Dissertation

In my dissertation I looked at the history of the graphical user interface (GUI), and how the attribution of human like traits and gestures to the PC has affected humans relationship to personal technologies in today's society.
I looked at how Apple changed the personal computer from a machine mostly used by people with computer literacy into a tool that ordinary non-technical users could access. The Macintosh in 1984 (one of the first computers with a GUI) was the product responsible for this change. The concept for this computer was to hide the technical parts of the machine away from the user, giving it a more familiar and human-like appearance to attract ordinary people who previously felt intimidated by this new technology. Apple's philosophy was "Since computers are so smart, wouldn't it make sense to teach computers about humans, instead of of teaching people about computers?" The design of the Macintosh GUI reflects this philosophy. The interface was given a familiar face that humans could relate to at a more personal and emotional level. This design strategy has continued to influence designs of user interfaces since.
Throughout the dissertation I discussed the negative and positive aspects of the 'computer as human' model drawing upon different theories concerning this, and touching upon anthropomorphism and animism. I also looked at the complexity of HCI alongside evolving technology and the computer industry's struggle in maintaining the trust of their users. Finally I looked at design strategies used in today's personal information devices and the affects on users relationship to personal technology.

One discovery I made was the difficulty the computer industry has had, throughout time, in dealing with the profound amount of new features and content at hand, whilst maintaining the usability needed for people to feel at ease and emotionally engage with the technology. I also discovered how a shift in the understanding of HCI has lead to products that aim to appeal to individual needs. Nowadays products and services aim to provoke feelings of personal importance, attachment and companionship, by providing individuals with user centred, customisable and playful designs. Mobile phones especially is a great example of this trend. I discovered that today's interfaces of personal technologies are designed to entertain an stimulate users senses through playful and theatrical displays to emotionally involve users. Manovich suggests that personal technologies today are designed with a 'form follows emotion' ideology rather than 'form follows function.' This means that the experience and emotional engagement in user interfaces have become as important as the functions they serve.


I enjoyed both the research and writing process of this project. I also enjoyed coming to some new discoveries and conclusions. I didn't enjoy writing the bibliography but I understand it's purpose and importance, and put a lot of effort into getting it right. The hardest thing was probably working out what research was relevant and what wasn't. I had to constantly remind myself of the key theme of the dissertation to avoid drifting away from the title of the dissertation. I tried to focus on making it enjoyable and interesting to read, making the language flow without too much disruption. I found it really satisfying when all the writing started to come together and form some answers and conclusions. Overall I am pleased with what I have achieved.

http://www.oman3d.com/tutorials/flash/portfolio_2_bc/

Where is it all going to end

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMK2B3XQEF_index_0.html

Google Maps Street View

Has anyone else come across this yet? It's quite fascinating you can walk around the streets in different cities in America, almost like you would in a computer game. It's quite realistic as it is based on real photographs. Not bad if you are planning a trip to a city you haven't been to before, but it does seem to have some issues regarding surveillance, try it out yourself under google maps, street view. I believe thay are planning to do it in Europe as well but have peoples faces blurred out. Interesting.

Very true

This quote, in my opinion, sums up exactly why we end up spending hours in front of our computers.

'I feel pressure from a machine that seems itself to be perfect and leaves no one and no other thing but me to blame. It is hard for me to walk away from a not-yet-proofread text on the computer screen. In the electronic writing environment in which making a correction is as simple as striking a delete key, I experience a typographical error not as a mere slip of attention, but as a moral carelessness, for who could be so slovenly as not to take the one or two seconds to make it right? The computer tantalizes me with its holding power—in my case the promise that if I do it right, it will do it right, and right away.'

(TURKLE1993:29-30)

Research for exam project

http://www.henshall.com/blog/archives/000552.html

http://skypejournal.com/blog/2004/02/the_disruptive_nature_of_skype.html

Excitement, Snow, Blogger Challenge, Exam Project, Skype, Virtual Babysitter and much more..

Hello Friends.

I am just having one of those moments that you only get once in a while where everything seems so exciting and every thought and idea you have so perfectly inspiring. So what better time than now to share some of these in my blog.
I have to admit that the excitement may have started when I woke up this morning discovering a thick layer of snow everywhere. You may think that a Scandinavian would be unimpressed and not jump up and down like a little kid, but you would be wrong.
Ideas, ideas, ideas....I can't type fast enough right now.
Firstly I would just like to remind everyone how little time we have left on the course and how nice it would be if we could all squeeze the most out of these blogs during our last few months of studies. I guess I am mostly speaking of myself as I haven't used my blog near enough since Christmas, which seems a shame when I have the opportunity to share thoughts and ideas with people of similar interest. So today I am deciding to make a fresh start blogging as often as I can, so watch it people, especially you Dan Stoneman, I am taking up the blogging challenge of who can blog the most. Anyone else up for the challenge?


