Month: October 2008

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Miscellaneous RestOfYou

Ordinarily I…

Assignment: “go do something you would not ordinarily do or something haven’t had time to do this semester. Sit in the park alone for an hour, attend a lecture, go to a museum, take a boat ride, visit an old person.”

Ordinarily I…do get out and try to do things beyond of my own routine, so I guess my routine is by definition “extra-ordinary.” Ha, not really. In the sense of being outdoors though, I played soccer again on Friday, which was great, as ITP won again (yes, we’re currently undefeated). I also went to a presentation at Eyebeam and an exhibit at Bitforms on Saturday. It seemed like it had been awhile since I had done something like this, perhaps the first this semester. Given the cold and growing depth of my personal geeking, I think I’ve actually spent more time indoors this week than others, and it seems a little strange for me. For example, I spent a fair amount of time on a couple unnecessary activities 1) re-subscribing to Netflix and rating more than 400 movies and 2) installing VMware Fusion and Ubuntu. Beyond this rambling, I did do something that seems to be perhaps a better fit for this assignment. On Sunday (laundry day), we stopped and walked through Fort Greene Park to observe the annual Halloween Festival for an hour or so. It was pretty adorable. Frida Kahlo was my favorite costume.

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RestOfYou

Rest of + mid-semester status

Last week, we were to add a layer of polish to one of the three assignments (log self, log environment, log computer). I opted to add something to the third piece by analyzing more words and visualizing that. In addition to counting my logged keys for a week, I used eclipse to count words from my ITP blog entries. The results were a little dry, but surprising in quantity and range. (I came across some interesting sites including wordnet). I also uploaded my data sets to a fellow ITPer’s thesis project site called openvisuals. While the visualization options did not fit my data as nicely as I would have liked, I thought this stringed pie chart worked ok (it’s interactive on the site itself).

What I was thinking about more so though was a final project — how I could really get into the core of the course and produce something both engaging and tangible. The ideas I brought to the class seemed like a fog in my mind, but the discussion that resulted helped me to choose a direction to take. In short, I want to be able to extract my thoughts, steadily, with minimal effort, and minimal immediate intention. Why? I’m not sure exactly, but I’m thinking about quality of life and self awareness. The assignments so far have given us several different perspectives and data that I haven’t really seen before, but the most subtle things and perhaps most interesting things are the ones that aren’t explicit, aren’t communicated, and perhaps require the most digging to reveal. In my case, my dreams and internal monologue / haze would be great to see and experience outside of my head — being able to measure from excitement, to confusion, to depression, to critical analysis, etc. Not only would it be enlightening in and of itself, but it would have numerous practical applications. It could maybe take journaling or therapy to a new, private, empowering level.

The plan was to record my thoughts through voice (since writing or typing requires more labor and possibly more intention). Then I would try to process the voice with two kinds of software: 1) transcription (content) and 2) stress analysis (abstract). The plan seemed challenging but great.

Reporting back: I checked out an m-audio kit from the equipment room, recorded several streams of thought, and saved them as mp3 files. Meanwhile, I read-up on transcription software and found MacSpeech for OSX (equivalent to Naturally Speaking). I installed this and began using it to dictate. My laptop’s internal mic is messed up, so I borrowed a snowball mic from the equipment room to train the software to recognize my voice. It works well, but getting the software to transcribe from the mp3 files is the technical problem I’m experiencing now. I’m using soundflower and line-in to redirect the audio in and out, but MacSpeech won’t seem to allow me to apply the settings from one profile to another… I haven’t touched any stress analysis software yet, but seems this will be the more complicated of the two even. Another issue is that a large portion of the thoughts I’d like to see would not be able to be spoken, because of my environment, whether it be another person, a group, a shower, train noise, etc. While the potential of this project is highly attractive, I’m not sure it’s going to be feasible.

