A Sustainable Train of Thought

Today we had our mid-project presentations. Both the Turing machine groups and the Memory groups presented, with a short question and answer session after each group’s presentation. We’re starting the third week of a four week project, with the final crits on the 28th.

Stress level was high going into this presentation, for several reasons: it was my first presentation in a long time, it was the first real presentation at the school, and there’s always stress when you’ve worked hard on something and are showing it to people for the first time. We were fourth to present, out of five groups in the Memory project, and I was getting antsy right before we went up to the front of the room. I definitely need to work on breathing properly while presenting: I found I wasn’t really breathing while I was speaking, which has a detrimental effect on, well, everything.

Our presentation went really well, actually. One of the indications was that when someone had a question afterwards, one of the audience members was able to answer that person’s question. So I think the communication of our idea was successful. We still have a lot of work to do to get this thing complete for next Thursday, but we are definitely on the right track. The discussion after our presentation was helpful because it revealed some areas where we either need to rethink our approach or where we need to explain our concepts better.

It’s somewhat annoying that we will probably depart from what we presented today considering how long we spent creating and preparing for the presentation, but if we develop a better approach to this project then I’d consider it worth the effort. Of course this means that as busy as we have been for the last couple of days, we’re going to be even busier between now and next Thursday. Tonight I need to catch up on sleep (we were up until 5:30 this morning), and then there are some other projects and work to complete.

The exciting thing, in one way, is the opportunity to integrate the concept of flâneuring, which something that I worked with while an undergrad at UD. We may or may not pursue this concept, but right now it appears to solve one of the questions several people raised during our discussion session. Briefly, we originally had the host describe a path through the city for the guest, but some people thought this was too rigid, that it didn’t allow for exploration on the part of the guest. If we introduce the concept of flâneuring, we can allow for exploration and use our tool as a safety net for when you want to return to known areas or to reach a specific place. Some of these concepts were implied in our presentation (for example, you can always put the map away or ignore its cues), but perhaps it’s better that we explicitly mention the concepts.

As with all the feedback we received from our presentation, we have to decide if it’s relevant and if we can or should incorporate it into our project.

Time to catch up on some sleep!

Since I’ll probably be spending a lot of time in this room, here’s a quick photo of my desk in Studio.

I find it funny that I swore I’d never find a use for the camera in my phone, and I in fact wanted a phone without a camera. I got this particular phone only because of the bluetooth capabilities (Sony-Ericsson T610). However, I’m now finding the camera useful for things like taking quick and dirty photos of places or things to post to my blog. Even though the quality is so poor, the pictures are still something I can share to give you an idea of what’s been going on.

I wonder if the designers who crammed a camera into a cell phone anticipated such behavior, or if they were simply looking for a new feature to add. I happen to think it’s all an accident, that given new technology in a form that’s accessible and convenient to use, people will figure out how they want to use it.

Anyway, apparently the furniture in Studio is all custom, designed and built by the architect who did the remodel of the school building. I find the space works pretty well…there’s a community feel to the space, and the chairs are comfortable. I like it. Sure, there’s been some fighting over who gets the red chairs, and we have a temperamental network connection (which is still faster than the one in the dorms), but they’re minor issues.

Time to get dinner and then it’s off to do some more work. Ciao!

Just a little note about the computers we got from the school:

14” Apple iBook G4, 1.2 GHz, with 256 MB RAM.

Office Pro Mac X

Acrobat
Photoshop 7
Illustrator 10
Premier 6.5
InDesign 2.0

Freehand MX 2004
Dreamweaver MX 2004
Flash MX 2004
Fireworks MX 2004
Director MX

Rumor has it we’ll be getting more RAM, but if that doesn’t materialize, RAM prices are relatively reasonable (512MB for ~$100), so I may look into getting more on my own dime.

