We all blame the future.

Investigating the interactive elements of the lattice has forced me to take a very realistic approach to what these panels and compartments will host. What form will interaction take in order to create an effective learning experience. Or augment the learning experience, at-least.

While thinking about these elements with a hyper-focus in this paper, I’ve entered a bit of a rabbit hole in regards to how much there is to unpack around interaction and interactive exhibits for learning. A conversation with Ben helped get around this with moving my focus towards looking at materials and possible interactions. Rather than trying to think of how to apply interactions to a full system which is a bit too complex. 

At this stage I am researching and prototyping potential materials that have interactive potential. 

Research has been focused around types of interaction within exhibits. In the paper I’ve been reading, this table is provided

This has been a good base for looking at what types of interaction are within exhibitions. When looking at this table I am drawn to all three types of engagement and would like to tap into each category within one Lattice section. 

From here I want to prototype potential panels and categorise the interaction of each material within the above categories. 

Within this paper I want to investigate the interactive elements of my studio project in detail. I also want to further my understanding of the elements of interaction and play overall.  The lattice form is intended to ‘activate’ existing space for learning. The form itself is starting to do this however I want to use the areas of interaction and play to inform the ‘dynamic’ aspects of the form to create a more engaging learning experience. 

I want to design a form of interaction between the user (guest) and the lattice (exhibition) that creates a learning moment or a moment of play where the user is immersed in the exhibition's narrative through play.

Finally managed to get a prototype laser-cut today. After assembling the pieces I could easily see a few design flaws which is great. The overall shape and assembly of the structure is on it’s way but there are some definite lacking areas.

Firstly, this base piece used as a footing for the protruding beams where there is no panel has the holes at the wrong angle. They need to be rotated 90 degrees so that the 3 holes make an “up arrow” from this perspective. This was a simple one to figure out but I missed it during the CAD stage. This is why physical prototypes are necessary.

From these pictures, you can see that I’ve had to use masking tape to keep the pieces from falling out. This is due to a few things: - My tolerances were too large for the slots. This was partly due to some amateur Fusion skills and poor scaling while also not being clued onto how laser-cutting works out it’s line. It’s probably enough to just make everything without any tolerance as the laser adds *just* enough to slot it together. - The design itself doesn’t yet have a way to add lateral tension to prevent the panels from coming off. I left this out as I was more interested in getting a structural prototype done however without the friction from tight slots, the design falls apart easily. The masking tape mock-up serves it’s purpose for now. Gives me a tactile avenue to start exploring this shape/design more and get another prototype out ASAP.

After some diligent taping, this is the structure so far. I like the design/look of the peaks created by the 45 degree angles on everything. This 45 degree design was chosen as triangles have inherent rigidity so the structure will be easier to design this way.  Moving forward in my next prototype I hope to solve the following issues:

- A way to add lateral tension.

- An easy ‘clip-on’ method for information to be added to the panels.

- A list of different types of panels (for different purposes) that can easily be adapted to the structural design.

Notion is an all-in-one workspace that we’ve decided to use for management of our Studio project.

Notion is completely customisable and our current set-up looks like this:

We want Notion to enable our group to work on the project whenever and wherever. We’ve set it up so that we can keep track of the of all aspects of the project in a way that suits us. The group is focusing on building this out as we go and we will likely continue to adjust layouts as we get comfortable with the app as a whole.  The key benefits for Notion at this stage is we’re able to organise the research and start centralising information related to anything we’re doing. Our early-stage has already benefited strongly from Notion as it’s helped us visualise the management of the project.  The next key step for our Notion set-up will be the timeline and breaking the project down week by week. Clint mentioned working backwards from your project’s ideal and then allocate sections of the semester depending on an estimate using a 1:4 rule. We will likely follow this structure for our original plan which we can display as a Calendar.  As we break the project down further, we can create a Kanban board within notion or adjust the same page as the calendar with a board view. This is where Notion starts to really help out. 

After reflecting on the first week and entering the second, I’m confident about our position at this stage of our studio project. We’ve clearly identified our scope and defined different avenues to approach the project which by first week is a strong sign. After forming a group with Adam and Dan, we quickly moved into discussions around our interests, strengths and ideas we want to work with. This lead to us deciding on a broad concept around using space in urban areas. A brief provided by the Auckland Library also helped shape the early conversations around Studio.

Our current discussions have pushed us towards looking at the idea of space from three perspectives - conceptually, functionally and contextually. We want to engage in each perspective from a strong foundation of research and investigation into spaces in Auckland City. 

First Studio Session

After last week’s revision of the recording techniques, I’ve been trying to research common vocal expressions that each correspond to an emotional state.

A concept covered in the Affective Computing paper I’m reading is one that Manfred Clynes introduced in his book Sentics: The Touch of the Emotions. The concept relates to how we express our sentic state. Our sentic state being the emotional state we are currently in. As it’s impossible for another person to know what emotion you’re feeling at a given time. Picard writes when she mentions “recognising emotions” she really means “measuring observations of motor system behaviour that correspond with high probability to an underlying emotion or combination of emotions”.

Briefly mentioned in my The User post is an important representation.

I was first exposed to the idea of a “user” within the context of big data and technology by the author Tung-Hui Hu in his book A Prehistory of the Cloud. He argues that the cultural experience when interacting with the current internet is isolated. The “user” is a single digital experience that has been optimised to fit as many people as possible. It’s often forgotten how many other people may be browsing a web-page at the same time as you. It’s not often you ever think about them. The best part of that is that when you’re the user the internet is often tailored to your taste and because the user is everyone, it works well to attract whoever interacts with it. The user is almost as infinite and ever adapting experience for humans. That last bit might be far fetched? Need to read more, it might be completely off the mark. ‘Human Scripts’ also incorporates this idea of a nameless user. As when the recordings are collected and put together to form this entity, it’s as if the “data” has been mined from personal interactions through me, as the coordinator. This data is “emotional data” in a way. Currently it’s how Manfred Clynes discusses emotional communication in his book Sentics: The Touch of Emotion. This ‘user’ is us. Through acting as the user and being a mine for data we’ve enabled technology to start to understand us. The data shows our habits and it’s slowly starting to show our emotion. This can sometimes be used to manipulate however the priority for Human Scripts is to provoke and shed light on the idea of the user from a positive perspective. I want to show that through being the user we’re allowing a digital light into ourselves that gives us insights and promotes discussions about ideas previously only understood to be abstract. This insight, backed by the data gathered from us, is enabling us to really see how similar we are as humans. Human Scripts wants to explore this realisation through a familiar medium. The payphone acting as the conduit between us and technology with the recordings being “mined data” from individuals within a community. With the purpose to be turning ourselves inside out. 

This is Notion. Notion is a planning application that is completely web-based and very simple. I use Notion in my personal life and thought it would be a great fit for use with my Studio project. After filling in each section and completing the breakdowns I feel like a mental weight has been lifted. Although this information was previously scattered through different devices/pages it’s a great feeling to have everything in one place. I’m stoked.

The workshop for integrative practice actually had me excited. Reading more books is a consistent goal I’ve had that revolves around me saying to myself “I should read more” and then proceed to not read more. Although I’ve made my way through a couple of books this year, I still feel lacking in the amount of information I could be learning purely through disciplined reading.

This integrative practice project will force me to read the material I’ve checked out today and hopefully gain a further understanding of the key interest areas I’ve identified. 

These areas are:

- Artificial Intelligence

- Education

- Architecture 

- Design Mixed into these are elements of philosophy. My goal is to pull information from all fields and examine how changing fields in design are influencing the more traditional fields of education and artificial intelligence. Although the roots of artificial intelligence, in my understanding, have always been founded in multi-disciplinary practices.

While furthering my conceptual basis of a human/technology relationship I’ve been running into a potential split between representing the concept and the concept itself. This split has the potential to skew the project away from my original intentions.

Further discussions around my base concept have steered my into a more research driven direction. This is positive for my current project stage as I don’t want to get locked into a specific concept.

Discussions about my concept have lead me to look into a potential symbiosis between humans and technology. From this investigation I want to be able to prove that there is an intimate and functioning relationship between ourselves/technology. A relationship between ourselves and technology would form the foundation for my project. Questions to answer: - What is the reaction to technology becoming more emotionally involved with us individually?

- Do our interactions with technology prove emotional similarities? How?

Human Scripts 

A Project Draft Stemming from an interest in Semester One’s look into the human and technology relationship. I want to investigate how we’ve become accustomed to technology becoming an emotional outlet by looking into the similarities between people and their technology, primarily telephones/mobile phones. The investigation will be around how people interact and communicate with their devices in emotional situations (positive or negative). Primarily when these devices are used as a conduit to communicate with another individual. The practical side of this project will be through interviewing and recording individuals. I want to then record each individual and ask them to replicate an emotional conversation or just tell a “person” what they wish they could say. These events could be positive or negative emotions. Presenting these recordings will take the form of multiple handsets arranged in a semi-circle equidistant from one another. These will either be hanging or on a form of mount. Interacting with the project would involve answering one of the many phones. This ring would be randomised and when someone talks on the phone they get a recording of one of the conversations recorded that fits within a certain emotional category (excitement, resentment, sadness, grief… etc). The conversation will be edited to sound more “on the phone”. As more people join the semi-circle and answer phones they are each played segments of one another's recordings. Still all in the same category of emotion. These fade in/out and create a cloudy audio of different people articulating the emotion. Technology can be, in a way, a materialisation of our own abstract emotion.

Inspiration

How we interact with our devices has become ever more intimate. I would go as far to say that we are more honest with our technology. The honesty probably manifests more in negative emotion as we’re less likely to share negative emotion but we’d still call a close friend or family when we win something, I think.

I wanted to create something that dives into the human experience and whether or not we all experience emotion the same way however process it differently. My current assumption is that the average person will experience a wide range of emotions similar to their peers. This project also has a personal element as I have struggled with experiencing and processing emotion. Human Scripts will allow me to develop my own personal understanding of how to work through emotion.

Sound:

Sound will play a major role in this project as the quotes/soundbites will need to be treated with great care. They will also need to sound and be perceived as authentic. Sound will be sourced from multiple sources. Primary sources being friends, family and hopefully strangers (ethical approval pending). Secondary sources will be movie/song samples where a character is expressing emotion.

The sounds sourced will be categorised into separate databases with each database representing an emotional category. Rather than using a static description for each category (happy, sad etc) I am wanting to categorise the emotion into one that represents the situation that provoked the emotion to allow for more context to each sample.

Editing the sound will involve chopping up each recording and taking the important, emotionally provocative pieces. One recording may have multiple samples that fit across a variety of categories.

I want each sample to be personal to the user. Removing names and choosing samples that are direct.

“I’m sorry… I’m proud of you… I can’t believe how good that summer was... Remember when…”

Vague yet relatable. 

Hardware:

The hardware necessary for this exhibition will include multiple arduino boards, dummy phones and a central controller.

Each phone will need to be able to play an independent recording out of a small speaker. That’s the minimum required functionality for each device. The central controller will be the logic that controls what database the sounds are being pulled from.

My current elementary understanding of this system is as follows: - Phones randomly ringing, 30 - 45 second intervals between each silent ring. Phones light up on ring. - Each ring represents an emotional category. - When a phone is answered that locks the emotional category and tells the controller to only play samples from the current category.

- When more users join the other phones they are also played samples from the same emotional category. These samples are more obvious in the source phone however they are also relayed and over layed into the other phones currently active. This will create a cloudy atmosphere or overlapping emotional samples. - When the phones are hung up, the samples decrease until it is only one user. When all phones are hung up the controller sets the phones back to ringing and randomly selecting emotional categories.

Potential bottlenecks:

- If users are constantly using the phones and not all are retired. Potential for the same category to be looped without moving onto other categories. Fix: have the phones force change after ~120 seconds.