Hertzian Tales
The most important point for this essay, is to narrow the gap from electronic object to its users in design. They were good example on how designers carefully thought of the new solutions to reduce estrangement and alienation of electronic objects, some treated them as art, and some went beyond than that to design as critical design, which meant to criticize design itself than function.
My favourite part is the example of camcorders, which is quite similar to what Lanier said in ‘ You Are Not A Gadget’.

‘ For instance, camcorders have many build-in features that encourage generic usage; a warning light flashes whenever there is a risk of ‘spoiling’ a picture, as if to remind the user that he or she is about to become creative and should immediately return to the norm’

The Design of Everyday Things
‘Affordances’ and how we understand the function of its use by its appearance are very important principles in design. I like the example of David Wargo’s light switches, which makes sense and creative for the way he mapped a story to mundane bland interface to make it more recognizable.  On the other hand, understanding for symbolic in each culture is very difference.  It’s hard to understand the hidden meaning or function on its appearance unless you live in that culture for a while.

Why We Need Things
It’s a good question, when people in this century collect things and throw them away quickly on the same time. From this essay, I feel that they tend to comment base on the western world e.g. a nomad wouldn’t need to collect that much. Many people collect things for different reasons, some for power, some for feeling secure, some for self-satisfaction, some for self-esteem, and some memories.

In this digital era, we have the Internet, Facebook, email and many things in digital forms, I’m wondering if we still need to collect for the same reason as the writer said or not. Do kids who have grown up having Facebook as their documentation, still need to collect physical things as memories?

Another point, since I got here, NY, I found out that people here always throw away their own things all the time, even some new things. Maybe they need those things just for the certain time. Or is it simply caused by Capitalism to get people to be unsecure and buy more in order to save the system?

For me, when I have an Ipod, I stopped buying CDS or collecting them and don’t have that belonging feeling to bands as much as I used to.

Tools for Thought
Personally, I think this essay seemed to look at technology one side with a Science fiction dream as in the 1960’s and it’s a very dangerous and narrowed thought. From what I could see now in this rapid change from new technology, I feel that the world is losing its magical mysterious dimension, the more we know, the more we can do. Moreover, the more we create complicated technology, the more we create unrecyclable trash, and make more miserable poor industrial workers in the third world country. Those weird people, they claimed as genius, were used as tools to create devices to ruin the world somehow. I guess, scientists mostly figure problems in a linear way. They don’t really solve the problem with holistic point of view, so that’s how they create new problems after they solve one. Once we can think like a machine or know all knowledge in the world from a tiny tool easily, where is the eager to ask and look at the world as a child and where is an imagination?

What do Prototypes Prototype?
In design process or any other creative process, we might somehow never really analyze what how we did it. In this essay, it gives quite a good analysis on the process of prototyping, to whom and in how in the little amount of time by pointing out three elements, ‘role – relating to users in the wider range (big picture)’, ‘look and feel – more details in interaction’ and ‘implementation – technical part’. Whatever we do in any process, I think it relies on good discretion of designers and that could be developed by experience.

This part is a key word to me ‘ Prototypes themselves do not necessarily communicate their purpose. It is especially important to clarify what is and what is not addressed by a prototype when presenting it to any audience beyond the immediate design team.’

Since I didn’t go to Makerfaire, I would show some of the exhibitions I went instead.

Mostly every Thursday, they have so many exhibition openings around Chelsea. I found that going there was so useful to me and to my understanding in art more.

Here are some exhibition that I got impressed

Two Different Tomorrows, by Leandro Erlich at Sean Kelly Gallery

http://www.skny.com/exhibitions/2011-09-10_leandro-erlich/

In this installation Erlich asked the question about our perception within a little space like elevator. In the big space he created an installation that looked like mirror images inside an elevator, but in this one he built many elevators instead. Walk a little further through the elevator shaft, rotated 90 degrees and I saw another elevator, which had a video inside. This exhibition was playful and gave me an idea of looking things backward.

