Maker Faire showcased a wide range of individuals who utilize the technologies available to create various types of projects. Some interfaces were specific to an audience who worked with the technology, but some could be used by the average joe. Overall, my Maker Faire experience introduced me to a lot of new technology and how people are creatively working towards improving the technology.

Key Glove, Jeff Rowberg The Key Glove project displays a new way to interact with technology without a keyboard. By putting on the Key Glove, a person can type using the motion sensors in the glove.  This technology allows for the user to interact with their computer using the motion of their fingers.   The Key Glove was created to be an accessory for technology as well as simplify interaction. It was designed with disabled users in mind.  This is where I see Key Glove being the most successful.  For the average person, the Key Glove may not be the most efficient way to do work.  The interface seems difficult to work with because you would have to get used to what motions react to the key functions. It may end up being more frustrating to use the Key Glove than it would be to just use a keyboard.

However, for a person who is disabled, and is only able to type with one hand, this would be the perfect solution to their problems.   The glove could also be a technology used in video games.  As I read more about key glove online, Rowberg is successful in his design since he has clearly done research on his idea and what is also out there. He used what he has seen to combine technologies and develop the broad features of Key Glove.

AtFab: Open Source CNC Furniture A series of furniture that can be cut by a CNC router laser cutter or water jet, and assembled by locking the pieces together. AtFab struct my attention because I thought the design of their products were functions, visually pleasing, and resourceful. This interface brings together the technology of CNC and a laser cutter with the practicality of creating furniture for the home. AtFab recognizes that their furniture might not be perfect for everyone but it is for most.

I appreciate this idea because it shows that the technologies of a laser cutter or a CNC router can be used to create well-designed products for everyday life.  Although initially developed to work with larger scale projects, AtFab proves that these technologies can successfully work for the average person (with the money, of course).

The perks of having this type of furniture would be that it can easily be moved, taken apart, stored, and then put back together.  What makes AtFab successful and useful is the availability of their files online.  The purchaser can use the files at home if they have the tools available, or they can order them to be cut.  The only downfall is that not everyone has a CNC router or laser cutter at home.  However, this project has a lot of potential for the future and since they are going to keep designing and customizing their products in the future, they will definitely find success.

MakerBot Industries: 3D Printer Prior to the Maker Faire, I have never seen a 3D printer in action. I had no idea that it basically worked like a glue gun that melted down the plastic material to print layer by layer. There were many people there showcasing what they can do on their 3D printer, but I listened to what John Abella had to say about his. This was another opportunity where I saw that the 3D printer did not just have to be used to prototype projects, but was becoming affordable to be used in the home.  Abella had a few models of objects he created on his 3D printer, but what was more interesting to me was how he uses the technology to fix things around his house.  (He also created the card-stand that held his brochures!)  This man was a hobbyist and enjoyed how much fun he could have with this product. There were also people at the Maker Faire who showed how the 3D printer could be used to extrude cookie dough and chocolate.

The technology behind a 3D printer gives possibilities to society, but what I would be hesitant about is purchasing one and not being able to understand the working mechanics. A person who would purchase a 3D printer would not just have to understand the working mechanics of the printer, but also the 3D modeling programs (AutoCAD, Rhino, etc) and how to use it. This type of interface will definitely be successful for those people who are prototyping projects. The price is fairly reasonable, but in the future, it will become even more affordable. The technology of a 3D printer definitely shows promise in aiding inventors and properly speeding up their process.

In the Cory Arcangel’s exhibition, ProTools, he uses technological tools that are available to all to create what he has exhibited in the gallery. Much of the exhibition is nothing that the average person could do.  For example, the series Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations, gives the exact specifications he used to create the image so it can be replicated by anyone with Photoshop.  Although, I did not find myself intrigued or deeply engaged in the color combinations and compositions in front of me, the concept that anyone can re-create what the artist created was important.  This gives anyone the power to be the artist because we all can gain access to these tools.   The art piece no longer becomes focused on the finished product, but more on the process and what the steps taken to create this image. Although I was not impressed by Arcangel’s gradients, I am sure that if I decided to open Photoshop and recreate one, I would feel accomplished and proud at my recreation. This process and emotional connection is important, and also brings the artist closer to their end result.

The process of completing an art piece can give the same feeling when playing a video game. In the two video-game modifications found in the show, the viewer can participate by watching, but Arcangel has manipulated the situation so the viewer will never win. In “Various Self Playing Bowling Games” one can see the progression of how the virtual world has progressed to slowly become increasingly realistic.  As I sat and watched the game being played there were two people who were attempting to “play” the game themselves.  Standing in front of the big screen, they started to move with the figure playing.  They went through the motion of throwing the ball, but just as Arcangel intended, became frustrated that every ball went to the gutter.  These actions of the viewers show how we have become so accustomed to technology doing things for us and putting ourselves into these virtual worlds. The frustration shows how technology has the ability to affect our daily life.  There were no directions of what to do, but two people instantly reacted to the game by wanting to play it.  It has become natural for our society to want to engage with technology. The two people in the show felt more natural participating in the virtual world, rather than just watching it.

