Prototype tests on the class

In class this week we were asked to bring in our prepared prototypes and share and talk them through with a small group of people. I think that this was a really helpful exercise and it allowed people to really talk through their ideas and by getting feed back, things were brought up that may never even have occurred to a person before.

Some of the main points i got out of the prototype session:
- make it more simple - there is a lot going on on the home page, simplify the categories so that there aren't as many things on the page at the same time
- do i want it to be an application or the tablet included?
- tablet very similar to iPad, maybe change design
- maybe try to add a few more features so its not only a controller

Paper Prototypes

Reading notes - Session 4

1. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby. 2013. 

Quotes from reading:

- There are other possibilities for design: one is to use design as a means of speculating how things could be-speculative design. This form of design thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people's imaginations to flow freely. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality. 
- What we are interested in, though, is the idea of possible futures and using them as tools to better understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want, and, of course, ones people do not want.
 - For us futures are not a destination or something to be strived for but a medium to aid imaginative thought-to speculate with. Not just about the future but about today as well, and this is where they become critique, especially when they highlight limitations that can be removed and loosen, even just a bit, reality's grip on our imagination.
 - This is the space of speculative culture-writing, cinema, science fiction, social fiction, and so on. Although speculative, experts are often consulted when building these scenarios, as David Kirby points out in a fascinating chapter about distinctions between what he calls speculative scenarios and fantastic science in his book Lab Coats in Hollywood; the role of the expert is often, not to prevent the impossible but to make it acceptable. 
- Design can give experts permission to let their imaginations flow freely, give material expression to the insights generated, ground these imaginings in everyday situations, and provide platforms for further collaborative speculation.

 - With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War the possibility of other ways of being and alternative models for society collapsed as well. Market-led capitalism had won and reality instantly shrank. becoming one dimensional. There were no longer other social or political possibilities beyond capitalism for design to align itself with. Anything that did not fit was dismissed as fantasy. as unreal. At that moment. the "real" expanded and swallowed up whole continents of social imagination marginalizing as fantasy whatever was left. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, "There is no alternative."

 - Now, a younger generation doesn't dream, it hopes; it hopes that we will survive, that there will be water for all, that we will be able to feed everyone, that we will not destroy ourselves.
- For us, this separation from the marketplace creates a parallel design channel free from market pressures and available to explore ideas and issues. These could be new possibilities for design itself; new aesthetic possibilities for technology; social, cultural, and ethical implications for science

and technology research; or large-scale social and political issues such as democracy, sustainability, and alternatives to our current model of capitalism. This potential to use the language of design to pose questions, provoke, and inspire is conceptual design's defining feature.
- We are not talking about a space for experimenting with how things are now, making them better or different, but about other possibilities altogether.
 - Conceptual design provides a space for doing this. It deals, by definition, with unreality. Conceptual designs are not conceptual because they haven't yet been realized or are waiting to be realized but out of choice. They celebrate their unreality and take full advantage of being made from ideas.
 - Conceptual designs are not only ideas but also ideals, and as the moral philosopher Susan Neiman has pointed out, we should measure reality against ideals, not the other way around: "Ideals are not measured by whether they conform to reality; reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals. Reason's task is to deny that the claims of experience are final-and to push us to widen the horizon of our experience by providing ideas that experience ought to obey."
DARK DESIGN:
- Dark, complex emotions are usually ignored in design; nearly every other area of culture accepts that people are complicated, contradictory, and even neurotic, but not design.

 - It is more about the positive use of negativity, not negativity for its own sake but to draw attention to a scary possibility in the form of a cautionary tale.

 REDUCTO AD ABSURDUM 
- a type of logical argument in which one assumes a claim for the sake of argument and derives an absurd or ridiculous outcome by taking it to its extreme, concluding that the original claim must have been wrong because it led to such an absurd result.

 - [The project] was always about highlighting just how complex and difficult the processes behind even the most simple of everyday conveniences, like toasting a piece of bread, have become.
COUNTERFACTUALS 
- A historical fact is changed to see what might have happened, if . . . . It is sometimes used in history to understand the importance of key events and their influence on how the world turned out.

-  For writers, it is an interesting way of creating an alternative present because the reader can understand how that alternate world might have come about. For design it can provide a fresh alternative to future- based thinking by presenting parallel worlds as thought experiments rather than predictions.

