Portfolio of a Design Strategist

Slideshow Transcript

1. Slide 1: Ross Popoff-Walker Design strategist portfolio of recent work 04.08
2. Slide 2: Who I Am An analytical thought-leader who advises Fortune 500 executives on topics from young consumers, to game design, to user experience. I hold a Masters of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon. This slide deck presents my past work.
3. Slide 3: What I Do Design strategist is a hybrid of creative designer and analytical thinker. I develop frameworks that structure creative endeavors, so companies can articulate problems and pinpoint the necessary design solutions.
4. Slide 4: Guitar Hero PeaceMaker game design my past work BVW Forrester
5. Slide 5: For two years I worked at Forrester Research, helping senior executives understand the importance of design…
6. Slide 6: Forrester offers thousands of reports to its clients. This was the 11th most read report in Q1 2008.
7. Slide 7: The Gen Y Design Guide, uncovered a new area of research for Forrester: Young Consumer Design.
8. Slide 8: These reports help senior executives at client companies understand how to engage young consumers online.
9. Slide 9: Before Forrester, I helped start a project called PeaceMaker…
10. Slide 10: PeaceMaker is a video game that teaches high-school aged students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by letting them experience it from the POV of political leaders. I co-founded the project, developed the concept, and pitched it to the Entertainment Technology Center, eventually securing a semester’s worth of funding. I was responsible for the user interface design, scenario design, design specs, business proposal writing, and PR and business development. A finished product demo was created, and the team developed business relationships with organizations like RAND, and World Center for Peace. We presented a our work at the the 2005 Game Developer's Conference. PeaceMaker is now an independent company, ImpactGames, LLC.
11. Slide 11: Proof of concept and mockup designs
12. Slide 12: Prototype user interface designs
13. Slide 13: Screens of the shipped product from Impact Games, LLC
14. Slide 14: PeaceMaker made me think about how games can address serious issues…
15. Slide 15: So I designed and coded a game called Second Chances. A game about the love between a terminally ill man and his daughter…
16. Slide 16: The player begins the game with 14 days to live, and has to talk with his daughter through a point-click interface to salvage their tattered relationship while combating the physical pain of his condition with medication.
17. Slide 17: But I wanted to learn to make a commercial video game, so I went to work for Harmonix Music Systems Inc. in Cambridge, MA…
18. Slide 18: Guitar Hero is a video game franchise which uses a guitar-shaped controller to let players become rock stars. The first Guitar Hero game was developed in 2005 in 9 months, and few thought it would ever sell more than 150,000 units. (It’s sold over 1.5 million.) I was responsible for “authoring” songs in the game, creating the note gems that correspond to the five buttons of the guitar. This was done across four different difficulty levels, which needed to be divergent enough to be accessible to children and hardcore gamers alike. I also authored the multi-player mode to create a fun two-player experience for each individual guitar part.
19. Slide 19: Screen of the shipped version of Guitar Hero 1
20. Slide 20: While at Harmonix, I created dozens of prototype ideas for new music-related games…
21. Slide 23: Player’s score Shapes correspond to controls on the PSP The Player rotates these four triangles to catch the right colored orbs as they move to the music An interface mockup for a music mini-game called “Rotate.” A combination Tetris and Amplitude-like beat matching game. The player must tap along to the music while switching around interface elements that correspond to specific colors.
22. Slide 24: Some of these ideas fed into a project called Phase…
23. Slide 25: Which was about procedurally generated game play based on data derived from MP3 files…
24. Slide 26: Phase is now a game for the iPod. (you can download it through iTunes)
25. Slide 27: Before Harmonix, I was a student a CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center…
26. Slide 28: The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University offers a two- year Masters of Entertainment Technology degree, jointly conferred by Carnegie Mellon University's College of Fine Arts and School of Computer Science. At the ETC, technologists and fine artists work together on projects that produce real products that entertain, inform, and inspire. The core of the ETC’s curriculum is a course called Building Virtual Worlds. Building Virtual Worlds was an interactive design bootcamp at Carnegie Mellon taught by the legendary Randy Pausch. Small four-person teams built immersive interactive, story-driven environments. Here are photos of one of the five worlds I co-created...
27. Slide 29: Guiding Lights is a 5-7 minute interactive audience participation experience.
28. Slide 30: An audience in a movie theater passes around glow sticks, which are then picked up by a computer vision system.
29. Slide 31: The audience’s goal is to use the lights to guide a character, Martha the moth, around the screen, helping her avoid obstacles. I was responsible for leading the team that created the experience.
30. Slide 32: Professor Randy Pausch shows a 500 person audience the tap-lights they will use to experience “Guiding Lights.” (April 05)
31. Slide 33: 7 Reasons You Should Work With Me • Active in social media – I blog and Twitter regularly • Combine left and right brain thinking • Deep passion for using design to transform business • Follow current trends of culture and media • Starting an independent consultancy to expand young consumer expertise • A natural story teller – writing and public speaking skills • I’m a nice guy, who likes helping people
32. Slide 34: Thank you. blog: annoyingdesign.org/blog/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rosspw Twitter: twitter.com/rosspw email: ross.spw@gmail.com Ross Popoff-Walker design strategist