Three men with a dream signing out xo

Createscape

Rationale

The purpose of this project was to conceptualise an experience which would enable professional creative writers to have an easy and effective drafting process. To achieve this, we created a mixed reality device/program which has two primary functions: to translate handwriting to digital text, and to place the user within a simulated environment. We placed this project in the context of Mobility, but rather in a sense of anti-mobility. By removing the user from a distracting zone they are able to write anywhere, anytime and can be essentially transported to a different world without moving.

On top of this, we designed a number of additional features which all aimed to remove distractions and make the drafting process as efficient as possible. We based the features on our personal drafting experience, as well as an interview with a creative writer. Our video gives an overview of the most important features but missed quite a few that we considered. Because of this, we found it necessary to create a dossier which exhibits our thinking process and ideas throughout. Given more time, we would have liked to visualise every feature in the video exactly as we designed them, as well as delve more into the product design by making a mockup pen and headset with a user manual included. We also would have explored more features which would aim to pull the user back into their writing if and when they got distracted.

We went with a hand-drawn style for the UI elements to create a more interesting look which reinforces the idea that Createscape is a merging of the traditional and digital realm into one MR experience.

Final dossier booklet & product pictures

Headset/pen with dossier booklet and box.

Sound

 

Printing the dossier

We planned to get the dossier printed but unfortunately ran out of time to get that done, so we had to opt for printing at Massey with some good paper (120 gsm white smooth)

First test print in black and white – found a number of mistakes and little things to change.

Quick one-page test print with the good paper to see how the colours looked and figure out some of the process of printing.

We were happy with that so we went ahead and printed on the good paper

First attempt at printing as well as binding and trimming went quite well except for one mistake – One of the green bars at the top of the page was bigger than the rest as seen below.

This was a reasonably subtle mistake that people did not seem to notice however it was very obvious to us because we saw it before folding where it was much more visible. We decided to still bind and trim the pages as the rest of the document was correct, and just print another one so we would end up with two copies.

– Jason, Kane

Dossier development

We felt a Dosier was necessary to better explain all the thinking and consideration that has gone into our project, which was not necessarily shown in the video. There are a number of features which we conceptualized but did not have the time to show in a video. This would give a detailed explanation of every single aspect that we have considered up to this point.

I began by trying to sort everything into a table of contents that was in a logical order. I used this as a reference for the layout. We wanted the document to have a very informative look and feel to it, much like a thesis or research project on our process.

Working out the layout and order of the contents took a long time as there were a lot of different things that we wanted to talk about and explain in the dossier.

Some different page layout concepts as we worked out the design:

Tried to include drawn elements in the dossier to fit the style of the rest, however we decided to bring back in a lot more clean elements as the drawn elements didn’t look as good in the context of a dossier.

 

Had to create some extra content to show off some features – here I photoshopped a screenshot from the video into a beach environment to show that the product allows a range of different environments.

 

– Jason, Kane

Thursday Full Renders

Wednesday renders

 

Additional Content for Dossier

For the dossier, we are making I had to mock up some fresh en-situs to demonstrate existing UI and prospective UI (such as the tasks tile).

(above: menu in-situ)

(above: contacts/collab menu in-situ)

(above: task tab in-situ)

-Kane

Final logo!

– Kane

Createscape – PROJECT NAME(!!!) and Logo ideas

The logo blends several elements of our concept into one compact form. Initially, our idea for the logo was to blend a visual ‘create’ icon with a ‘landscape’ or ‘escape’ icon; for example, mountains with a pen/pencil, but this idea changed. We decided we wanted to make sure we emphasised the writing part of our idea, whilst also bringing in the ‘c’ and ‘e’ from Createscape.

In the end, we managed to incorporate also a visual tie to landscape through mountainesque shapes in the negative spaces. We used a pencil to structure our logo and to describe the significance of the hand-written component of our concept. The ‘c’ and ‘e’ for the body of the pencil and the ‘lead’ of the pencil informs the shape of the ‘e’ and the shape of the bookmark silhouette that morphs with said ‘e’.

-Kane