Dialogue with Time reflection

Briefly share your experience going through Dialogue with Time. What were some of the feelings, thoughts, challenges and insights gained while role playing an elderly person?

I think Dialogue with Time was a very meaningful and thought provoking exhibition. It first highlights how ageing is a slow process that is happening at every moment and second of our lives. It brings light to things that we may not realise such as the extent of deterioration in our abilities to carry out activities, both mentally and physically. Since ageing is inevitable, the exhibition gave me a peak into how life could be as I age, allowing me to experience the problems I may face in the future and the drastic difference in capabilities. Through the experience, I felt that I could begin to empathize with my grandparents especially through the interactive games and “becoming them”. I started to wonder, if I could not successfully complete the stimulated activities, how can I blame the elderly for not being able to carry out the same task in greater adversity?

 

Drawing on your experience, can you think and list some of the benefits inherent in the design research technique of role playing?

The technique of role playing allows one to be placed in the shoes of others under similar contexts. By going through the situation through role playing, one’s thought processes becomes that of the person we are role playing. This allows us to better understand the actions as a consequence of one’s thoughts. We will then be able to gain empathy for the individual and understand their considerations and why they make such decisions despite how we sometimes view them as unreasonable actions. At the same time, role playing can also increase interactivity for the audience which will then allow for a stronger personal experience and therefore a more enriching and memorable experience.

Can you think of some contexts where role-playing can be useful to help discover and define design challenges or contribute to the development of design solutions? 

I think such role-playing has the greatest benefit in allowing for other’s to be in another individual’s shoes, thereby allowing individuals to cultivate the idea of empathy for the challenges faced by the elderly today and ourselves in the future. At the same time, role-playing allows us to anticipate and prepare in advance (eg. consumption of supplements). It is only through role-playing that we may be able to further understand the intangible aspects such as the feelings of disappointment, fear and insecurity, experienced by the elderly.

When we fully understand how we feel when we face with such challenges in the perspective of other individuals, will we be able to analyse critically as to finding out the problems. It is also important to empathise with the elderly and think of ways in which our design can help them not just physically but also be of use to their mental welfare and emotions.

Field trip to ArtScience Museum Future World: Impressions and Reflections

This was the first time I visited the Art Science Museum: Future World and I was very excited. The exhibition made use of science and art together and it was very applicable to our studies in new media and interactive art. Of all the exhibitions, there were three that left lasting impressions for me: “Sliding through the Fruit Field”, “Sketch Aquarium” and “Create! Hopscotch for Geniuses”.

The main common theme among the three exhibits listed was that it was able to bring out the child-like happiness and carefree feeling in me as I progress from the first exhibit to the others. At the start when I first came across “Sliding through the Fruit Field”, two children were sliding down the sloop. With each slide, the fruits then disintegrate into pieces. As my friends dragged me over to slide down the slope, I felt a little embarrassed as I was already a tertiary student. However, after the sliding down the slope, I stood around to watch the two little kids slide down and felt a sense of comfort that it didn’t matter what age I was at, it was simply fun to slide down the fruit field.

 

When I moved to the “Sketch Aquarium”, my favourite exhibition, it allowed me to choose an animal of my choice and add colours using a very traditional form, crayons, something I used often for drawing when I was younger. I coloured a jellyfish and drew it according to how I wanted based on my imagination. Although I was afraid of others judging my work at first, I found joy in colouring and I just wanted to make the drawing uniquely mine, disregarding what others thought.

I also felt that the technical skills used for this exhibit were very interesting, turning a stationary drawing to a moving creature.  Even though it was a 2D image on the screen, the movement of the jellyfish made it appear realistic. Furthermore, this was a very personalised interactive art as it allowed the audience to bring back their art pieces and see their work on a big screen showcased to others.

Lastly, the “Create! Hopscotch for Geniuses” allowed us to create hopscotches for ourselves and play the hopscotches just like when I was in primary school. It brought back a lot of memories as I hopped through. While standing around, I also saw some adults who walked through the hopscotch while some hopped through. I felt a little disappointed for those who walked through the hopscotch as they would not have been able to experience the full joy of reliving the childhood experience.

