My original idea was to use the GPS and compass functionality of the iPhone to direct one’s feet in the direction of the nearest space of play, but after considering the strengths of my partner James DeMond we decided a Javascript app would make for a nice cross-platform functionality on all browsers and smartphones so more people could use it.

I was inspired by the pastoral landscapes painted in the old days to convey lands of plenty and whilst Beethoven’s 6th Symphony played, I made the first design.

The color field at the top of the screen allowed a view to the underlying Google map while the bottom was solidly grounded to hold the porthole window. After I got the gist of what I wanted to portray down, I added icons specific to the season that would show on the underlying map as good suggestions of things to do.

After fooling around with the Google Maps API, James pronounced the circular porthole design dead as apparently when dealing with image overlays even transparent areas are treated as part of the image and that doesn’t allow you to interact with the map underneath. Square and rectangle windows cool, circle windows, not.

I hated it. I really wanted the wondrous magic of looking through a porthole to another world that a circular frame would provide so I tweaked the design a bit more.

And a bit more…

And a bit more. I used small floating dots to create a kind of effervescent effect to play with the viewer’s depth perception and recreate a little bit of the magic you experience in a field of fireflies at dusk, which also could be read as softly falling snow for the whimsy to span multiple seasons. I also added the call of Go / Allez so that once you discovered where you were and what was good to do, you’d… go do it.

After James had it up and working I realized that though the color field was sky-like on my screen, on a larger monitor or screen size the effect would be lost and it would look like just another rectangle. Keeping with the idea of discovery, I changed the color overlay to read like you had set down your glass on a table and were looking through the bottom of it into something extraordinary.

The effect was hard to pull off so I blurred it up a bit so it seemed to read like a foggy window and added more glowing bits.

Which worked well until we discovered that there wasn’t data available for some of the things in each season or there was a lot more data sets available for individual seasons, so 2 suggested activities turned into 8 and I needed to redesign the content keeping this in mind. I discovered how to make the square that I was bounded by disappear with the way I erased and cut up the pieces of the image for the page. On the advice of a friend I went back to a cleaner more defined look to the elements and realized I was still holding on to parts of the design that no longer made sense to be present. I moved the rotation of the seasons out of the porthole and made them more in tune with how one would think of the earth orbiting the sun to give the information more of a grounding in reality. In order to advance through the seasons and see all pages you need to click the sun and it will only go around in a circle, pausing to load the data for each season as one would go through a year; winter, spring, summer and autumn.

When building web pages and apps it’s easy to forget the concept of time and nature. Why would one go to the trouble of incorporating asymmetrical shapes or buttons that take you through a journey in time when it’s so much more useful and utilitarian to stick to squares? The simple answer is because it reminds us of our humanity. We contribute daily to our collective wisdom through the web and the windows that we use to interact with and add to it need to reflect more than bits and bytes in order for us to remember how organic and experiential the world is. It’s a harder road to design upon but in the end it will help to preserve the random complexity of life.

You can experience the application for yourself here.

The lens captured movement in nanoseconds and I witnessed an unusual unfolding…

The girl with her handkerchief raised high knew what positive thoughts could do and her fist started eddies of hiccuping light.

The light floated up and suddenly I saw when I zoomed out a most remarkable creature.

At the instant I realized what the light was connected to, it burst into dazzling luminescence emanating from the center outwards. “Great Scott!” I exclaimed and fell directly backwards.

“I shall have to try this lens again!”

She was laughing at something I said and didn’t see what passed behind her.

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked.

“No.” she said.

“I’m glad you could get off work early” he said.
“Me too.” she responded.

She reached over to take his hand while the light changed to red.

“Be careful here.”

A soft gust of wind pushed her back towards her friends.

“..Yes Dad.”

“…and HOLD!”

They looked at her expectantly, the memory of movements practiced already accumulating in corners and sifting softly to the floor. Outside a car honked sharply, causing more of the girls’ thoughts to fall.

“AGAIN!”

… if you want to know more about me” she said.

He stared at the sand between his shoes. “Okay… what do you like to do?”

“Oh, you know… stuff.”

“…Like?”

She laughed and the pocket of air surrounding them popped, filling them both with warmth.

He grinned and looked at the sand again.

that we discovered there is no such thing as distance at all.

She looked up from her half finished text and stared in wonderment and fear.

It responded with a harmonized hum and a new message appeared on her phone:

“<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 …”