Load. Saved.

The Process one goes through to design is often a blackbox to spectators and end users. As a result some colleagues and myself have been striving to get better at documenting the process the design took. Illustrating the lifecycle of a project from it's inception, conceptualization and finished product. This is an initial idea on the shape some of that may take.

The Hardware

The server side of the kegbot actually lives on this tiny Raspberry Pi running as a dedicated web-server. This makes the data output accessable to any web enabled device. I was looking for a way to capture the subtle life of the raspberry pi, the small blinks as it is on, you'll see a quick GIF test to do just that.

The Kegbots magic comes from a flow sensor installed into the tap line and connected to a kegboard. that relays that info back up to the server. I also have it hooked to a Motorola Xoom Android tablet for display and realtime feedback at the tap.

IDEATION & SKETCHING

Early on when spent a good deal of time in rapid ideation, for myself and the team this usually takes the shape of a lot of visual communication. we discuss the potential and start walking through the types of opportunities we see as well as the specific problems we may be solving for. The end result is ideally a lot of sketches that both inspire and cause us to question. To capture this, we used digital sketching methods to easily capture and export, and when we worked with physical materials we took lots of pictures.

Dynamic Storytelling

When looking to actually communicate this whole process back to an audience my colleges and I began to experiment a lot with full motion video as narrative backdrops for communicating what and why we were doing. I think anything that can help give additional understanding and get the audience into the moment helps from a narrative standpoint in their understanding. Here are a couple of the opening slide tests, and a quick synopsis of how i made them.

1. First grab a camera that can record video. I was looking for something that could capture HD quality and can maintain a specific focal point (just for the aesthetic look i was going for)
2. Trimmed the sequences in a video editor
3. For presentation purposes I brought the video into Keynote and applied them as full screen backdrops 
4. Added text and transitions 

The project itself, beyond some of this documentation is still a work in progress. The guts and ideas are all there, I  just need to find some time to implement more of it.