The Story Behind

During the time I was acting as independent design consultant, Nokia Institute of Technology (iNdT) asked me to come up with a concept for a Weight Control. This was an interesting exercise to connect phones to scales and update data automatically.

_Design Proposal _Marianne Abreu
_Briefing _Patrícia Montenegro, iNdT

With many cars in big cities and cabs driving around, why don’t take advantage of technology and making getting around easier?

The Story Behind

People are strunggling daily with the traffic jam in big cities. For me, it is always a stressful time getting around in some cities like Rio de Janeiro. During a long time wondering how I could solve this problem, I came up with the idea of an smartphone app that helps people get and share a cab on a tap.
During a dinner with friends, I met some smart guys who were building something very similar, called “Easy Taxi”.
At that moment, we started to share ideas for an app that now has many awards. Special credits for them that made everything happen and founded a startup.
Above, you can find my proposal for them and also a promotional video for the app.

_Visual Design Proposal _Marianne Abreu
_Video _Marcel Bernner
_StartUp Project _Tallis Gomes, Marcio William, Rafael Braga, Daniel Cohen

In 2007, I was working at TV1. At that time, the company produced a short video that summarizes a lot of what I have been studied and researched. The video talks about “Rafinha”, a young boy at age 17. Somehow, all my sociological and anthropological studies could explain Rafinha’s life.
Coincidentally, during the same year, I published a paper talking about how the technological and communication revolutions have influenced our society, or I could mean “influenced Rafinha”.

This video is awesome! Certainly, a great reference for anyone who works with the Internet. It is been four years since this video was published, but it is still current.
Take a look:

We live in a weird wired world. “Weird” because many concepts we learned from our parents were broken. Nowadays, I keep an open diary, where I talk to everyone about what is happening in my life (twitter), I am in many different social networks and my main communication is now… “Instant messenger”!

The “Happy Birthday” wishes come from my wall timeline, The invitation to my friend’s party comes from Facebook, the news about that friend who lives abroad come from Twitter.
I receive emails from my 6 years old cousin and posts from my 65 years old great-aunt, I talk with my parents on Skype.

And while many argued that it would make us shallow and distant from people, I say the opposite, I feel closer to them. Nerd, geek, Me? No, I’m an ordinary person. I like face-to-face, I enjoy hanging out with friends, riding my bike. Yes… Actually, Rafinha is my friend.

The Story Behind

As many TEDx projects, the team should work on different approaches: communication, website, production, scenario… The challenge is bigger when we are focusing on a special community, as a favela that has been stereotyped by violence for many years. In these cases, a human-centered design is needed in order to understand and get closer to that community.
I will post more about this project soon.

Credits
Interaction and Visual Designer_ Marianne Abreu
Information Architect_ Paulo Coimbra
Website Development_ Marianne Abreu and Paulo Coimbra
Photography_ Marianne Abreu

The Story Behind

A beverage vending machine could be more interesting with a touch screen glass!
Sometimes, I go to a store near my place in order to buy beverages. And often, this experience is boring: we open the refrigerator to see what is available, then we close to keep the temperature, we think about the best option, then we ask the price, decide, eventually, we open the refrigerator again, not satisfied, we change our minds, then we close the refrigerator, think a little bit more…
After all this process, we finally get the beverage and go to the cashier to pay. Just now, you got your beverage! Congratulations!
Ok! I agree, I am being dramatic. But it certainly would be a lot more fun if we could “play” with the refrigerator and just “choose, pay, get it and au revoir” in a touch.
This interactive showcase for beverages brings to you a free and fun experience!

Credits
Interactive Interface_ Marianne
Photograpy_ Cortesy of Rodrigo Picorelli

Credits
_ visual and interaction designer: Marianne Abreu
_ information architects: Paulo Coimbra and Augusto Freitas
_ globo.com UX team

An ordinary day following the same routine. Suddenly, I can’t see. If before image was everything, now it is nothing! So now “sounds” have smell and “wind” has flavor. All senses become confused and Earth stops! What’s happening? Is it the end of the world?

The Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, in his book “Essay about blindness” (1995) which became a movie in 2010, turned everything into a wild and hostile world with a blindness epidemic.

We grow up and we are raised to value what’s visual. Colors, clothes and make-up seem to have more value than thoughts. So, suddenly, all these concepts of life are dead. We can’t see anymore, so checkered t-shirts with flowered pants and yellow shoes are ok. If it is hot, we can walk nude on the street. After all, who will see? Now, what matters is the essence and the script.

