Cornish ChronoZoomers Make History at Seattle Design Festival

Mekala Nava

Design in Public hosted the 4th Annual Seattle Design Festival (Sept. 5 to 19, 2014). The festival is the largest design-related event in the Pacific Northwest, bringing together an estimated 10,000 attendees to explore all the diverse and meaningful ways that design makes life better. Citizens, city leaders and experts came together through workshops, tours, talks, films and gatherings to exchange ideas around this year’s theme, Design in Motion…exploring the ways design moves us…”from place to place, frame to frame, present to future”, and to see design as a vehicle of innovation.

Given this theme, the conference provided an ideal opportunity for my students to engage as presenters. We have been studying the century-long history of Motion Graphic Design, tracing the converging influences of avant garde film, graphic design, animation, and media technology innovation. We used ChronoZoom as our dynamic, open source platform to house and share our evolving History of Motion Graphic Design timeline. Each student choose a design history topic to research and created their own sub-timelines to share their independent research. I asked 3 of my Cornish ChronoZoomers, Mekala Nava, Will Kingstone and Petra Michael, if they would present their historical research at the SDF conference. They were thrilled by this invitation, and we spend part of the summer and early Fall preparing their presentations.

Petra Michael, Will Kingston, Mekala Nava and Genevieve Tremblay at the 2014 SDF

Our session was titled, “Cornish Students Visualize the History of Motion Design at SDF”. It was part of a block of presentations given by my Cornish designer/educator colleagues, Julie Myers (Designing for Flight and Digital Objects in Motion), Tiffany Laine De Mott (Frames in Motion), Dan Shafer (Freeboards: Analog Interaction and Public Messaging), that was held at the Seattle Public Library.

Will Kingstone

Mekala Nava shared her Early History of 2D Animation, William Kingstone presented The Evolution of Styles in Sci-Fi Television and Petra Michael shared the History of Western Fantasy Role Playing Games via their interactive ChronoZoom timelines. Over the course of the summer and first few weeks of school, these 3 students refined their research and prepared their interactive presentations. By the time they presented to this design conference community, they had transformed themselves from students to scholars, with truly engaging research and innovative presentation methods.

SO proud of these designers!

Making Our Mark in History

ChronoZoom, Microsoft Research Connections

I reached out to Roy Zimmerman, Director of Education and Scholarly Communication, by way of Rane Johnson Stempson, by way of Shelly Farnham…all Microsoft Researchers. He was very helpful in getting me oriented with ChronoZoom background, resources and application.  Jeff Brice and I paid Roy a visit out at Microsoft and he gave us a guided tour of the program.

 

ChronoZoom Project: http://join.chronozoom.com/

At CZ’s current stage of development, there are 3 “layers” of usage:

1. The first is as a highly curated, peer reviewed content source for histories (science, humanities, etc…). This content has been created by leading academics from around the country, in partnership with Msoft. It is what you see when you go to http://www.Chronozoom.com…and find the exhibits.
2. The “ChronoZoom World”, companies, educators, students and alike, using Chronozoom to create timelines and tell stories of historic value, using less high quality (i.e. research level) content (i.e. copyrighted materials, etc…).
3. Personal Canvas for those who are doing their own research, who want to keep their work private…until they are ready to publish and share with the world.

Roy’s visit to our ‘History of Motion Design’ class

We would be working somewhere between layer 2 and layer 3 for both our classroom work sessions and final research project. I created a proposal draft for the classroom project. I poured over the online resources I could find to get up to speed with CZ (see BLOGROLL —>) and learn more about how ChronoZoom might work in my classroom. The more familiar I got with the capabilities, the better I was able to frame our history timeline project. ChronoZoom Pilot Project: Part I

• Pair up (with your Video Installation Pioneers assignment partners) to organize and layout a plan for your assets from your presentation to create a CZ “exhibit” of your topic.
• Assets must be imported from the cloud, the Internet or Skydrive. Keep in mind, uploading directly from your hard drive will not work.
• Feature at least 10 assets (video, photograph, sound, text, etc…) in your “exhibit”.
• You exhibit content is contained in 1 dot or info bud on the timeline. You want to feature your primary asset (i.e. video, main image/text) in the center of your dot. The other assets/artifacts you add to your exhibit will surround your primary asset..
• Get acquainted with the Bibliography/citation capabilities of CZ

