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Part 1: Based on the lecture from this week on Interactive Environments, Ubicomp and the Internet of Things, write a response to the Singapore Smart Nation project.

In Lee Hsien Loong’s speech at the Smart Nation launch, he broke down its vision into 3 parts:

• Daily living: where networks of sensors and smart devices enable residents to live sustainably and comfortably, such as automating routinal things so that they can focus their time and energy on things that really matter to them. An example would be the use of driverless vehicles in One North.
• Communities: where technology will enable more people to connect to one another more easily and intensely
• Future: where the people of Singapore can create possibilities for themselves beyond what they imagined possible

Following its pragmatic roots, Smart Nation is an example that highlights how the government wants to ensure that Singapore remains as one of the leading cities in the world, by shifting to a more knowledge-intensive economy. Creativity and innovation will then thrive. Other major benefits of Smart Nation will be the enhancement of the country’s transportation system, becoming more energy-efficient and eco-friendly, and aiding in key public services such as healthcare, infrastructure and environmental problems.

However, there might be unintended consequences of Smart Nation. Being hyper-connected, the chances of cyber criminals planning coordinated cyber attacks on critical sectors is elevated as technology can be sabotaged. Technical glitches might also appear when not tested properly, causing problems to the daily living of people instead.

The initiative overlooks low-skilled workers such as cleaners and transportation workers. However, Singaporeans can be up-skilled through programmes such as General Assembly and SkillsFuture, and be equipped with relevant 21st century skills. As for the case of low-skilled foreign workers, they might be considered as redundant and have return to their countries. Simultaneously, the launch and success of Smart Nation may result in attracting skilled foreign workers and multinational corporations to Singapore.

One aim of being a Smart Nation is to strengthen Singapore’s community and society. However, being connected online has caused us to grow more detached from one another at a personal level, and in turn losing the “kampong spirit”. As human beings, we need physical interactions in order to get to know one another better, and communicating digitally leads to coldness.

References

Building a Smart City

Part 2: Create a proposal for a media art intervention to the Smart Nation project.  For example, think of how you might utilise or visualise data collected for Smart Nation, or create a game environment or narrative ARG (alternate reality game) or a public media art project, performance or propose something else entirely!  Where would your imagination take you?  Be prepared to show some sketches or mockups to illustrate your concept.

Augmented Reality game on android and iOS platforms.

Part 1: Choose any current exhibition in Singapore (except for “Future World” at ArtScience), visit it and write a response.  Select particular work(s) in the exhibit which inspire or interest you and do some research to find out how the work was developed and additional information about the artist.

The exhibition I visited was What is Not Visible is Not Invisible at the National Museum of Singapore. It was the name of the exhibition that first caught my eye, as I felt that the statement was very true. This exhibition brings the viewers to look at what is imaginary and temporary, through artworks that were selected from the French Regional Collections of Contemporary Art (FRAC). Upon entering the exhibition, I was greeted by Julien Discrit’s installation, which has the same title as the exhibition, What is Not Visible is Not Invisible (2008). It was a blank screen, which I thought was merely a wall. But when I stood at where a spotlight was shining at, a sensor activated a switch to the UV lights, after which I could see the UV painted words right in my face, saying “What is Not Visible is Not Invisible”. The wall text writes, “This underlines the fact that to express the invisible, one must paradoxically make it visible.” I felt that this was a good introduction to the whole exhibition as the work gets “born” due to the entrance of visitors and seems to say to us that this is the start of the exhibition and welcome. Discrit is a French artist who is strongly influenced by geography’s representation of the world, and did research on how discrepancy, ambiguity and paradoxes occur between the map and the territory. His works, consisting of installations, performances and videos, try to explore what is between the physical (visible) and imaginary (not visible). He also plays with the element of time in some of his works.

Another work of Discrit’s that I found to be interesting was Inframince (Mont-Blanc), an installation work done in 2007. It is made of acrylic glass and wood with white light stele to create a subtle glow effect. This glow emphasizes the thin opaque membrane that seems to divide the block into two. With transparent and luminescent resin, this work is a miniature copy of the Mont Blanc in Europe. With reference from a map, Discrit tries to show the limit between sky and mountain.

Images from: http://www.juliendiscrit.com/en/projets/inframince-mont-blanc/

Being strongly influenced by geography, Discrit tries to explore methods of representing the world. In his series Le Monde Physique (The Physical World), he tries three variations of map representations, two of which I found to be interesting and different from our expectations on how maps should be represented. One of them is Le Monde Physique -Topologie-, which is a crumbled world map. The representation of the world map is now changed because it is no longer represented in a two-dimensional form, but rather a three-dimensional one. Areas such as mountains protrude more than areas that are of sea level. Another work in the series is Le Monde Physique -Ishihara-, a wall painting that is inspired by Ishihara’s test for colour vision deficiency. The colours used are mostly taken from the world map itself.

Images from: http://www.juliendiscrit.com/en/projets/le-monde-physique/

Another exhibit that inspired me is The Performance Series. This is a both a performance and installation artwork, which was inspired by Àngels Ribé’s 1974 performance called Verification of the Presence of an Immaterial Volume. During the performance, a museum staff places a fan on the floor and switches it on. This causes the viewers to move away from it. Then, the staff will use white tape to mark out a border, separating the viewers from the fan. Now, the space marked by the white borders is thought to be something different than just an ordinary space. The viewers will wonder what is different and try to study the space closely, when in fact there is nothing special about it at all. What fascinated me was the simplicity of the whole setup and yet it was able to ‘play’ with the minds of the viewer.

