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.