Pionier I, by Carsten Nicolai, The Pace Gallery

The Pace Gallery is one of my favourite place. They always have good Post-minimal works and interesting installations. For this exhibition, Carsten Nicolai’s  work captured the  power of wind and the adventurous of exploration. I was so excited to get that kind of feeling like the first time human could fly.

http://www.thepacegallery.com/

Tight Spot, by David Byrne, The Pace Gallery

There are many buildings in Chelsea, which are parts of The Pace Gallery. Personally I like Talking Heads, and when I saw David Byrne’s work I got more impressed. It’s a site specific piece, criticizing about what’s going on in our world with sense of humor.

Dumbo Arts Festival

It was the first art festival in my life. They have many different sections and wide range of Art from projection to quirky arts.

The Dumpster Project was entertaining and made me think of Scrapyard Challenge. They collected so many weird trashes inside a van and drive around as a mobile gallery

-Artist studio opening section

-Weird art

Surface Tension#1
A.K.A. I think, that mother fucker is in the back 

In the final project I did a kinetic sculpture investigating in human perception on how we sense each material in different way. This project also investigated the ambiguous sensual relating to sexuality.

I experimented with many prototypes before and here is the vdo of prototype before final ‘prototype01‘

Here is the final work ‘ Final VDO ‘;

For more details please read here, ‘Final Project Paper Fall 2011‘

Thank you very very much

Assignment04 : Scrapyard Challenge

‘Don’t worry about getting it “right” or making it “good,” focus more on your process and response to the practice as well as the material affordances of what is made available to you.’ This was such a key concept for me.

In the beginning Ivy, one of a member in our group, came up of an idea of using a telephone cable and bounced it with something. Suddenly we happened to see a big robe on the other table then we thought we should do something with it as an installation. After experiment with it for a while, we got a little lost whether we should carry on with this idea or not, since we weren’t so familiar with technology. Some of us tried to hack a keyboard instead and some tried to come up with new ideas.

Later on, Ivy had an idea of making sound from a paper box. And then, we made trail and error for a while to make the box functional. Finally we made four controllers from four sides of a cardboard box. When those wires were pulled out foil inside the box would connect as a circuit and trigger different sound for each side of the box.

While we were almost finished the box before the deadlines, I still wanted to make the idea of using a rope come true as an instrument, since the big rope had potential for users to get engaged and play with it and in the aesthetics sense, it’s a very strong and a very tempting object in the quirky way. Hence, I tired a rope more on the air duct to make more circles of rope dangle.  As a suggestion from someone in the studio at that time, I wrapped foil around the rope to make it conductive. After wrapping four part of the rope, they worked as four different inputs and made four different sounds.

After this assignment I learnt a very important lesson about interface and how it connected to electronic equipments, in which the switch or input can be anything beyond just a button once you can connect or disconnect a circuit.

Assignment03 : Mashup

Mashup : Hardware + Internet

01 Spirit001
‘Eyes are the mirror of the soul’

Once I heard this famous quote and thought back and forth of this era, which we have so many tools as extensions to our body. Hence, this piece investigates the status of a spirit of this 21st century and the role of those networking tools, which relate to human invisibly. Therefore, I created a box, which brings the viewer to the outside world. On the other hand the viewer will be seen, by the people on the street, like a spirit in the building. People in the street will connect to the man behind the box by text messages to ask a yes/no question then the eyes will blink one time for yes and two times for no.

View inside the box to the outside world

View from outside world to the eyes in the box

02 I (don’t) have so much time

In the big city when there are too many things to do, we tend to have less time to someone we care or it could be a distance problem that makes a wider gap between two people, so I came up with this project of dolls that connect two people 24 hours like a voodoo doll which put a somebody’s soul in.
The image of the people from two side will come on the face of a doll or they can see what the other side sees all the time.

Mashup : media

‘Can You Hear Me?’
I chose to do the vdo mashup from Youtube. This is like a commentary of what I personally feel about American pop culture, in the way that everything has to be louder, bolder or more vivid. In audio engineering world, they tend to do the same with new music, the louder the better to get attention from people in the radio.

http://vimeo.com/30297086 

ASSIGNMENT01 : Re-imagine the social network

I started to ask myself what is the relationship between people and how they relate to each other, especially in New York City, where I’ve lived for a while. I really appreciated how this assignment is so opened to be done in any medium. I thought in the beginning that I would want to try to use real experience like an installation to interpret this social network.

