Alexis Lloyd

‘Reveal’ Interactive Mirror

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 16:31:49 +0000

Chosen as one of TIME Magazine’s Top 50 Inventions of 2011, The R&D Lab’s Reveal is a mirror platform that we’ve designed to explore how the relationship between information and the self is evolving and how media content from the New York Times and others might play a part.

By using a special semi-reflective glass surface, the users of the mirror are able to see both a normal reflection of the real world as well as overlaid, high-contrast graphics. We’ve dubbed this “augmented reflection”. Conceptually, the idea is that our mirror can reveal the halos of data around real-world objects, including ourselves.

Envisioned as a key fixture in your home, the mirror uses face recognition to call up personalized data, including health stats, a calendar, news feeds, and other information relevant to your morning routine. Voice commands switch between views, and gestures activate content, including full-screen video messages from other mirror users. An RFID-enabled shelf responds to objects that are placed on it, such as medications and personal care products, revealing personalized data. The mirror will recognize certain behaviors, such as when you schedule a trip or fail to get enough exercise, and recommend contextually-relevant content. If you’re interested, you can tap your phone on the mirror to sync the article for reading on the run or on our Surface Reader application.

Through the Looking Glass: A Tour of the Mirror That’s One of TIME’s Favorite Inventions

Nieman Lab: Mirror, mirror: The New York Times wants to serve you info as you’re brushing your teeth
(Role: Collaborated on concept development, interaction design, visual design. )

Nieman Lab: The New York Times Imagines the Kitchen Table of the Future
(Role: Collaborated on concept development)

News.me

admin — Mon, 30 May 2011 15:30:19 +0000

News.me is a different kind of social news experience for the iPad that shows you not just what your friends are sharing, but what they are reading as well. Have some friends with impeccable taste in music? Find out about new artists from the same places they do. Curious what Steven Johnson or Nicholas Kristof has been reading lately? Browse through their streams and find out. Everyone curates their Twitter experience to reflect their own unique set of interests, and with News.me you can see their curated view of the world. News.me offers a seamless interface for immersive reading, and uses science to find the most relevant content in every user’s stream.

Role: Concept development, interaction design, visual design

Download the News.me app
View the original News.me concept video
Read more about how and why we built News.me

New York Times Comments Visualization

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 19:35:38 +0000

News coverage from The New York Times provides the fodder for rich conversation and debate across many facets of our culture. This visualization from The New York Times Research and Development Lab offers a compelling look at the conversations that are taking place around the most-discussed articles of the moment. These comments and conversations are gathered from both the nytimes.com website and Twitter.

This visualization was exhibited in the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Triennial, “Why Design Now?”

Role: Concept, design

Credits: Alexis Lloyd, Nick Bilton, Noriaki Okada, Michael Young, Mark Hansen

Year: 2010

Video: Designing for the Tablet

admin — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:17:25 +0000

Books. Magazines. Televisions. We hear these words, and understand well what shape their content will take. But “tablet?” “Digital magazine?” How does the size of the objects frame the user experience? Influence their portability or accessibility? How will the experience with these devices compare with other more “fuller-figured” media? How do we need to consider grid, typography, and behavior differently?

Lecture: The Tablet

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:33:05 +0000

I will be giving a short talk and panel discussion on designing for the tablet as part of SVA’s MFA Interaction Design “Dot Dot Dot” lecture series. A bit last minute, but it’s tonight, 3/10/2010 from 6:30 – 8:30 at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. Here are the full details >

Video: New Interactions with News

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 07:00:00 +0000

What impact do emerging technologies have on news publishers? How will users be interacting with journalism and media in 2, 5, or 10 years? What kinds of interfaces will facilitate deep, immersive and engaging interactions with content? Alexis Lloyd, a Creative Technologist in The New York Times Company’s Research & Development Lab, explores these and other questions. In addition, she discusses the research being done in the Company’s R&D lab on new interactions with news across a variety of platforms and devices, including mobile interfaces, content in the living room, ambient interactivity using sensors and more.

TABLETWEETS

admin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:07:51 +0000

A real-time visualization launched for Apple’s iPad announcement on January 27, 2010. The visualization shows a continuously updated view of the number of times key terms about the tablet and event are mentioned. It was intended to provide a simple, up-to-the-minute view of the hype surrounding the launch of Apple’s new tablet device.

