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Assignment 3: Essay - Question 2:

How have Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) had an impact in the ways in which people communicate with each other today. Discuss with reference to the first GUIs and their development and implementation in one area of user experience design: e.g. Games, mobile media, digital tv, operating systems. self check-in terminals. I’ve decided to go with question 2 for my essay, focusing on video games and how communication and connecting people together across the globe through these games is a good thing, but also go into some cons about it as well.

I’ve decided to go with video games as it is a topic I am very passionate about and I find it much easier to do these assignments with subjects I am personally a fan of.

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Pecha Kucha Peer Review 2 - Portia Rook - Pull back on the Curtains on Hollywood:

Visual Presentation: Very casual but not lazy visuals with her own hand drawn imagery, that really suited the style of her presentation. If done wrong it could have come off as lazy and unprofessional, but it worked nicely. Verbal Presentation: She was very enthusiastic with her presentation, which brought a warm and personal touch to it. She was very engaging to the audience, even though she obviously did a lot of practice, she made it seem improvised and very spontaneous (if that makes sense). Very energetic.

Evidence of Research: She used a vast variety of research, with strong sources to back up her statements and research. 

Other Comments: This was definitely one of the most energetic presentations, which was nice and refreshing despite still giving us information to take in. Overall and feedback: My only feedback i wish to give is, at least for me, I was actually confused on what the topic of the Pecha Kucha was at first, there wasn’t really a clear introduction (which worked well for this presentation however). Perhaps a strong empathise on what the topic is might be useful.

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Pecha Kucha Peer Review 1 - Mark Coleman - The History on VFX:

Visual Presentation:  Mark displayed a strong hierarchy with a clear introduction, body and conclusion. It displayed a great visual story, with informative but also interesting pictures.

Verbal Presentation: You can tell his verbal presentation was well written and well practiced, perhaps the best thing about it being the fact it didn’t feel like he was reading palm cards. It felt like general interaction with the audience, and you could tell he was very interested in the topic.

Evidence of Research: He gave many different sources for his information, with all of it sounding very creditable with good information to back it up.

Other Comments: Something I really enjoyed about this presentation was the fact he showed both good and bad examples, which a lot of presentations only really showed the good side of their presentation topic. Overall and feedback: I definitely enjoyed this presentation, it was possibly my favourite out of the entire bunch. He did fall behind on some slides, where it moved before it finished, but this happened to nearly everyone so I don’t think it’s anything that could really be helped minus a bit more practice. But overall a very nice presentation.

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Pecha Kucha - A Self Evaluation:

My Pecha Kucha overall went pretty well, or at least I’d like to think so. The feedback I received was mostly positive, with some fair criticism.

I feel like I could have improved upon my interacting with the audience. While I believe my timing on the slides was nearly spot on (no awkward gaps or pauses or anything along those lines), this lead me to being too focused on the palm cards and getting out the information to the class apposed to being more interactive. To fix this, I’d perhaps try and fit less information in each slide, but to my own credit there was a lot of information to get out, and I was still only giving the most basic levels of information on the species I talked about. Another point was I could of added a level of criticism, such as discussing how certain species wouldn’t be able to communicate due to the lack of lips, but I left this out for the same reason as stated before, I had so much information to get out. I could have avoided this issue perhaps if I only covered information on 1 or 2 species instead of 3, but the reason I showed 3 was to show a nice level of variation when it came to the designs and how they functioned in the Halo Universe.

I tried to cover a wide range of topics, such as how the designs have changed, but also their design purpose has changed over the years. These species are just designed for visual purposes, they function in the game as enemies and they all play a different role in the story and in gameplay. I included three videos, one for each species, all to show how they interact with the other species of the universe, or just a visual showcase. Overall I was very happy with my presentation, and perhaps my favourite thing was the several comments I received from other students how it made them interested in Halo despite never playing or having an interest in it. I tried to show them a universe that was rich, full and the fact Halo has more to it than shooting aliens. Hopefully I delivered on that.

 The Elite (Sangheili) - My favourite Species.

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Week 7 Tutorial: Augmented Reality In this week’s tutorial, we worked on two exercises, the first being to show the class an AR app that we found interesting. My group and I found an very interesting AR application, which we’d surprisingly never heard of. Google Translate actually has an AR app that allows you to take a photo of text in another language such as a street sign etc, and it will translate it for you. This would be extremely useful when travelling overseas if you didn’t know the language.

The second part of the activity was created our own Augmented Reality app, so we decided to go the Comedic route and create “Fill-in-Friend”.

The pitch: Sick of being a lonely pathetic human being? Well look no further, because now you can fill your home or walk the streets with randomly generated friends with Fill a Friend. But if you spend the low low price of $99.99 per month, you can add your favorite celebrities, such as Kanye, kanye and kanye, cause let’s be honest, no one else agreed. Other celebrities are still pending due to lawsuits. Your stupid grandfather didn’t include you in his heritance, just put him in a nursing home and replace him with a cooler more hip granddad, with our granddaddy pack for $9.99 Your dad left 15 yearss ago to get bread and hasn’t returned? Fill the hole he left and ignore the trauma with fill in friend! Karen left you and took all the kids again? Just replace them with our augmented child friends pack for a low price $9.99 MONTHLY Cant afford a dog. Well stiff shit . Buy our app for a low low price of 9.99 per month on google play store.

This is obviously a very comedic and satire pitch, but I think we still produced a solid idea for the time we were given, and everyone seemed to enjoy our presentation. 

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Week 6 Tutorial Activity: Redesigning a product to fix an Issue:

In this week’s tutorial, we were given the exercise to fix a problem with a product through design.

Our issue, was to redesign a dog food treat product that was mistaken as biscuits for humans, such as Shapes or Tiny Teddies.

Our first way of going about this, was of course making sure the packaging would have clear, large bold lettering that stated it was DOG TREATS.

 We also explored different colour packaging ideas, however in the end we decided to go with clear packaging. That way the customers can see the biscuits inside, which would bone shaped biscuits. Bone shape biscuits are pretty hard to mistaken as human food, as it is the norm for dog treats.

This combined with “STORE IN PET FOOD ISLE” on the back of the back would show the supermarket employees when stocking the item to put it in the right aisle.

With all these design choices of text use, font, a clear image of a dog (not an animal mascot, as some brands have cartoon animal mascots such as tiny teddies), we believe this would solve the problem of people mistaking it for human food.

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Week 5 Tutorial: Faking it

For this week’s blog post, I decided to base it on the weekly tutorial exercise we during class. The goal of the topic was to create a photograph that could be deemed something along the lines of “fake news”, a common expression used since Trump ran for president in 2016. We were given some examples, perhaps the most recognisable staged photograph being the one of the Loch ness Monster as shown above. The thing was back when photography was introduced, it was the first way of capturing a moment to exactly how it was. Beforehand, drawings/paintings were the way of capturing someone or something. But with the invention of the camera, this lead people to believing if it was captured on camera, it must be real. The idea of a faked photograph was just unheard of at the time. Our version of this “Fake News” was using panoramic feature on a smart phone to do a Panorama shot of Civic Park, while one of the group moved according to be captured 3 times in the photograph. This paired with the caption “Human Cloning Experiments in Newcastle”. Now this is obviously an over the top and hardly plausible demonstration, but we just wanted to capture the feeling of “fake news”

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BLOG POST 4 - Pecha Kucha Progress

Subject 1 Idea: The Design of the Species in the Halo Universe:

My first idea for the Pecha Kucha was to show the various designs of the Alien Species in the Halo Universe. Halo is a video game franchise created by Bungie (and now developed by 343 Industries) back when they launched the original Xbox title, HALO: Combat Evolved. There are various Alien species featured in Halo, all with different designs, and roles in the game. I would focus on the species listed under “The Covenant”, which a civilisation that are several species banded together under their one religion. I want show concepts of their designs, ranging from their first appearance in 2001 onwards to 2017, their last updated appearance and what changes have been over the years. I would also dive into perhaps the negatives, like the biological errors in certain species. Above is my favourite alien species created in the Halo frachise, the Sangheili, but known as Elites by Humans. (figure 2-4)

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Week 4 - Isotypes (the International System Of Typographic Picture Education)

This week in our lectures, we talked about Isotypes and the legacy of Swiss/ International Design. After WW2, pictograms instead of text became increasingly popular and was used to spread and give the audience information.

The idea behind Isotype method was to depict bulk information that could be understood at just a glance, opposed to looking at large paragraphs of text. This method made information (important usually) easily spread across the masses. Even if you don’t speak or read the language, you can still have a general idea of what the symbol means. This could include the universal MALE and FEMALE signs used on public toilets and other sex specific locations. It uses simplistic shapes and silhouettes to represent it’s purpose, with contrasting colours to represent each set of information. This is what gives the Isotypes meaning and context. 

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Week 3 - Modernism and Propaganda.

This week in the lectures we looked into Modernism, and how it changed the world of Design.

A good example of the rise of Modernism was the use of propaganda in WW1. There are many famous propaganda posters, but one of the most recognisable examples is of course Uncle Sam. This poster alone has created 100s if not 1000s of parodies based off the original poster. There were even versions created by other nations, like Russia that used the same template back during the war.

There was also a lot of propaganda used against women during this time, since the men were off fighting, they needed the women to step up and take the roles previously held by men. This was usually gone about by using guilt to support the cause of war. What was interesting (and also wrong) about the push for women to take up jobs/careers, was the fact after the war they were thrown out, despite being just as competent at the same job.

Week 3 Tutorial Exercise:

In this weeks tutorial, we were given different propaganda posters in groups and we to discuss and analysis them. The poster we were given was below.

Together as a group, we put together that during the times of the war (WW2 in this case) raw materials were scarce. They needed the raw material for weapons, vehicles and anything else to help the war effort. The point of this poster was to say, throwing away items, being wasteful and not conserving materials was helping the enemies, in this case if it wasn’t obvious, Hitler and the Nazis. This level of design is creative, and also falls in line with a lot of the propaganda design used during the world wars. Guilt, but to be fair it worked quite effectively. The effective way of creating Hitler’s face using every day items such as paper clips and paper, made the image really clear. If you throw these away, it helps him. And that’s before you even read the text, which with the use of a large bold font, makes the message very serious and hard to not understand.

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Week 2 - The Guttenberg Press

In this weeks lecture, we looked into the History of the reproduction of type on a mass scale, which made it first major leap with the Guttenberg Press.

He converted a simple wine press into the printing machine, and created ink with oil and soap. The fascinating part of this however is the fact before this invention, reading wasn’t available to the masses. Only nobles and people of higher stature in society had access to books to read. This is simply because of the fact every book had to be hand written.In 1 year (1456), he made 180 copies of the bible. Before that, it would have taken a very skilled monk years to copy a single bible.This revolutionised the industry, and changed everything. 

Though it is important to note, this was not the first time someone had used a block based printing system, however it was the first time it was used effectively and as a long term solution.

Week 2 Readings - 19th Century Graphic Design

In this week readings, it went into how the industry of Graphic Design worked back then. It was quite interesting comparing how the industry is now, and how the design process was completely different.

A good example would be the use of text. They used a large variety of fonts, different sizes and styles all on the one poster. The main attraction of a poster back in those days was the text, not the picture.

Having several different fonts, ranging from different sizes and styles, showed skill as a graphic design as it had to be all done by hand. Using the 1 font with 1 colour was far less skilled for example, as it was just one layer.

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Welcome to my Design Contexts: Assignment 3 Blog!

My name is Connor, I am a Visual Communication Design student studying at the University of Newcastle.

A little about me: I enjoy gaming, graphic design, science fiction, fantasy among many other geeky things. Enjoy and have a read if you wish!