Tutorial - Assessment Guidance

Written piece 1500 words

Submission through turnitin and send a copy to Clinton via email

Write a bibliography - mention everything that you have researched: lectures (even if they haven't helped you directly talk about how they have encouraged you to seek alternatives), articles, books, Pecha Kucha, sites.

Talk about: practice, collaborative piece (how that went, findings specific to collaboration), Pecha Kucha, lectures.

Reference separately about quotes within text: use Harvard referencing system

Presentation 15mins 5mins Q&A

Script it and rehearse beforehand

Hard copies:

Mind maps - printed large, (do one on navigation)

Sketchbooks - Collated. Organise your process and methodology (post it note key section)

USB stick - practical work (bring computer to display and discuss)

Blog - show on computer (highlight main parts in presentation text)

Notes: 

Discuss problem and dilemmas as much as results and finding.

Root activity you've done under method and name your methodologies and use them in your presentation and written piece.

Examples: 

Self Observation

Juxtaposing digital and offline research

Deconstruction when referencing articles in sketchbook

Creat a glossary of terms, that way you remove the possibility of using a lot of jargon

Example

Z layout- definition

F layout- definition

Evaluate your blog and sketchbook in written and presentation work: deceminate it

Pecha Kucha - Review

The Pecha Kucha was really beneficial for me it allowed me to define the area of research I am interested in exploring further. 

The Pecha Kucha focused on an imaginary word "reconvention" a word generated from reinvention and convention. The idea behind it was to use people predetermined ideas/ conventions and repurpose them to change the way we navigate around a digital space. The presentation focused on my research up to date, the thinking I've been exploring and the direction I'm heading. The final thought was that "I would need to make a small change to make a big difference". In being made to do this in a formal setting and having such a short space of time to focus on each slide, it allowed me to strip away the parts of the research that weren't going anywhere. It also drove my investigation into navigate to a new way. It lead me the question how do we navigate in the real world and how has that transfers online.

Practice 1 - Update

Interesting research.

This piece of research discusses the way the brain has bastardised existing evolutionary neural circuits and repurposed them to allow us to deal with the process of reading:

"we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading. After all, we did not invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary history, around the fourth millennium B.C. So the human brain improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various regions of neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as spoken language, motor coordination and vision"

This piece of research discusses "place cells" and "grid cells" and there importance in terms of navigating our environment.

"Important clues have come from work honored by today’s Nobel. Half of the prize went to John O’Keefe, a neuroscientist at University College London, for the discovery of “place cells.” In the early 1970s, O’Keefe used hair-thin electrodes to record the electrical activity of neurons in the hippocampus of rats as they ran around an enclosure. Place cells, as their name suggests, fire only when the rat passes through a particular place. The other half of the Nobel went to May-Britt and Edvard Moser, neuroscientists at the Norwiegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim for the more recent discovery of “grid cells” in 2005. These cells fire at regular intervals as a rat moves through space, marking out an imaginary grid."

Similar studies done on rats in a virtual and a real world environment. Showed a big difference in the amount of place cells firing in the brain. These showed a significant reduction in navigation due to lack of external stimuli.

"The rats were then immersed within a virtual-reality screen picturing a room with walls decorated in different blue and green shapes. They then ran around said virtual room atop the treadmill ball."... ..."Later, the researchers repeated the same experiment within a visually identical actual room, 10 feet by 10 feet in size. The results? About 60 percent of the place cells that fired in the rats' brains inside the actual room, with all its sensory stimuli, were inactive in the virtual space. Which means all of that other stuff – the equivalent, for humans, of a subway grate underfoot, or the smell of Lake Michigan to your East – seems to matter a great deal."

Grid cells, triangular pattern.

In reading these separate pieces of research, I have been asking the question has the ability to reconfigure brain circuits been used to understand how to navigate an online space? Could the grid cells be used to map the online environment and the place cells be used to understand that environment and allow us to figure out where things should be. 

For example: On a webpage, do you drop these grid cells around around the page and when you see a logo in the top left corner, does the brain use place cells to tell you where that should be?

Could we be reaffirming these place cells everytime we visit a site and does this explain in part why these conventions arise.

Could we use this theory to alter how we navigate?

Jamie Shovlin - Documentary Film Making/ Fakery

He shows a short film about a guy making a documentary. In it he fails miserably due to the process of trying to script an old guy.

Discusses a project where he collaborated with other people... Lustfsust project is a fiction band about five guys who are trying to make it. The film looks at the members not the music. Used an online space to create an idea of a band as well a creating characters to give a sense of what the band is. Then created band collateral, online archive, tickets, memorabilia, posters etc. the strange thing is that it generated a life of its own, people said they had seen them, then a group of guys actually started calling themselves lustfsust.

Talks about a horrow film he made called Hiker Meat.

Fictional objects convey a sense of being mislead, why do you not feel that way about a fictional book?

He creates a fake history, a fake sue do history. This gives a story a feeling of depth.

He pulled together research, collaborative research, started to generate a plot, dialog, sound track and to give the film a sense he did a montage of a number of old horror films.

The point of the project is not the end result but a study on how they got there and what shaped the film. Collaboration, contribution, research, process and least of all important an outcome.

Heavily influenced by America 1970 horror, liked the lack of the ability to recreate this in the Lake District. Apparently a lot of these types of horror film were filmed in Italy.

Gave me an idea to recreate website in a new way. Take existing website that follow the convention very closely but are boring and recreate them to add an element of design and conflict.

Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in a Global Arena

James Mellor

Tuesday Morning

4 November 2014

Changing States:

Contemporary Art and Ideas in a Global Arena

Speaker from - DACS Est 1984 - by artists, for artists dacs.org.uk 

Speaks about the changing pace of the art world. Talks about INOVA organisation.

