Practice Makes Perfect

Final Project: Collective Storytelling

Click here to go to “Teen Confessions Thru the Ages,” my collective storytelling blog. Have fun with the maps. Post comments about what did and didn’t work for you.

Assessment:

As is always the case, my “final” products are actually works in progress. I am really happy with what I learned and the technology confidence I gained as a result of this assignment. Ins-and-outs of basic blogging; the basic functions of and relationships between ftp, servers, applications downloads, etc.; a little something about php and html; the challenges and opportunities associated with collective storytelling.

The intention of this blog was to create a place where experience could be shared between adults and teenagers that was fun and informative in the same stroke. In person, sometimes communication breaks down during teen years. This blog works from the idea that teens actually do really like to talk about themselves and their exploits. Also, adults may be more comfortable or more effective telling and making meaning out of stories of their teen years when they are not speaking to anyone specific.

Blog user feedback was positive or otherwise instructive, so I want to continue working on this blog to get the kinks worked out and to really test whether Platial MapKit adequately serves my goal. I learned a lot about WordPress Codex and php, css, html in the process of bringing this blog to life, but some of the remaining fixes require more advanced knowledge that will come with continued work on this. This documentation is intended as a checklist and reminder for ongoing work.

Click here for more about feedback from users, my assessment of Platial and current blog architecture, what I learned in the process of creating the blog and next steps.

Sustainable Energy, final Midterm

This PowerPoint presentation concludes the Midterm presentation begun last week.

PPT Attachment pending until find correct format for uploading to site.

The ListenUp Scarf

The Elevator Pitch
For a young teenage girl, the ListenUp Scarf is a canvas for self-expression and a reminder of her community of support. She collects snippets of conversations with the scarf and shares them in unconventional ways.

Description

Audio System: The scarf is equipped with Radio Shack 20-second audio modules controlled from an Arduino platform. The hacked modules can store multiple audio tracks. Two soft-switches are dedicated to record and playback functions, respectively. Soft circuit technology is used to locate the switches in one end of the scarf and the speaker and microphone in the opposite end.

Wearable Design: A bold pink and green color palette is arranged in curvilinear stripes lengthwise. Ornamentation includes matching trim in the summer version and, in the winter version, tassels and solar powered, nocturnal LED pummers (BEAM circuitry). The record and playback switches are distinguished by charms that spell out “SPEAK” and “LISTEN.”

Scenarios
As the young teenage girl stands in the kitchen wrapped in the scarf, her Mom grabs a dangling tassel to record an encouraging message her daughter can listen to later in the day. Gesturing theatrically with her scarf, the young girl operates the embedded audio modules and microprocessor to her friends’ delight, and to her own astonishment, finds a side of her she barely knew. A girlfriend enlists her as an ambassador to carry a message to a crush and retrieve a reply. Feelings she would ordinarily find too hard to share come more easily when she can deliver them through the scarf.

Because the scarf is all about voice, she thinks of it as a metaphor for speaking her truth. Soft, stylish and fashionable, she thinks of the scarf as harkening to her childhood security blanket while helping her grow into her next skin – that of a confident young woman.

The scarf creates memories of support and love she’s received and fun and friendships she’s experienced. At night it sparkles, as if celebrating who she is!

Key Words
Wearables, soft-circuits, BEAM circuitry, LED pummers, teenage self-esteem.

Team Members: Cynthia Hilmoe

Classes: Wearables Studio, Sustainable Energy

Space Requirement:
Presentation will be on an antique wall-mounted shelf with coat hooks, approximately 24” to 30” wide or a coat stand of some kind that takes up about 3X3 square foot area.

Equipment Needs:
A spot light shinning up from the base (in case of shelf).

Week 10, Wearables Studio

The Elevator Pitch
For a young teenage girl, the ListenUp scarf is a canvas for self-expression and a reminder of her community of support. She collects snippets of conversations with the scarf and shares them in unconventional ways.

Scenarios
As the young girl stands in the kitchen wrapped in the scarf, her Mom grabs a tassel dangling from it and records a message her daughter can listen to later in the day for encouragement. Gesturing theatrically with her scarf, she operates the embedded audio modules and microprocessors to her friends’ delight, and to her own astonishment, finds a side of her she barely knew. A girlfriend enlists her as an ambassador to carry a message to a crush and retrieve a reply. Feelings she would ordinarily find too hard to share come more easily when she can deliver them through the scarf.

Because the scarf is all about voice, she thinks of it as a metaphor for speaking her truth. Soft, stylish and fashionable, she thinks of the scarf as harkening to her childhood security blanket while helping her grow into her next skin – that of a confident young woman.

The scarf creates memories of support and love she’s received and fun and friendships she’s experienced. At night it sparkles, as if celebrating who she is!