Interaction ‘10

admin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:54:26 +0000

I will be giving a talk on February 5, 2010 at Interaction ‘10, IxDA’s annual conference. The talk is entitled “New Interactions with News”. A full description can be found here.

T vs. T

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:38:39 +0000

Lots of people say that they just get their news from Twitter, thinking that their Twitter stream provides equivalent information and breadth of coverage to traditional news sources because “if something’s important, I’ll hear about it”. T vs. T was created as an experiment to explore the truth of this assumption by comparing the most discussed/reported topics from the past week on both Twitter and NYTimes.com.

If You Build It, Will They Come? Web Usability v.2009

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:41:00 +0000

I was recently interviewed for an article on the current state of usability. Read it here:

If You Build It, Will They Come? Web Usability v.2009

NAB: “Ubiquitous Computing and The Future of News”

admin — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:26:30 +0000

I will be giving a talk at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Show on April 20th, 2009 on “Ubiquitous Computing and The Future of News”. Stop by if you’re in Vegas!

NAB Show website

Custom Times

admin — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:44:57 +0000

In the Research & Development lab at The New York Times, we’ve created a prototype called “Custom Times” which offers users a personalized version of The New York Times that seamlessly transitions across multiple platforms: print, web, mobile, tv/living room and the car.

Increasingly, people are consuming news content on a wide variety of platforms, thus the goal of Custom Times is to provide a rich, engaging news reading (and watching) experience that anticipates the user’s needs across devices and environments. Custom Times takes on many of the challenges that all media companies face in creating multi-platform products and services: designing consistent and appropriate user interfaces for a myriad of devices, delivering content that is appropriate for each device, and creating new, novel interactions that enable cross-device functionality.

Custom Times consists of a interactive newspaper box, a personalized web site, a mobile web site, a TV application and car integration and was one of the 2009 recipients of the Knight-Batten Grand Prize for Innovation in Journalism.

Role: collaborated on concept, design, and development with Michael Young, Ted Roden, and Nick Bilton

Year: 2009

New York Times Topic Map

admin — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 14:18:59 +0000

An internal data visualization project combining aggregated traffic data from NYTimes.com with article metadata. Topic metadata (comprised of New York Times taxonomic classifiers) is parsed from articles read by users. These topics are then mapped to the users’ geographic locations, thereby visually illustrating the relative interest in topics for different locations within the United States. The visualization cycles between a topic view, which shows interest in a particular topic across all states, and a state view, which shows the most-read topics for a particular state. The visualization is installed on screens in the R&D lab, and is intended to be an ambient, glanceable visualization that allows insights into how our readers consume New York Times content.

Role: Concept, design, programming

Year: 2009

The Ad Generator in the Netherlands

admin — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:31:58 +0000

The Ad Generator is being exhibited as part of the Image Radio festival in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Oct. 30 – Nov. 2, 2008.

Purse Lip Square Jaw

admin — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:23:06 +0000

Some kind words from Anne Galloway of the wonderful Purse Lip Square Jaw blog.

New York Times on Facebook

admin — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:30:57 +0000

The New York Times News Quiz is a Facebook application that allows you to test your knowledge of what’s happening in the world, and compete with your friends and the Facebook community to see who’s most plugged in. Five quick questions each weekday on the latest news.

The New York Times Most E-Mailed application allows you to catch up on the most popular articles from the New York Times directly from your Facebook page. The application also provides tools for sharing articles with your friends on Facebook.

Role: Design, front-end programming

Year: 2007

comMODIFIED

admin — Wed, 16 May 2007 17:27:24 +0000

comMODIFIED is a thesis project and paper created as a component of the MFA program in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design. The project consists of a series of new media art works that remix advertising media as a method of critiquing, questioning, and satirizing marketing rhetoric. The thesis paper documents the design process as well as providing critical analysis on both the theoretical and practical issues involved in the development of the works.

