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I’m slaving over this paper, practically worshiping it and turning her ideas into a framework to explain museum’s in relation to UbiComp…
*looks at top of front page of paper, notices Yvonne wrote it at INDIANA UNIVERSITY, it the very building I am sitting in*
had to share 🙂
After an emotional and much needed chat with Jeff- I crumpled up my papers (skeuomorphically, into my mac book’s trash) and started in a new direction that I finding I am much better suited for.
My new topic is something along the lines of: What can UbiComp learn from museums. Probably per Yvonne Rogers reassessment of Weiser’s vision, in which she calls for the following:
“I propose one such alternative agenda which focuses on designing UbiComp technologies for engaging user experiences. It argues for a significant shift from proactive computing to proactive people; where UbiComp technologies are designed not to do things for people but to engage them more actively in what they currently do”
I wanted to share an experience I had today while researching for my paper. I went to the IMA, just to see what I could find. I actually felt sort of guilty taking time out of my day to do something fun, do you all feel like research doesn’t count if you’re not sitting in front of a pile of papers? Anyways, I sat in the Robert Indiana show decided to sit down and let myself see what would happen. I wrote down notes and observations. And feverishly at that… like, my friend was probably embarrassed to be near me and my hand hurt from writing. This went on for an hour and a half. I had so much to say and so many things just came to me. I had done some reading about UbiComp Friday night (a really cool way to fill a Friday night) and with that on my brain, so much started clicking.
Afterwards, the museum’s Audience Interpretation Director came up to me because she noticed me taking notes. She gave me some awesome insights and suggested some new sources. She is going to email me some internal case studies, as well (score!). I feel really good about this direction. It feels clear and bright and all those good fuzzy feelings.
Hope all of your paper are going well. I totally recommend leaving a desk and going out into your space (if possible). It felt like cheating, because I actually enjoy my topic.
– julia
I have to say, this made me really miss my CMCL courses. The way I read and watched the film was pretty weird, here was my method:
1. Skim the paper (not engaged… I didn’t know who the characters were, it was honestly hard for me to genuinely enjoy the reading)
2. Watch the film while following along with the paper (I missed a few things in the film, I thought I could multi task better than I could ((a lesson I should have learned by now )) also, the reading did not follow along with perfect chronology, a half assed attempt on both end)
3. Finish the film (I had to pause the film a few times throughout the day because of meetings. A former boyfriend used to get so angry at me for this… not to mention watching a film on my laptop or other device… David Lynch has more on that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0)
4. Re-read the paper (this time I was all about it, I did skip around to look for parts that didn’t make sense to me… like the rubbing of her eye with the with the ring, also I looked for something about the colors in the film- red & green, I knew there was something significant with this, but it wasn’t covered in the text, so I’d need to watch the film again to get more out of it)
5. Re-watch scenes to verify things I missed (I had the paper in one hand and skimmed the film with the other, I saw so much more than I had before)
Overall, I got a lot out of this. The way he criticized and remarked on the film, and the way he went out on a limb at times, but you never felt like he was on thin ice. I can definitely use this for the writing of my final paper and the criticisms of the designs. I tended to get more excited as the process went on- I spent about 5 hours of my day with this, when I could have spent 3 if I just did this in a logical way. Oh well, it was fun.
I was reading Erik’s blog and saw his review of Nigel Cross’ “Design Thinking”. Erik’s critique would have fit right into our class discussion, he is quite impartial.
What I found most interesting was Nigel Cross’ rebuttal! He talks about what the publishers wanted and what he thought of Erik’s post.
Check it out: http://transground.blogspot.com/2011/05/book-comment-nigel-cross-design.html
I’ve been thinking about a final paper idea for a while and I think it’s the best I’ve got, so here goes… let me know if you know of any resources I should look into, I’ll be starting my compilation this weekend. I’m not quite sure what I’m trying to say or what the HCI angle is in this exactly, but hopefully it’ll come to fruition.
Topic: Digitization & the loos of the brushstroke
Background:
I told a story in class one day about my study abroad experience in China. The students at CAFA would buy bootleg art books outside the school grounds and their work, while exquisite, would reflect the book- the photocopied, yellowed, flat, sloppy rendition of the Renoir, or what have you. They were mimicking perfectly, but the thing they were mimicking was a copy of a copy of a copy of a photograph from a person who was once in France, in front of the painting with a camera.
Digitization in the arts is a huge movement currently. Museums are spending a lot of money to get collections online. While it both preserves the work and expands the reach, there is a lot of information the photograph can miss. In paintings, color, scale, frame, where the curator placed it in a gallery, other onlookers reactions, and, of course, the previously mentioned brush stroke, all come to mind.
