FranzLom

Hi there you have reached the end of my blog. its been moved here!

franzlom.wordpress.com

So I generally felt like happy with our final project for Integrative. We collectively as a group came together and combined the bits and pieces of our interest and in one way or another incorporated it into our final project, hence integrative. 

we put hardcore parkour, post-human form, architecture into our final project, and presented the gravity boots. 

Here is the first comment of our feedback. Initially they are questioning the hair. It is intentionally to be this way. It is the gravity system that acts on the skin of the person, this includes their hair, to be gravitationally attracted to their foot which is acting as the ground. And that is why their hair points to the their feet.

for the overlapping part of the poster we didn’t see it. Maybe we stood a bit too far to the left to see the poster. But next time let them see the entire thing from one spot rather than being blocked.

This is the one that we didn’t take to account for the installation. We thought that it was enough to convey the idea of walking on on the wall from the ground to the ceiling. but looking at it now it is clearly showing that this is not how a person would walk onto the ceiling. First of all the right foot on the ground is too close to the wall and the left foot on the wall is too close to the ground. Together combined it is impossible to to walk like this. It seems so obvious now which makes me sad that i didnt see this in the first place.

This is something we did in the last minute. almost in the last 5 minute... But I accept this criticism. This was the least planned thing on the installation because we discovered that we didn’t have our names on our project and we  hastily printed a small thing and attached it to the bottom corner of our poster..

This part I personally felt like it was being nit picky. Yes it is part of the installation but I felt like it was irrelevant enough. But next time i will make sure that this will not happen. As it as the only that really stood out.

This learning part of installation is interesting. Because you have control of what your audience is going to experience. Maybe if we put an X on the ground to witness our installation from a specific angle would made a difference. And clean the small problems like the blue tack or the placement of the feet. 

One small thing that I really liked what we did is that we held down the zipper down with blue tack to show nothing is being pulled downwards.

The best part of this assignment is that as a group we overcome the problems we initially have. We had a mannequin with no head no arms and  part of the thigh. We cut some wood planks, made joints, pape rmache the head, painted it, stuffed the legs with paper to give the legs some meat, stuffed the arms of a jacket and placed the hands in the jacked hand place to hide the fact that it dint have hands, glued and sprayed the hair with hair spray so much that it is probably a safety hazard for being so flammable. and lastly attach her to the beams above the ceiling panels so she looks like upside down, Over all it was a good semester.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/franzlom/shares/942T0J These are the photos of the shoe, the sole, Jamie’s head and us trying to combine the mannequin with legs and stuffed it with paper to give it legs and arms. we made the face by paper mache, by AJ and Alana, around an inflated Balloon. Kavita, painted the face and made the eyes slight offset to prevent it from staring at you, helps not feeling stared at. We then bought some Shoes at Number One Shoe Warehouse and we painted the shoes silver as we all know the future is chrome.

We then Got the mannequin on Level 10 on the WG building and were told we weren't really allowed to  modify the mannequin, like drilling which made it hard for us to create the legs but we got around it by machining some wood to act like a pivot as the knees and made some groves to tie a rope and around the hips of the mannequin. We then stuffed the pants with paper to give it ‘meat’. Lucky the on the lower part of the mannequin had holes where we could attach the legs

it also had no arms and hands and we got around it by a sweatshirt and stuffing it with paper and making the hands go inside the sweatshirt to be less formal.