Categories
DesignForEmergingPlatforms

Future of tv: concept meeting

Hulya, HyeJin, Sanjay and I met today to pull our user research and initial thoughts together. We have a few primary concepts:
-skype meets stadium / living room
-sitcom groups go online
-tv betting (wild)

and I have here my stream of thought / notes below as well.

we like the built-in functionality of skype. we recognize that netflix, hulu, cbs, are doing most everything already. a facebook app could make sense for the social aspect of the project, but it’s been overdone perhaps and could be very difficult. we want to sortof combine remotely connecting couch potatoes while giving users more control. creating a following is another train of thought. answers to what we can do while watching include tv/movie trivia, polling viewers, trash talking, linguistic mashups. working with movies, sitcoms, sports, news might or might not matter in terms of the scope of our design / concept. in terms of groups, we have people gathering in cinemas for movies, fans gathering to watch sports in bars and in stadiums, but not really people getting connected while watching sitcoms in their living rooms. the mobile consideration doesnt seem to be one we want to deal with at this stage.

Categories
DesignForConstraints FlashOfFlash LiveWeb Miscellaneous

Morning thinking aint bad

I got a good night’s rest last night and woke up with possible project ideas on the brain, initially for my Flash course. The train of thought gained enough momentum that I decided to boot up and write a little to start my day…

Flash is an application that motivates and reassures me sometimes. Why? Well, it’s a piece of software that combines technical coding (with Action Script) and visual design (with the ide). It’s a blend similar to ITP itself — on a micro or macro level, depending on your perspective. AS3 specifically seems to be more hardcore than AS1 or AS2, more closely related to other object oriented programming languages, so that’s positive in the sense that my draw to the application will automatically force me to improve my “engineering” self. And there’s Flex and Flex builder for development, which I still don’t fully understand, but seem beneficial, much the same as Eclipse is beneficial for Java and other software development. The ide with Photoshop-like tools and a timeline is much more natural for me to use, since I would consider myself a visually oriented person, and my instances of “flow” generally occur when I’m creating something visual. I remember spending many hours in a foundation design course on simple assignments, not because I hadn’t fulfilled the requirements already, but because I was so wrapped up in analyzing different possibilities until my eye was satisfied.

Anyway, needless to say, I think Flash is great, and I will improve my skills with it with time undoubtedly. But this entry should be more about my ideas interconnecting coursework and general career path / project direction. I took a class with Amit Pitaru called Designing for Constraints last year. It wasn’t a stressful course, but it was challenging, built new skills, and exposed my mind to various new concepts, which is really my ideal course. In the context of this mornings brainstorming, it is relevant for a couple reasons. 1- Amit is an interesting instructor and I suspect a really cool person, whose path I’d like to know better and potentially follow, and 2- I made a game in his class called Burbujitas, which I could work on evolving now. If I do expand the game, it would become a project both for Flash and Live Web; it would be significant enough to serve as a fundamental direction/pillar in my ITP work.

The game itself would be assistive, education, and social. The primary audience would be paralyzed individuals who are learning to use sip-and-puff technology and would benefit from a connection with others experiencing the same lessons who might be living in different parts of the world. In short, Burbujitas is a 2-player, lightly (ferociously) competitive game, with a goal of improved coordination and a prize of victory and virtual ice-cream delight. At this point, the controls are marginal and the design functional. As a Flash project, I could take the graphics and animation to the next level and migrate the code to AS3. As a Live Web project, I could add live video screens around or in the game itself to allow players to view their competitor in real-time. This would require the use of shared objects and the Flash Media Server.

Further, I attended a Web2NewYork networking event last night in the Lower East Side (LES), where four groups of young entrepreneurs pitched their concepts to what seemed to be a room full of middle-aged venture capitalists. How does this relate? So, there’s an overload of information in my generation, and ITP, a graduate program focused on technology and the information age doesn’t exactly reduce the amount of information, though it does offer ways of filtering and understanding the information at times. This perhaps is why I’m so drawn to meditation/sleep, exercise, and dreams as a form of escape. Additionally, maybe it’s part of why I want to keep “quality of life” at the core of my work. Getting back to the event last night, I’m reminded that much of what my peers and I are reading and thinking about is designing for and actually building the future of technology and thus the future of interaction and society. I’ve put myself in an environment where staying on the cutting edge is the aim. In one sense, I think of this as progressive thought and infinitely important. On the other hand, I think it’s super challenging to come up with original ideas for the traditional privileged audiences that seem to be easier to keep in sight. So, as the masses move forward, are their populations needing better designs, needing universal designs? Clearly. What’s keeping me from having my focus there?

End brain dump. A good night of sleep is… good.

