savant art gallery

savant gallery has impressive ideas from people who create taxonomies, make connections between things, remember through their own processes.

redesign of the european macbook air plug

good for both the explanation of the problems and solution to the bulky design of the macbook air plug. the plug itself is many times thicker than the computer. a sleek design tied to blocky older technology. the video shows an idea to make a more space efficient plug.

motion study video update

last weekend I shot video at an aikaido exam. that wasn't on my list for motion studies but the opportunity came up and I decided it was rare enough and possibly interesting so I went for it. like the aquarium, I put a few of the videos on my web site so I can look at them when I have a chance. the aikaido has some qualities that are missing in all the other video I shot since there is usually a conflict with an aggressor in them. there is also a nice piece of someone folding the black pants of one of the judges for the test. it makes me think about how things might fold in and out in an interface.

aikaido video index
aquarium video index

I have also started shooting some video of water and people using interfaces and have one video of a giant windmill to go into the mechanical motion category. I haven't taken the time to format those for the web yet.

here is my list of motion studies that I am working with:

living things
wind
gravity
water
mechanical things
laser lights
people using real interfaces



working with video of jellyfish and the motion lab, I was able to make an example of movement where I think the motion lab movement has been informed by observation of the jellyfish. it isn't an animation of jellyfish and it isn't exactly a perfect replica of the way the jellyfish moves but has some qualities of the jellyfish, as I could replicate it. the example is enough to make me think that the technique can be refined to the point that it can be useful.

there is a link at the top of the aquarium link above with the jellyfish video and the motio study. follow the instructions under the swif file on the motio web page to see the video work.



2.
once I can make the point that a motion I can create has a similarity to the motion of a real thing the next step is to work out that motion in a real interface problem. I've been looking for a very simple problem that I might use as a test case. there are 2 things I have been considering as study problems:

one is to use the functionality of the small application on my pc that searches for wireless networks. you might remember it, it puts a small computer in the center like the sun and has wireless hubs rotating in planet-like orbits around it. the paradigm is all wrong since the computer is the thing that can move and the hubs are static. I was thinking that motion might be useful to get the point across but using the ideas from natural examples and reinterpreting the interface.

the second idea is something that I'v confronted several times in various interface projects. I would most likely want to start with a very simple problem and then see if it can be expanded to more demanding scenarios. the idea is to attach a piece or pieces of information to an existing piece of information. I was thinking of a bit of text that has related text attached. I suppose the original data could be a different data type like an image but I was looking for a simple problem to begin with, possibly a single word with some additional words attached. I was considering a word with synonyms and antonyms attached, with the motion telling the 2 apart might be a good enough place to start.

an example of applying the idea at the more complex extreme would be the News Reader game I worked on that connected several texts to an original text.

I am still thinking about other interface problems that might benefit from using motion. one suggestion I've had was to look at the video examples and ask myself how that might work in an interface. it's an approach that is entirely foreign to me. maybe that's a good reason to give it a try.

Mike made the suggestion of writing down the qualities of the motion that I'm watching on the video as a way of clarifying what I'm thinking about. that seems like a pretty good idea to me and I will start that as soon as I can.



3.


it's been brought to my attention that the motion lab is boring. admittedly, it's a research project so it's probably not odd that its boring. Simon made a very good suggestion to make an interactive pop-up book to illustrate the research. he was thinking of combining popups like I made in my popup book of Einstein's general theory of relativity and movement from the motion lab projected onto pages of a large book. I have attached a photo of a diagram he made for me. I'm not sure how exactly pertinent to what I'm doing it would be except to say that it would be very interesting, would bring some of my strengths into one place, make a good project for learning more programming and bringing programming into the physical world and be a nice way to document the motion lab in a way that would be interesting to an audience. if I am lucky, I might be able to print any unchanging text on the pages on the letterpress, which would be really fun for me.

info video

some books of interest from David

Elaine,

Speaking of books... I would like to recommend four books for understanding where the internet is and where it's going. If I had to pick just one to start with, I suggest "Small Pieces Loosely Joined."

Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web by David Weinberger

Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee

Convergence Culture. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

You can read a short blurb about each book at:

David's site

And yes, Edward Branigan's Narrative Comprehension and Film (Routledge, 1992) is among my favorite books discussing the process of cinematic narrative. He recently published Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory (Routledge, 2008). Branigan is currently working on a book exploring the interaction of color with a viewer in cinema considering psychological, aesthetic, anthropological, and historical perspectives. It should be pretty good if his other books are any indication.

http://www.filmandmedia.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/professors/branigan/branigan.html

latest ideas on my work

here is what I've been working on and thinking about for the next steps in the independent study work.

1.
I have started considering what the basic elements of motion are. I'm thinking of the basic elements of design and how they might relate.

