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November 28, 2005
Universal Design
For my universal design project I evaluated the following objects:
cell phone
watch
alarm clock
coffee maker
oven
ipod
thermostat
lamp
metrocard
bike
bike lock
pen
atm
iron
dvd player
doorbell
washing machine
As I was making my way through this list the first thing I noticed is how poorly informed my ratings were. I am considering the assistive usability of these tools through the lens of an able bodied individual. With these evaluations I am guessing what it may be like to be at a certain disadvantage but the only way to really find out what it is like to be disabled is to ask someone with the disability.
In the case of 'without the ability to walk', all my devices outside of the bicycle have an easy of use of one. The devices are localized. For example, in the case of the ATM, you don't need your legs to use the ATM. You do need your legs to make it to the ATM but that would be the case for any tool. A tool is somewhere, if you want to use it you need to be able to get to it. How you get to it is outside the scope of this exercise. The device might be more easily used if it was closer rather than farther but that would involve making assumptions about where people keep their tools. The only way to find out the answer to those questions is to ask people.
My own prejudices about what it's like to be disabled put a lot of fours and fives in the 'use without the ability to use hands' category. For me, hands are the most indesposable for any device and most devices become useless without the use of one's hands. A major shift would have to be made to make most devices useable hands free because most devices assume the use of the hands. Hands are the most versatile in device manipulation and an interaction that device designers take for granted. Without the use of one's hands, interactions are funneled through a single device, possibly a mouth that controls a straw or a system which monitors eye positioning.
Posted by mb2811 at 11:52 PM
November 21, 2005
Thanksgiving
I'm flying to Boston tomorrow, the break is here. We are slated to present first for our Physical Computing project (December 7th) so when I get back we'll have one week to complete our project. It's going to be flat out until the end of the semester.
I got a copy of the Spring '06 course listing but i'm running around too much to evaluate it. I need to think hard about what I want to do with my time here at ITP and which direction I want to lean towards with my studies. I also want to work with as many people as possible and most importantly, I need to give space and time to nourish my ideas.
Yelena is getting married. She beat me to it. She wants me to perform the ceremony?!
Posted by mb2811 at 02:38 PM
November 18, 2005
Tags!
Both reactions to Clay's lecture were great, as expected. The first group explored the physical tagging and redefining of meaning in the real world. There were four of them and they all started out with the same number of words as well as a few different words. They then went out into the world and taped their 'tagging' exploits with a homage to graffiti artists. It was interesting to see how they used the same words differently and how the redefined what 'is' is with a sticker. They took a broadcast announcement and changed it into a conversation.
The second group produced itp.licio.us, a play on del.icio.us which had us tagging our own classmates. My tags are on the left. The exercise was pretty neat, 70% interesting and 30% high school popularity contest with a bit of slander thrown in. At first people were asked to opt out of it but now people are asked to opt in to their names appearing on the list. It did highlight some of the problems of tagging that Clay brought up such as the thesaurus problem. The video was nicely done, interspersing students' tags with student interviews. The student interviews highlighted the chasm between what we think of ourselves and what others think of ours. As you can see, I didn't get any 'hot' tags :)
Posted by mb2811 at 05:20 AM
November 15, 2005
Crossed Wires
We're still working on our movie, they're going to kick us out of the lab at midnight, but the most memorable image out of this process are the headphone splitters. The computer only has one headphone jack but since there are five of us we have to split the signal. Each split gives us another jack so we need four of them to get all of us plugged in or audio. The image attached is a grainy cell phone camera picture but you get the idea.
Posted by mb2811 at 03:44 AM
South Street Seaport
For my outside activity I went down to the South Street Seaport to see the Cadavers exhibit. These are reconstructed human bodies, organs, muscles and bones encased and preserved. It isn't something I really want to see but it is controversial and just very out there and I wanted to see it for myself, judge for myself. It reminded me of the time I came up from Boston to see Sensations. I was in town for a wedding but felt like I had a duty to see the show that had the mayor shutting down subway stations.
I didn't see an cadavers. The show doesn't open until the 19th, but i'll come back.