Over the weekend I have been thinking about the exam project. Although I have no finalised idea for this project, I do know that I would like to use Skype in some interesting creative way.

Over the past two years Skype ( the free Internet telephony service) has played a major role in my life as it has enabled me to talk and see my family on regular day to day basis. I no longer feel many miles from home and never miss my family as they are right there in front of me on the screen. It amazes me how much a web camera and a free call service can change the nature of a telephone call. I guess I am lucky to have a good relationship with my family, we are all quite relaxed and never have any arguments or complex family dramas, so often I just use Skype as a way of being in their company whilst I am doing other stuff. This would never be the case if you had to pay for you calls and couldn't see the person you was talking to as it would seem pointless holding a telephone to your ear without talking whilst paying for every minute of your call. Well this is not how Skype works, I can now just be another person in the room joining the conversation when and if I want to, just as you would in any ordinary family gathering. I find this really interesting as it is a whole new form of engagement in cyberspace. I have over the past two years been the family member trapped on the screen but fully engaged and able to see the same as the others and join in the conversation when wanting. Having said that there are some limitations, physically I can't join in when everyone is offered a cup of tea or a piece of cake for example. My brother has also on several occasions joked about closing the laptop screen whilst saying "That's enough of you sister". This is quite funny because it is like they have the ultimate control, I am just helplessly trapped inside the monitor.

I have also tried to be a virtual babysitter. My brother clipped his webcam to my four month old niece's cot and told me to look after her whilst he was in the kitchen making some food. He told me to give him a shout if she started looking unhappy.

Now that she is a bit older, about a year and a half, we also have fun using Skype. I see her about once a week and I think she experiences me as her ultimate teletubbie character who sits somewhere behind a whole in the wall and talks to her directly. Much more fun than the TV which doesn't say your name and respond to your actions.

Some links to art projects and articles involving the use of Skype:

http://girlfriend.mediamatic.net/

https://developer.skype.com/wiki/CommunityProjects

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4639824.stm

Organising Information

Over the easter break I went to Berlin for a long weekend. This time I managed to visit the film museum which got me thinking about how curators organise and display different material. There was a lot of information giving a history of how films have evolved from early film pioneers til today's cinema. I was really impressed with the overall presentation of the information. You walked through 10-15 different rooms each completely different but with a feel of consistency and flow. Lots of mirrors and low ceilings gave you a sense of the excitement that would have occurred around the early days of cinema. The rooms were on different levels and throughout the journey you could look down at other people who were ahead of you. Over the past three years curation is something I have become increasingly aware of especially when I had to build an interactive museum guide for brighton musum. I think it is as important how things are displayed, as what they are. Good content can fail miserably if displayed badly. When you are trying to capture an audience, who doesn't know anything before they look at a series of work, you have to find a way of capturing their attention and keeping them engaged throughout. I think this way of thinking should be equally important for the course I am doing as it is the same with websites, books, posters, DVD menus etc.
The Invisible Computer by Donald Norman - A book I've been reading about the complexity of organising information on the computer.

Hove Museum - Film Gallery

Had a little look at Hove Museums Film Gallery. It is small but really interesting, so for those of you interested in films it's worth a look. The museum also has a Local History Gallery which is really good. I discovered that the house I am living in was build around 1878, I didn't expect it to be that old.

Character Animation for D&AD brief - The Cleaner

Been a while since I updated my blog, so here is the latest regarding the D&AD project.

Went with the character animation brief as I enjoy animation and want to be involved with this in the future.

The idea
The idea I am working on is for a 2D character animation portraying an old cleaning lady in her daily routine. The subject being a humoristic take on the habits and rituals we build through repetitive chores, in this case cleaning. The animation will portray the cleaner's personality through body movements, facial expressions and timing of different actions.

The sequence of events that will take place are as follows. The old cleaning lady is walking to work along a busy street in the city. This opening scene will introduce the cleaner by showing her whole body figure, her way of walking and her day to day environment. In the following scene the character enters her work, an old apartment block where she cleans the communal stairs. The sound of a bucket being filled with water leads into the third scene showing the old lady mopping stairs. Her cleaning routine is very methodical, she mops each step five times and before moving onto the next step she takes two deep breaths. This sequence is repeated continuously until a person walks down the stairs messing up the clean floor. The character sighs deeply, shakes her head and starts all over again from the top of the stairs. Half way through she is again interrupted by a second person coming up the stairs. Again she sighs deeply and shakes her head and grumbles this time looking more red faced and frustrated. Once the person has walked past and isn't looking, the cleaner points her mop at the person in a threatening manner. Finally the last scene is showing the cleaner repeating the mopping routine from the top of the stairs.

Small changes such as the cleaners breathing becoming heavier and her face more red, will allude to time passing. The animation will have music at the beginning and end of the animation and sound effects in between.

