inkapoeoel-blog

[inkapoeoel-blog]

Presentation day went well!

I was pretty nervous when we left the room and put on the recording we had made the week earlier, but I’m very proud of us and the way it turned out.

We recorded about 25 mins of talking and I managed to edit it down to 6.30. No one really noticed the cuts and I’m happy with how it all turned out.

It was so much fun seeing all the other presentations too, there were a lot of really good ones

Thanks for a great trimester!!

[inkapoeoel-blog]

Last post?

In this I’ll conclude the last two Fridays we had.

We had a great day of testing our installation, the weather was on our side, we had the armchair, Milan had made a temporary stand, we had a recording and we were all happy (except gaja who was ill :() after a cup of coffee on my rooftop in the sun we were all in good spirit and carried the project towards the church square. First spot was opposite “de burger”. We put everything in place and sat down at a restaurant with tea to blend in and observe. Even though the chair stands out in my opinion, most people passed by like nothing was off. Some glances were thrown but that was mostly it. The only tester we had was a de burger employee who sat down with a drink and had his friends take a picture with their phone, he didn’t seem to think much about it and hurried back into the restaurant.

We decided it had to be a bit more obvious and inviting, so I ran back home and got a little rug and a piece of wood, on which we wrote “what have we here? Listen in...” we carried the chair to the square outside the church and placed it pretty centrally where the walking streets cross. Once again we seated ourselves at a distance to allow people to question what it was doing there.

Here we had a bit more luck. After Milan sat in the chair and then left some other curious people came up to give it a try. Even though the vast majority passed it we had some four groups or couples who tried on the headphones. I chased after them after they walked on and asked what they had experienced. Most of them were a bit confused about what it was. The main points I could take with me was:

1. Bad sound quality. They couldn’t really make out what was being said and therefore quickly lost interest.

2. The headphones were Bluetooth, and so they didn’t know where the sound came from or if there was any

3. The sign was good because it invited them to come sit down

Next Friday we all sat down with these points to make improvements. I thought we should have headphones with a cord that led into some box with a red light, and then Gaja came up with the idea that we could make that box a little miniature house instead! To clearly show that the recording comes from inside a home.

We got to work, I took on the task of building a table for it. Ashardeen and Elena and Gaja built the foam board house, and Milan went to the metal workshop to build a new hook for the headphones that we could mount to the table.

A few weeks earlier Elena had also built our “indoor” listening device that imitates a classic Alexa type thing, and it’s so beautiful.

The last thing we did was prepare for the presentation next week, but that’s a secret and you will see it on our last class. But it felt good. I’m so happy our group has gone from a confused and split bunch of people to a solid team during this trimester. It feels pretty damn good now in the end. I’m happy about our project, I like the concept and I’m proud of our result.

Thanks for a great class!

[inkapoeoel-blog]

Sweet day!

A banging lecture on feminism. Really good! A video of a mega coked philosopher. Wow.

Now to the group work. It’s nice to feel that our group has gotten better and better for every week. More in line and more productive. I tried to make my idea with the mic/computer-phonecall work. But none of the mics offered in the digital workshop seemed compatible with my laptop :/

Rest of the group liked the visual representation of the mic as an object similar to ”Alexa” though. The idea being that it’s a recording and transmitting device that people already put in their home.

We spent most of the class discussing how to design the other end. The street side of it, where the sound would be played back. And where to place it. Bernhard suggested it would be important to have a interaction and to place it somewhere where you would not want to have a private conversation. