Assignment
Design Domain is a project that all of the Design School participates in. Every course is provided with the same theme and the briefs are adapted to each of the studios practice. During design domain we have two Symposiums which involve attending guest artists speaker talks, the project finishes with an Open Studio which allows the different studios to view each other’s work.
Design Domain allows for various interpretations of the brief ranging from drawings and paintings to projections and soundscapes. However it’s important that the process involves some kind of computation along the way.
Symposium
The symposium today was extremely inspiring and has encouraged me to change my approach and continue with design domain with a much more playful approach by experimenting and trying things I find interesting rather than starting by planning my final and restricting myself to the Part 1 proposal. I really enjoyed Jessica In’s talk as she was one of my inspirations for the Physical Expressions project and this provided a new insight into her work which I didn’t know about by looking at her website. I enjoyed her explanation of ‘the seen and unseen’ when discussing projects and code. This has made me consider possibly attempting to make my own personalised sketches of how I see my projects and code which I could then form a zine from. I also really enjoyed the complex code that Jessica In showed and this has definitely pushed me to change the direction of my project into exploring code and computational processes in processing. I have used processing for projects in the past but I feel like I still have a lot to learn and there are many areas to processing which I haven’t yet tried.
Research
https://github.com/CodingTrain/website/tree/master/Tutorials/Processing/11_video
http://dunneandraby.co.uk/content/projects/68/0
I was very inspired by Jessica In’s talk as she portrayed the playfulness of code and finding new ways to draw. During this project I will aim to play with code and try out various processing libraries I haven’t yet used or would like to learn more about.
Jessica In’s website: https://www.jessicain.net
Helpful links about processing and sound: https://processing.org/reference/libraries/sound/FFT_analyze_.html
https://www.processing.org/reference/libraries/sound/LowPass_freq_.html
https://processing.org/tutorials/sound/
Researching Child and Technology studies and articles:
Click to access Druin-BIT-Paper2002.pdf
There’s a lot of studies and articles which speak of creating technology interfaces specifically for children which in itself shows that as far back as 1999 people were already trying to aim technology towards young children. Even though many of these articles and studies try to encourage that children be considered during the design process it just highlights my possible future idea where technology will be a massive part of educating children however my idea explores this in a more dystopian, sinister way rather than a positive. I’m not necessarily saying my belief is that technology is all bad for children, my aim is to start a conversation and to present the viewer with a new alternate reality we could possibly face.
Click to access Druin-BIT-Paper2002.pdf
Click to access Druin-BIT-Paper2002.pdf
Experimentation
I’m currently looking through processing ‘Examples’ to see if there’s any code I would like to experiment with. Right now I’m interested in the ‘drawing’ and ‘audioin’ examples. I’m experimenting with creating a sketch which asks the viewer to participate in ‘play time’ asking the viewer to perform certain tasks like for example singing or whistling. If the viewer is being too quiet they will be asked to sing louder until the ellipse portraying the sound is big enough to cover the text. Right now I want to explore and play with code to see if anything particular interests me rather than deciding on a final outcome like I sometimes tend to do. I also plan on amending my Part 1 proposal because I don’t want to restrict myself in my ‘making’ process.
Re-visiting my proposal I have decided to link my research of children and simple task games I would like to attempt to make a ‘play time’ system to begin this project. I’d like to explore different possible outcomes with different code libraries a well as possible staging a documentation video with a child viewer interacting with the piece. This would be a sinister commentary of the screens creating devices between people and children who at a young age are already becoming ‘addicted’ to technological devices.
During the tutorials I was advised to focus on one of the sketches I wanted to create. I am now experimenting with the ‘Sing with me’ idea and I am working on creating a sketch which draws when someone sings to it.
This speculative design approach portrays a possible future combined with an alternate reality where creativity is no longer encouraged at a young age and computers have found a way to manipulate new generations of humanity with only the AI’s past records of creativity like artists and musicians. In this specific ‘scene’ I will be showing how children will not be encouraged to draw anymore instead they will use their “noise making abilities’ to try and copy a song or rhyme that was created in the past and one chosen by the ‘AI’ the child is conferring with. Once the child sings they computer creates a drawing which it then prints out and the child pins this to a board with other drawing created by the robot. This sinister alternate reality/possible future is a commentary on the new generations dependance on their mobile phones and technological devices. It suggests social skills will also be limited as the AI will teach the children which means no play time with others further ‘lowering’ the child’s creative skills. I think this idea has the potential to become a very effective documentation video. I also like the idea that this piece of work will depend on the audience responding to it, I don’t want to plan and give everything away I definitely want to include my key ideas but I believe the idea will grow further with a response from the audience. I created a rough storyboard to portray this idea.
