Marek Plichta | Interface Design Portfolio

Newsblocks

Overview
Newsblocks is a concept for an emotional news filtering tool. Depending on their energy level and mood, users can filter out news articles through shaping forms.

news, filter, information architecture, mood, form, shapes,
Prof. Boris Müller
3ds Max, newspaper and scissors
2005

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Task
In this two week long university project the task was given to restructure the information architecture of a traditional newspaper.

My Solution
Depending on their energy level and mood, newspaper readers will want to read different kind of articles. Newsblocks allows filtering the news through attributes like: length, simplicity, positivism and rubrics. Because the users can filter articles for emotional values, the interface allows emotional input. The users can filter an article through freely cutting a form into a block.
▪ Size of a piece equals length of an article.
▪ Roundish form lead to positive articles, and angularly forms lead to negative articles.
▪ Simple forms lead to simple articles, and complex forms lead to sophisticated articles.
Although a physical box (as shown in the graphics) is pure fiction, the core principles could be easily translated to software on a PDA with touch input or stylus.

Preliminary examination: my unscientific proove that one can equaly categorize articles of a real newspaper according to simple/complex and negative/positiv values. Each number represents an article and its wordcount.