Overall, Arcangel makes solid points about our relation to how we use and interact with the technological tools we have available to us today. By just looking at the exhibition, I was not convinced what I was looking at was considered “art” but after reading more about each piece, and understanding the artist’s process, I found the value in the exhibition.  Initially, one might have strong criticisms on the work, but Arcangel is taking positions on the human interaction with technology, and how so much of our culture depends on it.

Assignment 2: Completing seven projects in seven days

Concept: 

Right from the start, I knew I wanted to make seven projects that were related to me and my background. Because I take Creativity & Comp Lab, Physical Computing, and Code for Art this semester, I tried to stay away from computer programming related projects for Major Studio. I tried to make seven daily projects that just popped up in my head, no matter how stupid they were. I believed this project was a good chance for me to do projects that I’ve always wanted to do.

Day1: Jason Kim and Identity

(click on pictures for enlarged view)

First and foremost, I really wanted to make myself a business card

My logo is where you would put your thumb when handing out my business card to others.

Day2: Jason Kim and Advertisement

I made a Snapple bottle wrapping in order to advertise myself and placed it in a grocery store beverage shelf. The advertisement had information about my homepage, facebook, and twitter. I also tried to play around with the Nutrition Facts saying that all people need for their daily intake is to visit my homepage.

Day3: Jason Kim and Product Design

I asked myself “can I make something useful without spending money and without technology?” Then I remembered Katherine telling me there were thrown away cardboard and materials on the fourth floor of 2W 13th. I went and picked up cardboard, paper, wooden stick, and some shower curtain clips. I decided to make myself a table organizer.

Day4: Jason Kim and Graphics

I decided to make a poster of everything that represented me and the graphics style I liked. This poster has a person made entirely of icons of all the product design concepts I made during my undergrad. It also has my favorite style of graphics and my logo as well.

Day5: Jason Kim and Pictures

On day 5, i really just wanted to work out… and take interesting pictures… and make a photo diary. I love to take pictures of things that people might miss during their daily busy lives.

Day6: Jason Kim and Doodles

I love to doodle. I love the color yellow. I love shoes.

I bought Sharpie pens, some badges, and a yellow shoe.

This equated to…

Day7: Jason Kim and Tattoo

I’ve always wanted a tattoo. But I knew I was going to regret it afterwards. So I tried having a tattoo for a day.

7 in 7 Experience and afterthought

I think the main difference between a concept and an execution is that when one creates a concept, he or she only thinks about a plan of a project whereas in execution, he or she actually does the work. There are many times when I think a certain project will seem interesting but I don’t have the will to actually carry the project through. I start to doubt myself of the idea and think it to be silly at times. Seven in seven gave me the opportunity to do some projects I have been wanting to do for quite some time now.

Because the project had no “wrong” way, it gave me freedom to do whatever I wanted. I tried not to create a concept that would link all seven of my projects at first because I thought it would then reduce my creativity to explore. I tried at most to do a project that first popped up in my mind each day – no matter how silly they seemed. Once I finished all seven projects, I realized all seven projects had a relationship to either my background or my personality. My business card represents who I am and my advertisement is a method to advertise myself. The cardboard box I made represents my industrial design background while my poster represents the type of graphics I like to use. I incorporated my hobbies of running and taking pictures for one of my projects. For the last two projects, it shows I really love to doodle and draw.

I do not think there actually is a real “finish” to a certain project as every project – whether one thinks it finished or not – always has room for improvement. But if I had to define a finishing of a project, it would be where one or a group would no longer have any additional ideas to further add to the project or finds or find adding more to the project will make the project too broad. I would like to say that my projects are finished within the seven by seven criteria but have lots of room for improvement if I wanted to further develop each idea. Although a project might seem good one day, it might look horribly bad the next. I don’t think any of my projects look horribly bad but I can certainly change them to look better. As an example, although I spent 6 hours doing my graphic poster and thought it looked ok, I saw it the next day and was wondering what I was drawing. But this was actually quite intriguing. This was one of the interesting things I found out about myself while doing the seven in seven project. Sometimes I’d grab a pen or start to draw on illustrator without thinking much but things were actually being drawn naturally.

I am very glad we had the opportunity to do the seven in seven project. Although it came as a stress when I didn’t have an idea each day, I think it was a good experience in that it gave me the opportunity to do projects I would have never done unless it was the seven in seven. I really learned a lot about myself and had the chance to release a little bit of inner self in me.

