For the final project my goal was building a three dimensional structure, reminding a stage where the illustration being exhibited, and projecting a color tinting animation in order to create wondrous view.

Here is the video of Lumacity.

Here you can download the documentation.

Scrapyard challenge as the name of the workshop says, was a big challenge for me because it was the first time I’ve ever created an electrical circuit which actually worked.  We were expected to make a switch for a musical controller, and at the end connect it to an arduino board which was plugged in to the MIDI software. Our team created instruments for a band that included a guitar,  bass, drums, and a turn table.  Bass guitar that I worked on was formed out of, three separate conductor wires passing through the junk that I’ve found, and a plectrum as the switch. Used lots of aluminum foil for making the plectrum. Whenever the plectrum touched the conductor wires, MIDI software created musical sounds.

Media Software – Where’s My Stuff

Many people have busy schedules and have no time left for shopping, so that they prefer to shop online. Almost every store has their own online shopping site, and there are many other online shopping websites. When we order items from different web sites, information and the tracking numbers are being e-mailed to us. If we have multiple purchased items from multiple stores, tracking shipments of  all the online purchased items can be difficult to handle. Some stores use UPS whereas others could use American Postal service or another delivery company. As a result I came up with this idea of mashing up basic shipping companies (fedex, UPS, USPS , DHL..) and all the online stores (amazon, ebay, urban outfitters..) in order to track all your shipments online in one site.
This mashable site called “Where’s My Stuff” where you can view your online purchased items and their online shopping sites. Contact the customer services, leave and read feedback about the shipments and most importantly track your shipments easily.

Hardware to Internet

To help skiers and snowboarders to find their way in slopes.  Goggles inserted 3g sim card having a internet connection, will provide skiers and snowboarders to view information through the screen on their goggles glasses. Slope colors will be indicating the difficulty levels like black, red, green, blue so that beginners wouldn’t have any difficulties because of entering a slope not in their level.

Maker Faire amazed me with all the creativeness that it exposed. I went there on Sunday and my favorite pieces were the Arcattack and Lumarca.

Arcattack
The Arcattack crew created singing tesla coils which makes audio modulation from the output sparks of the tesla coils. The show was very interesting and also the building where the show was taking place was magical. Great Hall known as the church of science had electric blue glasses placed into the walls, to create the starry effect of the outer space with the play of light.

Lumarca

Lumarca Creators made a three dimensional space using thin white strings as a screen to project the animation.

Click on this link to watch the video.Lumarca

Soldering+led lights

I’ve made soldering for the first time, and made these led lights. Nice to have souvenirs.

Day 1 to Day 5

I was living in Ankara, Turkey. So that, after coming to New York, I had to find a new place to live in. During the 7/7 project period I was moving in to my new apartment. Boring plain white walls of the new apartment had created the urge of adding somethings to them. So I draw illustrations on the walls. Theme of the illustrations are about what I would like to change about this new place I am living in and what was on my mind on that day.

Day 6

Why do people treat their dogs as barbie dolls? This project is focusing on the perception of New Yorkers, and questioning the way how they treat their dogs as toys. As we all now Vogue magazine is the one of the highest luxury fashion magazine, New Yorkers pretend like there is a Dogue magazine for their dogs with the way they stylize, decorate  their dogs and even take them to dog gyms.  I created these magazine covers for an imaginary Dogue Magazine. For the cover girls, I photographed plush dogs instead of real ones because I don’t think that people see a great difference between plush dogs and real pets.

Day7

Designing Stickers for MFA DT students. Self-made font reflects the aspects of this mfa program. Filling the letters with the objects that D+T students are surrounded with in their environments. Coffee Cups, joy sticks, robots, programming elements, metro card, 5th ave street sign, smartphones are the visible elements integrated in to the font and giving it a complicated , dense look which in my point of view defines the aspects of the program.

The Web Means The End of Forgetting – Jeffrey Rosen

The author of the article Jeffrey Rosen, mainly discusses exhibitionism and indiscretion allowed by web and how people can be threatened by the dangers of disclosure. He exemplifies the photo finder application of Facebook that uses face recognition that soon will allow us to take an image of a stranger and to find all his/her information via web. The information which could be embarrassing for that stranger. Like the unfortunate case happened to Stacy Snyder who got fired because of a photo that showed her at a party drinking from a plastic cup. In my point of view, in order to avoid this kind of dangers people must be cautious about all the data that could affect them negatively, because somehow negative data just leaks in to web. Before uploading data, they should re-consider it, it’s not that essential to upload every single photo or data, why not to keep them for their own records?. Rosen also suggests the solution of reputation bankruptcy, a process which will mimic human forgetting, to erase all the data provided after an expiration date. Which I don’t think it is really necessary for a social networking site, because what i think that people should be able to control their act of exhibitionism, rather that trusting on a digital storage device programmed to delete data.

Natural Interfaces are not Natural – Donald Norman

The significant improvement of technology improved technological possibility of the natural user interfaces. and the author Donald Norman, discusses how  gestural interactivity could affect interactions. Wii console is exemplified as being way too much natural which causes damage for the tv screen. This was the first time that I read an article which argues the errors that Wii console had, and made logic. But on the other hand I still believe that natural user interfaces of wii is fun with all the not natural interaction that it causes. In my point of view kinect, xbox 360 which sense their surroundings are providing excellent interfaces by the use of gestural interactions which feel real.

Pixel.Me

Through the digital profiles in social networking sites or the search engines, people are collecting information about other people’s private lives. So when I began the assignment, I questioned what kind of data does people use to form their digital profiles. We use “image”, as profile pictures or to built photo albums in order to present or daily lives and we use “text” to tag our personalities. Thorough the data provided, we let our close friends to catch up with us. Unfortunately 100 friends out of 800 might be our close friends and other 700 would be only voyeurs of our profile, actually who are being inactive friends. However we are not interacting with all of them, we just let them to see everything about us. People can stalk you down to your last pixel. Having all these in mind. I came up with a social networking site called Pixel.Me.

Smallest elements of datas are pixels. Images and texts presented as pixels in a computer screen. So why not making a profile page pixelated in order to make it more private. The more you will communicate with a person, the more you will get rid of the annoying affect of pixels.

Aspects of Pixel.me

– Making profiles invisible by pixelating, against the inactive friends.

– In order to make a profile page visible, one should contact the other by opening a conversation window and have a chat for at least five minutes. So that people will be aware of who are strolling around in their profile pages.

– Some people only look at the photo albums and doesn’t communicate with the owner of the profile. In this case, in order to be able to see the data they’ll be communicating the owner.- Any of the contact whose becoming an in-active friend again, won’t be available to see the profile page, so that he/she will be stimulated to communicate with the profile owner, in order to see get rid of the pixelated page.

– Only the people communicates you will be able to see you profile.

After the critique:

I find more appropriate; Pixel.Me as an application that people could plug in to a social networking site, rather then making a social networking site as it own. As a result  people who have privacy concerns can conceal their lives by using this application, against their friends who are being inactive.

Above,is the final look of the profile page which activated and visible after being communicating with the owner of the profile.