Project Three Provisional Teams and Tasks

Hi Class:

Good work zeroing in on a concept today. There are lots of unanswered questions about our staring contest, but there's also lots of room for growth.

You have volunteered to be part of (or have been assigned to) a provisional team.

Documentation: Katie, Brad, Lindsay, Josh
Promotion: Sarah, Cathy, Jay, Humrya
Virtual Logistics: Justine, Desiree, Tarz
Physical Logistics: Stephen, Joe, Cole, Laila
Temporal Logistics: Alan, Charles, Nicole

In your teams, your tasks for this week are as follows.

1) Develop a fully specified variant on the staring contest concept. Be prepared to present this variant to the class next week, both as a storyboard and through role-playing. Your storyboards and role-plays should be more polished than they were during the individual ideation stage of the Project. Post your new storyboard to the blog, bring a hard copy to class next week, and come to class prepared to role-play your variant. Bring any props you may need for the role-playing, including any necessary A/V equipment.

Contemplate the project in terms of the five phases of a compelling experience that we went over in class: Attraction, Entry, Engagement, Exit and Extension. You should be able to describe how you plan to deal with each of these phases in the context of your variant.



2) Develop a detailed strategy for how to tackle your team's prescribed issue:

Documentation: a proposal for the document (presumably multi-media) you will all take away as a prospective portfolio piece at the end of the Project;
Promotion: a proposal for how to promote the project before, during and after the Activate event, without posters;
Virtual Logistics: a proposal for how to virtually present the project before, during and after the Activate event, through video projection and other means;
Physical Logistics: a proposal for how to physically arrange the project within the bounds of the Activate site, and
Temporal Logistics: a proposal for how to temporally sequence the project requirements during the weeks, days and hours leading up to, during and subsequent to the Activate event.

I look forward to developing this experience together. See you next week.

-Jesse

ps. I found a link to Immersion, video of kids playing video games from the perspective of the screen. Check it out.

Urban Interventions Presentation and Links

Click here to download the Urban Interventions presentation.

Some links to groups referenced in this presentation are listed below. If you know of any others, please add them as comments.

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REBAR collaborative, who install temporary parks:
http://www.rebargroup.org/projects/parking/

Wade Toronto, saving Toronto's wading pools through fun interactive installations:
http://www.wadetoronto.com/

Toronto Public Space Committee:
http://www.publicspace.ca/

Illegal Art:
http://illegalart.org/

Gorbet Design:
http://www.gorbetdesign.com/

Toronto Sculpture Garden:
http://www.torontosculpturegarden.com/

Nuit Blanche Toronto:
http://www.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca/

Toronto artist/architect/activist Adrian Blackwell
http://www.ald.utoronto.ca/people/faculty/bios/adrian_blackwell
http://criticalspatialpractice.blogspot.com/2006/09/adrian-blackwell.html

Canadian Centre for Architecture ACTIONS Show:
http://cca-actions.org/

Reference Material: Emotional Design 89-133

In his recent book Emotional Design, Donald Norman attempts to deconstruct fun several times, most usefuly on page 105, in reference to the work of human factors expert and designer Patrick Jordan, when he defines four types of pleasure: physio-pleasure, socio-pleasure, psycho-pleasure and ideo-pleasure.

Click here to download Emotional Design 99-133.

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"Fun and pleasure, alas, are not topics often covered by science. Science can be too serious, and even when it attempts to examine the issues surrounding fun and pleasure, its very seriousness becomes a distraction. Yes, there are conferences on the scientific basis of humour, of fun ("funology" is the name given to this particular endeavor), but this is a difficult topic and progress is slow. Fun is still an art form, best left to the creative minds of writers, directors and other artists. But the lack of scientific understanding should not get in the way of our enjoyment. Artists often pave the way, exploring approaches to human interaction that science then struggles to understand. This has long been true in drama, literature, art, and music, and it is these areas that provide lessons for design. Fun and games: a worthwhile pursuit." (Norman 100)

Reference Material: Narrative

Click here to download the Narrative presentation.