Assignment 1: Re-imagining a social network

Concept: 

Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Vimeo, etc. are all SNS that requires vision. In other words, you are not able to multi task while social networking. I wanted to create a new interfaced social network that allowed “communication” between people in the internet. I thought what best way to hear people’s voices and to communicate than the old fashioned radio? I wanted to use the concept of FM (Friend Manager) and AM (Anonymous Manager) in order for people to hear other’s current status and music preferences online. The radio format allows reminiscence and to hear forgotten music and personal stories.

How it works: 

Once logged into Stream Talk, people have the choice of either being a “host” or an “audience.” When hosting, people only need to either upload a previously recorded file like their presentations or talks or they can record live through the program. Other Stream Talk users can hear your radio talks live and can interfere the radio with questions. The host has the option of receiving interferences while hosting their own radios live. In the Audience part of Stream Talk, people can hear to the most popular Stream Talks on a live, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. By turning on Stream Talk, people can just listen to other people’s radios while doing other work.

This is the flash prototype of how Stream Talk would work: streamtalk

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.

Assignment: Complete one project a day for seven days.  This started off as a very challenging task, but as I started incorporate my new lifestyle and adjusting to New York into it, the process was much more natural.  Being far from home, a lot of people want to know what I am doing here.  Since Hawaii is surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, I decided work with the idea of sending home a “message in a bottle.” Everyday, I intended to try something new, make a new observation, or do something that I could visually contain in this bottle to send home and show others.  To see where I went and what I collected, view my 7×7 Presentation.

As I documented each day physically through collecting artifacts of my daily adventures, I also wrote.  These pages can be found in the back of the box containing all of the bottles. Here you can find my personal daily reflections.

After complete the project series, I learned a lot about myself. Sometimes I don’t actively focus on my feelings and reactions to experiences I have. The day moves by so quickly, and being busy allows me to forget that I everyday there is something to be learned. Read more about my thought process in my project write-up.

I enjoyed this exploration because I can look at back everyday of this past week and know exactly how I felt and what I did that day, just by the few visual momentos I collected in the bottles. I think this idea could be taken further digitally.  Maybe it is not reasonable to collect 365 bottles for everyday of the year, but through taking pictures and documenting thoughts, I could do the same thing and have an on-going online website. This would be a challenge I would like to see myself continue!

Assignment: Re-Design a Social Network

Concept: Today, we are being introduced to new ways of connecting with friends using technologies and a majority of internet-based networks. Although this is great at keeping in touch, we are losing “touch” of what it was like to receive a hand-written, personal letter.  There is nothing more personal and sentimental than receiving a letter from someone and knowing that it traveled some type of distance to physically get to you.

Although my initial thought was to create a simplified bulletin board post social network, I slowly realized in my process that what I was creating was moving in a different direction from what I believed in.  This is where “Snail Mail” really started to develop. “Snail Mail” creates a social network the “old-fashioned” way.

How it Works: The key components of “Snail Mail” was to first send a letter to three friends. When you do this you also send two additional note cards and postage so that person has the opportunity to send their own mail to another friend.  This is where the “network” is created.  Whether the person decides to send mail back to you, or to two new friends, it opens up communication through letters.  It is a conversation starter, a trail maker, and a friend connector.

Here is my complete Snail Mail Presentation with pictures and my thought process.

This project was a lot of fun for me. The way I tackled this problem was that I first thought of a theme. I need some sort of boundary, so I came up with the 7 deadly sins. But, I didn’t just want to do the 7 deadly sins, because it’s been done over and over. So I wanted to twist the concept a bit. When you think of a sin, like gluttony, the polar opposite of that sin could also be really bad in itself. Eating in moderation is fine, but eating so little to point of anorexia is probably not the healthiest way to eat. So, I guess the point of the whole concept is to show moderation. Take the middle path.

I thought about the opposite of the sins and called them “virtues,” and twisted them. All my projects share the same theme of “twisted virtues,” but each project has been executed differently.

ENVY CONFIDENCE

The first sin I thought about was “envy.” The opposite of “envy” would be something like “confidence.” Then I thought what if someone was over-confident, maybe to the point of vanity? That’s not really a good thing either. So I made a hat out of found objects in my apartment that would allow people to look at themselves the whole time they’re wearing the hat. I basically attached a mirror to a hat that you could reposition to better view yourself.

PRIDE SELF-ESTEEM

This sin was a little confusing but the twisted virtue was “low self-esteem.” Then I thought about the people whose self-esteem was so low, that perhaps they wanted to commit suicide, or had tried to commit suicide before. I chose to make a noose as a representation of suicide. A symbol. I then spray-painted the noose black and red to show the darkness and sadness around the idea of suicide.

