The web 2.0 application that I have found is DeviantART. This is a site that is mainly about uploading your creative work for others to see! It currently has 30,493,926 pieces of work submitted, but this number grows every second! Users create a account and get there own page that contains a gallery, journal section and places for people to leave comments. There is a free account and a paid account. The paid account allows you to personalise you page more and add extra features. 

Contribute: Users can upload anything that they have created, be it pictures (digital or scans), art work, graphic art or any other design work! when you upload you choose from different categories that suit your work. You can also add keywords to your work to make it easier for people to search through. All these allow for easy searching of vast amounts of work.

Above picture shows the ‘Submit Art’ screen. As you can see there are many ways to categorise your work, with main sections and 2 sub sections. This system allows for easy searching by what interests you most.

Collaborate: You can post comments about peoples work, these allow users to give tips and pointers to people about how to improve there work. You can also add people as friends and ‘watch’ there work. There is also a favourites feature, which allows users to add other peoples work to there individual page for others to see what they are looking at and what inspires them. Most people are also willing to lend a hand if you need one and explain how they did things!

Participate: Users are the ones that add the content for the site! without the user there would be no site! They can participate in many ways and not just in one. The can upload work, comment on other peoples work, there is also a small blog section and forums as well.

This site is good at what it does, however due to the huge amounts of work submitted it can be hard to get noticed without spending vast amounts of time looking at everyone else’s work and commenting so they come and look at your work! But then this is the same with any site like this! It is a useful site though as it opens up your work to criticism that can help you improve within your particular field of art/design. You can also get ideas from other peoples work as well as advice about how to do things.

Andy Hall

Afternoon/Evening all!

I started my research by looking at the different ways in which people can/are interacting with some existing prototypes out there. I was interested to see what was being created in the world and if the ideas were driven by the way in which the prototype would be interacted with or by what content you interact with! (i.e. what came first the idea to interact in a certain way or the idea of what to interact with.)

I looked at the Electronic Shadow website and found some interesting things. I was most interested in:

I thought the idea of using someones feet to make the frog move around was a good idea and something that really interested me. I found it useful to see what was being created by different people, however it was just intial research and I moved on from looking at Electronic Shadow work as I decided that it didn’t relate much to what I finally decided to do!

Onto the idea! An interactive map of some sort was the first thing that came to mind! As I want to do something that could be useful to people and have a commercial interest as well. After a long think about what else I could do, nothing with the sort of depth and flexibility of a map came to mind. I briefly thought about doing a interactive train network map, but due to the complete mess that the british train network is in I decided that that was a bad idea! I finally decided on doing a map for Bluewater shopping centre. As it is a big place and I felt it could benifit from having an interact map to help the customers find there favourite shops!

Once the idea was decided upon, I started looking at things that are more relent to the idea. So I had a look at existing shopping centre maps. I came across two that had some good features that interested me. There are best used and looked at, so the links are:

Festival Place

Alamoana Center

My plan now is too move onto looking at all forms of interactive maps, as I think I may have been too focused at looking at shopping centre maps to early and my research path should have been wider. I will also be looking at different ways to interact with a kiosk for shopping centres.

Andy Hall