The Conclusion

This semester has been a huge learning experience for me. One of the first obstacles I faced is coming up with and proposing an idea for Experiential Design. I felt that I wanted to make something different from what I usually make. Many of my works are fictional and story-based, so this experience was completely different, since I was making an educational PSA about poverty.


Some of the pros while developing my design is that it was different from others because of its use of keyboard controls and I was also not indecisive about what I wanted to add to each page. The cons of developing my design is that it did not turn out as interactive as I had planned.


My strength is that I have experience in drawing human figures and characters. My threats while producing this design is, first of all, it was very difficult to find tutorials for using keyboard movements to control both the character and background in Adobe Edge. When I had finally succeeded in using keyboard controls, another problem appeared, which was the main character walking out of the frame. Fixing this problem required me to change the java codes that I had learned from a tutorial, but I had never learned javascripting before so it proved a challenge. Another problem that I faced was that Adobe Edge does not work well for Windows users. There was a consistent lag every 5 minutes and the moment I restarted Adobe Edge, a message would pop out saying that I had to reinstall it. But since Adobe Edge is unavailable in our mac/computer labs, I was forced to keep working on my project with this issue. An opportunity that I gained during this project is that I am now able to use Adobe Illustrator more efficiently. Since I had rarely used Illustrator before, I found that this was a good opportunity for me to use it more, which was what led me to using Illustrator more than Photoshop when developing my designs. My weaknesses are time management and lack of experience in Adobe Edge.

Trying out technical aspects in Edge

Since my design involves facts about poverty, I decided to add a question mark above a homeless person's head and showing the information when hovered on. I feel this would be better and piques the curiosity of people, rather than just having the facts pop out of nowhere.

This is the tutorial that I used: http://www.adobe.com/inspire/2013/12/symbols-interactive-edge-animate.html

And here is the result:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXy9z47rnbA

Using keyboard movements for walk cycles

As I was looking up tutorials, I discovered another way to use keyboard movement for walk cycles. This is the tutorial:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/create-like-crazy-with-adobe-edge/episode-10-controllable-characters-in-an-interactive-environment/

Referring to this, I managed to make the character walk while the background is moving, but one problem is that at one point the character walks out of frame.

Here is how it looks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ULp3pprGRg

Character progress

These are my character designs for the homeless people. I decided to mix two different softwares: Illustrator and Photoshop. Since I rarely use Illustrator, I decided to experiment more on this software. Here are the designs: