#data objects

https://calsbctthingy.tumblr.com/post/184238120642/new-year-not-really-new-brief-2503#notes

https://calsbctthingy.tumblr.com/post/184493048537/so-we-im-doin-stuff-2603-to-2903#notes

https://calsbctthingy.tumblr.com/post/184494922737/theres-no-i-in-team-but-there-is-in-iteration#notes

https://calsbctthingy.tumblr.com/post/184524344242/prototypes-are-go-804#notes

https://calsbctthingy.tumblr.com/post/184524496842/so-where-is-this-going-904#notes

https://calsbctthingy.tumblr.com/post/184524784182/back-to-the-future-10-1104#notes

https://calsbctthingy.tumblr.com/post/184524970632/contrary-to-advise-we-worked-during-the-holidays#notes

Today was the first day back after the break. We got straight into the next prototype which we would be presenting at the Crit session tomorrow.

We were also down a person so only 4 of us were in today. We spoke to Yvonne about this in terms of our disappointments and downfalls and she spoke to us about the work we were doing and what we could do to push though. Jarem asked if the project was being marked on the final product we present - She reassured us that it was more about the process carried out to get to where we are. This was really good to hear and I think this took away a lot of the teams doubts. We were 3 people down essentially and at the end of our wicks with this project (I think in a sense, we’re all just happy for it to be almost over and done with)

Anyway - We worked on our final proof of concept while Khai drew up a concept of what we’d ideally like for it to look like once finished. We took the ideas we worked with on Friday and began to play around more. We decided to tighten the left side of the shirt and sleeve by roughly a third so it made it tighter around the chest area and also made it hard for the wearer to put on. What was interesting was the fact that the left hand side of the shirt (the part that had been tightened) became restrictive with the movement it allowed. I decided to research into this further and found a study done about the arc in which obese people are able to move their arms is lesser than that of a normal-BMI person. It was also stated that due to the extra weight and balance required, those considered obese generally move more of their body to reach further in front of them (Berrigan, et al., 2006). We also added a panel where a third of it is red and the other two-thirds blue. The red mainly to represent the 1 in 3 people who are obese, and behind that we added a layer of padding which makes the breast area slightly larger and constricts the movement of the arm. The blue panel was simply made out of an off cut that we had from the fabric left over - No other correlation.

Ideally, we would have liked to have had a element of fun in terms of using weight and maybe pool floaties to simulate a “fat suit” which would provide some level of shock factor in terms of highlighting how obesity and the consumption of fast and fatty foods affects the body. 

Yvonne also spoke to us about how this could move forward in the future, and we dabbled with the idea of taking this to fashion label potentially - a label that specialises in plus sized clothing perhaps? And have them help us create a full line of clothing that would highlight this as a prevalent social issue.

So it’s nearing the end of the holidays and everyone has been sort of MIA in their own way - Which is understandable as we all have our own lives.

We have, however, been hit with a few bombshells which have made things a little more stressful - 2 people have pulled out, one due to health reasons (completely understandable) and the other decided that they would like to go in their own direction. I’ll be honest, I am a little upset about this especially since they only told us a week out from submission which means the remaining 5 of us have slightly more workload to take on in such a short space of time.

Anyway, myself, Gohanne, Jarem and Khai both came in today to knock out some work - We started off by altering a shirt that Jarem brought in from home. We decided to keep things simple that we would use a original dataset from the Ministry of Health Data Explorer 17/18 (https://minhealthnz.shinyapps.io/nz-health-survey-2017-18-annual-data-explorer/_w_0811ceee/#!/home > Topics > Body Size) - And found that the set mentions that 1 in 3 New Zealand Adults are obese - This works out to be roughly 1.9 million adults or a third of the population.

With this, we decided to alter the shirt by reducing parts by a third. We reduced one side of the body, the sleeve and the pocket.

Today I expressed some concerns with the team about the fact we are only focusing on 1 concept or 1 type of object being clothing. This is what happened with my last team in Cards for Play so I thought it was probably a good idea to highlight it sooner rather than later.

At this stage we have only been focusing on using objects relating to clothing. While initially this is what the group was formed based on, what I learnt from the last project is that it’s good to explore all other avenues first before jumping into something.

With this, we made some discussions on using heat to show our data set and inadvertently randomly decided to make a toaster kind of concept - This would be relevant to show climate change and the rate in which the global temperatures are rising. We spoke to Krishna about this concept and asked for some advise in terms of using coils to generate heat. He advised us that it would be a bit of a stretch as we would be able to control the temperature easily. He instead suggested that we mimic the look of an element by using an arduino controlled LED light system which incorporates buttons which increases the intensity of the lights over a certain time period. From this discussion, we decided that we would only really be showing a bar graph in light form and decided not to go forward with this idea.

We started the week by continuing to make and refine more prototypes of the garments we wanted to make.

Jarem and Liam both worked on making some patch work design to represent our prevalence data and from this we’ve learnt that we can manipulate the size, tightness, colours and textures of our garments to show our data. From this, to keep things relevant we decided to stray away from consumerism and instead focus on more health related data such as obesity.

Our initial concept from this was a t-shirt that gets tighter and progressive starts to compress the main areas of the body such as the chest, waist and shoulder areas which are more likely to gain more fat than some other parts of the body. We wanted to give the user the experience with that of a person who might be suffering from obesity - Things that they might feel are tight chestedness from cardio-vascular issues/illnesses and also the inability to fit into clothing during weight gain - more specifically around the shoulder/waist areas.

Over these past 4 days I started looking at all avenues I could explore. I started out on Monday looking at population growth of Auckland over the next few years and then Tuesday started looking at and discussing ways I could show this – I started with a very simple (and I mean it was pretty much a bar chart) prototype where I had used standard pieces of paper and crumpled the into balls that grow in size over 5-year increments from 1995-2019

I was trying to show obviously a visual growth in size which correlates to the growing population but also the use of paper was used to highlight the amount of resources – namely wood for building – that is needed to sustain such growth. I showed this and explained it to a few people around me and they all agreed that it was just a bar graph and that there was no way that would be correlated with the data set. So back to the drawing board I went.

Over Tuesday/Wednesday I started to try and find a new data set that sparked my interest – Working for a telco I have a genuine interest in the infrastructure of our networks for both mobile and broadband, and also in the ways people access those. I stumbled across some research conducted by Internetnz which showed in 2017 that 93% of New Zealanders have access to the internet whether that’s at home or work or both (InternetNZ, 2017) – I worked out that it means 1 in 6 people within New Zealand do not have access to the internet. From this, I started to develop my first model – I wasn’t really going for a hat vibe but that’s kind of what it turned out to be.

Essentially, I used a paper bowl for the base and then grabbed seven skewers. 1 placed directly in the centre and coloured Yellow to represent the Internet, and then I placed the other 6 randomly around. I then colour coded the different types of access randomly by home broadband (orange), mobile data (pink), work/school/public places (green). From there, I used yarn to connect each of the skewers together to represent the connection to the internet – Start away initial observations from people was that they did not understand at all what I was trying to communicate which is understandable. I had just stuck some skewers in a bowl and used yarn… Nothing about that screams internet but I think it was a good start.

Next week we are forming our teams so I think for this I will stick with internet access and try and find a team that has similar interest to me in that respect.

Today we got given our second brief of the semester..

“Design the experience of your chosen data-set by mapping it to the physical properties of an everyday object”

My first thoughts on this are that it’s going to be a craft-ish related project. Something that will require me to take something like a mug or cup etc, dissect it and then piece it back together with different properties as per my data set. I’m a little bit worried about this as I’m not a very crafty person. I prefer the confines of Photoshop and Illustrator - But at the same time it will be a good experience to step out of my comfort zone.

A few notes I made for myself from this lecture were: - It has to be an everyday object, not something obscure - We are not designing an object, rather an experience of a data-set - Try not to be interpretive. We are designing the mapping system

From this, I started to think about the things that interested me. I struggled on this for a bit because I then had to go out and find the data-set that correlated. My first instinct was to look into something relating to LGBT youth, but I couldn’t find the data. I then thought about my interest in cities and growth - So I found a data set relating to the population growth of Auckland on Figure.nz

Fig. 1a - Population growth estimates of Auckland between 96′-25′

This shows a rough yearly estimate of the population of Auckland and then leads onto a projection. This is something I thought might have been a good angle to go on - Showing the difference between now and later on.

I decided I would start to look into this and ways I could make prototypes to show this over the next few days

As we have now closed off Cards for Play, a new challenger approaches, Data Objects. We were objects that change function due to a dataset impact and what it means. For my data set I chose the NZ youth suicide rate between the ages of 15-24, this is around 18%. I chose this because it’s a dataset that hits very close to home for me and I believe with my chosen dataset and object I could make a very meaningful representation of the data. Something that will convey the message without misrepresenting it like it is commonly shown in media. To speed up my creative process and get myself in “the zone” I jumped right into a prototype of an object commonly used by people between the ages of 15-24, a notebook. To change the way it’s functioned using my dataset, I cut 18% of it’s pages in half to represent the shortened life of those who’ve lost their lives due to youth suicide.