Conceived and produced independently

Year: 2007

The Ad Generator

admin — Wed, 16 May 2007 16:52:11 +0000

The Ad Generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. By remixing corporate slogans, The Ad Generator illustrates how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

The Ad Generator was produced as a component of an MFA thesis in Design + Technology at Parson The New School for Design.

Year: 2007

The Concrete Jungle

admin — Sat, 05 May 2007 17:19:26 +0000

The Concrete Jungle is a street art piece in which miniature tableaus of jungle animals were installed on the streets of Brooklyn. Using elements of the urban landscape, the project brings elements of the natural world into the manmade cityscape in a humorous way that encourages exploration and discovery.

Conceived and produced independently

Year: 2007

InterSections

admin — Tue, 01 May 2007 17:01:13 +0000

InterSections is a site-specific project that enables exploration of the layers of New York City history using your mobile phone. Stickers bearing mobile barcodes are installed in public spaces, and can be decoded using a camera phone to download a historical photo of that very location. This mobile interface allows users to compare the historical image with the current view of the location, thereby gaining greater understanding of the layers of history and change inherent to the city.

Conceived and produced in collaboration with Ana Velez and Gaelen Green

Year: 2007

Performing the Mundane

admin — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 07:00:00 +0000

‘Performing the Mundane: Interventions in Everyday Life’ is a paper exploring the ways in which artists are utilizing design objects, performance, and interventionist practices to create spaces for play, ritual, and poetry in the midst of everyday experience. Specifically, the paper examines these issues through an analysis of the works of the artists Andrea Zittel, Improv Everywhere, and Tim Etchells.

Role: Author

Year: 2007

My Washington Square

admin — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 16:42:31 +0000

My Washington Square is an experience-mapping project exploring contemporary and historical stories situated in New York’s Washington Square Park. By including both user-submitted stories and historical information, the project investigates the ways in which physical spaces contain multiple layers of memory and experience.

Conceived and produced independently

Year: 2006

AnimaLand

admin — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:41:30 +0000

AnimaLand is a wireless interactive plush toy and educational game that helps children to learn about animals and their living environment. Children can play with the plush toys and receive immediate responses from an animated, screen-based character and environment. For children ages 3-5.

Conceived and produced in collaboration with Ana Velez and Dave Pasquel

Year: 2006

Adscape

admin — Sun, 14 May 2006 15:22:06 +0000

In 1971, the average American encountered 560 daily advertising messages. By 1997 that number had increased to over 3,000 per day.

David Shenk, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, 1997

As citizens of a “new branded world” (Naomi Klein, No Logo), we have a general understanding that we are viewed by corporations primarily as consumers, targets for advertising that becomes more and more invasive each year. Even if you never turn on the television, never check your email or surf the web, never read a magazine or newspaper, how much advertising has pervaded the physical world in which you live and travel? This project aims to understand the extent to which advertising has changed the urban environment and how the commercial landscape may or may not reflect the socioeconomic landscape of neighborhoods and communities.

Advertising data was recorded from three neighborhoods in New York City: East Harlem, a historically poor, primarily Latino neighborhood; SoHo, a downtown shopping district; and the Upper East Side, a wealthy residential area. In each neighborhood, ads were recorded in a five-block section that consisted of two avenue blocks and three adjacent street blocks.

The Adscape website allows users to browse the advertising landscape by the content, type, or location of the ads, in order to gain insight into the ways in which advertising and cultural geography are interrelated.

Conceived and produced independently

Year: 2005

Bar Talk

admin — Sun, 14 May 2006 15:14:47 +0000

BarTalk is a social networking installation for bars, clubs, and other venues that allows participants to send photos and text messages from their cell phones to big-screen displays. The interface can be used for general social interaction, or it can be customized for specific events or venues, including conferences, parties, nightclubs, and festivals.

Conceived and produced in collaboration with Shaun Rance and Ana Velez

Year: 2005

Hoop Loops

admin — Sun, 14 May 2006 15:03:47 +0000

Hoop Loops is a program for live performance designed to dynamically create projected visual and audio accompaniment for hula hooping or hoop-dance performance. The shape and motion of the hula hoop provide the foundation for a progressive layering of visual imagery accompanied by electronically created sound. Programmed in Max/MSP/Jitter.

