Multimedia Research

This is going to be a rather long post I’m afraid, so be warned – or just don’t read it. Rather than just showing you what I’ve researched, I’m covering process too. I think the development of the idea is as important as the idea itself, so to have a thorough understanding of what you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it. Far from just wanting to learn things, I’m very much an advocate of critical thought, as I think knowledge in itself is almost worthless without application, and to thrash out yet again an age-old saying that I use/plagiarise quite a lot: “Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit, Wisdom is knowing not to put it in fruit salad.”

So, pretentiousness aside, I have to admit I didn’t really have a clue to begin with what this assignment was about, so I trawled the recommended links, and read through a bunch of articles until I came to these on the ‘We make money not art’ site.

Emotional Clothing

Wearables for a Distant Society

Wearable Instrument Shirt

These three particularly grabbed my attention, I think because they make the mundane, the static and unchanging into changeable, dynamic items. Clothes that change their mood in response to your own, fashion for a future society, and interactive clothing that, although seemingly little more than an amusement in this example, show how convergence of different forms, in this case electronics and textiles, changes the experience of wearing clothing. That may sound ridiculous, but scientific development along with innovation and application, proper marketing and development, leads to an eventual but inevitable change in the lifestyles of humans. I began to wonder how we will ‘think’ about clothes if clothes become more than simple fashion or necessary requirement, but are amalgamated with technology. Not only that, but it lead me to wonder about what areas are already amalgamated, and where has that intrigue and desire for change and progress and innovation not been successfully applied.

That got me to thinking about what areas of interactive design I would most like to see developed. I’m very much a person into the development of space for interactive use, as I don’t think space in itself has any utility if not put to use. This got me thinking back to the Marketing assignment I did at the beginning of the second year, where rather than using posters to market an idea, I stuck post-it notes with messages around Thanet as an idea for making our immediate environment more interactive.

I very much dislike journeys from A to B, because of the lack of productivity, the lack of things to do and achieve, knowing that you go from A to B to achieve something at B that you couldn’t at A. All the time in between is wasted, unless you really enjoy morning strolls and listening to the birds, but those are events beyond your control and subject to varying tastes. So when I walk around my home town of Sandwich, my journeys are short but they’re a bore to me. There’s nothing to do in between where I’ve come from and where I’m going to.

I’m a fairly big science fiction fan, and I think one of the problems that science fiction writers tend to have is that while they develop future technologies, man’s life rarely changes itself. The goals are usually the same, except in some unique examples. Some science fiction writers understand that the course of life changes with scientific development of an environment, for example, in Dan Simmons’ “Hyperion”, rooms in houses exist on different worlds, implants aid memory and mobile devices give constant access to information and political decision making for people on the move. Living, movement, information gathering and processing all change, so the human way of life itself is developed as it is augmented with technology, which we have covered quite extensively in Alan’s lessons regarding technophobia and technophilia.

While all that sounds like a wonderful future to me, apart from exhibits I think actual development of areas in terms of interactivity has been fairly slow. When I move around a town, I want to constantly be able to make and do things, so that being between A and B is not a useless exercise. I believe this is down to a kind of mental inertia on the part of the majority of people – which is nobody’s fault as such, it’s just like having to break before turning a corner. So for this project, I’ve had a few thoughts on what I want to achieve.

Around my town, like many others, we have notice boards which are locked and only a few people can access and contribute to, whenever they get round to doing it. We have boards where people write on cards advertising things for sale, employees or employer required, and other various wants. We put legal notices in local papers and on the library well. You limit your audience in doing this, you limit the effectiveness of your statement, you limit the service provided to the public and you limit your potential returns.

My idea then is to take these elements, public notice boards, advertising boards, message boards, street maps, billboards, and combine them to be accessed in your environment.

I had two thoughts of how to achieve this – firstly through specified “big-screen” areas, which replace the old town board areas, that you access through a terminal in front of the big screen. The terminal has two card entry points. The first is for the upcoming ID cards. I believe ID cards can be useful in society, and in this case, the chip on the ID card is read and your personal details are accessed from the database. Secondly through a built in projector as part of a handset which you can carry around with you and project to any wall. The trouble with the two ideas being that in the first, you still have to be in the right place to use the terminal and in the second, projecting from a handset could leave the projection so shaky that unless you’re absolutely still, you may not be able to see what you’re doing, and anyway, it becomes very much like a phone or a personal organiser, only possibly more tedious. Still, I’m open to the idea of altering either idea.

In terms of the prototype we’re to create in Director, to represent this, I would be doing something along the lines of converting the cursor into a hand, which picks up the image of a card, and places it into a virtual slot. I could make an administrator’s program seperately, though I’m not sure this is a terribly good idea in that it would be fairly time consuming. However I do it, the details of the card are read if I use the terminal, and a password or PIN is required to access the use the terminal’s facilities. The big screen, or projection, would be represented as a second movie, responding (if possible) to the use of the terminal or handset, in this case the first movie.

I think that perhaps adding an administration element to this project would be for the best, in terms of adding public service messages and advertising local events. I find that around my town, I have to be at a place to find out that an event is actually happening there, which doesn’t attract new custom, it only keeps old custom. Our town’s biggest event was advertised with just flyers door-to-door, which many people never even received.

Later on, referring to my proposal, I stated this:

“Much of my current research has been on future technologies so far – looking into such things as Panasonic’s interactive table, drawing on the idea of interactivity within our surroundings as in David Kousemaker’s “Touch Me” installation, which allows individuals to “create and contribute a personal image to an otherwise impersonal public space” through physical interaction with a glass surface, and influenced by ideas like Graffiti Research Lab’s “Interactive Architecture”, involving projecting graffiti onto a tower block.

My prototype aims to reflect a technological device that would amalgamate these three differing pieces with the communications we already see in our environments that would be a device more productive and useful than any current technology that possesses the ability to do some of these things as a mobile device – laptop computers and mobile phones for example – and to do this would require the technology offering either a more efficient service, more diverse use, or more specifically relevent use depending on its technological rival.”

Here are the three examples I stated in that section of the proposal. I had been spending a fair amount of time raping Garrett’s favourites list on YouTube, and these were the three that struck me the most, because simply put, these are the technologies and ideas I want to combine for my assignment – projection, portability, the outside environment between points A and B, practicality, all wrapped in a package that is not only informative and useful, but creative.

Panasonic Interactive Table

David Kousemaker – Touch me

Graffiti Research Lab – Interactive Architecture

I know this seems a lot to be taking on, but I’m fairly clear about where I’m going, and how to present and develop this over the coming weeks. We touched on the use of the database before Christmas, and I’m going to get into this further, look at more futuristic designs for aesthetic inspiration. Feel free to comment on what you think of my idea, and pleeeaaaase be as critical as possible, pick holes in everything. I’m not going to learn anything otherwise.

Right, that’s enough for now… comments?