Cover of a book for a INOVA conference.

The organisation formed in the 1990, when a large collection of multicultural artist

gathered together. During the time before this society was changing and fracturing into

two section. Creating a new identity.

Discusses various projects and explorations she has been involved in. 

Art requires; Time, patience, meticulous work and continual questioning. Art work

poses question not necessarily with any answers.

about the world.

MA Individual Practice Intention

Ive already laid out what my intention is; 

The aim of my project is to research and understand key areas of digital design. With analysis, field-testing designs and review, I hope to create a digital design piece that has been informed by my findings.

The areas I hope to research are:

Web designs advancement from traditional print structure and why certain graphical design conventions have transferred over?

The technological and subject orientated influences/restrictions that have shaped web site and mobile design e.g. interfaces restriction, legacy systems influence, and content regulated design.

The human element. How people interact with digital space, how they search and find content, what they like and don’t like about web design, how people’s preconceptions influence digital design.

Research

I have 6 books to read and I am getting through them, taking notes as I go.

Don’t Make Me Think,

Designing for the Web,

Grid Systems in Graphic Design,

Ordering Disorder,

Seductive Interaction,

Universal Principles of Design

I've also started looking at articles around the evolution of the web:

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/look-back-20-years-website-design

http://www.dawnvista.co.uk/website-design/learning-from-web-design-trends-through-the-years/

http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/swiss-design/

http://www.vanseodesign.com/series/the-7-components-of-design/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/17/lessons-from-swiss-style-graphic-design/

http://shortiedesigns.com/2014/03/10-top-principles-effective-web-design/

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/differences-between-print-design-and-web-design/

http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/how-design-screen-guide-print-designers-1131786

http://alistapart.com/article/how-we-read

The idea behind amercing myself in all of these different rules and concepts of web design is to figure out what elements are necessary/unnecessary, what distracts and adds when designing for the web and how the elements we choose to use in our design are actually perceived by the user.

Methodology 

I have to take this beyond research to something tangible, I would like to generate a design based on 4 times in web history; pre web, early web, desktop web, responsive web. By doing this I hope to see what elements are actually needed in order to convey the same message and what is adding to it and subtracting from it?

I would also like to generate a number of design experiments to see how we interact with certain ket areas of web design; hierarchy, typography, navigation.

I hope by creating these designs and testing them on people, I can generate a web design solution that uses the principles found to inform the design.

Field Research - Liverpool Trip

I started out trying to arrange something for quite a few of my class mates. Explaining a few of us were going to Liverpool and asking who wanted to come.

Initially a lot of people showed interest, but restrictions were put in place, certain people couldn't do one day other couldn't do another day. Eventually we were left with only Friday as an option. This was fine but after all the restriction only three people ended up going. This, for me, was frustrating because I had to miss out on talks in Manchester that I could of otherwise gone to.

Saying all of that it was a good trip.

We visited:

• The Tate Liverpool
• The Bluecoat Gallery (collection of Whistler drawings, we weren't allowed to take pictures)
• The Liverpool Museum

The Tate Liverpool

This was great. We saw some brilliant modern art. I'll be honest when viewing art I always look at the aspects I could take into my design, different techniques, methods, graphical elements etc, this is what is important to me, not so much the reasoning behind the piece.

In that regard I took a lot away from it.

There were a few video pieces that I couldn't capture but one in particular Felix The Cat by Mark Leckey gave me the idea of using vertical lines to cut and offset the image, in that way create something evolved from the original. 

 

This cubist painting started me thinking about pixelation 

and the different way I can transform objects using cubism.

I liked how this is functionless. 

Each rider added makes it more elaborate and less usable. 

It's like its saying keep it simple, don't re-invent the wheel. 

These three pictures show a collection of photographs overlaid over one another. Each picture has an element that is interacting with the photograph behind it. For example, the one directly above, shows an image of a burnt out/overturned car with the image of a face in the smoke. I liked this idea of overlapping images to create something else.

This was just cool. I liked the way it transformed something flat, i.e. the metal mirrors and because of layout and orientation it created a 3d piece that brought those separate elements into a different space. This would be nice translated into a digital picture gallery, where each picture has a different orientation and depth. More interesting than just stay next to on another.

Chris asked me to take a look at this, I think what we both liked was the second look you need to see whether it was a trees shadow or just the mould creating this pattern.

This was a pollock, I took this for my dad as he is an abstract artists heavily influence by pollock.

This was displayed in a glass box and made from metal strings. It was elaborate and beautiful, I liked this sense of symmetry. It pulled on something that I had heard the other week on a show about the universe. Complex behaviours and solutions come from simple rules and simple elements. For example, and I will murder this -apologies to any astrophysicists, the universe was formed from simple rules i.e. gravity, speed of light etc and simple elements like hydrogen and oxygen. It was only when you combines these simple rules and simple elements that great things happen.  

This seemed like a good idea for a speaker design, that was
until I was corrected that a speaker has to be hollow to be any good... cheers moustache.

Another piece that took me back to the idea of space and 

how simple elements combine to make complex results.

This reminded me of studio gibly drawing style. I like the innocence of the style.

This image used metallic paint to create a translucent effect that made a simple image come alive.

Liverpool Museum

We just took a look around to see if there was anything interesting, turns out the Liverpool Museum is quite well designed. Easy to understand and digest information at a glance.

I liked this timeline layout. Good for visually getting across a complex subject.

Another clear and concise timeline done is a different way. 

They really figured out the space they had to play with and designed it with that in mind.

This was a nice bit of typography set into concrete. Shadow and light play a big part in this.

The use of grayscale images with eye-catching accent colours really work.

Again a nice typeface and a great use of existing imagery.

I just liked this because someone had scribbled all over hope. Is that irony?