Case study
During the week there was a New School block party, hence I used this chance to survey the interface of the event and how people reacted to each other in that situation. Most of things there happened randomly and melted the space and situation to be one enjoyable moment.

Then a few days after, I went to Washington Square Park and had quite interesting experience about people and musicians there as well, which they mostly never knew each other before and used music as tools to get to know others as a community.
From the case studies, I came up with 3 schemes, but on the same concept in investigation of how people live with each other in this big city.

Prototype

‘I DON’T KNOW IF THERE IS COMPASSION FROM PEOPLE IN BOXES’

This project is an investigation of the capitalism world where people are struggling to live so hard in big city, as seen clearly especially here in New York, where people, rich or poor, get from one box to another. What is the quality of living as a human being in the city? Money? Look? Networking??

7.00 AM : I wake up in the boxy tiny room in the tiny apartment.
8.00 AM : I got out of the boxy room to be in the middle of other boxy rooms in the same boxy building.
8.10 AM : I walk out of my boxy building in the middle of other boxy buildings.
8.30 AM : I get in a boxy bus with other crowded people.
8.45 AM : I get off the boxy bus to take the boxy subway train.
9.00 AM : I stand in one of many boxy subway trains with many strangers.
9.30 AM : I walk into the tall boxy building in the middle of many boxy buildings and boxy intersection space.
9.40 AM : I am in the crowded boxy elevator again with many strangers
9.45 AM : I get into another boxy room from a tiny boxy elevator. I guess the other floor must be same boxy….

Schemes
1.Chalk Installation

In this scheme, I had an initial idea from the grid line, which divided each state in US. This is a kind of an installation in gallery space with an instruction, which people have to use a chalk to draw a line around them to indicate their own space, then the next person come and draw another square and so on. Once a square overlaps with another square, there is an area from two squares to connect with each other. Hence the network begins, and more of people will come in the room.

2. Random houses webpage

This is an idea of a social network, where people come to occupy each individual box and click to another box to chat with another box randomly implying a kind of grid apartments in New York City

3. Occupying in the parallel world webpage

Simulation situation when people can stay anywhere they want by donating a little of their money. Then they can choose any address in the world and click at other address to socialize with others, one room in an apartment can have 1000 people.

Mashups: The new breed of Web app
This article gives me more understanding about variation of what mashup can be and some of them are what I use normally in everyday life. One of an interesting issue of intellectual property made me think of an idea called copyleft, which people share their idea and work, then let other people to develop it as you can see this culture from open source software. This idea of mixing one kind of information with another and managing them in the right context, would really turn unimportant information into something valuable you can’t never ever expect.

Calm Technologies 2.0: Visualising Social Data as an Experience in Physical Space
‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’ Albert Einstein. I thought of this quote once I read this article and saw how complicated life could be since we had invented one thing to another. I don’t know if calm technology would make the world calmer or not. But one thing I’m quite sure is that the more we are tied to technology the harder we can live without it. Anyhow all examples are good demonstration for many aspects of mashup combining with hardware. For me, I’m quite impressed with Jonah’s work and it reminded me a bit of a work of an American artist’s I saw in Bangkok. He used to work for the project called ‘ We Live in Public’, which conveyed how people live together totally in pubic, as we started to see from Facebook these days, by having 24 hours broadcast of some people living in their private space.
http://www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com/

Why Things Matter
When I read this ‘Blogject’ idea, I started to think of animism, the belief that objects are spiritual beings, but in this sense Blogject is more likely to be in sci-fi version. For this blogject idea, I can’t imagine how people would treat things differently and looked at them differently in the future, a tree might not be just a tree anymore. In the example that they put sensors into pigeon, doubt me about how people would integrate themselves with machine in the future for example a glass might be able to detect how people blink their eyes and give important information about social health statistic or even a shirt that detects pulse to know heartbeat rate of people in each country. In the beginning of industrial revolution, human treated nature and things as objects, just objects. Hence they didn’t care how they used them and had no feeling of what would happen to them. This 21st century people started to look back to what they did to nature and tried to find the balance point.I guess blogject might be one of a good example.