Essay about Blindness

Ok… But in the Woody Allen’s movie, “Directing in the dark” (2002), the main character “Val Waxman” is directing a movie of his own with a nonsense plot. Waxman discovered that he was blind in the middle of the film making and hid this information in order to not lose the movie direction. He compared himself to Beethoven, the deaf composer.

However, it’s necessary much more to really feel image and recognize differences in colors without sight, just with touch, and Allen knew that. So, everybody realized that the director was blind, the film became weird, and the always funny boy, Woody Allen, made the story into a Hollywood satire.
After all, how many films don’t seem directed by blind directors, or better, as Allen could say, by “cinematically illiterate”?

Woody Allen in “Directing in the dark”

The characters created by Saramago and Woody Allen were afraid of being blind and would do everything to see. But something completely different happened with Val Kilmer in the movie “At the first sight” (1998), a movie based on a real story. Kilmer’s character, however, just discovered that he preferred the darkness after having seen the sunlight. Blind since his childhood, he had the opportunity to see for the first time after years. This is possible because he got a congenital cataract that had developed from early years, and thanks to medical research, it is now possible to treat and cure this disease.

Therefore, imagine people in their 30s or 40s, who practically have never seen in their lives, having the opportunity of see. Something so desired and considered a real divine miracle for all! Isn’t it?
Well… No! And I could call it “a matter of point of view”. Life for those blind people became chaotic! For those who were always blind, the light cuts their eyes, the colors disturb, the movement unbalances.

At first sight

Working with graphic design makes me value image and the sense of sight. Everything has become visual and colors essential! Seeing, associated to this eminently visual-centric society in which we live, is the most highly-stimulated sense we have.

Most of the time, I forget that I can work and explore the others senses. Due to the “Compensation theory”, the visual disability can enhance the capacity of other senses, mainly hearing and touch. Therefore, being able to see or becoming blind forces us to reinvent our life.

With this, I propose a challenge: Design with no regard to sight, thus exploring the other 4 senses. Or, as a friend of mine would say: explore the organoleptic sensations… Have you ever thought about this before? After all, we see with eyes, but not solely with them!

Window of the soul

There was a time when people didn’t know how they were connected to others. So, scientists invented the “Six degrees of separation theory“. According to this theory, it is necessary, at most, 6 steps to connect any two people. To prove this theory, scientists have applied a very old method of communication: the letter.

First of all, scientists choose a target-addressee and send letters to several individuals with the addressee’s name written on them. The indviduals who have received the letter must resend it to the target-addressee. If they don’t know him or her, they need to send it to anyone from their contact list who might know the target-addressee.

With this experiment, people were keeping track of their contacts, showing scientists how they could be connected to the target-addressee. Nowadays, this theory could be easilly demonstrated by the social network systems that, today, are hugely popular. A good example of this in Brazil is Orkut, a social network created by Google. In the beginning, only those invited could sign up. So their friends invited their friends, who invited more friends and so on. After a short time, the Orkut creator from California was connected to millions of people around the world. Pretty incredible, isn’t it?

Another very interesting example is the famous “Oracle of Bacon”, a game based on this theory. With its vast data base, it is possible to discover how two actors are related and to find out their work history.

Now, if this is beautiful in theory, imagine graphically?

Generated graphs from social networks show how we are connected to each other. Therefore, some systems were coded to capture data from these networks and display in a graphical way.

The “Lost” and the “TV Globo” website produced graphs to show how the characters from plots are interconnected.

Below, there is a graph built by Neuro Productions that connects members of twitter.

Visually, the most interesting graph that I have found is Nexus, which collects data from Facebook. It is almost a starry sky! It’s like the system creates a galaxy, where each star represents a friend, and each group of stars, or friends, represents a constellation. In the end, we have a lot of friends’ groups together in our social galaxy.
Check it out, and tell me if it doesn’t seem like a starry sky…

I spent some time looking at my personal graph and how people were connected. After a few hours, I started to find the social network even more incredible!
Imagine a data base of all the different relationships that we have today. Years before, people wouldn´t have had the slightest notion of how friends were connected.

Look at graph analysis:

It is fact that facebook has limitations, because there are still many people that don’t have a facebook account.

Anyway, these findings justify the saying, even living in a world with 7 billion people: We live inside an egg!!