Through these 3 exhibits, they truly left lasting impressions on me. I felt that it was important to relieve these happy and child-like moments from time to time as we grow up. Especially so in this current competitive world that we live in where stress often gets a grip over us, we can face it with a positive outlook and sometimes these innocent moments such as playing hopscotch or simply using imagination could open new doors and help us through our tough times. Where Art meets Science, it is really interesting to see how new media is being used to collaborate with art to bring it to a new level of interactivity and vast capabilities the new media can bring to art.

Roaster Bin Conceptualization

 

Reflection:

I think what I took away was really the exploration of different software and how it combines with other areas of design to make the eventual product a whole. While the use of coding poses much difficulty to us in terms of understanding the code and finding the code, the fact that Arduino is an open source software really helps us to be able to do some self-learning and exploration which is something I truly enjoy. It was also very satisfying to see how our modified codes worked the way we wanted them to.

However, I also realize how important is it to create a correct setting to provoke our audience and set the interaction at the right pace and push our audiences to do certain things. It is not just the process of making the bin or making the code work, but it is a whole process of finding out how we can make our audience interact with our product in the best manner and achieve what we set out to do.

If time permitted, we would have actually liked to link the programming with Twitter as well as printing out the images we captured in order to solve the issue of the images captured being overwrite and keeping track of the offenders just like a town council. Overall, we really enjoyed the project and we definitely enjoy seeing our audiences respond and interact with our bin while getting ROASTED.

Research Critique 4 – Uncomfortable Interactions

Uncomfortable interactions are defined as

“actions that cause a degree of suffering to the user”,

as defined by the reading. These sufferings can either be on a physical a mental level. Most of the time, uncomfortable interactions come as an unintentional result and is often viewed negatively. However, the reading states that

“the potential value of uncomfortable interactions as part of designing cultural experiences”

could become benefits to us due to its positive outcomes towards the society, entertainment, and enlightenment. This is provided that such interactions are well calculated and done in an ethically acceptable framework.

 

Image showing the different types of benefits of Uncomfortable interactions.

 

An example I would like to use to illustrate the benefits of these uncomfortable interactions would be the Desert Rain established in 1999 by Blast Theory that uses such interactions to achieve positive outcomes towards enlightenment (mainly) and sociality as reflections on our actions. It is a war game that involves virtual reality aims to highlight the problem of what mass media reported (virtual) versus the reflection of the real world (reality) especially during the period of the Gulf War.

Players had to make it through the game by finding their targets. Throughout Desert Rain, there are also numerous moments where these uncomfortable interactions are established strategically to bring about maximum benefits.

“Human suffering is a powerful and recurring theme among artworks,”

Desert Rain uses the constant play on sufferings by the victims and casualties through the game to evoke discomfort, fear, and guilt. This leads us to a specific perspective to view the work, allowing us to reflect and empathize, prompting us to find a deeper connection to the game, allowing greater understanding. This would eventually allow a form of enlightenment among the 6 players.

 

Image illustrating the different types of Uncomfortable Interactions and their methods.

Image illustrating the flow of Desert Rain Game

 

These forms of uncomfortable interaction can take place in the form of visceral, culture, control and intimate interactions. Through Desert Rain, it was obvious that cultural discomfort was experienced due to the dark cultural associations of the Gulf War and its casualties.

The game pushes the participants to make moral decisions. In Section 5, the act of pushing away the numbers representing the casualties suggested the act of turning a blind eye on the humanity. The players might not have considered ethical consequences until reflected upon.

Through designing devices that bring back direct memories of the unfortunate events, a sense of discomfort is evoked. In section 6, the revelation where the hunted targets were disclosed to be victims of the Gulf War, interviewed on how ‘real’ the experience of the Gulf War was in the very room the players were in. Emotions of guilt could be evoked from these moments since the players would reflect on how they cruelly hunted down the targets who were victims of the War.

In section 7, the 100,000 grains of sand were given was meant for the participants to reflect on the 100,000 Iraqi casualties and the decisions made by the governments in the Gulf War.

Overall, uncomfortable interactions are effective in provoking thoughts and reflections resulting in enlightenment in the society. The use of a virtual reality space and these uncomfortable interactions have allowed the participants to reflect that what they see such as the targets, may not necessary be the truth.