 

The Road to ChronoZoom

Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle

Last summer, Jeff Brice (Design Chair, Cornish), asked me to teach the History of Motion Graphic Design. It is relatively short hundred year history that traces converging influences of avant garde film, graphic design, animation, and media technology innovation, starting in the early 1900’s. I invited my colleague, media historian, Robin Oppenheimer, to co-teach this course with me. As we prepared the curriculum for this class, I remembered catching my first sight of ChronoZoom, a web-based graphical, open source timeline dedicated to visualizing the history of everything, at the 2013 University of Washington’s Information School Capstone Review event.

Big History in ChronoZoom, Adil Ait Hamd/Travis Warren

With sponsorship from Microsoft Research,  Adil Ait Hamd  and Travis Warren created content for the ‘Big History’ class at Lakeside Upper School in Seattle. Their ChornoZoom timeline content described events, data and discoveries relating to the history of energy and climate. And because ChronoZoom addresses issues associated with viewing massive timescales by allowing the creation of infinitely zoomable timelines, their approach was designed to help students appreciate human history in the context of the larger events.

 

With this innovative model in mind, I was curious to see if ChronoZoom might be an appropriate platform to use to create the History of Motion Graphic Design with my students. I’ve set up this blog to share the documentation of this project with students and teachers who are interested in experimental and experiential formats for learning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cornish Design Students Offer Microsoft Helpful UX feedback

   

 

 

 

 

 

We invited Roy Zimmerman, Director of Education and Scholarly Communication at Microsoft Research Connections, to our second to last class so we could share our progress. He was interested in fielding questions, comments and suggestions our designers had about the ChronoZoom interface and functionality. Needless to say, these keen eyed design students had plenty of feedback to share!

ChronoZoom is an open-source platform…so sharing feedback about the functionality, UI design, User Experience is key to developing it further. This was one less obvious learning benefits to my students, as they were initially critical of the design constraints. But once they realized the power of the knowledge sharing and became more attuned to an evolving “open source aesthetic”, they became more engaged in logging and sharing their user observations and feedback.

Our class kept a record of bugs and interface issues throughout the project. During Roy’s classroom visit, we created a log of many of the technical and interface design issues they students identified during the course of the pilot. Since CZ is still in Beta form, this feedback is proving to be of great interest to the ChronoZoom team at Microsoft.

 

TECHNICAL BUGS 

Trouble with “save exhibit” function

• Navigational glitches

• No trackpad scrolling inside info buds

•  Gmail account – sometimes not working/Hotmail account – OK

• Log in/Log out glitches • no scrolling, just zoom?

• depth of timeline limit – Our timeline became vertically oriented, since we had so many subtimelines. CZ seems to have a limited vertical orientation, as we are not easily able to access the bottom (title section) of our timeline.

USER INTERFACE ENHANCEMENT

• Cut/Paste function for creating timelines independently, then sharing on larger timeline

• More design capability (type, color background, depth, opacity, object, placement, etc…)

• Create exhibit dialogue box that lays over timeline

• More “subspace”

• Timeline within Timeline capability

• Connectivity of content in exhibits

• Wireframe Preview Mode

• More manipulation capability of info buds, subtimelines, etc…

• Zoom in/out using key command

• Ability to visually customize sub-timeline backgrounds

• Ability to create backgrounds in info buds

• Less rigid structure to info buds

• Ability to have 2 working canvases

• Ability to arrange infobuds rather than a default arrangement

• Control over line width, opacity…(graphic interface)

• Title as option inside “info bud”

• Roleover Bibliography

• Content View mode to view embedded content without moving in/out of timeline

• How to use timing on “tours”

• Connected content/asset management tool (i.e. One Note, Excel, etc…) for more fluid workflow

• Embedded Task Flow function

• color coding for content

• overall ease of manipulation of elements…