Sources of inspiration for the idea:
The main inspiration I had for this idea came from an observation I made in Berlin. A big group of us were walking down the stairs from the hotel. The cleaning lady had just mopped all the stairs, I was the last person to walk past her and as I did she just rolled her eyes and sighed deeply. This made me think about the irony of a cleaner having a very structured daily routine that is completely interrupted by people messing up their cleaned surfaces. I think there is something quite funny about the whole idea of cleaning because it is something that seems so insignificant as it usually takes seconds before something is messed up again.

The second source of inspiration was from a job I had in an after school club a few years ago. The cleaner there was an older lady called Murtle, she had cleaned there for over 20 years and had a very funny dry sense of humor. If any of the kids got in her way she would point her mop or broom at them in a threatening manner, which they thought was very funny.

The final source of inspiration for this idea was from an experience I had in France when I was about 11 years old. I was in a public toilet in Avignon and stupidly decided to wash my feet in the sink. A french cleaning lady noticed this and went mad in french. I didn't understand what she was saying but I got the impression she was very angry, understandably.

Generally the idea is very influenced by Sylvain Chomet's animation Belleville Rendez-Vous and Chris Wares comic book Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Both of these works uses clever techniques in order to portray a characters emotions and expressions without the use of words and dialogue.


















Progress so far:
Have finalissed:
Storyboards
Treatment
Discription of character in detail
Content ready to animate
Music track (provided by a friend)
All sound effects

BERLIN 2008 - Student trip to Transmediale, festival for art and digital culture

The BA Student trip to Berlin (Jan 28th - Feb 3rd) was fantastic. We got back last night and sitting here looking back over the past 7 days, I am wondering were to begin...
The main reason for the trip was to visit the yearly Transmediale Festival which was held in the beautiful building "Haus der Kulturen der Welt" situated by Tiergarten near the centre of Berlin. The festival ran from Tuesday til Sunday and included exhibitions with installations and art pieces, seminars on different subjects related to art and digital culture and showings of films, documentaries, live performances and music.











This years theme was "conspire" and a lot of the conferences and work shown had taken a negative approach to the subject by looking at issues regarding the corporate world in relation to the identity of the individual and a culture as a whole. Below are some descriptions of a few of the seminars I attended which illustrates this.


















CP02:Public Signatures Wed 30 Jan: 4pm (Theatresaal)

Public Signatures was two documentaries about 'Culture Jamming' and 'unauthorized street-art'.
The first documentary by David Schwerten was made as a result of two years research into European 'Culture Jamming'. I found it very interesting and key to many current paradoxes seen in media advertising and logo designs.
As described in the programme, "modern culture jamming is distributing viral information like fake media campaigns to 'jam' the mass media".
One of the people interviewed for the documentary described it as using the media itself to draw attention to how we are influenced my the media. We are all part of the system and we can't escape the system.
The idea of culture jamming dates back to the beginning of the 20th century looking at Marcel Duchamp and the French avant-garde group Situationist International.
In the documentary various cases of modern culture jamming were talked about, including a campaign by Nike where they travelled around placing a Nike infobox in various city's. People could enter the infobox which had a 3d sculpture displayed
giving information about a giant sculpture to be placed in the Karlsplatz or Nikeplatz the following year. The giant sculpture of Nike's famous logo, a "Swoosh", a 36 metre long by 18 metre high monument supposedly made from "special steel covered with a revolutionary red resin made from recycled sneaker soles". The information was obviously not true but visitors believing it were shocked and angry by the suggestion of a big corporation buying a piece of an old historic square to promote their identity.

Another example talked about was Hans Bernhard from ubermorgan.com who a few years ago created a website where people could bit in an online auction for Americans votes. voteauction.com This obviously caused a big stir.
One other point talked about, that I found interesting, was the idea of logos and signs being presented everywhere and in a sense being forced upon us, yet they have a copyright. I think one of the persons interviewed suggested that this was like having

copyrights on trees and other natural surroundings. He amongst others believed that public advertising should have no copyright as it is already being placed upon the individual unwillingly and should therefor be available for anyone to copy just like trees and buildings are.

The second documentary by Volker Sattel, Mario Mentrup was about a secret unauthorised street - art exhibition in the small city Wuppertal in 2006. The film follows the perspectives of artist who uses the industrial city walls as an exhibition space. One artist was using the dirty black walls along the monorail as a backdrop for his artwork, by cleaning lines on the walls rather than graffiting on to them, he could erase white from black. I found this fascinating as it made me think about the legal aspect of making art in urban spaces, usually it is illegal to paint on to something but if you are cleaning something is it a different matter? The documentary had a very slow and slightly gloomy feel about it which made it, at the time, not very interesting but looking back ,very memorable.