The sole of the shoes is drawn by kavita on black foam. The shoe is attached to the mannequin by lots of hot glue and the head is attached by a wire running around her neck and arms.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/franzlom/shares/46X5R2

There is something interesting that happened in our impromptu showcase for our idea in class. When we were designing our speculative object, i am not sure if we did too much or not enough, which is a strange problem,  we made had 3 unique objects food growing out of people, cheese moon, and post-human form to help parkour around the city. Then we broke down our third one and decided to turn it into a gravity system that allows a person walk on walls. But before we got to the gravity system, we made another 3 ideas of what we wanted to make, another 3 ways of climbing walls, we had a gyro spherical ball that was used to ascend up walls

https://youtu.be/Piv_Hoj0zV8

we had suction shoes as another prototype complete with brae to help keep a person upright walking on walls

https://youtu.be/qLiYHmHNvaI

and lastly our gravity prototype

https://youtu.be/6z_oDGU_-Ho

https://www.flickr.com/photos/franzlom/shares/7iG646

but during the mock showcase people commented we had too much in our table. the image set above. We thought this is what is being asked of us. Three then 1 then three then 1. But some people in class said it was too much even one lecturer commented that it was too much and that people didnt see whats going on. And we did see what the other groups are doing. They have one to showcase. Maybe we didnt do enough that we didnt pick one point or we expeanded too much when we should have our final project by now

but now we know what we are doing

The basic concept of colab is imagining for the future. But as  I am a cynical man and that most of my survey suggest that most people are all only to look out for themselves, it is interesting what the world, doing something out of the good of their heart really takes people. And i would really like to incorporate something like this in my final outcome. My main focus for my final studio project is how to integrate homeless people back into society. Initially i wanted a mandatory program that forced homeless people and non-homeless people to have dinner to force a connection. But when I found out that no one really wants to sit down with a stranger, especially with one we associate failure with, ie, homelessness. It then became prevalent that people only really wanted to say that they are helping people, to make themselves better, mostly in the form of donating. So this really helped me open what i am looking for.

So I decided to propose something for homeless people. What do they really need? Looking at my interview, it saw that most of them are willing to work. Although they only said it ant not really acted about their desires, as it is said that it is easy to say than do. I broke down what the thing I am trying to create. An artifact that allows then to make money and therefore becomes their job? Or give them a job that will earn them money? They might sound similar, but I think there is a distinct difference between the two statements. The first one, give them something that will allow them to earn money maybe donations? And the side effect is a job. The other sentence is that my main goal is to  allow them to become a useful member of society and therefore get paid. and the side effect is money?

I would like to focus on the second sentence. Give them a job and the money will be a side effect. For many people, a fulfilling job is very beneficial and help them keep off the street. But since they are homeless people, they don’t really have much desirable skills, useful skills that company and people would want working for them. I would like to imagine a dark and uncomfortable advancement for the year 2076. The big problem with many AIs is that for example Siri from the Apple phone, it is incredibly buggy when it comes to try understanding speech from people. Auckland is easily translated to Oakland. as i imagine it, for the year 2076, it is still complicated to create a fully independent AI. They could be close but I think they won't be there yet. 

 i want to Take homeless people and use their brains as the computer, as the processor in a computer. The homeless person will be brought into a facility, be then plugged into a machine and their brains will then become a computer. as a human, we can detect emotions, we can detect speech patterns more accurately than a computer currently can. For each uploaded homeless person, there is an equivalent ball arc interface that people will interact with.

  and this interface I called, Pida. loosely connected to the Greek word for hope. This interface will be in people's homes. it will be in libraries, shopping centers cars. Connected through the internet, and These Pidas will be able to communicate with each other as a giant mesh of individual computers connected in a giant network. As for one ethical concern is the privacy issue. invasion of the user's privacy etc etc. personally I think privacy is non-existent nowadays but that is beside the point. The way these things will work is that at the end of each day the homeless people will be drained of their memory. As a sort of read-only mode. They are only being used to calculate, understand, and complete task but will not retain any prevalent information, names, address weight except privacy concerns that are already approved such as the spending habits of people that allow companies to give them tailored ads.

the other things that I am trying to pinpoint for myself are, what is integration, what is the desired state? Initially I want homeless and non-homeless citizens to be able to sit down in dinner and force a connection. But I quickly found that no one wanted that. I then thought of ways trying to force a connection of giving and take. Instead of a one-way transaction, the homeless person will get paid with dinner with a person or family in exchange for let's say cleaning cars. But I felt this was not 2076 enough, IT felt too bland and really could happen now and not speculative enough. so Then I took what I saw in my data. people didn't even want to order a human looking thing that is why i was forced to make a geometrical object closer to a nonhuman form, AI. People are more inclined to order a nonhuman thing because they are built for that?

i think it is enough as the solution for integration as a job, they become desirable and maybe even become important as they become integrated in our everyday lives? 

