A new year, a new semester, and possibly a new outlook on life for some. Seems like a new semester really brings about starting anew by having us present ourselves to the rest of the class. This is even more daunting to me because I had to pathetically select only myself in a survey of “people you know in this class.” Anyway, my name is Chanamon Ratanalert. I’m a junior in Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction. I absolutely love design but was discouraged from pursuing it for the entire time that I spent legally under my parent’s control. I find it pretty funny that I ended up steering my career as an IS major into the path of design anyway (take that, mother).

So far, my classes have either been entirely computing or entirely design, never together. It’s something that I’ve dabbled with on the side but haven’t fully experienced. I have high hopes for this class (IACD) to not only mesh together the two sides of my life but to teach me numerous methods and mediums for creativity.

My Twitter: @jaguarspeaks
My Github: https://github.com/chanamonster

A project that I worked on last semester was bringing the board game Battleship, popularized by Milton Bradley, to the computer screen and creating it as a version that you could play with someone without needing to be in the same room as them. I do not currently have it online because I ran over the trial time for its previous host; I’ll hopefully get it up shortly. This month-long project was the first that I created entirely from scratch–from idea conception to project presentation. It was also a fair collaboration between my coding side and my design side, since I wanted to present it with multiple graphics (see images below) and interactions. It was written using Javascript and Socket.io. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out (unlike how I felt about my janky 15112 project). I had been actually excited to present it despite my general hesitation toward public speaking, and it ended up winning two awards: Best User Experience and Best Visual Design.