I guess motion wouldn't be one of them, but:

contrast
rhythm
pattern
proximity
repetition

and these seem to have a place here, too:
balance
unity
hierarchy


then there is:

camera still, object moving
camera moving, object still
camera and object moving
camera and object still

to consider.



2.
the squares from the motion lab are suggesting some kind of motion thing to me. not sure what it is. maybe it's just that they feel like something that could work in an interface while all the other things seem chaotic. I have a very old list of those object motions that I haven't done anything with yet, like:
jump
bounce
fade
roll
wiggle
slide
bump
pour
float
twist
wave
wobble
fly
fall
stretch
bend
spin
push
touch
follow
etc.

I am going to continue to refine the motion lab, hopefully to the point where I can control it to create these kinds of motions.

3.
Scott suggested creating language for when many objects make the same motions all at once. I love this idea. don't know where it might lead but it sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

4.
I also will make some video studies of gravity, water, mechanical movements and maybe more work with the laser lights in addition to (Mike's suggestion) studies of people using real interfaces.

5.
I went to the aquarium last thursday and shot a lot of different kinds of fish and penguins swimming. if you have some time you can look at some of the video here:

aquarium video studies

the list at the top of the page is the second cut so scroll down to the second group for the better video. I'll soon reorganize the page but I wanted to get the video on line so I can look at it whenever I have a chance.

there is a lot to look at but the jellyfish are really amazing and I got several shots of a wave crashing on the green anemones. you have to wait till the end of the video. they tend to be about a minute long and the wave is in the last quarter.

emergence article wikipedia

emergence

books and web sites referred during reviews

here are the books and stuff I wrote down from comments during your review:

Phil Worthington Shadow Monsters (not really a book)
Scott Simbbe another design person but I didn't note his topic - this was Mike's suggestion
Random International internet architecture

Eric Raymond the Cathedral and the Bizarre the end to end argument (maybe by someone else?)

Group of Mitch Resnick
Lo Ceiling White Walls
Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams

Edward Brandigan
Narrative Comprehension and Film


2 random books I think from David
Water and Power
the Computational Beauty of Nature





some stuff from others:
Scott colorlovers.com


Colin search for Golan Levin master's thesis
Golan Levin also has a great site with flash experiments: http://www.levitated.net/
if you search in google you will find a wealth of other stuff

Golan Levin's page

destroyed in seconds

vieo of explosions

inflatable bag monsters

wow. I just love these creatures animated with subway exhaust. they are magical.

kaiten sushi time japan

...where the subject is static and the camera moves.



here it is in faster motion, but unfortunately paired with a really cheesy track.

3 rules for swarms:

a tendency towards spontaneous order

a. all individuals are only aware of their nearest neighbors
b. have a tendency to align in the same direction
c. all attracted to each other, but try to keep some distance.
fish 1 body length apart, birds 3 or 4 body lengths apart.
when a predator's coming, get out of the way. then try to get back together.

advantages: your odds of being the one eaten is reduced. waves of panic can propagate. information is sent about half a kilometer in birds in a very short time.

find Steven Strogatz whole talk about nature and sync here.

John Maeda makes stuff

in this video hosted at ted.com, John Maeda talks about his life and work. he shows lots of experiments where he makes students function as parts of a computer. he also made a drawing program that has the feature where you can make a piece move about entirely randomly.

Dubberly Design concept maps

Dubberly Design has posted a series of maps of different things on one page. some of them have links to pdf versions so you can really see the details.

how to make a blue laser gun

instructions for making a blue laser gun out of an Xbox and a CO2 pistol (whatever that is).

user experience design at halo

this is a short interview with Colm Nelson, Halo's interaction designer.

here's a short excerpt:
"By any measure, Halo 3 is one of the most wildly-successful consumer software interfaces in recent memory: more than 1 million players played the game in its first 24 hours on Xbox Live; over 8 million copies sold to date; and “over 100,000 pieces of user generated content being uploaded daily[...]"

the article is fairly brief but I wanted to be able to find it again some day so I'm posting it here.

DMI LUNCH MENU

Rod Dee Menu

fenway restaurants with delivery

water veins

natural motion with a haunting similarity to a vascular system. thanks to Paul Kahn and NEW Magazine.

links to self portrait pdf's

here are pdf files showing 8 self portraits drawn with my eyes closed from an exercise in class compared with self portraits I have drawn from as far back as when I was a teenager.

self portrait 1
self portrait 2
self portrait 3
the above 3 are just portraits drawn from memory with my eyes closed

self portrait bad 1
self portrait bad 2
these next 2 were drawn when I was thinking about a time when I was being told I was bad

self portrait child 1
self portrait child 2
these 2 above were drawn while thinking of myself as a child

self portrait overjoyed
this final one was drawn while I thought about a time when I was overjoyed.

link to as3 class notes

I started posting my class notes from Brian's class in a separate blog. this way they will all be in one place without other junk inbetween. go to my main blog at viacamp.blogspot.com and look in the column on the right under good links if you want to see them.