Week 8: Collective Storytelling
Tenement Museum Visit, 4/7/08
C. Hilmoe

Readings:
Collective Storytelling and Social Creativity in the Virtual Museum: A Case Study, Elisa Giaccardi.
Storytelling: The Real Work of Museums, Leslie Bedford.

Points from the readings that are relevant to observations made during Tenement Museum site and website visits are quoted or paraphrased below:

Motivating Participation:
Narrative engages the listener’s ability to make meaning of an object or event by embodying the tangible and intangible.
Narrative inspires internal dialog that results in a sense of connection.
Stories harbor authenticity.
Object Theatre: Stories bring objects to life without necessity of hands-on experience.

Sustaining Participation:
A listener will fill in gaps in a story or relate the story to his or her own experience. They will make the story their own; create their own meaning.
Using stories as objects taps listeners’ imaginations and sense of play, strengthens cultural identity and sense of belonging. In this way, telling and listening to stories help start a conversation that grows over time.

Outcomes/Act/Impact:
In the act of contributing to, telling and listening to stories, diverse members of a community can become unified and act in a unified manner.
Stories help bring out the universal; reveal the universal through the particular.
Storytelling can help the process of social transformation or cultural change, especially when multiple platforms are combined into a system that motivates and sustains participation.

“Museum” Design:
Need to invent new museum models and interaction spaces that act as catalysts for innovation rather than approaching technology merely as something to be added onto existing practices (Giaccardi).

My Commentary:
The readings relate closely to my own inquiry into the potential of stories and “museums-without-walls” to unify or transform communities or to create a greater sense of belonging or connection within them. Stories promote going out into the communities affected by or targeted by a museum exhibit, whether from an online platform or in on-site workshops, events, etc. Stories make it possible to go out into these living spaces where context can leverage more meaning than is typically possible from inside the walls of a traditional museum.

The case study of the Virtual Museum of the Collective Memory of Lambardia (MUVI) presented by Elisa Giaccardi suggests a system of interdependent programs rather than content management is required to turn a collection of stories (objects, artifacts) into something dynamically related to a community’s past, present and future (instead of a static collection of nostalgia).

Giaccardi calls for a “new approach to museum management and a new communicative competence toward the audience.” She thinks in terms of a new “form of virtuality [that] entails new forms of social creativity and museum construction, and [that] produces cultural objects that were previously unimaginable. ……The audience — the local community – [is transformed] into an active heritage, and [becomes] the main actor in the construction of the museum. …previously unknown facts come to light, role of “fantastic” can play in relation to the emergence of truth.”

The MUVI system used photographs, stories (audio, written?) and a local radio program. Alliances with other organizations were crucial to pulling this off.

At the Tenement Museum and Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS), online and on-site exhibits really seem to incorporate the idea of storyteller, but are less adept at leveraging the story listener for purposes of creating the exhibit and making it a living entity. In other words, the conversation seems truncated.

In the Veteran’s exhibit at BHS, interactivity/technology is utilized more as an add-on (sensors to activate, database content to view) to traditional didactic or discovery methods than as part of a system designed to spur social transformation or cultural change. According to the curator, one of the vets sometimes visits the exhibit, engaging visitors in conversations. I wonder if excluding this element from the formal programming was intentional, for instance, for financial reasons.

At the Tenement Museum, the on-site tour format (1-hour length, space???) and individual educator discretion/ability seem to limit the degree to which the visitor/listeners can dynamically add to the experience.

I am left with a big question: Is it the function of museum vision, logistical feasibility or the pocketbook that stops these two great museums from taking their program to the next step, leveraging the meaning elicited by their exhibits to help visitors explore more explicitly or tangibly opportunities for cultural change or social transformation? The exhibits seem to point visitors in that direction without offering any platform on which to act or participate further.

Granted, there may be activities and goals along these lines that I am not aware of. Or maybe perspectives within Museum management or executive boards consider this approach uncomfortably close to taking a stand.

My own manifesto for experience design, based on readings and site visit analysis during ITP Cabinets of Wonder class, is a work in progress. This version is incomplete and needs to be edited, but it sets me on my way towards a very important exercise and professional product.

Experience Design Manifesto, Cynthia Hilmoe

Notes from Our Listening Trip to Panama
Azuero Foundation Intern Initiative

I have been reviewing my notes from many hours of listening in Panama. I am trying to synthesize common themes and compile insights and key pieces of information. I am also using this as an journal for developing project ideas and principles in response to the listening. Click here….

Sustainable Project Philosophy
Here is an excerpt from my notes concerning attributes of a sustainable project. Click here…

Click here to read a Community Arts Manifesto prepared by participants in a March 2008 conference at Maryland Institute College of Arts.

Week 9, Sustainable Energy

BEAM Technology, Hex Pummer

Gave an interim Midterm Project Presentation. Click here to see the PowerPoint.

PPT Attachment pending until find correct format for uploading to site.

Week 7, Collective Storytelling

Click here:Hilmoe’s Final Project Proposal