But i did want to play with this because this is incredibly dark, it is not looking to the bright future and not something people would want to see. But if this becomes true, if it becomes something important, does it become acceptable? does it become something of an everyday thing? This is weird. But i think this is the only acceptable technology. People will reject this initially but i think it could become a thing. it partially solves the issues of the homeless people because there is still that barrier. Maybe homelessness no longer becomes a problem. maybe the prejudice comes in the form of Pidas. Whoever is a Pida is considered dirty or something.

but to me this is what accomplishment looks like because it is not a 100 percent solution, it is a give and take that really questions people's morality. its not hurting anyone. its not doing any harm. in fact, by participating in this, you are giving homeless people jobs. But is this the same as the sweatshop issue? you buy $200 Nikes that was made somewhere in an Asian country in a sweatshop. You are giving them jobs they become important in a western country. But you see for one side to enjoy a luxurious life, someone has to suffer, work long hours with minimal pay to wear your designer boots. But no one looks at this anymore. And maybe in the future, no one will know that there are even people behind this Pida.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/franzlom/shares/86Mw4K

As the name suggest, the shoe contains mostly neutron atoms surrounded in a near material vacuum state. Though as the name suggest, it is not from a star but is made up of the same things. It is a high density object comprising of mainly neutrons in a superfluid configuration which is stopped by the neutron degeneracy pressure to prevent it being a black hole It is the high density object we needed to simulate the effects of gravity on the surface the user is standing on, whether it be standing on the wall or ceiling.

Grip The shoe works in unison with the Star to create perfect harmony and balance that allows the user to walk on walls and on the ceiling. This is done by the contact surface of the shoe communicating with the star enabling it to only gravitationally attract  up to 5 atoms deep on the surface to make sure that no objects on the other side is attracted to the shoe

Shoe/headpiece

The shoe is paired with the headpiece. The head piece comes in different designs to suit your needs. They communicate through the quantum fluctuation in the Aether, the lower state of energy after the vacuum energy, with the Black Current as its charge/force propagator. This mitigates how the gravity from the Star in the shoe affect your whole body and the things around you. Instead of a gravitational field propagating outwards from the shoe, this works by limiting the gravitational field to an invisible thin layer on the user’s skin. This allows for the application of interacting with things by holding on to objects but not flying to your head if you are near a knife.

my block 3 and block 4 blogging have been absolutely atrocious. It has been a combination of both lacking interest, and just being generally an unexpected difficulty that was encountered when doing this assignment. I’m not sure if I am the one to blame to inadvertently picking such a wicked problem to tackle when the initial brief only said, think of a thing for the year 2076 and it lead me to how to integrate homeless people back into society through augmentation.

Initially, my favourite prototype the is the one that had a screen interface in homes connected to screens in places where there is high amount of homeless people. I only tackled one this one for the prototype block because it is the only one that i thought had any future as my other ones seems lack luster compared to the ones that was presented in class.

i then dissected my what made my proposal work, integrating homeless people through augmentations/technology. In other words, what happens to or where will  homeless people go or be in the year 2076

i then prototyped this finding what people want in their homes. As it is the culture, people dont want servers generally in their homes, especially if they were homeless, even if they were taught or augmented to make them desirable. it is the trust issue that is the heart of the problem, not really sure how they will interact with them even with desirable augmentations.

i am now focusing on what form will the helper be in the home and maybe somehow make a connection between the home family and the homeless servant in any form.