Categories
LiveWeb

Eating Club with FaceLift (midterm)

Thomas Chan, Sanjay Papinzinath, and Ben Yee (me) strived to bring this idea to life. The class demonstration went fairly smoothly, but the application still has bugs / improvements (mainly visual) to address. While Thomas worked mainly on the server side, Sanjay and I worked mainly with the client side. Here’s the placeholder link for now.

See it with my face-lift here.

Categories
RestOfYou

Log Computer: Word Counting

The first two segments of the semester focused on “logging yourself” and “logging your environment.” The most recent segment focused on “logging your computer.” Some of my peers tracked and visualized their mouse movements, some were sniffing packets, and others logged their keystrokes. I fell into the latter group, using a program called logkext to keep a record of my typing. The advantages of the program are that it’s lightweight, free, runs in the background, and encrypts the log file. Still, there is a bit of risk in logging key strokes because of sensitive information including login details and private conversations. Regardless, I installed the client and ran it for about a week. The terminal interface was simple and refreshing to use.

Once I gathered the data, I found the first step in analyzation (word countring) to be tricky, but fortunately our helpful instructors at ITP provide code to move that process along (see Daniel Shiffman – concordance and Dan O’Sullivan – language). Even with the code, getting the raw data into an organized list of counted words wasn’t obvious for a eclipse coding novice, but I got to the stage I wanted. **Note: in Eclipse, there’s an option when you select “run as” called “run configurations,” which allows a user to specify a file path in the “(x)=arguments” tab. You can see the top 500 words here. To get that nice round number, I manually removed noise and cropped off anything typed less than twice. The next step with this project would be to compare this data to other data …

Categories
CraftingWithData

NYC study proposal

A new assignment was given for this week’s class: Prepare a one-paragraph proposal for the following study: “Think of a question about New York and gather some data that answers it. Is the express train worth the wait? Is there a prime street for dog-watching? Are people in DUMBO smarter than people in RAMBO?” Tell us what you want to study, what you expect to find, and how you will collect the data.

My response to the second stirred up several ideas around restaurants, transportation, entertainment, nature, music listening patterns, exercise, shopping, school systems, political activity, sense of isolation versus connectivity, drivers… with different goals including personal interest, financial gain, assistive, education, or artistic value. I’ve decided on the concept below.

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Miscellaneous

ITP social and such

After another excellent game of intramural soccer today, I realized I’ve been documenting my projects and some random thoughts, but I haven’t noted other pieces of ITP / NYU that are treating me quite well (i.e. soccer, Coles Rec Center, foosball, TNO, floor conversations). I’m not sure how well I will remember all this later on, and I don’t always have the camera on hand, so I should do myself a favor and at least leave a partial log.

Today was another soccer victory for ITP’s Baked Potatoes (don’t know where the name came from or what it means). We play on Friday mornings at 10 am at the East River Park. It’s difficult to wake up sometimes, given the time and the Thursday Nights Out, but getting the blood flowing and having some athletic comradery during the week is great.

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LiveWeb

Eating Club (midterm)

For the LiveWeb midterm, I had generated some vague ideas around words like playful, fun, boredom-curing. Our last class session was helpful in my brainstorming process. Hearing other people’s initial thoughts (or in some cases, finalized concepts) helped me to identify some general categories under which live applications could live: education, citizen news/journalism, exercise, games, visual/artistic. It’s been a challenge for me to perceive the future utility of the tools that we are being exposed to (i.e. streaming audio, video, chat, shared objects). Based on my read of Clay Shirky’s book and my background education, applications relating to social networking for the purpose of creating political power seem the most important. But these notions feel beyond the scope of my personal …not necessarily interests or capabilities… but maybe immediate feasibility or relevance (if that makes sense).

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DesignForEmergingPlatforms

CellFish: Another update

Team Carmello had another meeting yesterday. In short, we re-assigned the 4 buttons on our iPhone app, chose a color palette, and are pulling together the finalized user journey. The rating system was a tangent topic that consumed too much of our conversation in my opinion, but all members have offered great contributions overall. A team as large as 5 members could use a management structure from the start, but I feel we’ve done pretty well keeping our dynamic positive and productive. However, at this point, it seems the more we discuss, the more confused the project becomes, so we have divided the remaining work between us and will meet probably one more time to discuss the presentation plan. Ok Monday, we’ll see you soon.