WRATH HAPPINESS

“Wrath” is a sin, but happiness is a good thing. A state we all wish to achieve. But some people are so desperate to achieve this state of happiness that they take drugs like anti-depressants to reach this state. I’m not talking about people who really need to take anti-depressants, but I’m more speaking about those who take anti-depressants to deal with every day stress, or those who take them recreationally. For this part of the 7×7, I made a processing sketch. The sketch has an emoticon bouncing around, and when you feed the emoticon an anti-depressant (like Paxil), the emoticon becomes happy.

finding-happiness

GLUTTONY ABSTEMIOUSNESS

For “gluttony,” I thought about people who eat so little, that it’s unhealthy. For this part of the 7×7, I fasted for one day. I wanted to see what it felt like to deprive myself of something I loved so much. On the scale, I probably fall closer to being a glutton than an ascetic. I kept a video blog throughout the day talking about how I felt.

http://vimeo.com/28964455

GREED CHARITABLENESS

This execution falls off the realm of the concept. My original idea had been to donate to non-charitable causes. For example, only donate money to people who outright admitted that they only wanted the money to buy booze. Basically, donate money to non-charitable causes. However, I only encountered people who really seemed to need the money. So instead, I decided that I would donate $5 to each person who had a sign or a cup that indicated that they were asking for money, in exchange for their stories. I then built a website to document the project and their fascinating stories.

http://lovepaweena.com/namesbehindfaces/

LUST DISGUST

For this part, I thought about some of my friends who are so desperate to get married, yet are so picky. They have in their minds a set laundry list of every trait their potential  mate has to meet, and if their potential mate doesn’t meet their expectations, they act almost disgusted by these people. So, I designed a social networking iPad app for extremely picky individuals.

The user would be able select which traits they desire in their potential mate, or add their own.

The app would match these traits to a potential mate. The potential mate who most closely matches the user’s laundry list would be in a bigger circle closest to you.

The user can then view the potential mate’s profile. If the user doesn’t like the potential mate, they can just flick them off the screen, disgustedly, to make them go away forever. The person they picked will never again show up in their matches.

SLOTH INDUSTRY

The execution for this sin was purely for entertainment purposes only. I thought it would be a fun way to end such a dark presentation. However, it still goes with the theme. The opposite of a sloth would be a hard worker. When I presented this execution, I said, “Working hard is good, but not if you work so hard that you don’t sleep, and you don’t eat, or you might end up looking like this.” Then I showed my self-portrait that I created in Photoshop because I hadn’t been eating or sleeping in days. I was a representation of what I was trying to portray with industriousness.

This project was very difficult for me. Right now as a designer, I’m struggling to do things that are “off-the-screen,” and I realize that I could’ve done something “off-the-screen,” but my thought process is to automatically think of screen-based designs. I thought and thought for so long how I can connect people without using the internet, so I thought about phones, snail mail, things we used to do before the internet was all up in your face.

Also, I need to set limitations for myself. I thought I wanted to create a way for locals to hook up with travelers. Based on personal experience, I would love to meet locals to show me all the cool spots, and just give me advice about the places I’m traveling to. My initial thought was that it’d be cool to place pseudo mailboxes all over the world where people could pick up and drop off real postcards to places they want to go. But what if the postcards never get picked up? Or they get picked up and the traveler has already come and gone? I couldn’t figure out the logic even though I tried and tried, so I ended up going screen-based again – much to my disappointment. But I shouldn’t create something non screen-based just for the sake of it. Sometimes it just makes more sense to design something on-screen, and use that tool because it is the best available tool for what you are trying to do.

So, I came up with a website, a very simple website, called “journeyers.com.” The website would be invite-only for the safety aspects of this site.

People would sign on, and then they could do one of two things – send a postcard or pick up a postcard.

How I imagine this site to function, is people would then select a postcard to send.

Then the person would write on the postcard. They can write whatever they want, just like real postcards. They can also write the activities in which they want to participate in when they visit these countries.

And then you would send your virtual postcard.

To pick up a postcard, the process would be very similar. The user would log-in, select “Get a postcard,” then choose a postcard of a person they’re interested in meeting. Perhaps the user would choose the person based on shared interests – they see that a traveler wants to go a place where they love to go. Or it could be based on appearances. Or the user can see that the traveler is from New York, and perhaps that local has lived in New York before, so they want to select that person. As a designer, I don’t know all the reasons why someone would choose one postcard over another. Because of that, the “Choose postcard” page would have all sorts of information available to the person who is selecting a postcard, or essentially, a person to hang out with.

After selecting a postcard, the user can then read the postcard and decide whether or not they want to contact that individual.

Also, the website’s simplicity in design is intended. I’ve seen many social networking sites where I’m not sure what to do. So by having only two functions, I feel as if it would be easier to navigate the site.