The whole art scene on South Street was distancing itself from the event. No one really knew where it was or would talk about it. That's not surprising since South Street is very touristy, with box stores and bland local food. Reminded me of Faneuil Hall. Ok, that's enough self righteousness for one week.
Posted by mb2811 at 03:39 AM
November 14, 2005
Break Fever?
It's been a slightly less than stellar morale week. I think it's the dip between my running the marathon and the anticipation of leaving town for the thanksgiving break. It helps to hang out on the floor more so that even if I don't feel like doing much, everybody else's collective enthusiasm rubs off on me. I want to say that last week was a quiet week but if I think back, as always, a lot happened.
This past week we were editing our communications lab movie which we were supposed to shoot the week before but actually shot late last week and started editing mid week. It was supposed to be a couple, breaking up, chatting online but the script was completely rewritten. I was in pcomp at the time but was hardly attached to the old script. The new one is a sort of disjointed telephone game played with cell phone. Lots of jump cuts and hilarity. Today is Monday and the whole movie is due tomorrow. We have to do some cleanup editing and still shoot the last scene but Gabe, the film making pro is in our group so we should be fine. He has been very helpful and has a fancy 3 chip camera so our footage looks much nicer than it would if our footage came from the equipment room cameras.
Clay Shirky, my adviser, spoke in front of our class from Red's Applications on tuesday. It was a great talk. I've heard it before online when I found out he was going to be my advisor. Ontology is Overrated. Even though I knew the content of the talk, he was still spectacular to see. It's a delight to see people so articulate about technology and new media, to cut through all the noise and make a distinct, interesting and enlightening point.
Last thursday, after I punched out from the Q, I decided to sit down and write Red's M5 bus paper. I was running out of time. I had been holding out for something amazing, the history of garbage, the path of a craigslist advertisement, people who died in accidents along the bus route, but nothing was jumping out as practical or concrete. My rough cut of the paper worked out pretty well, the thesis being that older people who are more likely to ride the bus and are more threatened by technology, they also have stories to tell. Anna marked it up and I should give it another go later this week but i'm glad I got something down. I do have a hard time going back on something I wrote. I can't tell what's important and what I wrote just to write. What holds the piece together and what can be discarded.
In physical computing, Alice, Min and I have been building breath collection prototypes. We've been holding focus groups (that documentation needs to be posted) to collect breath, settling on pinwheels last week and building more breath collection prototypes this week. We've settled on a light box with pinwheel structures on each side. As a participant breathes into the box, lights turn on at different intensities using PWM. The box will have four sides accessible but the pinwheels will only be on two of the sides. Individuals can interact by blowing or just by looking at the lights. Participants can have a conversation, an interaction with breath and lights.
Posted by mb2811 at 06:10 PM
November 09, 2005
Elevator Pitch
This week's assignment is to create an elevator pitch for our final project. My inspiration is Momento Transmission and being here at ITP. In answer to the questions:
What are the keywords to describe your project?
History, Folksonomy, Tapestry, Continuity, Memory
What is the general scope of ideas?
The general idea is to try to explore the space that is between a museum and a school as it reflects on ITP. ITP is short on space but not short on ideas so this exploration could happened in the space least used, the one above our heads.
What parts of the general scope are specifically covered by your project?
The project would metaphorically push older ideas up while newer ideas would exist on the ground level. The area above our heads would be a physical manifestation of the older blogs and projects on the itp stage web server. Older projects are catalogued in a museum type environment (above our heads) while the oldest projects are pushed out through the roof (disposed).
How to introduce your project?
The project gives a physical volume and dimension for all the work that happens and has happened here at ITP. It creates a concentration on the process allowing for new ideas to be developed from the discarded tentacles of older projects. A person experiencing this project would just have to look up. The audience would be anyone who is interested in what we do here.
What does your project provide that other similar projects do not provide or provide differently ?
There is nothing like this here right now because of the glut of information and lack of space. Stage.itp was hacked last year and all the data was lost. Our spatial projects are thrown out on a weekly basis. Using the (unused) space above our heads, we could create a history of what happens here, we could tell stories.
