Brendan Dawes and Interaction Design

We had an on-line class this week due to the AECT conference, which sounded very cool. The one next year is in Anaheim, so I must keep that in the plans.

I spent the week with Brendan Dawes. Well not really. But I did spend much of this past week listening and relistening to, and being inspired by, his Interaction Design tutorials on lynda.com. So much in fact, that I bought a used copy of DragSlideFade, his book on Flash action scripting, from Amazon. I also spent some time looking at his website, which if you haven't seen it yet, has Flash examples, code and other inspirational experiences like the ones he talked about in the video tutorial http://www.brendandawes.com/

I have been thinking a lot about what Brendan talked about in his tutorials: things like points of difference, creating the unexpected, sketching with code to come up with innovative results. Even his lynda.com tutorial was different than the others we've seen so far.

As we get ready for the second part of the semester in ITEC 830, and think about our final project, I wonder how Brendan's lessons can be put to use. We are more than familiar with the medium now, right? We've seen tens of video tutorials made with screen capture software. But what else can we do? My goal for the final project will be to approach the medium with a new perspective and see whether I can use the tools of the medium in an unexpected way.