In 2007 I completed a fun project that I call “Social Murmurs.” I recently had arrived home from living in Brooklyn for the summer and was interested in some of the behaviors I noticed from people around me while sitting in public; such as waiting for subway trains. Some people seemed shy or concerned when someone else sat next to them, while other people seemed irritated and upset. Commonly, couples sat next to each other; while strangers would place an empty seat between them. I found these efforts to control their personal space interesting. I wanted to force their inner thoughts to the surface and make people consider their responses.

While in New York, I had my first opportunity to work with an Arduino Microcontroller, already familiar with Processing I was really interested in how I could use an Arduino and some basic electronics to enhance my projects. That summer my friends at The Studio for Interactive Media and at Interaction Lab at RockwellGroup helped answer a lot of questions and really inspire me.

When I returned back to Minneapolis to finish up another semester at MCAD I found that I had to scale back my ideas, due to time allowed for execution and having only myself to rely on. At that point, using multiple capacitance sensors attached to a bench were a little out of my range, so I went digging.

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Located in the beautiful warehouse district of Minneapolis, Colle + McVoy is an integrated advertising agency. Founded on traditional media over 70 years ago, Colle + McVoy was quick to add digital capabilities and has gained a lot of notoriety for its interactive work.

To express our capabilities and make our space speak to what we do, we enhanced our existing plastic logotype with a hidden projector and camera. Mapping our projections to the space, we created sequences of illumination for the lettering and created a play between virtual and physical objects that responds to the activity of people in the space.

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There is a lot of noise on Twitter; we figured that out fast as our servers filled up with gigabytes of data (just text) the first day, while monitoring only a handful of popular terms. A few months ago, I began discussing this concept with Jason Striegel, we knew there was a need, especially for brands, to make sense of what is happening on Twitter, see what people are saying and how much they are saying it.
Our research phase discovered tools that had some of the similar objectives as us and we were shocked by their short-comings. The most annoying trend was the inability to give real metrics. Sites like Twitscoop plot your term with a near-meaningless scale of 1 to 5 on their “BuzzMeter,” and I was surprised by the complete UX #fail Radian6 developed, and charges a premium for. Note: this is not to say that Radian6 does not have good qualities. Their application’s scope is larger than that of Squawq and offers a lot of valuable information regarding a brand’s reputation in social media. More below.

It only takes minutes with Jason, for a seedling to turn into a giant beanstalk; and Squawq was born. Well, I guess there was all of the pain-staking work in the middle that made it a reality, a lot of which I was spared. A lot of hard work was done by Zara Gonzalez, Andrew Wetzel, Grant Eull, Andrew Charon, Braden Stadlman, Aaron Clark and Julie Kaloides and so many others. Thanks to their hard work, Squawq provides a lot of answers.

Squawq does a lot (soon it will do even more). It stores information about your terms so you can view its activity over a custom date range (most tools won’t show you past 3 days), it extracts common keywords, #tags and @authors associated with your terms, finds your most vocal authors (the people talking about your brand), and provides you with links mentioned in their tweets and more.

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At Colle + McVoy a lot of us are avid bikers. I commute by bike most days, as do many others. There are also about 15 agency bikes that remain in our space, and we ride them around to different conference rooms. We are serious about cycling, some of us in competition, some just for fun and all of us for its benefits to our environment.

We were given the opportunity to create a quick project that we could show to other groups that share our interests. We created a mural, using rear-projection and top-mounted camera. The camera sends activity information into a Flash application that triggers animations. We decided to show the many styles of cycling and have some fun with it! I worked on this project with Grant Eull and Barrett Haroldson.

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So Advertising Week will be ending tomorrow and I hadn’t mentioned our project for it, Twaugmented Reality. Our creative team got together a few weeks ago and was briefed that we would be creating a print advertisement for Ad Week. We decided this was a good opportunity to test the waters of augmented reality and have some fun with it. So our team created an augmented-reality site using fiducial-tracking (the type with the paper square) and I was the lead developer.

Printing our mark in the event program brings the users one step closer to experiencing the site; since there would be no need for them to print out a mark. Since Ad Week took place in New York and we are in Minneapolis, we wanted to connect the two. Holding the mark right-side-up shows you a Minneapolis sky-line and tweets relating to @collemcvoy, rotating the mark upside-down shrinks the Minneapolis sky-line and reveals a New York sky-line with tweets relating to Advertising Week. It was a pretty fun project to develop, It gave us a chance to learn more about flash-based augmented reality’s many limitations and of course using Papervision3D is always fun. Truly a fun labs-worthy project.
The video below is of my friend Andrew Charon demonstrating the piece. Be sure to visit the site at http://www.collemcvoy.com/big.

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Although I knew it was coming, it was still a bit of a shock to see Ramon-Lawrence Coleman from Minneapolis on Project Runway tonight. I was introduced to his work about a year ago when my good friend and fellow MCAD alumni, Travis Hall, was working on his website. I stepped in and coded some major components to the site including the galleries. It lead to a couple really nice stand-alone components that I have used in a lot projects since. I actually hadn’t seen the site since completed until tonight. I am very impressed with Ramon’s portfolio, it will be exciting to see him in this competition.

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Things are exciting at Colle + McVoy right now. One of the reasons, is our recent Webby Awards honors and nomination.

YearbookYourself.com is a project I worked on and is currently winning the People’s Voice Award for the Viral Marketing category, more information. I am excited to announce that Snowdin, a project I lead development of, is a Webby Award 2009 Honoree in the Self Promotion / Portfolio category. We also are honoree’s in the Music category for Paint that Shit Gold, a site to promote Atmospheres newest album and Fishington – The Fishing and Boating Capital of the Internet in the Social Networking category. It is great to see such appreciation for our work.

We are Energy was a brief project I did almost a year ago. It was a lead up to my Aura Installation, focusing on typography and illustrating meaning through human interaction. As the user moves through the space there body is illuminated with infrared light and tracked, the motion of the assets is an attraction to their activity, the particles swarm to users body.
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I was finally able to get some documentation of my What Matters Most installation edited. I even got it posted on my portfolio site here. To describe the project, I’ll quote myself:
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Make: Day was on Saturday. What a crazy event. The event ran from 10-3 and there were several thousand people pouring through the doors. There was a wide range of audience and the fellow presenters/makers were very inspiring and showing a lot of interest in everyone’s work. There was a sense of community that was real nice.
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