Creative Systems

'Your Personalized Design' - 2021

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'Your Personalized Design' is a graphical interface program that allows a user to use a joystick plus switches to draw abstract stylized designs. It is meant to be a spontaneous experience in which the user has a balance of randomization as well as control, always a good formula for inspired design! The designs are quickly made and ephemeral, as much of an experience as an end product when the program is run on the console it is made for. The programs can be created as entertainment or for some quick design inspiration.

Design Choices

Instead of randomized colors, I wanted more control over a user's design to make it more stylized so I created 3 hard-coded palettes. The occurrence of these color palettes is randomly generated on each run. This sort of control was a continuation of the forced stylization attached to the joystick controls. In the end, the thin quality of lines also made the designs start to look like embroidery to me.

n order to make the device interactive, the analog joystick, button, and switch were used along with the ESP32. The analog joystick, in particular, needed the ESP32's digital to analog converters to be able to read more than just high and low when it was used. Arduino IDE was used to write the code to receive user input as well as upload it to the ESP32. It is possible to run my program on a laptop without the Pi and just use the bottom half of the device. However, for a more specified and device-like experience, I wanted to incorporate a display. Rather than using a tool on a laptop, I wanted users to feel as if they were using a device specifically made to draw these designs. With the display, the device also became more portable (if you forget about the cords) and proportionate to the enclosure with the controls. The display is connected to the Pi via HDMI to mini HDMI. The 5" LCD display did require some pretty simple driver setting up, although I learned the hard way that you must use the HDMI0 port on the Pi and not the HDMI1 port, or else the display won't work.