There are also issues of protection. If museums offer these resources for free, what is to keep people from repurposing them without permission? Or will the appropriate experience and understanding come across through a web browser. I supposed someone could snap an image in person at a free museum, but this does require a bit more ground work. What could the museums do to attempt to better facilitate the experience? What are they doing? Is there a way to show the brush stroke, brushed used, brush style- make the learning experience more immersive?
I’ll probably dive into:
- The mission of museums
- Acknowledging the difficulty of travel
- Thinking about what the artists would say?
- Look more at digitization efforts… maybe use one as a case study
Non HCI papers
- Ways of Seeing – John Berger
- There are lots of papers done for the Museums and the Web conference
In terms of HCI papers, I’m not really sure… Off the top of my head:
- Koskinen, “Showroom theory”
-
Bannon, L.J., Benford, S. Bowers, J. & Heath, C. (2005). “Hybrid design creates innovative museum experiences.”
- Defamiliarization, because why not?
- Maybe Robertson and Simonson ?
- Tufte Images and Quantities might be a stretch..
- I really need to keep digging.
Any thoughts or directions would be super appreciated!
In looking for a sublet and posting a sublet on Craigslist for this coming summer, language and images are everything. Even on the listing screen, you can tell from the title whether the posting is by a spammer, a broker, or a person you might get along with. The string of <150 characters in listing titles are arranged, CAPITALIZED, misspelt., !!!*~over excited~*!!!, and less frequently from a cool, calm, normal human you’d actually like to live with.
I just engaged in my first ever posting, and I found myself looking at example postings to capture the “Craigslist Speak”. I pondered “What does asterisk surrounding a word in all caps say about me?”. There is a specific addressee, and on this low-tech, basic html site, you, as the addressor, have to adapt to the native lingo to gain attention. The site is coded in an informal format, and as an addressor, it feels like you’re supposed to use incorrect grammar and spellings to get the point across and feign importance.
The context of Craigslist is a perfect example of semitics at work. It has been a hilarious experience to code my wording to operate well in this context. Check out my posting to see how I tried to speak Craigslist:
On Friday morning I found a funny thing on halpricebooks.com. Our very own Erik Stolterman’s book for quite a few pennies over what I’d seen before…
I am a little bit short on blog posts, so I am going to attempt to explain to you all how we can tell “Almond Branch Books” out of “New Hampton, NY” didn’t read Erik’s book, because from the one chapter I have read, this is the opposite of desiderata. It should be known, before we begin, this business is either A) incredibly typo prone, as all of their books listed are several hundred dollars, B) very bad appraising books (no offense to Erik) or C) laundering funds through a phony company. (After conversations with a friend who works at HPB, it looks like C is common and unfortunately, after a book is in someone’s possession they can charge whatever they want).
Desiderata includes aesthetics, ethics, and reason, or what we intend the world to be. Almond Branch Book’s (ABB) service design model is the design I will be critiquing. The company’s “felt need” to change of the listed book price to a grossly inflated number they desire is what Stolterman and Nelson refer to as a “dead end” as opposed to “next best steps”. They have dead ended themselves away from legitimate customers and entered into what can only be assumed as illegal activities in plain sight. “That-which-is-desired” or desireata is none of their concern.
The authors of The Design Way are wise. They know “desires are not all good… Over time, we learn to discipline the negative desires and live out the positive ones.” Possibly not enough time has passed for ABB to understand the difference between negative desire and positive ones. It would be a good idea for them to open the book of which they sell.
Later in the chapter, the authors state: “A created need is an imposed desire […] It is preformed and impressed upon a person in their role as consumer or end user, through persuasion or manipulation.” ABBs service design model is a clear manipulation of the online marketplace. The need for the book is obviously not successfully imposed on consumers, however if they were a laundering front, they are intending to look as though they do good business by blending into an online marketplace. A pedestrian consumer is definitely being performed and impressed upon.
The people of ABB should reconsider their service design model and actually get into an honest business. Hey, maybe they could actually sell books. As Stolterman and Nelson state: “…rather than allow our various problems to run our lives, we would be wise to approach the world from a design perspective and look to our desiderata for direction in our approach to intentional change.” The path to legitimacy is possible. If they desire to make more money than booksellers, they should look at their desire to make money and design an ethical solution to their problem.
Here is the seller’ s page: http://www.hpbmarketplace.com/stores/2a0b1b3a. Also, it should be known that hpbmarketplace.com is much like Amazon, individual sellers manage their own pages. I happen to love HPB stores and this post should not be mistaken as a stab at them as a business.
