A tool for creativity, Mélange allows its users to create collages and tell stories using online media. Designers are often taught to create collages as a means to gain insights into design problems. As part of my Master's graduation project, I decided to expand on this, by designing and creating a tool, which allows users to tell stories and frame solution spaces using today's digital media. In essence, it's scrapbooking with online media.
Mélange
Designers and many other creative professionals tend to think visually. In order to support this visual thinking, they surround themselves with inspirational material, like photographs, film clips, magazine clippings and sketches. This material is often opportunistically gathered and stored in personal collections. Such a collection gets meaning, relative to a design problem, when the materials therein are used in creative processes. A designer may tap into this collection in order to tell a story, exemplify a certain mood, show relavant examples, etc. In other words, these source of inspiration provide support for creative exploration.
Mainly because of the art of Dave McKean and other surrealistic art, I became interested in collages and using image manipulation for this purpose in particular. If the goal is the collage itself, this emphasis on the visual is fine, but I noticed that creative professionals were getting inspired more and more by other than static visual media. While rich in nature, these new digital and often online media tend to be ill-suited for meaningful collecting or using these in an evolved form of the classical collage.
Mélange allows creative professionals to tap into today's vast online media collections, such as Flickr and YouTube, and use these in an online scrapbooking/mash-up tool. The concept would allow users to create multiple scrapbooks (based on specific topics presumably) and share its pages with other users, making it a social media tool as well. However, I never got around to properly designing this, as it wouldn't have left enough time for prototyping.
A functional frontend and other prototypes, created using MooTools, can be found here.