Session 2:Embedding Fear Thu 31 Jan: 1pm (Auditorium)
'Embedding Fear' was about the Internet as a platform for political, military and corporate propaganda and the perceived threat of terrorism. The discussion was based upon the freedom and access of web communication becoming a complex issue when confound with a corrupted image of what is real. especially in fighting against war on terror. The four speakers talked about the subject within four different caegories, the world wide risk society, Position of the individual, The Internet - terrorist spectacle, and the illusion surrounding people and the internet.

Faceless: Opportunistic infections of the surveillance apparatus
Fri 1st Feb:2pm (The Co-opting strategies salon)

Faceless was a presentation by Manu Luksch about her research into surveillance cameras and her ways of using them as an artistic tool. She did a small project in a housing estate in the UK using dancing teenagers in front of many security cameras, as a humorous response to Bushby Burkely's choreographies. After this project she became more interested in the legal aspects and spent some time in London seeing how many pieces of footage of herself on surveillance camera she could claim. She sent

hundreds of letters, but only 10% of her requests for footage were successful. In the received footage all other faces than hers were cut out. She then decided to try and make a film telling a story of a woman who lived in a faceless world dominated by time. However the further she got with her film the harder it became to claim footage, as regulations were tightened and most letters she sent came back with a negative reply saying the footage had unfortunately been deleted. Instead of finishing the film she tried to work on changes in movement within the footage that she did receive, such as movements of shadows, lighting etc.

Overall she works with the legal aspects of the image and the aesthetic which you don't have control over.

I found her project quite interesting and unusual. The ideas of using tools within public spaces as a personal mean for artistic expression is quite fascinating.

www.ambientTV.net

General opinion about Transmediale:

Overall I think the festival was a great experience with plenty of interesting input that I feel I can use in the context of the course and future projects. The one thing that disappointed me was the quality and attention to detail in some of the work presented at the festival. In one of the films the subtitles were unreadable, and in one conference the video didn't work. My opinion on this is that surely these things should have been tested beforehand especially as people pay a lot of money to attend these programs. Having said that I was really loving the overall atmosphere of the festival, the place seemed relaxed, friendly with families, many nationalities and people who new each other from previous years festivals.
At the time it was all very overwhelming, and trying to keep up with all that was going on could at times seem frustrating, but now that I have come away from it all, I can honestly say that I enjoyed it and would even consider going back one day.

Other interesting things I saw in Berlin:
The Bauhaus exhibition
The Holocaust Monument
The Aquadom
Panorama bar

(More to Come)

Project: D&AD Global Student Awards Jan. - Mar. ' 08

Iv'e looked at the different briefs for the D&AD student awards. Most of them seem very commercial and quite geared towards selling or relaunching the identity of a brand. However a few of them seem a bit more open for personal experimentation and these I like the sound of. The ones I am particularly interested in are:

HSI London - Create a character then portray it through an animation to express it's personality

Research Studios - Re-launch FUSE Magazine by designing its 20th issue

Davisystems - Produce an illustrated book about yourself or someone else

MTV - MTV is a virus, what does it look like, how does it behave and where does it invade

Gollancz/Orion books - Create a striking new look for the "Space Opera" book series

The Macintosh with the first graphical user interface presented in 1984

http://static.hugi.is/misc/movies/1984macintro.mov

DJ Scotch Egg

Had a presentation by Dj Skotch Egg, interesting stuff. He played a series of his tracks whilst explaining the inspiration that formed the style for each track. All the music was made using sounds from gameboys. What I particularly found interesting was the range of different inspiration he had incorporated into his music. By having an instrument so controversial as a gameboy he is able to work with a whole range of genres, from Dub to Barch to Stoner rock. Very experimental. In most cases mucisians tend to stick to certain style according to what instrument they play, for example a saxophone for jazz and a violin for classical. DJ Skotch Egg likes all genres and expresses this in his music. He also talked about the idea of limiting himself (or his amount of tools) in order to be more imaginative and creative. This is a concept I have been interested in for a while, and tried to explore in my final piece last year by making an animation based on rules and limitations, inspired by Lars von Triers experimental film "The five obstructions". I agree that if you limit the amount of options you have you force yourself to be more imaginative.
We were also shown the piece by John Cage "4'33" which is a a 4.33 min long composed piece of complete silence. |It was interesting to see the idea of silence as being a piece of sound in itself, it got me thinking if you could make film with no content, but even a black or white screen would seem like content, so maybe no screen at all. I guess the reason why the 4.33 piece worked was because it had a conductor and an orchestra and everything was timed in fine detail.
The sounds used by DJ Skotch Egg were old school gameboy sounds which bring a sense of nostalgia for people who used to play these games, adding to the overall experience.

http://www.djscotchegg.com/

Research

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/
http://swarmsketch.com/
http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/Pixelfest/