I don’t have much experience with the Macromedia products, so I shall have to spend some time getting up to speed with the technology. I’m particularly interested in Flash. Marcos Weskamp is one of the students in my year (you may know him from newsmap), and he’s done some pretty cool things utilizing Flash. I don’t know when I’m going to find the time to fool around with the software, but I’m sure I’ll manage. It’s hard not to be inspired and pushed by my fellow students. It’ll probably take me a long time before I can do anything like what Marcos is doing, but I gotta start somewhere!

The only other comment of note for the moment is that the keyboard on the iBook is all strange (at least to me). The layout is not the same as the layout on my old iBook. I’m not sure if it’s an international keyboard or if it’s specific to Europe. It’s taking me some time to get used to the key positions, particularly because you can set the keyboard to behave as if it were laid out as described (i.e.: each key does what it’s supposed to do) or you can set it to another language. So right now I have it set to the US, which means that although on this keyboard the 8 and 9 keys are shown to produce the left and right parentheses when holding down shift, on the US keyboard layout the 9 and 0 keys are the parentheses. So I have to type on this keyboard while ignoring the actual symbols on the keys. It’s sort of strange at times, and I’m glad I’m used to pseudo-touch-typing, because otherwise I’d be completely lost.

Anyways, here’s a shot…

Today we began the first major projects of the semester: Graphical User Interfaces. These projects are meant as vehicles to teach us programming and graphic design skills. As we work on the projects, we’ll be taking skills courses concurrently. There are two projects: Touring Turing, and Memory as Information in Motion.

The common thread between the projects is that of memory. The Touring Turing project deals with developing a graphical user interface for the Turing machine. I’m not in this group, so I can’t describe in detail what a turing machine is, other than to say it is the basis for all modern computational thought. It is the theory behind the practice of computing. So any computer works along the principles described by the Turing machine.

The Memory as Information in Motion project is much broader and less well-defined. I’m in this group, and, well, I can’t really elaborate on the project because it’s still in its nascent stages. Whatever we come up with has to involve memory, and it has to offer a graphical user interface to observe and interact with the project. Yeah, it’s vague.

A quick note that Graphical User Interface in this situation does not mean we’re dealing with widgets in the Windows operating system, or something of that nature. Instead, we’re dealing with the principles of the Graphical User Interface: how do you display information? The widgets and windows you see on the Mac and on Windows machines are based on Graphical User Interface principles, and they are expressions of those principles. We are to develop a set of principles to express our ideas of memory. I’m working with a partner to brainstorm and develop some ideas for Thursday’s class. Tomorrow and Friday we have a skills class focusing on graphic design (in my case) and on programming for those not familiar with programming.

We have four weeks to develop and build this thing, so I can imagine we’ll be working pretty hard. Still, I’ll make an effort to keep up with the blog during this time. I don’t know how much I can or will be able to describe of my project work during the process, but I’ll certainly be happy to share the results, whatever they may be.

For those technically inclined, we’re using the Processing programming language. Processing is a thin layer over Java (or so I’m told – haven’t actually used it yet), and it was developed with designers in mind, so it’s easy to grasp and allows you to do powerful things without having to know too much about programming. The website probably has a much better description of its capabilities, if you’re interested in learning more about it. I’m just excited to be learning about design principles…

Today we had our first taste of work at IDII. In the morning it was Italian class as usual, but in the afternoon we began a week-long project to develop a 30-second video clip explaining what interaction design is.

The two guest speakers advising us during the creation of these video clips are Simone Muscolino and Marcello Lago. Both are famous in their respective fields. Marcello is a professional advertising film director, and can give us much advice about the structured, intentional method of making commercials and video clips. I believe the technical term is pre-production.

Simone is an architect who makes videos that blur the line between cinema, advertising, and design. He has worked extensively with IDII on some of their publicity videos and has documented several projects at the school. He specializes more in the post-production end of things. Simone and Marcello offer different perspectives on essentially the same topic: how to go about making a video clip.

This brief is difficult because it is hard to summarize anything in 30 seconds, much less a field that is still developing. my group worked on some ideas this afternoon, and tonight I’m working on some story-boards for tomorrow’s meeting. We definitely want something simple and easy to create, as our time is limited. Better get crackin’.