  

Three approaches: 

-       - Conterfactual – what if – question scenarios (fictional) create spaces of debate and discussion – total imagination

-       - Dark design – questioned the limited range of emotional and psychological experiences offered by design products (and marketing) the limitation of ‘making things nice’, possibility of unhappiness.

-       - Reductio ad absurdum – assuming a claim for the sake of argument to derive an outcome – take an idea and follow it through no matter what – but researched and already existing – like making a toaster from scratch 

Session 4 - Workshop

Web tips:

1.     naming conventions – no spaces ‘index.html” “page01_intro.html”

2.     aliasing (when you can see the edge of a pixel) / anti-aliasing

3.     file structure / template page

Slice:

save for web

2-up

JPEG

Save

Format: HTML and images

Slices: all user slices

On DW open choose images

Roll over:

Layer images – same size

Save for web

2-up

GIF

01

make what you want it to change to

all same but save as 02

on DW insert rollover image

GIF:

If you want the picture to change on your website you need to make a GIF

Photoshop – window - timeline - create video timeline

Drag images onto document

Drag down images in order you want them to appear

File - save for web - makes sure its GIF format - animation once or forever 

Final Project Ideas

Me: 

-       Black and white

-       Simple / minimalistic

Project ideas:

-       - Viral videos - Dark design? - laugh at pain

-       - Dark humor - dark jokes - not funny - clowns?

-       - Music - celebrities - royalty - worshiped

-       - Interactive human - make them do whatever - puppets - Build-a-butler

-       - Viral images - tumblr - reddit - 4chan - imgur

-       - Children’s cartoons - how innocent are they really?

-       - Animals - baby animals - fucking adorable 

-       - History - interesting photographs - don’t know the story behind them

Build-a-butler: 

Seller – big corp, no appreciation of human rights, want money

Buyer – richest of the rich – 1 butler costs 1 million dollars

build-a-butler

- the butler is basically a robot

- monthly subscription – very expensive – only for high elite

- choose how they look 

- comes with tablet – mini-butler – what ever you do to mini-butler on tablet your real butler has to do

            - get water

            - make food

            - massage

            - literally everything

-

Session 3 - Workshop

Notes in class:

Terminology

-       Remediation

-       Hypermediacy

-       Immediacy

-       Interface

-       Reproduction

-       Representational inheritance

-       Presence /telepresence

-       Aura

-       Mass media

- “The ultimate purpose of media is indeed to transfer sense experiences from one person to another”

- Media is ‘designed to efface itself, to disappear from the user’s consciousness.”

            - Bolter

- “Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated.”

-       Zelinski 

What is a ‘deep time of the media’?

-       Media archeology

-       Various obsolete forms

-       Something that has been left out / lost along the way

- “History is the promise of continuity and a celebration of the continual march of progress in the name of humankind. Everything has always been around, only in a less elaborate form; one needs only to look.’

-       Zelinski

Every piece of technology comes from an older form of technology.

- “Do not seek the old in the new, but find something new in the old”

            - Zelinski

Gives us a new perspective when looking at technology and media as it focuses more on the good elements of the past that have sustained to be something of the present.

Gives the example of the Sistine chapel and virtual relative spaces as being immersive media. Does it make a difference if something is painted on the wall or if it’s a projection?

Zelinski wants to retain the possibility of the first moment of inventiveness.

Impossible machines vs possible impossible machines

Zelinski doesn’t think that any ideas should be looked at as fiction – e.g. Da Vinci drew plans for machines that at the time seemed impossible, yet were created several years later.

HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language

Today we use HTML 5 and HTML X

WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get

An application that enables you to see on the display screen exactly what will appear

Dream weaver is a WYSIWYG

Basic HTML web structure starts with <html> and finishes with </html>

On dreamweaver:

Open HTML

Designer – change to classic

Code / Split / Design – mostly be on design will sometimes use code to see what it looks like in code

Title: what you want it to say at the top of the web browser

Inset à Table à choose preferences à take time to fill out caption and summary (its how people figue out how to navigate)

Save as index – front page should always be saved as index

Page properties à appearance (CSS)

Lorem ipsum

Just want floating text choose insert à layout objects à AP Div

From photoshop to dream weaver

Slice what you want to move

If header use GIF

If photographs pale colour use JPEG

Save it in right place folder

Save as all user slices

Then you have your images to plug into page on dreamweaver

You can make your image link by selecting it and looking at box at bottom

Practice Website

Original Idea: (technology artefact)

Mood board:

Lay-out on Photoshop: 

Site Inspiration: 

Final product: