serial consign

I've been anticipating the release of Spore for a long time, partly from the nostalgia of having "grown up" with (in?) SimCity and Will Wright's later work, but mainly because I think the game will be a very convincing thought-experiment in scale, emergence and interface in gaming. I'd like to highlight some comments made by Will Wright in a recent video interview, as I consider this commentary great advice for any designer. When asked about the "intelligence" embedded in the recently released Spore Creature Creator, Wright had the following to say:

Most people when they use 3D editors, they approach it you know, just very mechanically. Here's a tool, here's the ability of the tool, but if you think about a tool as entertainment you go about it in a totally different way than [when considering] a tool as a tool. So that's why we wanted every tool in Spore to be as entertaining as a toy, so they want to be toys first and foremost and by being a great toy, it automatically becomes a great tool.. and then you get a lot of people using it, making lots and lots of stuff.

This notion of "playability" is evident when manipulating the interface of the Creature Creator as the application offers users the ability to engage in sophisticated parametric modeling without it even feeling like work. The above image illustrates an editing function which allows the user to alter the length of their creature via pull-taps located on either end. In activating this operation you are presented with an x-ray view of the underlying skeletal structure of your beast. It is important to note that this information is not so much graphical, rather an actual physiology that determines how the character will walk, run, fight, etc. The Creator Creator is full of interesting 3D modeling widgets for placing, moving and aligning body parts and all of these operations are extremely intuitive. I haven't felt so immediately comfortable operating a 3D application since the first time I used Sketchup and while users are not modeling from scratch in Spore, the diversity of the "anatomy library" coupled with the flexibility of the interface for placing and manipulating these organic building blocks offers an incredible amount of control.

If you're interested in learning more about the Spore Interface I highly recommend spending some time with the demo version of the Creature Creator (available for both Mac and PC at the official site for the game) and if you are feeling a little more hands-off in your curiosity, WIRED posted an overview of the software earlier this month.

Thanks to Jim Rossignol for tipping me off about the Wright video interview via this Rock, Paper, Shotgun post.

Having connections to web development and architectural practice (I've developed sites for two architecture studios), I'm rather opinionated about the manner in which firms archive and market themselves online. In general, I think the presence of most architecture firms on the web is tremendously underwhelming and the organization of an online portfolio almost always boils down to the "timeline vs. project typology" binary. That said, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across the web site for LOHA: Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects this past weekend.

The LOHA site mimics the structure and appearance of the Periodic Table of Elements and proposes a classification system for pertinent information associated with architectural practice. As illustrated in the screen capture above, the interface for the site is essentially the project archives and entries are categorized into news, project types, firm recognition and publications—all the information you'd expect a firm to provide. What makes this site interesting is the fact that you have access to everything at once with a "viewer" for displaying related photo-content. The site champions information and access to it rather than photography and this is a welcome change considering the all-too-familiar strategy of tacking a sickly UI onto a glorified slideshow. The empty cells that currently separate clusters of nodes will allow for a fair amount of future expansion, so it looks like this site has a lifespan of several years before a redesign.

Given the idiosyncratic nature of this interface, it is accompanied by a mini-legend which explains the nomenclature used in tagging each cell. Each cell features an abbreviation of the project name, the year completed, the square footage and colour coded tags which denote project type (residential, commercial, etc.) and other information (i.e. if the project has been published or received any awards). When you scroll over the various cells you get an interesting reading of the connectivity within the work and information archived across the site - it is really quite a pleasure to explore this archive! Kudos to the sayFINN design agency for this work.

Some tangentially related links: this project immediately made me remember the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods and Catalogtree's site is another great example of an interface that champions an indexical approach and visual identity.