Mid-term critiques, done!

Saturday was a long day of mid-term critiques for our class of 2014. The presentations made for a late night on Friday and an anxious Saturday (I didn't present until 2.30pm), but it means we are one milestone closer to graduating! Hooray!

Listening to feedback post presentation, and smirking, apparently.

For my presentation, I built a phylogenetic tree of sorts representing the different pathways of access I am investigating. (See the matrix of prototypes, discussed in Thesis meetings: 2/14/14)The common ancestor is accessibility, and each of the explorations through which a visitor can interact with or learn about the work fits into one of the four broader categories -- material, visual, dimensional, and historical.

Overall my presentation and critique went well. Plenty to chew on and figure out before the next milestone in March...

Thesis Meetings: 2/18/14

Most of this week's meeting with Scott was spent discussing my presentation for the critique this Saturday.

Here's a summary:

My shift in perspective is key.
The roots of my current investigation are in the way that people who are blind experience an art museum and how that experience could be improved. Originally, I wanted to create experiences through which people who were blind could access art from different pathways.

But, I realized that access is limited for a lot more people that I originally was considering. I shifted from designing something for a specific user group, to designing something for the general public. By representing works of art through different mediums, people can access them from new perspectives and are bound to see or learn something new.

Thesis Meetings: 2/11/14

This week I got feedback on my second RP, for now called Pixeled. This prototype, like the previous one, changes vision from a comprehensive process to an additive process, and asks the question, what will we notice when we deliberately slow down our vision?

In Pixeled, the user starts out by choosing a piece of art to look at. An image of the selected work is projected, but it is a distorted version of the user's selected piece. As long as the user is willing to spend the time, the image will slowly reveal itself.

I used Processing for this prototype. After the sketch is opened and a set amount of time passes, a prompt pops up, and the user can "click to reveal," which will decrease the size of the pixels. The sketch is currently set so the user has to go through 12 levels of de-pixelation before they see the clear image, but this is fully adjustable so I can made adjustments as needed!

Cézanne's Still Life with Apples distorted through 50x50 pixels

A few levels less distorted. The prompt "click to reveal" shows up after a set period of time.

Some clear shapes beginning to form

Thesis meetings: 2/4/14

A good meeting with Scott this week and my first rapid prototype.

One of the ideas I have been discussing is the difference in the way you see something with touch (additive) and the way you see something with vision (comprehensive). So my first prototype was built to explore this idea: How can you make vision additive?

The user sees an image a little bit at a time by looking through a loop which is surrounded by cloth to obscure the rest of the image. The longer they spend, the more they learn about the image. I used a magnifying glass lens as a loop, and secured it into the center of a piece of black canvas which acted as the blind.

I attached a strip of cardboard to raise the lens and increase magnification

Looking through the lens at Poster for the Stefan Sagmeister AIGA Program in Detroit [Text scratched onto the nude body of the designer]

My hypothesis was that generally, people see things and move on. We don't really look close enough to notice the details. But when you have to discover an image bit by bit, you slow down and pay closer attention to details; you learn things you wouldn't learn by seeing the whole composition at once.

I gave participants four images to choose from: Paul Cezanne's Still Life with Apples, an image of Henry Weekes' Bust of Mary Seacole, Georges Seurat's Study for "La Grande Jatte," and Stefan Sagmeister's Poster for the Stefan Sagmeister AIGA Program in Detroit [Text scratched onto the nude body of the designer]. Once the participant selected an image, I placed it on a light table and covered it with the viewing/obscuring tool.

While this exercise was extremely literal, I think it was a good one to do. My classmates enjoyed the process of discovery and most of them pointed out how much they were drawn into the detail.

Jess, exploring a print out of the Sagmeister poster

Agu, exploring Cezanne's Still Life with Apples. Some participants were chose pieces because they were familiar, some chose pieces because they were unfamiliar.

In attempt to keep myself and my thinking from jumping around like popcorn kernels in a microwave, I spent some time this week making a matrix of prototype ideas which includes description, hypothesis, materials, category, what I am measuring against, and the prototype's conceptual relevance to my project. I hope that by organizing these experiments into the various bodies of information I want to explore ("category," on the spreadsheet), I will be able to explore each body of information more completely.