What are the resources available to you today for this project?
I'd need access to the ceiling and Red's approval but other than that there are plenty of projects here that are never shown. If they are shown, they are shown to a select group of people or are shown very briefly on the floor. People would be happy to give their work to an elevated gallery.
What are the missing elements for your project?
Design. The projects above would have to be visible. It should be clear what is going on up above. The individual project authors' vision should be clear.
How do you plan to provide these element?
I would work with others in our class.
Posted by mb2811 at 07:45 PM
November 07, 2005
New York City Marathon
For my outside activity this week, I ran the New York City Marathon. I was accepted in the lottery a long time ago when I was still running every other day in Boston. Now that i'm in New York and at ITP, I haven't had any time to train or keep up my running schedule. I was going to pass on the Marathon but then decided that I didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to be a part of something so quintessentially new York. I figured we weren't running into the woods. If things didn't go well for me I could just get on the subway and go home.
I had a fairly low number, 8614, because when I signed up I was actually training. This sunday, I didn't want to start in a very fast corral because I didn't want to risk loosing steam too early in the race. It is after all twenty six miles and more importantly I didn't want to get trampled. Ignoring my low number, I started way back, with a group which was expected to finish the race in 4:15 and figured if it was too slow for me I could move up. My friend Leon, who was running for Fred's Team, was back there with me.
The race started out fairly slow. We ran over the Verrazano-Narrows bridge into Brooklyn. To thin out the field, runners split between different levels of the bridge and then rejoined the full pack later on in Brooklyn. This caused congestion and made it difficult to keep an even pace. There was always someone in front of you, slowing down, stopping or going a different speed. I left Leon and his group around mile five or six because the pack density was making it hard for me to concentrate.
The rest is a daze. The marathon takes you through all these breathtaking views but I don't remember any of them. I don't even remember the race that well. Injury wise, I thought my fibula fracture would act up but my lower legs were fine. It was my hamstrings, they seized at mile thirteen and didn't let go for half the marathon. Every time I tried to return to a normal gait they would start to spasm, most likely a symptom of not running for months followed by twenty six point two miles through New York. It was miserable. At mile nineteen I asked a race director for the subway, I was done. I was in Queens and couldn't take the painful shuffle that my running had become, but he convinced me to keep on going .3 more miles to a medical tent. By the time I got there I decided to keep on going.
With the unusually warm weather, I saw people completely loose it. The heat was too much. People passing out, one guy falling and slamming his head on the sidewalk. I think it's then that I realized that this wasn't just something you do. Twenty six miles can kill you.
I couldn't have made it without all the people on the sidelines handing out snacks and water. I drank a lot of fluids, a lot more than I usually do when I run because of the heat and because I felt salt crystals on my forehead. I was sweating salt. At the end of the race, a race volunteer had me eat a couple of packets of salt and that brought me slightly back in balance.
I'm done with my first Marathon and I'd do it again. Yup, I just said it. At mile 20 yesterday I hated myself for not being at a friend's party, watching from the sidelines, drinking but now I just want to heal up so I can start properly training. Running is addictive and I miss it.
Posted by mb2811 at 03:13 PM
November 05, 2005
User Testing
This friday evening we did some user testing with Rob Faludi's help. It was really enlightening to see how what we thought people would do with our prototypes would match what they actually ended up doing. The windmills worked out well. We are going to pursue those and also look into Min's smoke idea.
We also discovered that the proximity of the prototypes as well as their order next to each other made a big difference. Whatever was after the windmills was much more likely to get blown on. That's also a lesson in using an item which might not be central to an installation but could lead by association. The windmills were also being touched so we are going to experiment with placing a barrier between the user and the windmills so that it's clear that if you want something to happen (hopefully) you will give us breath.
Posted by mb2811 at 03:25 AM
Fortunte Teller
This week in spatial design we had to build the physical manifestation of the data we collected last week for our labyrinth. Since my data from last week was so straightforward and well, data driven, I wanted to build something more abstract for this week. I printed up the visio maps and made paper fortune tellers out of them. Like this one:
Each fortune teller gave the user an opportunity to take a different path in the labyrinth. I then strung a number of fortune tellers together to expand the labyrinth.
