Brief | accessos
Project Leader | Chiara Diana & Claudio Moderini
Project Assistants | Renzo Giusti & Sigrid Wiederhecker
Group Members | Trusha Sawant, Giorgio Partesana, Il Suk Kim
Idea | Problem | Context
The goal of our project is to provide a new structure and representation of the activities performed by the user on its computer. The focus is on merging real life relations with the informative ones, so to represent chained digital events as fictional stories.
What is it?
MyOS organizes data as a sequence of scenes (events) that are produced within stories. A story is composed by a number of scenes, that are constituted of elements. These smaller bricks include people, places, dialogues and objects.
MyOS joins two informational worlds by integrating external resources (websites, communication services, …) and internal personal data within the same representational framework, to provide the user with a uniform and collective platform for manipulating and sharing documents.
KEYWORDS:
Fantasy
Custom
Friendly
Fear
Archive
How it works
The user interface is divided into three spaces which are characterized by their function. They are named Story Navigator, Scene Manager and Elements Editor.
The Story Navigator shows the time-lined structure of scenes with an abstract representation. It allows the user to search and find elements inside the main structure, which is composed by sequences of scenes, organized by stories. This space provide a search engine that filters the complex visualization allowing to highlight the scenes that include the searched elements by type and name. The user can move around and zoom onto the structure previewing the scenes (and the elements contained in it) that can be opened and accessed dragging them into the Scene Manager.
The Scene Manager is mainly figurative, which means that it provides a deeper insight on scenes, and particularly on the elements that compose them. If more then one scene are opened they will be arranged according to the time they have been produced : this means that the present scene (which include the elements involved in the actual activity) will be always on the leftmost position. In any opened scene the elements are related to each other in a diagrammatic fashion that shows which action has been performed (by whom and where). Elements will be represented as icons, and more details can be previewed within the scene in a pop-up window. Elements here can be manipulated (i.e. dragged by a past scenes to the actual one) and can be opened to edit them dragging them to the Element Editor.
The Element Editor is where people profile, places configuration, dialogues and all objects can be edited by means of specific applications. To save an object it can dragged into the actual scene.
Value & Potential
Similarly to role-playing games, MyOS exploits the benefits of a figurative representation of digital activities. This is intended to shift the perception that computer users have with intangible documents. This allows also to use personalized avatars, which fit fictional identification with the main plot and with each particular action.
Showing the spatial and proportional relation of people with places and objects not only allows the user to easily understand what is actually happening, but also helps him in tracing the history of a data flow. Also, dividing the stories (eventually nested) into slices of time allow to have a global and clear overview of user’s activity.
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