FITC Toronto 2006

The Design and Technology Festival

Presentations

• Beyond Usability: Building Meaningful Learning Applications

• Convergence: TV, Broadband, and Flash

• Playing with Yourself (for fun and profit)

• Making a VJ tool with Flash

• Keynote: Flash and the Adobe Engagement Platform

Beyond Usability: Building Meaningful Learning Applications

• Speaker: Kristin Henry from GalaxyGoo

• Website: http://www.galaxygoo.org

• Non-profitable organization that creates experimental open source learning applications

Does Animation Aid Learning?

• Not totally true!

• According to research, animations are not more effective than a series of still images.

• However, people learn better through interaction with information.

• Why? People need to looks more closely at the materials.

Examples of Interactive Learning Tools

• The Cell Learning Tool

• Sine Curve Visualization Tool

• For more examples, visit: http://www.galaxygoo.org/tour_general.html

Convergence: TV, Broadband, and Flash

• Speaker: Robert Reinhardt from Schematic

• Company website: http://www.schematic.com/

• Schematic is one of the nation's leading interactive agencies that provides award-winning design, user interface, and technology solutions for the Web, advanced devices and television.

Future = Web on TV?

• If we can do it on a cell phone, we can do it on TV.

• North Americans’ favorite entertainment is still watching television.

• TV screen is bigger!

• Some uses: interactive television, streaming online video, play games.

Microsoft Media Center

• What if you really want to try it out? Get an XBOX.

• For more information, visit: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/default.mspx

Playing with Yourself (for fun and profit)

• Speaker: Grant Skinner

• Website: http://gskinner.com/site2_5/

• experimentations can help to advance yourself and your career options.

• http://www.gskinner.com/talks/play/

Making a VJ tool with Flash

• Speaker: Mario Klingemann

• Experimental work: http://incubator.quasimondo.com/

• Bloghttp://quasimondo.com/

• Lecture Slideshttp://lectures.quasimondo.com/

Flash and the Adobe Engagement Platform

• FlashLite2- a lighter version of Flash Player that is suitable for mobile devices- http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/devices/

• Flex- development environment for developers who don’t want to deal with the design side of things.- http://labs.macromedia.com/flexproductline/

• Adobe Apollo- allows developers to create and deploy desktop applications and content using a combination of Flash, HTML and PDF

Can I Pursue Happiness in Design?

• Think about ideas and content freely – with the deadline faraway.

• Work without interruption.

• Using a wide variety of tools and techniques.

• Travel to new places.

• Work on projects that matter to me.

• Having things come back from the printer done well.

Presentation Summaries are available online at:

http://jacquelinetong.com/nfblog