Conceived and produced in collaboration with Ana Velez

Year: 2006

American Express Partners in Preservation

admin — Fri, 05 May 2006 14:55:04 +0000

American Express Partners in Preservation is a $10 million, five-year commitment to historic preservation that will increase public awareness of the importance of historic preservation in the United States and around the world. This commitment will help protect historic and cultural landmarks and will strengthen local communities. It is a joint effort between American Express, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the World Monuments Fund.

The Partners in Preservation website allowed users to learn about historic sites that had been nominated for preservation, contribute their personal photos and stories about the sites, and vote in real-time to help determine which sites were funded by the PiP project.

Role: Visual design and art direction

Year: 2006

New York Historical Society

admin — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 14:40:34 +0000

In 1787, at a time when slavery was crucial to the prosperity and expansion of New York, the New York African Free School was created by the New York Manumission Society, a group dedicated to advocating for African Americans. The school’s explicit mission was to educate black children to take their place as equals to white American citizens. It began as a single-room schoolhouse with about forty students, the majority of whom were the children of slaves, and by the time it was absorbed into the New York City public school system in 1835, it had educated thousands of children, a number of whom went on to become well known in the United States and Europe.

The New-York Historical Society’s New York African Free School Collection preserves a rich selection of student work and community commentary about the school. The website offers a browsable archive of high-resolution images of selections from the archives, as well as interactive timelines, maps, and biographies that draw a rich portrait of the schools’ historical context.

Role: Interaction design

Year: 2006

Malcolm X Multimedia Kiosks

admin — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 14:10:48 +0000

Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures designed and executed the content and presentation for three extensive multimedia kiosks for the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, located at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan.

The touch-screen kiosks include a wealth of photography and archival film as well as comprehensive text and interviews covering the lives and contributions of Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz. The three kiosks offer one and a half hours of short videos as well as never-before-seen family photos, photos of Harlem by Malcolm X’s contemporaries, photos shot by Malcolm X himself during his travels, and postcards that he wrote to friends. They represent the largest existing exhibition on Malcolm X available anywhere in the world.

These engaging digital presentations are designed to be intellectually accessible to a wide range of visitors, from school children to adults who have a background in the history presented. Visitors can explore the kiosks at their own pace, touching the screens to navigate through videos, photographs, text, and interactives that include a timeline about the lives of Malcolm and Betty, a map of Harlem locations significant to Malcolm, and a display of Malcolm’s postcards. Visitors can view the materials chronologically or by topic.

Role: Interaction design

Year: 2006

Dial El Barrio

admin — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 02:14:43 +0000

Dial El Barrio is a project conceived by Stephanie Owens and developed by MFA students at Parsons School of Design that uses a location-based, wireless network to create an embedded documentary in the streets of Spanish Harlem. In an effort to preserve the neighborhood’s rich legacy, DIALelbarrio is creating a cell-phone accessible ‘media cloud’ over the neighborhood to highlight its role as the center of Latin life in New York City.

Contributions: Concept development, research, audio recording, design

Year: 2005

The First Amendment in Google Images

admin — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 14:46:01 +0000

“Google Image Search: The First Amendment” is an exploration into the visualization of language. Specifically, the piece explores the way tools such as Google Image Search have altered our visual understanding of words and text. The Google Image Search technology allows the user to search for images using natural language keywords and phrases. Does the use of this technology create a closer relationship between words and imagery, or does it further alienate the visual from the linguistic?

“Google Image Search: The First Amendment” was created by performing a Google Image Search for each word in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Using the search results, I created a visual narrative of this historical text. The imagery that resulted from this process ranges from the mundane to the bizarre. I selected the First Amendment because I am interested in revealing new meanings and representations of historically and culturally important texts. In particular, I think that First Amendment rights are facing a multitude of threats at this moment in time, and I hope that this piece will encourage viewers to examine the language and meaning of the document more closely. I intend to further explore these ideas in a series of pieces that will apply the same techniques to a variety of other seminal works.

Writing for the Web

admin — Wed, 05 Nov 2003 20:31:17 +0000

‘Writing for the Web’ is an article published in the Brooklyn College Faculty Bulletin to assist faculty members in creating websites and other digital learning resources.

Role: Author

Year: 2003