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pressbooks-3

Another bookish experiment with Hugh McGuire! Pressbooks (based partly on Bookoven). PressBooks is an open source book publishing platform, that makes it easy for individuals or teams to author books, and to generate clean, well-formatted books in multiple outputs.

Status: Completed.

harbour-1

harbour-2

harbour-3

The Harbour Banquet and Conference Centre offers elegant rooms of various sizes and a breathtaking panoramic view overlooking Bronte Outer Harbour Marina and Lake Ontario. The Harbour team wanted something that expressed the subtle elegance of their facilities with a hint of sexiness in the imagery used to attract a younger clientele.

Status: In Development.

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Higher Education Marketing (HEM) offers Internet marketing services for schools, universities, and community colleges around the world. Philippe Taza of HEM wanted an SEO driven layout, a friendly and approachable palette and a certain playfulness to reflect the dynamism of higher education.

Status: Completed

Hi! My name is Marie-Eve and I like design and research, startups and academia, napkin doodles and clean grids, cats AND dogs. I believe there’s a way that we all can get along and make things work (proof: the cat and dog sleeping on my couch right now). I’m a designer, researcher, and recent graduate from the University of Toronto’s iSchool where I earned a Masters degree in Information Studies. My thesis (a huge 240-pages brick that you can find here) was on the annotation practices of graduate students, under the supervision of Dr. Matt Ratto, at the Critical Making Lab. I discussed annotation as not only the end-product of one’s engagement with a text, but also as the process that enables critical reading and, ultimately, the progress of one’s research.

I enrolled in the Information Studies program because I believed that design and information are intimately linked: I wanted to study the raison d’être of design, that is, the varying importance of different types of information and the consequences of this constant flux on design (basically a fancy way of saying that I wanted to study Information Architecture). While I have touched on this quite a bit during my studies, I decided to focus my thesis and coursework on a newly found passion/academic interest: the process of creation, management and use of information. Just how do people create new information? Why? How do they remember this information? Do they keep it on sticky notes piled on their desk (guilty!), or else? How can we create a better information environment, conducing to a better information hygiene?

And this is the philosophy that now commands my design projects, whether print-based, digital or material (see: Critical Making Lab). I like to build around the expected management and use of information, observe and poll users and individuals to know how just what I got right and/or wrong, adjust my designs, etc. Design is iteration (in some ways).

Typology of Annotation

Volume of Different Types of Annotation throughout Project

Lifecycle of Annotation

Annotation Practices and Social Worlds: Different Views

I have recently (August 2010) defended my thesis entitled “The Annotative Practices of Graduate Students: Tensions & Negotiations Fostering an Epistemic Practice”, under the supervision of Matt Ratto at the Critical Making Lab. You can download this 240-pages brick right here.

Here is my abstract:

This research explores the annotation and note-taking practices of graduate students at a large Canadian university and reports on the sets of activities, habits, objects, tools and methods that define the practice. In particular, this empirical study focuses on understanding the integration of annotation and note-taking practices within larger scholarly processes such as reading, analyzing and writing. This study therefore aims to describe and analyze annotation and note-taking not only as the material externalities of the research process, but also as crucial epistemic practices allowing students to progress from one research activity to the other. Interviews are supplemented by document collection and analyzed using a multi-perspectival framework based on theories of practice. The findings describe an annotation lifecycle and suggest a new model of the scholarly process using annotation and note-taking practices as units of analysis. The study further discusses annotation as a primitive epistemic practice and examines the productive tensions and contradictions fostering the student’s progress towards her goals. Addressing annotation practices in light of the rise of digital textuality, this research finally proposes requirements for future tools supporting scholarly practice.

I’ll add a bit more here, and expand on the topic in the next couple of weeks. This research is still ongoing and the next step is to operationalize my findings: defining user requirements for the future development of a collaboration/research platform based on my research findings.

My thesis is released under the WTFPL free software license (it’s a real license, I swear! See here.)

Logo

Event Poster

Hack Space Poster

Hack Space Poster in the Wild

This interactive conference sought to extend conversations about new modes of engaged DIY citizenship and politics. Retro-styled logo and posters were created, and styling was applied to the website.

Status: Completed.

HomePage

Blog

Portfolio

Large Image

Think Retail consults and represents international, national, and regional retail chains.

Status: Completed

Logo

HomePage

Landing Page

Better Faster is a blog aiming to inspire its readers to improve all aspects of their lives. Emphasis is on video and audio content, while navigation elements and meta information frames the primary info/content.

Status: In Development.

Application

HomePage

Right Hand Man is a native iPhone app for ice-breakers. The application and website are heavily influenced by Saul Bass, mixing playfulness and mystery.

Status: Completed.

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Mona Moore is one of the hottest Montreal (and now LA!) shoe stores for avant-garde and runway styles. The girls at Mona Moore wanted to play with the theme of light: white, subtle lines, clean layout.

Status: In Development