Portfolio of a Design Strategist

Ross Popoff-Walker Design strategist portfolio of recent work 04.08

Who I Am An analytical thought-leader who advises Fortune 500 executives on topics from young consumers, to game design, to user experience. I hold a Masters of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon. This slide deck presents my past work.

Design strategist is a hybrid of creative designer and analytical thinker. I develop frameworks that structure creative endeavors , so companies can articulate problems and pinpoint the necessary design solutions . What I Do

PeaceMaker Forrester BVW Guitar Hero game design my past work

For two years I worked at Forrester Research, helping senior executives understand the importance of design…

Forrester offers thousands of reports to its clients. This was the 11 th most read report in Q1 2008.

The Gen Y Design Guide, uncovered a new area of research for Forrester: Young Consumer Design.

These reports help senior executives at client companies understand how to engage young consumers online.

Before Forrester, I helped start a project called PeaceMaker…

PeaceMaker is a video game that teaches high-school aged students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by letting them experience it from the POV of political leaders. I co-founded the project, developed the concept, and pitched it to the Entertainment Technology Center , eventually securing a semester’s worth of funding. I was responsible for the user interface design, scenario design, design specs, business proposal writing, and PR and business development. A finished product demo was created, and the team developed business relationships with organizations like RAND, and World Center for Peace. We presented a our work at the the 2005 Game Developer's Conference. PeaceMaker is now an independent company, ImpactGames, LLC.

Proof of concept and mockup designs

Prototype user interface designs

Screens of the shipped product from Impact Games, LLC

PeaceMaker made me think about how games can address serious issues…

So I designed and coded a game called Second Chances. A game about the love between a terminally ill man and his daughter…

The player begins the game with 14 days to live, and has to talk with his daughter through a point-click interface to salvage their tattered relationship while combating the physical pain of his condition with medication.

But I wanted to learn to make a commercial video game, so I went to work for Harmonix Music Systems Inc. in Cambridge, MA…

Guitar Hero is a video game franchise which uses a guitar-shaped controller to let players become rock stars. The first Guitar Hero game was developed in 2005 in 9 months, and few thought it would ever sell more than 150,000 units. (It’s sold over 1.5 million.) I was responsible for “authoring” songs in the game, creating the note gems that correspond to the five buttons of the guitar. This was done across four different difficulty levels, which needed to be divergent enough to be accessible to children and hardcore gamers alike. I also authored the multi-player mode to create a fun two-player experience for each individual guitar part.

Screen of the shipped version of Guitar Hero 1

While at Harmonix, I created dozens of prototype ideas for new music-related games…

An interface mockup for a music mini-game called “Rotate.” A combination Tetris and Amplitude-like beat matching game. The player must tap along to the music while switching around interface elements that correspond to specific colors. Player’s score Shapes correspond to controls on the PSP The Player rotates these four triangles to catch the right colored orbs as they move to the music

Some of these ideas fed into a project called Phase…

Which was about procedurally generated game play based on data derived from MP3 files…

Phase is now a game for the iPod . (you can download it through iTunes)

Before Harmonix, I was a student a CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center…

The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University offers a two-year Masters of Entertainment Technology degree, jointly conferred by Carnegie Mellon University's College of Fine Arts and School of Computer Science. At the ETC, technologists and fine artists work together on projects that produce real products that entertain, inform, and inspire. The core of the ETC’s curriculum is a course called Building Virtual Worlds. Building Virtual Worlds was an interactive design bootcamp at Carnegie Mellon taught by the legendary Randy Pausch. Small four-person teams built immersive interactive, story-driven environments. Here are photos of one of the five worlds I co-created...

Guiding Lights is a 5-7 minute interactive audience participation experience.

An audience in a movie theater passes around glow sticks , which are then picked up by a computer vision system.

The audience’s goal is to use the lights to guide a character , Martha the moth, around the screen, helping her avoid obstacles. I was responsible for leading the team that created the experience.

Professor Randy Pausch shows a 500 person audience the tap-lights they will use to experience “Guiding Lights.” (April 05)

7 Reasons You Should Work With Me
Active in social media – I blog and Twitter regularly
Combine left and right brain thinking
Deep passion for using design to transform business
Follow current trends of culture and media
Starting an independent consultancy to expand young consumer expertise
A natural story teller – writing and public speaking skills
I’m a nice guy, who likes helping people

Ross Popoff-Walker design strategist Thank you . blog: annoyingdesign.org /blog/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rosspw Twitter: twitter.com/rosspw email: [email_address]

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Portfolio of a Design Strategist

by Ross Popoff-Walker on May 30, 2008

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Portfolio of a Design Strategist — Presentation Transcript