Fall in Ohio
For our next investigations, we’re exploring the use of gestural interaction with an interface. I’ve chosen a museum setting for the context of my piece—the taxonomy i’ve created exhausts most of the possible hand gestures, providing me with a referential source to refer to throughout the duration of the semester.
Concept Map created of my database used to guide my explorations this semester
After loosing this project when my hard-drive crashed, i’m excited to report that I’ve FINALLY finished (well, nothing is ever finished) recreating it.
This semester we have investigated the idea of interface by exploring a chosen data base. I chose to explore monuments in need of being repaired the list that I was working from was generated by the World Monuments Fund.
This particular iteration explores the idea of making choices through category.
Forms of Future—response to reading
This past Friday, David and I had the opportunity to lead seminar. The suggested readings for the week had an overarching theme of play, the virtual world, and of course interface. We decided to restructure the class for the day and had groups of two answer questions that we provided on one of the readings. Each group was to then present their thoughts through “a new interface” by creating a short video. Towards the end of the class we shared our videos then discussed our findings as a class.
David and I were somewhat unsure outcome of the of this activity before class on Friday, but I think that the activity turned out very well. This exercise gave everyone in the class a unique opportunity to think through creation, which is not something normally done in seminar. In the conversation that David and I had while making this video, we started out by doing most of our idea generation through normal conversation, towards the end, I noticed that a great deal of our idea exchanges were done through this interface. All in all—a success!
This weeks reading:
The New Media Reader: ”Will there be condominiums in data space?”
Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet:
“Virtuality and Its Discontents”
http://hevra.haifa.ac.il/~soc/lecturers/talmud/files/547.htm
Rethinking Media Change: Introduction; “Reflections on Interactivity”; and “Forms of Future”
…Speaking of Authenticity
I recently finished some freelance work for a Christian Rap Artist based out of California. As an artist himself, the design for his album art was born from his original vision. He wanted the art to look like one of the “NOW” music CD’s. Not exactly my style, but why not take on the challenge—could be fun, right? It occurred to me as I was studying the art of previous NOW CD covers to better understand the 3D letter forms (this was the first time in my design history that I have skewed type to make big flashy letters) that I was overtly appropriating the NOW aesthetic. Ironic for someone who just helped plan a symposium on Design, Community, and the Rhetoric of Authenticity…
And another semester has begun!!
This project is a piece that I have been working on for the last several weeks with an industrial designer, Tim Bennett. It was designed for a competition sponsored by Metropolis Magazine on creating a small but significant sustainable fix. We decided to go with a conveniently collapsible coffee cup.
The following is an exert from our application. The question, what makes it important?
Our small fix creates a simple solution that has the potential to put a substantial dent in the amount of human waste. When one person purchases one coffee (or tea) everyday and disposes of the container after its use, they contribute approximately 23 lbs. of waste a year. When that number is multiplied by 108,000,000 coffee consumers in the United States alone, the issues related to coffee consumption become quite evident. Reusable to-go coffee containers that currently existing on the market are bulky and inconvenient. The hassle they create leaves consumers opting to use disposable coffee containers provided by coffee houses. Our product provides a sleek and convenient alternative to any other warm beverage vessel on the market. Its ability to collapse down yields the option of storing the container in a bag, a purse, or even a pocket.
I believe that you can learn a lot about how something works by figuring out how to make it stop working. Watching a system struggle and collapse can tell you about what that system needs and what it doesn’t.
So I did try that day to begin a little project with no preconceived idea of what I would do—and even though it was difficult to get started, I have to admit it yielded results very different from anything I had produced before
PROJECT 3
The design strategy I decided to investigate for this project is Form making. Trough the process of creating in which the designer considers form first, I believe the designer is able to come explore many options and come up with more innovative, thought-provoking, and intuitive solutions to a given problem. I really struggled with how to present this idea, likely because (as Denise pointed out) I was having a hard time defining my concept as a design strategy or a methodology.
The solution pictured above is an investigation of my own exploration of ‘hierarchy within a community’. Through various form making processes, I considered the chosen prompt and demonstrated the idea through form.
This project would have been more successful if I had explored more versions using a wider variety of form making strategies and had I restricted the time spent on each example as to avoid the issue of them looking like “finished products”.