for the next part we focused on the wall climbing aspect of our initial ideas. Personally I really want this because the ability to climb walls or hang on walls allows us to save space in houses. there are a lot of space that isn’t just used because we cant access it, for example the ceiling which we can use for some extra stuff

but enough about what i like

https://www.flickr.com/photos/franzlom/shares/WbBA0F

this is a zorb like ball that the user can be in and like a gyroscopic ball the insides don’t move but the outside has suctions and the ability to roll up the building and will have gaps, hence the mesh like outer feature, that allows the user to interact with the world outside the ball

https://www.flickr.com/photos/franzlom/shares/Zbt47A

the next is a combination of a hat and suction boots. It is one of the main concern of some of the members of the team is that if you are running or walking up the wall, the pivot of of your weight will be on on your ankles and will cause it to snap or break as it wasn’t design to hold stress like that

The team I formed for this final block for speculative design is the same for most of my project during the year.

Personally, this block was incredibly intimidating, and frankly scary, as this block focused on speculative design and focused on iterative process for picking, choosing, finalising and improving, rinse, repeat. and one of the more important things about of this process is the emphasis on creating basic thing such as sketching.

we began individually picking things we found interesting personally, I chose cooking, the art of food in the future, or not future, depending on which lecturer I am talking too. I then refined this  to the fascinating idea of a... idealistic future goo that will appease to people's taste buds to create a flavour that they desire the most. So all food will be nutritious  and taste what they want it to be. Don’t like broccoli? Taste like chicken? A casual vegetarian? we can't help you there. Don't like onions? Don't become a filthy casual. Endless solutions

then i got together with my team and brought our areas of interest together, post-human form, astronomy, architecture, hard core parkour and lastly the great experience that is food. 

we brainstormed our categories and made those forced joined categories and tried to come up with something that connects 2 or more categories. We got to the point where we want to grow food on people. on their body carrots growing on your leg. yeah wild night.

we left it for a couple of weeks because according to the chart that one of our lecturers gave us we were still in our f**k off period in our timeline. during this time we split and gave each of us a task to draw what we think is the strongest candidate to pursue. Low and behold, tell 4 former art students to come up with concept drawing and I can safely tell you there is nothing more to make you feel inadequate when you draw an equivalent of a 4-yearn old with no hands. Some going for the perspective, most people with the sketching, and some for the colourful side, it is hard for me to when I only see colour in black and white and don't trust myself with colour like you don't trust a 14 year old with a pen lisence.

so i got smoked in the drawing not really drawing competitions, i didnt mind my food concept really didnt go anywhere and the others had much more compelling arguments for their selections.

we the focused on parkour aspect mixed with post-human form initially to focus our efforts to create a thing that allowed us to walk on walls.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/franzlom/shares/5NP5f4

some of the sketches from my teams which are clearly not mine ( thanks for carrying me)

There seems to be a great deal of debate on the question why. Some say that what the lecturers want, is the absurdity, something out there and making it look like it works in a format of a video photo camera trick whatever and the other side is torn on the idea of being ground in reality, going the route of not crunching any numbers but basing choices on sound science such as gravity and mixing things with science fiction to make it semi-believable rather than outright lie or from a science fiction imagination.

interesting conversation with one of the TA today, it wasn't really part of this course but he gave insightful input, he said why does it have that thing there. or whats its purpose. For something to be only explained as funny or just is, is not really a design method and funnily is incredibly subjective, one man's funny is another man or woman or the other 9000 words to describes someone gender, identity or whatever’s social justice warrior. For example, why does a mug doesn't have two handles? Because it is incredibly counter-intuitive to drink something with two hands, rather than one hand. essentially his point is, whenever there is a product like a mug, what makes it desirable? what makes it like that? Why not 3 triangles sticking out of it? What makes a mug different to the next mug? They all have an essence that by just looking at it, we know what it is.  the combination of feasibility, desirability and cost

what is the purpose of putting it there?

