Last week I started on a new project. It is going to be a showcase application build in Flash. The showcase will be implemented on the website of the Hogeschool Rotterdam under the sector CMI. Work from CMI-students will be available in this showcase.
It’s a great project to work on because I get to dig in to all kinds of techniques and because I get a lot of freedom. Interaction wise I get to solve all the details which I love to think about from a technical viewpoint. Technology wise I get to work with OOP structures and Finite State Machines.
Finite State Machine is a design pattern close to programming Artificial Intelligence. It says that every object can have it’s own state and the actions accompanying that state. Every state has specific actions when the object enters or leaves the state. I found it very interesting to think about how to apply this technique and got me inspired to make something with it. So in my spare time I’m going to try and build a small flash-app where creatures will live in and evolve themselves. Let’s see how that works out!
I also think that FSM as a design pattern could be useful to use when thinking about Interaction Design. During an interaction one will find itself entering and leaving various states of it’s flow. When you define these states and think about how these are entered and left you would be able to orchestrate the flow in a different way. I’ll try to make an infographic out of this sometime. I’m quite interested in how others see this approach and if they think it’s useful or not.

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