The first of the organized talks connected to this module was with Toby Milner-Gulland, currently working at the Studio Moving Brands where he has been specializing on research and prototyping for multiple clients. He has been at the studio for 9 years and is currently working as a Creative Technologist, he is passionate about reinventing mundane day to day software into something that is more visually pleasing and immersive for the user, He’s achieving this by using design methods seen in Games development.
Moving Brands is studio that is passionate about Storytelling, Technology, and design. The studio was born in 1998 with 5 people passionate about media behind it. They have built a big name for themselves with several highly recognizable companies collaborating with them in the early prototyping and design stage.
He pressed some of these beliefs about reinventing mundane software and use of games design straight away in his talk with these short points –
- Games Design should be a Universal skill
- What if everyone was a game designer?
- Why is most software for business and computing depressing such as excel and PowerPoint (He believes that game design and its interpretation of UI design could fix this.)
During the presentation he went on to talk about several of the projects he has worked on during his time working for Moving Brands. The first of which was coming up with a design for the BBC Weather App.
Work on this app included -
- Wanting to visualize the weather past the use of weather icons
- Using a Game engine to render weather conditions
- People care about the weather because its highly impactful on the user so the weather displayed on the app should resemble the mood it invokes on the user and be visually clear
- Using reference footage that was filmed in the studio to help inspire weather creation in the game engine
This dedication to making a weather app impact the user on an emotional and interactive exspirenece relates back to his main goal in the media in industry, which is to make every day mundane software, not boring to interact with and see.
Similar ideas they brough to the BBC would later be seen in an IOS update released by apple for their weather app.
The second project he began to talk about was for Aoyama Treehouse Invisible Technology -
- The base premise for the project was to design a business space for a company in Japan which had technology incorporated everywhere yet none of it was visible at first looking
- This work included a wide arrange of sketches and notes on elements researched from the studios culture
- Along with that a large amount of prototyping was shown until something worked for the clients brief.
Along with talking about the base process of researching for this brief he showed several examples of digital and physical prototyping for elements of this brief. Ranging from procedurally generated objects to camera tracked movement for digital writing.
He really stressed the wide arrange of prototyping they do for a client and it is clear that this extensive method they use is the key to the studio’s success in my opinion.
The final major project he goes in depth about is a brief for them to prototype ways to come up with a piece of software that will help English farmers learn better ways to convert their farm to more sustainable routes.
- There is a current issue with farms in the uk with many not being able to meet production needs and facing bankruptcy
- This project looked at creating tools that English farmers who wouldn’t be that adverse with interacting with technological software, be able to use this tool easily to see what they can do to make their farm more sustainable
- Toby related this software to games as he believed you would be taking the user on a complex narrative explaining what this change from traditional farming to sustainable farming will do for their business
- It was extremely important for them to work in tandem with farmers and understand what they like as they needed this software to fit their demographic as much as possible
When going through the details of this project he goes through one final major thing the studio does and that is user testing and researching, which is crucial when designing a piece of software especially for such a focused group that wouldn’t typically have much knowledge of digital platforms.
The final note he leaves us with is about how groundbreaking technology seems game like at first, referencing the first computer in which one of the first programs developed for it was the game pong and the release of the original IPOD in which the interface seemed very game like in his opinion with the rotating wheel for navigation and how responsive the buttons would feel.
Overall this talk was great for showing a different route of employment with the set of skills the course has taught me along with just how fleshed out purely the prototyping stage of a project can be.
Special Thanks to Toby for coming in and giving this fantastic talk and to Moving Brands.