Presentation: https://prezi.com/view/MVDcz69zh8omox4zH4Nt/

References:

Desert Rain

http://multiplejournalism.org/case/desert-rain

Micro-Project 2: Crowd-Sourced Art

What is the content of the work and who is creating it?

The aim of the work was to create a song using crowd sourcing, allowing us to form a song via the services of our classmates who so kindly helped us complete the song lyrics. This project involved Qi Yun, Zi Ling and me.

The general gist of the project was for one of us to message our classmates individually and provide them with the previous sentence of the song created by another member of the class. The classmates continue to create the next line of the song while adhering to the limitations such as having a maximum of 7 words and ensuring the presence of a specific random word given by the team in the lyrics they create.

The first sentence started with “Cause you had a bad day”.

At first, we wanted each of our class mates to sing the lyrics in the tune of any nursery rhyme, allowing us to compile and form a song. However, as many of them were shy, we had to simplify it and instead our classmates created the lyrics only.

Where does this work take place?

This work took place in the classroom where most of our classmates were located at.

How does this work involve social interaction?

This work is considered social interaction because it allows and creates both direct and indirect interactions between the different members of the class. Thereby, becoming a common base for the classmates to interact at and result in a form of cooperation to come about to form something bigger, in this case to create a song together.

How is your crowd source project different from one that is created by a single artist/ creator?

Crowd sourcing allows a much bigger community to come into play and therefore increases much of the creativity, allows more brilliant ideas to be inspired and formed due to the different perspectives people have and this exchange of ideas creates greater impacts and compositions to be made.

Our turkers contributed and formulated the existence of the song. Each turker/classmate gave us “advice” on what should be done to continue the sentence despite the limitations given to them. Through these minimal interactions, the team was able to perhaps get a hint of the class’s character and take a step into getting to know our turkers better instead of indulging in ourselves.

Song:

Cause you had a bad day
Needed some help sian to the max
Chicken essence helps the brain think faster
Smell my shoes pikachu
Oh how very tree-rible it is
Hey soul sister
Meeting an old friend down the town
Baby you the reason I frown

(Bold words represent the essential word required to be in the lyrics.)

Link to video: https://youtu.be/cUGu5CmbLr4

 

 

 

Micro Project 1: Creating the Third Space


Why did you choose this space or object to photograph?

This space showcases the infrastructure of the whole building of ADM made of glass and also the empty green fields on the top of the school. It makes me proud as many of my school mates envy our school’s special infrastructure. Most importantly, it was because the building encompassed the meaning of design within it which made it significant to me as a design student who studies there.

What are some of the characteristics of this alternative virtual space you had created collectively?

The virtual space created involves many different perspectives, ideas and inspirations behind each photo and angle placed to capture the essence of the image. It mapped out a new ADM for me exploring places that I have yet to see. Furthermore, each caption gave me a glimpse and hint of the photographer and the possible significant representation it may have to the person. It became a collection of not just places but a record of how ADM is special to each of us.

Under what circumstances will this alternative virtual space change?

When the people within the buildings have changed, our level of understanding and attachment to the school changes as we go along the years from freshmen to seniors to graduates. Hence, when we look at the virtual space, it can become a form of excitement, progress, history and longing depending on the stage we are at.

Perhaps, when the people viewing the photos have no prior knowledge of the place being photographed, the different scenes in a single location may confuse the viewer. (Image of the building VS Image of the green/forested area). Filters may also affect how the virtual space is viewed.

How does this project relate to what we discussed in the lecture regarding co-creation, the concept of  Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and Do-It-With-Others (DIWO)?

Deciding on the location and taking the photo is generally the work of one person and involves more of the concept of DIY. However, as we move around with each other to the different locations, we often get inspired by the photos and concepts of our friends, giving us an opportunity to discuss and share with one another.

Furthermore, when the different images that were captured are place together using a similar hashtag, #1010adm, I think it becomes a concept of DIWO more than DIY. Despite all of us being in adm, we took pictures of vastly different areas in order to create a new virtual view of ADM.

To an unknown viewer, these images map out and create a perception to those who see the images, such as having both nature and classy infrastructures.

 Even though it was an individual decision on how and where we took the photos, together it provided and allows viewers to come up with one single perception of a place for others to view, thereby bringing all of our individual works together to form something bigger. Hence, the concept of DIWO.