The Jordan Button
Group Members: Tyler Cooper, Neil Chulpongsatorn, Jordan Lee
For Project 0, we are to sketch, design, implement a singular button based on a certain person's personality traits.
Before deciding on a client, our group of four split into two groups to interview their partners. This way, there will be a huge collection of ideas based on different personalities, before selecting and filtering out which design we all like.
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The person I interviewed for my initial design sketches was Neil. From the interview, I quickly learned that Neil is very friendly, loves cycling, playing Japanese RPG's (particularly Final Fantasy 9), and playing guitar with rock finger-style music. He misses Thailand (especially the hot weather) and his favourite food is fried chicken. He also mentioned that he is more careful with cycling now as he got into a bike accident.
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With the Initial Design Sketches, I thought of ideas such as using a bike as a button that when pressed it will cycle different locations of Thailand, using the guitar to play rock music in a "Guitar Hero" kind of way, a Final Fantasy 9 character playing guitar and riding a bike, etc.
The Final Design
Taking In Feedback & Implementation
Overall, the group really liked the idea of burning a banjo while simultaneously cooking a steak. Our original final design is having an Instagram photo frame with the campsite and spit-roast in the picture. Depending on whether the steak was rare or not, the post will either get a "Jordan likes this!" (when rare) or "0 likes" (when not rare).
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After getting feedback from other people in the class, we have decided to refine even more, taking in some great ideas. One feedback we got was to make the whole thing more minimal and simpler, because "there's a lot going on". We also liked the feedback of changing the banjo into a much more notable symbol of country music, which is a cowboy hat.
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From this, we decided to scrap the Instagram frame, and just have a simple campsite setting.
The final button design features a campsite, a spit-roast inspired by the Monster Hunter video game, a steak being gradually cooked and can be interacted with, and a burning cowboy hat.
Choosing the Main Button Idea
Refining and Funneling Ideas
After the group met up together and showed each other the different ideas, we all found one of Tyler's button ideas amusing. He interviewed Jordan, and said that he despises country music. So, for one of his sketches he drew a button that when pressed, will set a banjo on fire.
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Liking this idea, we all agreed to come up with more variation sketches based on destroying what Jordan dislikes. Before sketching, we all interviewed Jordan again to get more of an idea of his personality. I learned that besides that he hates country music, he also didn't hesitate to mention his dislike for anime. However, he does like photography, cycling, camping, the Monster Hunter video game, and rare steak. His favourite season is fall, and his favourite number is 13.
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Some of the sketch variations I liked was burning a banjo while it cooks a steak, using his bike to run over a banjo and anime DVD's, using a camera as a button to take a picture of the spit-roast, capturing the spit-roast in an Instagram post, and having Jordan react to the steak depending on how it's cooked.
Source Code
Code & Application Contributions
Main Contributions:
My main contributions to the software are providing aesthetically pleasing design, debugging and testing the functionalities of the app, and combining our group's code altogether. For design in particular, I coded designs for the sky, tent, and the cowboy hat.
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How to Download & Run Code:
Make sure you have Visual Studio 2015+ installed
Go to the download link below
Click on "Clone or download"
Download ZIP and extract
Open Visual Studio > File > Open > Project and select "Project 0" from the downloaded folder
Click "Run"