Grey Album from Danger Mouse
Mashup really interested me for last few years. I guess this culture got to be popular from Hiphop DJ sampling culture in 70’s when they used some part of different records to mix together as background music for their rapping. Some people said that Pop music since year 2000 are more likely to be kind of mix and match from retro elements eg. Amy Winehouse used elements of 60’s. Masup music could be the character of this decade, while music business is getting locked in and artists can’t purely invent the new sound or new element from beginning, because artists in the generation before have created and experimented with many things already. Another reason for this culture of mashup music is due to the development of music studio technology that is cheap and available for everyone to make their own music in their bedroom not in an expensive studio as many years ago.

http://amt.parsons.edu/2011/09/15/tangible-musical-interfaces-performance/

Dr. Sabine Seymour | Assistant Professor of Fashionable Technology presents Martin Kaltenbrunner, who will discuss his work in sound technology and interaction design.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19
80 Fifth Ave, Room 802
6-9pm

Martin Kaltenbrunner is Professor at the Interface Culture Lab, University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz. His research concentrates on tangible user interfaces and the development of novel human computer interaction concepts within open tools for creative production. As co-founder of Reactable Systems he had been mainly working on the interaction design of the Reactable – an electronic musical instrument with a tangible user interface. He is author of the open source tangible interaction framework reacTIVision and the related TUIO protocol, which have been widely adopted for the realization of tangible tabletop applications.

http://www.arcspace.com/architects/nox/d_tower2/d_tower2.html

Assignment02 : 7 in 7

It’s a great opportunity for me to express whatever I want in this project, when there is no limitation in the requirement of the project. After around two months experience here, New York, I’m still so intense and overwhelmed with everything going around and in my life. Hence, I tried to do this project by doing Art from what I felt and thought everyday.

Even though we were supposed to finish every piece everyday, but it’s impossible to me to do totally everything in one day, since there were lots of thing to be done in someday e.g. tight schedule for elective classes from Monday to Wednesday, group project, weather etc. However, what I could do was just to plan everything out and kept sketching all my ideas every time I could.

Luckily in production process, I asked my roommate about places to get all supplies like cheap frame, paper or used magazines. Some part of time was spent as finding shop with right price I could afford. On Sunday, I went to Strand bookshop and found lots of great stuffs to use for collage. For the lesson I learn from this project, I learn that school new working space isn’t that bad. Still it would have been better to have own space or at least some place that I could leave my stuffs. Another important lesson is to try to think positive when everything doesn’t work out or not reliable. After all I’m quite proud that in the end I could get every piece done as good as I expected and learnt from critics in class as well.

01 : Rain, After I Met Irene
Wood carved

In the Chinese restaurant, I saw this box and thought of the relationship between Chinese and American from the old time to these days. This piece is a commentary of that ambiguous symbiosis between those two countries.

03 : At Least Five Minutes
Digital print with handwriting

When I did this one, I had the question of how superficial some relationships can be. Somebody you know for a month, but still feel like knowing just a moment ago and would never ever get any deeper.

04 : I Like You
Digital print

This relates to Animism in form of a piece of paper that plays double-faced and tricks a viewer

05 : Not Anonymous
Used book

I happened to find this used book about legendary basketball players in the US. That made me think of what a friend of mine, who is an African American, told me in the first day here about racism and opportunities in society. This book doesn’t have a cover. Hence I cut all the African American basketball players’ names in this book and put them in the cover as a hall of fame.

06 : American Forrest
Collage images

On Monday I went to the Museum of Natural History and I was quite impressed by the talk and the film about Gregory Bateson. Hence I knew what to do to the used book I got on Sunday.

07 : Killing field
Artist’s sperm, napkin and digital print

Sometimes unintentional action might cause huge consequence. In Eastern philosophy, we believe the incarnation life after death, life to the universe or universe in life.