Dr. Puterschein, “noted typeface and typographic critic”, writes his criticisms for designers. The first clue is the nature of the text itself and the dead give away is the “Ratings Key” he utilizes.
In the text, Puterchien reviews the typefaces by leaving their functional nature behind and personifying the letters. I thought I might like to see the reviews written in the typeface they were describing, but letting Puterschein guides your imagination and the passages becomes a delightful game. In fact, I don’t believe the review would have been effective if he did this. By separating the typeface from the function, Puterschein makes the reader reflect, squint their eyes at formal details, and consider the typeface beyond being a vehicle for language.
The ratings key above is laden with design metaphors and insider information. First, the mention of Garamond and Matthew Carter as common knowledge assumes this is not the readers first brush with typography. Next, he assumes the reader will respect type enough to pay money for it, something only designers who have budgets for such things would do. Lastly, and possibly the biggest give away, is how he uses the point values as his rating system. The designers reading this can imagine the hierarchical differences of the pt. values in their minds because Puterschein is speaking their language.
Firstly, this Dunne and Raby piece was a fantastic overview of conceptual design as a whole. From the reason to being to the call to action at the end. I, for one, had a lot of fun looking into the aforementioned projects in varying fields. I love art and clever thought, as most do… but I found myself really caught up at the end of the chapter about the costs to create such work, both as it relates to money and time. This is not something that was lost on D&R and they stressed this, but I had lots of thoughts on the topic and want to trace through some examples that came to mind.
They touched a lot on markets of the varying design arenas driving demand for design that gets made, which makes sense. More specifically, in architecture, the conceptual “House IV” by Peter Eisenmen was only brought off paper by a wealthy fan of his work. The home was unsuitable in many respects, much like Frank Gehry’s work, but both architect’s visions were “brought off paper” (again and again) because of an appreciation of their domain and funding. Later, D&R mention Marcel Wander’s oversized objects that hinted at the future of design “until they were cut short by the global financial crash”. They touch on the bounds or industrial design, explaining that conceptual work only gets done by students, who have not matured as designers.
To add to this, I thought of the success of Warhol’s work in the 1960’s Post War America, or what is known as the “longest uninterrupted period of economic expansion in history” [source]. A more contemporary example of this is The Hirst Index, an infograhpic comparing the sale of Damien Hirst’s artwork to stock market values (by one of my favorite graphic designers, Kelli Anderson). The result of this is no surprise, aside from the shocking dollar amounts! I also thought about Alex Bogusky, of the ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Bogusky left his namesake to work on Common.is & FearLess Revolution. His goal is to start a consumer revolution, or, in his words: ” to provide more transparency, more collaboration, more democracy, and ultimately more value.” Bugesky’s ventures are “conceptual” [or maybe “edgy”.. i don’t know] in part, and commendable in my book, but how convenient that funding these ventures was not an issue for someone with their name on a door of a well known firm.
This is a total ramble. I’m not worked up, but I more so confronting my own insecurities in the arena of “conceptual design”. As a student, it is obvious that my point of view on design and it’s possibilities/ethical concerns/future implications are much in development. I wonder though… while I am interested in Dunne & Raby’s CTA, if I could be held accountable. I, along with my peers are in a position to go out in the world, get jobs, and the odds are in favor of us getting a little caught up in life, bills, family, and so on. Neither course is more important course than the other in the end. I know it comes down to personal values and potentially, a calling(?). What we occupy ourselves with is a choice, and I think it would be daunting to have something to say and need to find money, something like “the artworld” support/ a venue, and time. I’m looking at it all from a very big picture, meta point of view (without a specific goal in mind), but I just found that I was really intimidated at the end of this article.
I guess what I’m trying to say is… this is a huge mountain, I don’t know the way up, some people seem to have a gondola pass, but I don’t know if I will want to embark at all when it is within reach.
I am, admittedly, only half way into the reading, but I thought of something I saw today.
“Dumb Starbucks”, a Starbucks parody, opened up today in Los Feliz today. They are operating their business as “art” and people are confused. A friend drove by and vouched for how long the lines are.
“A barrista who identified herself as Amber said she recently found the job online and was interviewed briefly by a man whose name she doesn’t recall. Asked whether the store was some kind of artistic statement, she responded, ‘I don’t know. What is art? Maybe serving coffee is art.'” (Source http://on.wsj.com/1gj2xvP)
So, is it art or not art? What would Danto say? What would Warhol say? If they were in LA, would they go?
More: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/dumb-starbucks-is-la-parody-coffee-shop-performance-art-tv-stunt-or-just-a-legal-dispute-waiting-to-happen-9118464.html
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