Navimation Research

Design

On this page I present my own design production done in collaboration with business partners in the RECORD project, in 2007-2008. The theoretical analysis of the projects are presented in my paper on Social Navimation.

In addition to the videos on this page, I have made a range of ‘motion sketches’ that are presented and analysed in my article on motional form in web browsing.

The videos on this page are made in AfterEffects and Adobe Flash, and have not been developed into functioning prototypes. It was never the intention to make fully functioning interfaces; they were created so as to explore new ways of using movement.

NRK Urørt Map

NRK Urørt is an existing social media service for unsigned bands and artists in Norway to upload their own music, and possibly get broadcasted on Norwegian radio. More than 57000 tunes have been uploaded so far! I wanted to create an interface for exploring this music – as well as to experiment with how navimation can be used in social media applications.

(If you understand Norwegian you can watch a more comprehensive video with voice over.)

The Urørt Map application is based on a simplified representation of Norway, in accordance with the defining geographical context of Urørt. Tunes are represented by straws, and coloured in relation to music genres. The way the straws emerge and sway give them salience, and may be described as a subtle form of motional transformation, indicating the living and producing culture of Urørt. Therefore, I argue, social navimation is realised by communicating the production of user-generated content (which is a general feature of social media) through the employment of motional transformation.

When entering the playback mode, the three-dimensional environment is substituted with a flat, two-dimensional environment. In this environment, location on the map is no longer relevant; the tunes that grow out of the album artwork are selected in terms of musical and social criteria, independent of their artists’ physical belonging. This mix of 2D and 3D representations is an example of what I call spatial manipulation. The images floating around refers to what people are listening to in real time, independent of their physical location in Norway. Therefore, I argue that social navimation is realized by allowing people to navigate in a huge volume of music across real and virtual space through the employment of spatial manipulation in the interface.

Telenor Football: 4 interfaces

The Norwegian company Telenor is one of the fastest growing providers of mobile communications services worldwide, and is the largest provider of TV services in the Nordic region. In 2005, the company and affiliated partners bought the rights to broadcast Norwegian football league matches on TV, Internet and mobile media for a period of 3 years. We wanted to explore possibilities for creating social media services connected to football for Telenor, and to investigate how navimation could be used for this purpose. Several designers were involved in this project (Jørn Knutsen, Morten Solem, Jonathan Romm and myself), which resulted in three scenarios that included a range of interfaces. In this video, 4 of the interfaces are presented that investigate the use of navimation.

1. The Pitch

The Pitch is an overarching interface for a range of social media applications, which are grouped in each corner of the screen in respect to the activities they enable: to create, watch, explore and share media content. The mix of visually dynamic and navigational elements allude to the football field & surrounding culture. Social navimation is therefore realised by using what I call indexical composition to create a virtual space in which social activities can take place.

2. The Timeline

The Timeline application allows users to continuously navigate all the meta-content that is produced during a football season. In the upper part of the screen the whole season is presented, while the lower part of the screen presents information from a specific match. Social navimation is therefore realized by allowing social activities on multiple timescales to be mediated and communicated through the employment of temporal navigation in the interface.

3. The VideoMix

The VideoMix application is an application that allows people to remix professional and user-generated videos. The application allows ways of filtering videos, which are represented by still images that appear to have mass and weight, in an environment that appear to provide elemental forces like gravity. I refer to this as virtual kinetics. In addition, the videos are placed in three rows in a three-dimensional environment, as if they were located on a spectator stand on a football match. This allusion to the stand may be seen as an example of indexical compositing. Social navimation is therefore realized by employing virtual kinetics and indexical compositing to facilitate navigation in, and remixing of, professional and user-generated content.

4. The Magnets

The Magnet application allows users to see the relations between football players, friends, football matches, and other events. These relations are made visible as the user searches for a football team, and a “virtual magnet” is created. The visual representations are then attracted or repelled as if possessing kinetic properties. Social navimation is realized when relations between people and mediating artefacts (such as representations of friends or football players) are explored and communicated through the employment of virtual kinetics in the interface.