Mood Board

An arrangement of media or collage that captures the overall feel of the proposed application.  It can be composed of visual and written artifacts, photographs, swatches of color, snippets of historic texts and visual culture artifacts, clips of visual interfaces and precedent interactive applications images.  It is a collage of ideas which will inform and guide the development of your project, and is intended to evoke or project a particular style or concept.

a few related links:

20 pro tips for mood boards (Creative Bloq)

How to create a mood board (Canva)(more graphic/web design focused)

Mood boards for mobile apps

mood boards within a conceptual design / prototyping process:

Project Scorpio / Xbox One (Randy Huynh) 

Leap Motion VR / 3d User Interfaces

 

Affordance –

“…the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. […] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.” (Don Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things, 1988, p.9)

Types of affordances in digital artifacts (among many types):

• Interactive / Interface
• Narrative
• Aesthetic
• Ludic (play)
• Functional
• Social
• Experiential

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Examples – Identifying Affordances in Digital Applications –

• Bloxels – video game creation platform (for classrooms) (student example)
• Hatoful Boyfriend – pigeon dating simulator (student example)
• A Dark Room – text-based role playing game (student example)

GPS-based games

• Zombies, Run! (2012)
• Turf Wars (2009)
• Pokemon GO (2016)
• Ingress (2013) / Ingress Prime (2018)

• I Am A Man (2017) – narrative describing MLK assassination and Memphis garbage strike (Derek Hamm – NCSU design)
• Joycestick (2017) – VR exploration of James Joyce’s Ulysses

• I Am A Man (2017) – narrative describing MLK assassination and Memphis garbage strike (Derek Hamm – NCSU design)
• Joycestick (2017) – VR exploration of James Joyce’s Ulysses

• Gone Home (2013)  – first-person story exploration game – (wiki)
• Firewatch (2016) –  first-person adventure game – effective / emotionally charged / great environmental design – (wiki)
• Papers, Please (2013) –  puzzle game – play immigration/border officer – interesting game mechanics -(wiki)

 

• 80 Days (2014)  – narrative adventure / interactive fiction – Jules Verne – Around the World in 80 Days – (wiki)