Jean-Marc had sent us this email a few days before this friday's class:
Please note that Nina Freedman will be our guest critic on Friday. Nina will review your labyrinth projects. She is a NY architect with interest in community driven architecture, sustainable architecture, research and spatial explorations with technology. Nina collaborated on national and international projects with Richard Meier, Renzo Piano and Paul Rudolph, while at the Architectural Association, in London, she studied with Peter Cook, formerly of Archigram. She is currently with H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture (www.h3hc.com ), formerly, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates.
Nina had some interesting feedback for my work. I did my best to try to keep my process labyrinth from being a linear progression but she said that this gives it the appearance of randomness. It lacks a coherent structure. To improve on that, she suggested some other media to bring everything together. Possibly sound from the pictures to give the piece a connecting spine.
I'm going to large print last week's work and maybe put it up @ the show. I could only double it inside because Visio would not save very large resolution/size files. I need to learn Illustrator.
Posted by mb2811 at 03:09 AM
November 04, 2005
Small Architectural Tour
Jean-Marc gave us a quick architectural tour of lower Manhattan, closest to Tisch. The building of the city were put in the context of the ideas we are playing with in spatial design.
We started out with the long, narrow buildings right across the street from the school. The ones that look like they might be out of the Triplets of Bellville. When they were built, the city stopped at the church in Union Square, everything north of that was farm land. The buildings were constructed in an old world style, where builders were taxed by the number of window. More windows meant more potential retail revenue, you could show more stuff to sell. The settlers here wern't taxed by each window but the custom remained.
Every building looks different depending on where it's inhabitants immigrated from.
The buildings are an "irrigation system of money". The first few floors are plain and purely for function. Industrial containers for stores and factories. The buildings are most ornate at the top where the owners usually lived. In this way the owners could pay for their habitation upstairs through the commerce downstairs. With this system, the renter had a direct relationship with the land owner. In the city's current incarnation, a couple of large, anonymous banks own all the land.
Down broadway is a skyscraper built by Cass Gilbert. It wasn't possible to build a skyscraper until after the elevator invented and the one in lower Manhattan was built soon after that. I think the one we saw was the Woolworth Building. The skyscraper was initially developed as a gothic church to bind the stretch of broadway to the other church in Union square but after it was built they realized it was a testament to the church of capitalism and not christ.
The subways are built in a vault, you can see it in how broadway has an arc to it. In the early 20th century people realized that utilities should be underground. The street became an abstraction instead of the only place to be. Now there was a down and an up instead of just a "there".
A lot of the basements of the buildings on Broadway extend under the road.
The subway went underground and there is very little concrete separating us from the vault underneath. Since the subways were also a utility, they are lined with tile, like a bathroom.
Also, in a tight city like Manhattan, you are always saving on space. You can see that in the 8th street N/R stop, where one side of the entrance is a building so you don't need railings on both sides. You can use a building as railing.
If you take a right at the N/R, you can see a small building which is a prototype of a skyscraper. It's more even, flat, straight and is more of an engineering feat than the buildings around it. No other buildings on that street have such a flat facade.
We moved down to Astor place, where the opera house used to be. The large building to the right is the Cooper Union School which was picked up and moved from the Bowery to realign the architecture of the city.
The Bowery used to be much more dangerous only twenty years ago, cities change quickly. NYU gave away housing with ridiculous leases in the eighties because no one wanted to live in Manhattan and now these people can lived their indefinitely with ridiculously low rents.
The big note/clock on the wall is from when the Fischer store was there, the Virgin Megastore of its time. People would buy sheet music there. Now the sign is a national landmark.
The building across from Cooper Union looks like it belongs in an Italian piazza. It was a prototype but the style never took off. It was too ornate, too old world.
Along Lafayatte you can see the pre depression opulence and the post depression practicality. In the parking garage, design is done on the cheap accentuating the interplay of brick arrangements.
There is an interesting building, the Bayard-Condict Building on Great Jones St built by Louis Sullivan. Sullivan was a mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright's. One of the first skyscrapers, it surges and looks to only be stopped by its roof. It isn't industrial and it doesn't announce itself, it's almost a building as poem.
