MX: Polititeens

 Class last Friday was a lot of fun, considering all activities involved. But, most of all I really enjoyed the brain activity that happened. When building these structures something clicked in the brain that hadn't yet happened, and if these renderings of that clicking don't look as good as they should, doesn't mean they won't.

Here to the left is my first structure I built when 3D-sketching. It was meant to represent sorting. So there are specific steps and ways of someone getting deeper and deeper into richer information. When building this, the structure could not hold all the weight I was putting on these plastic straws so it started to do this balancing act when I held it up to show...then from there on we got our first idea of how to render our homepages...shown below.

 Here is how I was representing the way our vocabulary feature works. There is one word, and different users can make their own definition and then get rated on how well they defined the word. The balloon= word. Then the purple dots=people's definitions. As you can see the purple dots are different sizes, so that represents the feedback and rating system the other users did on the word.

 Here is the first attempt at handling the mobile balancing act on the ipad. I'm not sure how well this is working, or if it is even working at all...but I still really like the idea of switching out information based on how much people are reading the content involved.

 Going off of the mobile idea I had this idea of a slot machine, and how when you turn it you never know what is going to match up. So considering the two sided political stances, such as liberal and conservative I thought it'd be interesting to see the juxtaposition with stories aligned with other stories. So ideally there would be a button to mix them up, and they would all roll and then land on different top stories, spotlighted students, and anything that would be going on during that day (i.e. debates, events, etc.)

As far as the iphone goes, I still have one more screen to explore with this one. Here is the balloon idea rendered out in photo shop. It still looks very 2D, so working with shadows and light I think is where it needs to go. I do however enjoy the way the scale is working, especially within the typography, because if the definition is tiny...no one can read it, so they'd have to investigate further.