This is prototype is where i decided to do a 180. Instead of trying to be positive about the bridging of the two kinds of people, i took a lesson from the past. Eunuch, male, sometimes female were removed of their reproductive organs essentially losing a big part of themselves but it didnt stop them from being important or necessity. Specifically in China, depending on the emperor, he turns people into eunuch as a lesser form of the death penalty, prisoners of war, or people who have revolted against him. people are resource and killing people is not productive. This allowed a very specific niche to be filled, mostly regarding the ability to be high servants in the houses of the emperor, in fact eunuchs are used as a form of thank you as the emperor send them to be as gifts or peace offering. They value eunuchs because their inability to touch the wives or concubine of the emperors harem, they will bear no child and therefore will be incredibly unlikely to depose them and create an heir, a line of succession. And the fact that they cant and dont have families which make them excellent on focusing on their work without the baggage of families.

 My prototype is less macabre, but still plays with the idea of how body modification make homeless people desirable by giving them abilities that we would want for a helper. It is still bringing two class of people making them enter the world. The modification involved being smarter, and more powerful. The fine print is that the homeless person couldnt pay for the treatment, and is essentially sponsored by the family that the homeless person will be  serving for 5 years and until then they have serve you. They are not slaves in the traditional term that they are forced to work from day to night, think more in the sense of a butler or maid. They are more favorable to their  employer exercising the idea of friendly but not familiar.

i got people to play the role of a well off person in the year 2076 and see how they would react and view their butler, how will they see them as a person. People treated them like a butler, with making them do menial things. like answering simple problems or opening the door for them

there were many comments on how they appeared, as i have used the image of the homeless person, people wanted to have the person to be cleaned up Others also spoke about what do they want, that they don’t want to force the person to do things unless they want to.

The next prototype is similar to the one above

still about the homeless butler. This time i wanted to test peoples feeling and reaction about the homeless person as a part of the house rather than a server. I asked if they would take the butler with them on vacation, have a live in butler, would open the door for them, if they had the chance to save their server in exchange for a random person who is not homeless.

people were mostly on board with the idea of bringing the server with them to vacation, unanimously agreed on letting the homeless person stay with them as a live in server, split with most of the people willing to open the door, unanimously agree to save their butler.

So the interesting thing about this block is to prototype something that doesnt exist and also said that a questionnaire is a very weak form of gathering data, but it is still something that i thought that would be very beneficial for my process.

This was due to the negative acceptance of having dinner with homeless people for free, “out of the kindness of our hearts’ as many people were not comfortable with the idea of bringing a random person into their home as they were weirded out by it.

  i was testing the idea of how people would react to a transaction or exchange instead of a giving aspect of charity. It preserves the integrity of the homeless to have  job or a meaningful work instead of waiting for hand outs as some people i have interviewed has pointed out and bridges the gap between non homeless people to have an established system that allowed homeless people to work for people with homes in exchange for dinner with the family of the home they have worked in.

Theres a chart from 1 to 10  to express their feeling on how likely they are going to let a homeless person do the chores instead of the person in exchange for dinner

the categories were

Groceries General House Cleaning Car Washing

the main concern for the people is that they want to clean the homeless person first before they enter and about half of the people said that they want them to be clean first before before they arrive and the other half said that they dont mind the person to clean in their house as long as they are clean

For groceries many people were hesitant in allowing a person they did not know what to do because as most have said that  they have always done their groceries and for them it is a chance to buy new things they they forgot or not on their shopping list. most of the people didnt mind that the homeless person do their shopping with an average of 7 and a minority was completely against the idea.

For General house cleaning, there was an almost unanimous decision with the highest point was 4 that they are not willing to let a homeless person clean their homes even if they were cleaned or did a good job. Many comments about the quality of work, how trustful they are and worried about their belongings getting stolen.

For the last one, car was, people were generally inclined to let the homeless person clean their car as people weren't that worried about it.

many people were surprised in knowing how to pay or reward the homeless people for their service with dinner with them. People commented how strange it is  but will try it, to meet someone new.