standpoint, if I can get this software to work out well it could become a useful tool for rapid prototyping of 3D objects.   Excelsior!

Back to reading the paper for now though – Son of Grumm has taken his spot guarding my trackball.

Flash Wireframes/Prototypes – Cellular Phone UI

I created these wireframes as part of my senior capstone design project for Northeastern University.  The wireframes were meant to be upgraded interfaces for 3 user profiles: The Grandma, The Dad and The 20-Something College student.  The motorola flash interface was created to mimic a popular phone at the time so that user testing sessions could be used to create baseline task completion times and usability ratings.

You can use the flash menus below as you would a normal cell phone basically.  The Motorola version however has limited functions to specific tasks that were required for the usability sessions.