I decided to invert the colours of the sketch. I will be using this sketch in my video when I’m filming during the weekend but I might improve and change the sketch for the presentation exhibition in the garage space for open studios.
Testing to see if the mic input works with my sketch.
Some pictures taken during filming of the video.
Video explanation: A speculative possible future where children are no longer encouraged to be creative. Technology and robots are dependent on human’s creativity, so the only way to break free and to control humans is for technology to stop new generations from learning creative skills. Children no longer draw, play instruments or sing. Children are made to participate in a simple audio based interaction where the computer ‘draws’ the sound made by the child. This is the only creative outlet the child is allowed to participate in. Frames are empty as all art is discouraged and there’s an extreme lack of colour, everything is mostly white, black, brown or purple. This is inspired by new generations dependence and ‘addiction’ to mobile phones and technology from a very early age.
Week 2 To Do List:
- Edit the video – work on audio and saturation
- Fix and re-submit Part 1 proposal
- Open Studio Friday set-up – Necessary Equipment: microphone, mic stand, instrument interface, mic cable and interface cable, 2 Screens, 2 HDMI cables and 2 laptops or a HDMI split
During the editing of the video my goal is to make it around a minute long and to portray the feel I am trying to achieve I am going to turn down the saturation on the video as well as editing out all the parts where Zosia is laughing or smiling to show the supression of creativity.
While editing the video I was testing it on the monitor as the display is much more saturated and warm toned than my laptop screen. I am considering displaying the video on my tablet instead of the screen as I’m already using a screen to show the live code.
Week 2
I’m currently working on prints I want to make to accompany my Video and live code example. I think it’s important for these to be displayed as they explain my concept and tie in the video and live sketch. There will be 3 prints split in half with text on the top and the corresponding sketch on the bottom. The text will be a nursery rhyme while the sketch shown below will be the corresponding screenshot of the sketch made with audio (the audio being the nursery rhyme spoken into the mic). Two of the nursery rhymes will be famous English ones while the middle one will be in Polish and it is the one spoken in the video. I believe it wouldn’t be effective to translate the nursary rhyme instead the fact the other two are in English explains the concept clearly enough for me.
Sketchbook pages containing notes, idea exploration and storyboards:
Updated Design Domain Part 1 proposal:
DesignDomainPart1ProposalEdit_MartaPalacz
Summary
Overall, I am happy with the amount of work I have put into this project, I feel like I have spent a lot of time on it and I also enjoy the fact I was able to realise all my ideas especially since I had 3 different artefacts to stage and complete. I am happy with my choice to keep things minimalistic with clear noticeable parameters like the colour scheme and connecting the different artefacts presented with the ‘audiograph’ sketches as they were printed, shown in the video and the sketch was also presented live for viewers to interact with. Jen did advise me to add the working sketch into my video, I have decided to keep that out of my presentation video however I did make an edit for my documentation video which contains a title page, captions and also that moving code, I just felt that since there were prints and the code was going to be presented live it would naturally make sense and link all the components together so that once the viewer interacted with the microphone to affect the code visuals the video would make much more sense. I pushed myself to work with video as it is something I don’t feel confident in so I will always be very critical of any video I make, I liked the staging of it and I had a great actress but I think I definitely need to work with higher resolution, even though my camera records in HD 1080p I feel it’s just not showing the quality I would like to present. I think I will also benefit from learning more about editing audio and video. I like how my concept naturally formed itself through the process of creating a proposal for part 1 combined with the process of making I am extremely happy to come up with something original and unique and I believe it was thanks to researching to many varying artists and once I started making links between them I started to noticed uncovered ground. Overall, I am happy with what I produced in this short time scale.
Documentation Video
Exhibition
Marta Zofia Palacz 
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