Juliet's Blo BLo bLo bLOg~

Here is the link to our process diary website: Ked’s 1930’s Surrealism Collection, Process Diary

This is the video that we have used for our final presentation:

These are the patterns that we used:

And the final posters:

\

Part 2: Writing
1. Changes over time are seen by the way people behave. One of the obvious changes is that more people are now eco-friendly compare to 10 years ago. Lots of companies use this as a selling point too.
2. Being a designer, we can design propagandas to influence others to changes. Although it is hard for individuals to affect political changes, us designers can build websites to spread messages, making videos and posters would also rally round.
3. Freedom means no one is controlling you, you are allowed to do anything you like without burden. I find that staying in the country side is the most free as there are less influences around you and everything is calm, it makes me feel that we are all back at the start where there are no problems in life.
4. My own ‘potential utopia’ would be a place where people can express themselves freely but not offending others, somewhere that has a cleaner and better environment, and where things can be accessed easily.
5. I was born in Hong Kong. I grew up in Vancouver, Canada. And I now live in Manhattan, New York.

Part 3: Interface Critique
1. The current state of the site is fun and allows people to access information clearly. However, I feel that the color palette is not very pleasing as the use of grey tones make it hard to read.
2. The aesthetics of the site is very robotic for a site that promotes social change. I think something that involves more of the environment would make it more successful. Also, the months are in order which makes is hard for the users to understand what is happening.
3. It’s very interesting how there are circles in the ‘search page’, but I feel that it is hard to use.
4. I think that the web designer should try to design it so that people can access them in a even better way. For example, websites should be well designed so that users would not have difficulty in using it. This website isn’t very clear as for how we use it and what information it gives.
5. The tools are very neat in relation to one another. There is a very specific style to it that makes it uniform. However, the tools are a bit hard to use as the click area is small.
6. The tools made me think that there will be music playing as it looks like some play and fast-forwarding buttons. I think simple arrows or page numbers would be easier for the users to understand.
7. I think that by changing the color of the site would help a lot with its legibility.

We looked at a few examples in class today that inspired us on what to do for our final interactive project.
I really like the projects that Charlie Todd creates. Here is an example of the “Frozen Grand Central”.

I think that it is really amusing to cause a scene, especially ones that people wouldn’t expect that would happen at all. It is amazing how much attention they get out of the projects that they do. I think it would be interesting if we created a project that would also be able to cause a scene around the school elevator.

Another example that I like by Charlie Todds is the “Human Mirror” Project.

During class, our group came up with several different ideas of how we can make people interact within the elevator. Ideas such as talking to them even when we don’t know them, putting on music to change people’s mood, putting up a canvas to allow people to write thoughts on it, and play games such as ‘finishing the sentence’, ‘cross words’ and ‘twister’. We wanted to make people not use the elevator as often as another idea, we thought of pressing all the buttons to make the elevator stop on every floor so that people would get out and walk. Or even put up signs such on the elevators such a ‘work in progress’, so people cannot take them and will be forced to walk up and down the staircase.

I’ve researched some ideas of what we can do in the elevators to change people’s interaction inside. It would we interesting if we somehow cover up all the numbers on the elevator buttons and see what people’s reaction would be, or even to mix up the numbers. Or we can pretend to have someone fainting or have an asthma attack and see if anyone will be helping out.

This is a stop motion lego animation, I think we can incorporate the idea of using stop motion as a way to document out project.

And here is a flash animation that loops. If we use one of the screens, maybe we can create a flash animation project that keeps looping for people to see.

After reading the article “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, it makes me wonder where technology will take us to, and what is going to happen next. Everything seems a lot more convenient and efficient as technology progresses. We start to rely on these technology as if it’s something ‘natural’. We take many of these technology for granted and don’t consider about what they will do to us or how they would change out lives. Imagine we didn’t have transportation for a week, it would change a lot of peoples routines enormously as many use them to travel around to school and work everyday.

For example, Adobe Photoshop can manipulate with pictures so well that it is hard for us to identify whether the photos are real or not. They will have the new CS5 program that will launch in around a month’s time. This program has already been amusing numerous people with its new tools; things that take us, designers, a few hours to tweak now only needs a click or two and it’s done. It makes us worry in fact, of maybe loosing our role as designers. Therefore I guess there are good and bad things towards these new technologies after all. The Adobe programs come out every 18 months or so, and they advance so quickly, it makes us, the users, always have to catch up with the new programs.

—————————————–
—————————————–

The other article, ‘Interface Culture’ by Steven Johnson, talks about how we look at the new interfaces. It is interesting when he asks the reader “By what criteria should we judge our interface?”. Computers change the way we see things, the “territory you see through the augmented window’ is ‘not the normal landscape of plans and tree and oceans, but an information scape in which the features are words, numbers, graphs, images, concepts, paragraphs…” I never thought of this before, I always just accepted the computer images and how it manipulates our work as something really natural as it is done so often. However, for people who didn’t use computers before/ people who don’t use computers, to them it seems like information are “blasted open” as Doug mentions in Steven’s article.

Computers have changed the ways we imagine things and also seeing things. It changed our taste towards aesthetics, we expect them to be perfect and clean. Technology seemed to have interfered our lives in many ways; to perfect it. However, we are still limited to many things. An example would be the television, as mentioned in the article. Everything it restricted to the television box itself. The information transferred to the screen is designed by humans, there are limited channels and things for us to see.

As time goes by, we will soon be outdated with the technology we think that are extraordinary. As McLuhan stated that ‘living with electric and mechanical technologies at the same time was “the peculiar drama of the twentieth century”‘. Steven Johnson believes that no matter what changes, the ’strange new zone between medium and message’ will be the same despite its many guises. I think that he is right, but maybe it wouldn’t be based on a flat screen anymore, like the ’sixth sense’ technology.

After reading the article on “Graphic design Theory”. I’ve learnt that design has changed due to the change in technology. It has allowed us to create different works of art and the styles are influenced by them in many ways such as manipulating photographs, as compare to before, everything was done by hand. Everyone in he design industry would know very well that designs are now mostly manipulated to make everything look perfect before they are shown to the public such as advertisements. The most popular software, Adobe, has created a whole series of different programs for us to create art work. Using a few of these programs together to make a piece of artwork will help enhance the creativity of it. Exporting and importing images into these different programs can make awesome pieces, such as making drawings from illustrator and exporting them to make into a 3D animation in After Effects.