Ribé takes elements of minimalism, such as repetition, volume, geometry and phenomenology, and incorporates her own body into her works. She is interested in manipulating physical phenomena such as light and shadow, or natural elements such as water, air and foam, so as to explore the relationship between the artificial and the natural. After that she adds her body in her works to play with physical space and subjectivity, with the exploration of identity and the ordinary in mind. In Ribé’s performances, she tries to remove artistic entities in objects and focuses on the presence of the artist and the spectator, shifting from the meaning of the artistic object towards experience. She wants to deobjectualize art by showing that works are not necessarily durable. Her most notable works are her performances at the N.A.M.E Gallery of Chicago and at the Vehicule Galerie of Montreal in 1974 (of which she performed the work shown above in person).

Image from: http://nationalmuseum.sg/programmes/programme-list/what-is-not-visible-is-not-invisible—the-performance-series

Below is a video by MACBA Museum d’Art Comtemporani de Barcelona, with Teresa Grandas curating on Ribé’s exhibition which showcases her works from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s.

Being interested in psychology and how the human mind works, some works from this exhibition was indeed an artistic journey of the mind and senses to me.

Artist biographies: http://www.juliendiscrit.com/en/cv-2/ || http://www.angelsribe.com/en/bio

If I were to set up Julien Discrit’s What is Not Visible is Not Invisible, I will lift Ribé’s idea of using a white tape to mark out a path so that viewers will think that they are confined within the spaces of the tape. Then, I will take the spotlight away, so that the viewers will not be expecting something to happen when they stand at that specific spot. This will then give them a surprise factor when the UV lights turn on, showing that even though they do not notice that something is there, it is actually there. This can be linked to the “invisible” people of our societies, such as cleaners. Sometimes we take for granted the cleanliness of our cities and forget that these people we deem as “invisible” actually exist.

Part 2: Read CH 1 from Kim Goodwin, Designing for the Digital Age. Write a response to the reading and post two questions to the reading.

Goodwin starts off by giving us the definition of design, which is “the craft of visualizing concrete solutions that serve human needs and goals within certain constraints”. Hence, as visualizing concrete solutions is the basis of design, designers should be able to have the desired end result in mind and express it in a tangible way. They are those who excel at filling blank surfaces with creative and practical representations of an end product so that others can see, understand, and eventually build it. Designers provide precise instructions rather than building, and these designs have to serve human needs and goals, which can be not only functional but also pleasurable and aesthetically satisfying. Design also happens within certain constraints, such as time and cost being the most common factors. I feel that Goodwin’s breakdown of ‘design’ is a very comprehensive one and has helped me further understand the definition of the word.

The main focus of Chapter 1 was the introduction of Goal-Directed Design, which uses a mental play-acting approach by creating personas and mentally run through interactions by pretending to be each persona. When Cooper first started proto-persona, he asked himself questions while play-acting, such as why perform this task in the first place, what is already known to him (the persona he is pretending to be) at the beginning of the task, and what he was more likely to figure out along the way. Over the years, the Cooper firm worked on improving the design, which up till now is changing due to updates on which approaches are effective and which are not.

Without intending to set rules and constraints, Goodwin introduces the components of Goal-Directed Design (which are marked in bold):
Principles: Guidelines for creating good solutions under specific circumstances. Two essential things to keep in mind: not all principles apply in all contexts, and not all principles are created equal.
Patterns: Types of solutions that tend to be useful for certain classes of problems. Patterns are essential in design as they are the building blocks of a designer’s vocabulary, like how principles are the rules of grammar that govern how we use them.
Process: The design process, steps and techniques involved in planning and conducting design research, using it to develop personas, scenarios, and requirements, then using those to develop and iterate a design solution. Process can be scaled up or down depending on constraints and priorities. Goal-Directed Process is broken down into the following steps:
– Project Planning: Identifying key stakeholders, determining project objectives, drafting a plan.
– Research: Gathering objective data by interviewing stakeholders and examining risks and assumptions.
– Modeling: Identifying trends and developing models based on what has been observed. Creating a set of personas, which are user archetypes that will help design decisions and communicate rationale. Other models may include representations of current workflows, the usage environment, or other important aspects of the problem.
– Requirements Definition: Getting consensus about the focus and parameters of product’s functionality and design.
– Framework Definition: Laying out basic framework for the form and behaviour of the product. There is the interaction framework, visual framework and industrial design framework, which are articulated at a high level, meaning that details are omitted so as to focus on the scope of the project.
– Detailed Design: Developing a detailed project plan, filling out and refining the design by ideally collaborating with related experts and engineers.
– Implementation Support: Maintaining a good relationship with the engineering team and supporting them when unexpected issues or questions crop up.
Practices: Effectiveness of the Goal-Directed Design process depends on how well the company practices it.

Goal-Directed Design helps skilled designers ensure thoroughness, timely execution, and consistently high quality of output. It also makes the thought process transparent to the rest of the product team, who can then understand better what the designer wants and build the product accordingly. After reading Goodwin’s text, I am interested in trying out her design method for future projects so as to improve the flow of my projects and my project management. However, if Goal-Directed Design is applied to Game Design, are there any major changes? And shouldn’t I be hiring play-testers rather than creating user archetypes to test the pacing or difficulty of my game if I were a level designer?