Reference Material: Designing for Interaction 89-119

Click here to download Designing for Interaction 89-119.

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"The craft of interaction design is really the craft of creating the models, diagrams and documents that communicate the designer's designs. These representations, and the testing of those with clients and users, are the designer's bread and butter. They are what designers use to do their most important work, moving their knowledge and vision from their minds and hearts to their hands and to the design itself . . . Designers should strive to make each representation a designed artiact, filled with smart, deliberate choices." (Saffer 119)

Reference Material: Basic Principles Presentation

Click here to download the Basic Principles of Experience Design presentation.

Reference Material: Information Visualization 201-240

Click here to download Information Visualization 201-240.

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"The Brain is a powerful pattern-finding engine; indeed, this is the fundamental reason that visualization techniques are becoming important. Ther is no other way of presenting information so that structures, groups and trens can be discovered among hundreds of data values. If we can transform data into the appropriate visual representation, its structure may be revealed." (Ware 239)

Reference Material: Envisioning Information 12-35

Click here to download Envisioning Information 12-35.

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"Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three spatial dimensions and reason occasionally about higher dimensional arenas with mathematical ease, the world portrayed on our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatland of paper and video screen. . . . Escaping this flatland is the essential task of envisioning information - for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature. Not flatlands." (Tufte 12)

Reference Material: Flow Charting

Click here to download Martin Stevens' Flow Charting handout.

Reference Material: Establishing Structure - Maps and Diagrams - Conveying Information

Click here to download the Establishing Structure - Maps and Diagrams - Conveying Information presentation.

Reference Material: Ethnography Presentation

Click here to download the Ethnography presentation.

Reference Material: Visual Intelligence 173-184

Click here to download Visual Intelligence 173-184.

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"I don't want to claim only that you construct what you see. I want to claim that, at a minimum, you construct all that you hear, smell, taste and feel. In short, I want to claim that all your sensations and perceptions are your constructions." (Hoffman 176)

Reference Material: Perception 1-22

Click here to download Perception 1-22.

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"The world is filled with objects and events that combine to create a kaleidoscope of potential information. Though much of that information is irrelevant for people's daily needs, some of it is absolutely essential. So that they can use this information effectively, human beings are equipped with specialized machinery for capturing this information and for translating it into a language that can be understood by the nervous system. In this translated form, the selected information is digested by the brain, culminating in perceptions of the world. These perceptions then guide people's actions in the world around them." (Sekular, 1)

Exercise Three: Strategies for Conveying Information

Your group for Project One has been assigned 3 or more examples of strategies derived from the Gestalt Laws of Pattern Perception that can be employed to convey information.

Click here to download the relevant pages from Universal Principles of Design. In your Project One groups, create a blog post that summarizes your assigned strategies for the class. For each strategy, include at least one illustration that is not found in Universal Principles of Design. Be prepared to briefly present your post next week.

Exercise Three is due at 08:30 on Monday, January 19.

Reference Material: The Design of Everyday Things

Click here to download The Design of Everday Things 12-17.

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"Without a good model we operate by rote, blindly; we do operations as we were told to do them; we can't full appricate why, what effects to expect, or what to do if things go wring. As long as things work properly, we can manage. When things go wrong, however, or when we come upon a novel situation, then we need a deeper understanding, a good model." (Norman 13)

Reference Material: Universal Principles of Design 130-131

Click Here to download Universal Principles of Design 130-131

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"Designers generally have very complete and accurate system models, but often have weak interaction models - i.e. they know much about how a system works, but little about how people will interact with the system. Conversely, users of a design tend to have sparse and inaccurate system models, but through use and experience commonly attain interaction models that are more complete and accurate than those of designers. Optimal design results only when designers have an accurate and complete system model, obtain an accurate and complete interaction model, and then design a system interface that reflects an efficient merging of both models." (Lidwell et. al. 130)