Posted by mb2811 at 06:45 PM
Geographic IP as Networked Object
Idea:
When I read, I don't think about where the sender was physically when they wrote the email. I may think about them as a person, or have a picture of them in my head from some memorable time we spent together, but I don't think of them sitting in a computer lab, a bedroom, a coffee shop and writing email. I may be the exception.
I think something may be gained from bringing this data into the equation. Finer granularity would be preferable but as an initial first cut, the IP address of an individual could be converted into a physical map of their location. It could be another header, e.g.
From:
To:
Subject:
Body:
Attachments:
Map of Physical Location:
I think it would add an interesting dynamic to email and push email in the direction of networked objects.
Something to consider: Technically IP data may be misleading, especially for mobile devices.
Posted by mb2811 at 03:51 PM
November 01, 2005
The Seven Year Itch
This exhibit (Link: http://www.ektopia.co.uk/ektopia/archives/2005/09/07/blow) uses a microphone for breath input but what's interesting is that the photograph explains what to do at the exhibit. If you find yourself in front of a microphone you may end up doing one of many things. Singing, talking, yelling, etc. not necessarily blowing but the fact that the microphone is accompanied by a highly recognizable photo makes it perfectly clear what the microphone is for.
In this way we have the flexibility of a potential shift from what we discussed this evening. Instead of the blowing being clear, the thing that reacts could potentially make it clear that you are supposed to blow. Another way of looking at it thought we may not necessarily want to mess with microphones again :)
Posted by mb2811 at 03:40 AM
Dollar Store
I scavenged the dollar stores and found some blow-y things in the party department. I'll see what I can do with them. I also think that another way to make the installation coherent is to lead by example. Say you have a couple of thin grass-like wires that you want people to blow on. You could have a fan blowing on them initially so when the individual approaches the installation they can follow the fan's 'lead'. Another potential way to facilitate interaction.
Posted by mb2811 at 03:39 AM
The Shape of Space
In The Shape of Space, Minsky hypothesizes how we, as newborns learn to sense the space around us, with an eye towards crafting artificial intelligence algorithms to do the same. How do we figure it out and put it all together? Where is the prime mover for the development of our relative understanding of our surroundings. How is it that individuals come to the same collective understanding about what is and isn't?
What I find most interesting is the how we consistently mistake truth for our imagination. When we have seen an object from a single perspective, we imagine what it looks like from other perspectives and 'recognize' it from said perspectives. We do this using learned information about perception and space. This power of imagination allows us to function but closes us off to worlds and possibilities that we will no longer allow to happen. Real breakthroughs appear when we recede and let go of those assumptions. When we think like a child, again.
Posted by mb2811 at 02:46 AM
The Library of Babel
Borge's The Library of Babel describes a labyrinth containing a finite set of all the books ever written and all the books ever to be written. By generating all combinations of a set of alphabetic characters, the Library's contents guarantee a super set of all possible information. All predictions into the future, including a visitor's personal post mortem biography, exist somewhere in the Library.
All the useful information in the world has been generated for the library but the problem is it lacks context. The books, shelved arbitrarily, possibly by the location of the characters on their pages do not give any insight into their truth or validity. They exist as is and it is up to the reader to give them value. This arrangement is maddening to the library's visitors and employees.
The library is visited both by official censors and truth seekers. Both will fail. The censors can never truly destroy any information they deem dangerous because another, slightly different (maybe with just an extra comma), version of the same book exists somewhere else in the library. The truth seekers find the truth but they never know if it is the truth that they are looking for. There are many answers in the library but it's up to the visitor to match the answers to the questions.
Borge's essay is a timeless reflection on the value and weight of information, on the subjective perspective that defines truth. His essay could easily be applied to the current emerging medias, where everyone can publish their own book of potentially meaningless alphanumeric characters. I would also say that the essay is hopeful. There is a certain beauty to a labyrinth of true answers, indestructible and unhindered by self interested.
Posted by mb2811 at 01:55 AM