This project started with a one day long observation of the crowds at astor place, the conjunction of multi-way pedestrain crossing. Video was setup from different angles of the site, and some mundane activities are captured.

Click To Play

During the course of the observation, I found myself indulged in the act of observing, finding people who are daydreaming in the city, finding people who are lost, finding people who are just busy crossing the road, as mundane as it may seem. What if we all take the moment to observe each other, when the eyesight crosses, what might happen? On that day, I was hiding behind a camera, recording, what if I could give the pleasure of observing to other people? This is the initiative of the project.

I have also looked at the photo streams posted on flickr. The imagery created was amazing. It was a life recording of the people, of the place. What has happened there, day and night, rainfall or sunshine was so incidental and beautiful.

I decided to build a monument for the place, and for the pedestrains who are just passing by, giving them the opportunity to stay a little longer, project their observation onto the screen, and be seen by other people who are nearby.

Week7- Your Mug

Inspired by objects embraced by our body.
Design for our body. Emotional Design
everyone has the desire to have their personal shape imprinted, casted





IMPRINTS = MEMORY
in the old days, people also have their baby's face casted, if they died in their early age. Hence, I came up with the idea of a mug which has our personal finger prints. Basically pressure maps from the finger over time on a mug is casted into a mug. I decided to make this using rapid prototyping technology. This is a model from Maya.

Work in Progress

Portrait of Strokes

< Portrait of Strokes >

Initiatives:

What is a character? Is character a form recognized by human as familiar object that resembles us or can it be something else? We asked ourselves these questions when we started the project. We set out to investigate the very basic forms, such as the sound made while writing, to ask the question what is the most reduced form that can be recognized as a character. Does it have to be expressive? Does generative forms help?

Description

< Portrait of strokes > is a project where we attempt to make aural multi-layered compositions using pen strokes as they are drawn on paper. Two people sketchglyphs and in the process record the sound the marker/pen makes using a microphone. The sound made by drawing each of the glyphs turns into an individual sound sample which we then layer with other previous glyph samples.

Each sampling of the glygh can be pretty distinctive through its rythm, whether its a dot drawn repeatedly, or a curev drawn swiftly across the paper. By layering up the repeated samples, we are able to get a jazz-like rythmic composition.

We were interested in constructing something larger through repetition of smaller discrete elements. To us, doing this illustrated the idea of building a character- a process that involves iterations in form of editing, removal and addition of elements that eventually give characteristics (make the character). The initial idea was to explore how hand drawn typographical characters/alphabets translate to unique sounds and compositions. We expanded this idea to further include abstract shapes and strokes because it gave us the freedom to explore and construct a larger gamut of sounds and glyphs.

Throughout the project we found it hard to locate the 'character' of a piece. The piece was a whole was somewhat non-deterministic through performance. Each recording we experimented with have very different qualities. So it will be helpful to define shapes or elements reflect a certain sound quality that can be used in future composition.

What we consider as an interesting residue were the left over pen drawings- glyphs/strokes. We weren't sure what to do with sheets of paper. They did represent the process in discrete steps and served as manuscript of the composition/performance. We feel these could have been a much more important part of the performance if we had used a larger surface (like a whiteboard) to draw.

Feedback from Class Critique:

- This was an interesting framework for further exploring gestures, drawings and sound.
- Interesting because our building blocks were natural sounds of the stroke and not computationally synthesized sounds

- It will be helpful to define more shapes, elements or drawings that reflect a certain sound quality, which can be used in future composition. Instead of making the composition abstract, we could consider giving performance that actually portrays a particular sound: ie: raining, birds in the forest.

Reading on OpenSource

The literacy of the word OpenSource emerges from software development world, “The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source” talked about how well the OpenSource model fit in the bussiness world. It is beneficial in the bussiness world that when non-differentiating intellectual knowledge is shared, we avoid re-inventing the wheels and risk and investment was reduced to the least compared to the retailed model. And efforts could be concentrated onto the differentiating part of the bussiness, which could provide customer with tailored service.

And now we see OpenSource is inevitably penetrating the design world. It was discussed in class the fashion products are being opensourced to the mass through stores like H&M the emerging modular electronics - like Lilipad Arduino made readily available to designers and developers. These activities foster a community for the technology and ideas that are being invented. The profit center has moved on from the direct technology/idea/products to the ability to communicate and the expertised consultancy. With the technology and product made available in the hands of a larger community, we benefit from the network effect, or the rippling effect of greater collaboration.

Network

Big Screen II

These are the videos of my program running on eclipse in a single screen mode. Strokes are generated in different directions to mimick the calligraphy effects. Every time a different pattern is generated.

Big Screen Progress

My initial idea was to show the relationships among human writing, scribbling, drawing and how the quality of different medium are correlated to each other. Here is a presentation of my initial proposal and some visuals are shown here.

Exploded Comic

Concept

We decided to use the folding of paper to tell stories earlier on in our experiments. Rob and I started playing with origami and found this basic origami shape quite appealing for our purpose to develope a narrative system of non-linear story-telling. These mini-sculpture reflects the structure of the story, i.e: one has to lift up the modules in particular order to reveal alternative outcomes to the story. The story could be present in linear style, with several alternative endings or in a loop.




We also found in our experiment that stories can be invented by reordering the drawings, so it could be used as a toy to tell stories between kids. Here are some of the drawings I made for telling the Aesop story "The crow and the fox".





And Rob developed another story on "The lion and the mouse". We had a lot of fun drawing and building the mini-scrulpture. Printing became a big technical problem, as we need to figure out the rotation of the drawing to fulfill a nice image when the viewer's looking at it when it's folded up.

We expect this to be playful and we have spin-off several ideas to take this further into an animation production and a toy project. Thoughts are given to alternative material, such as laser-cutted plastics and embed connectors between the modules etc. Looking forward to see the critiques.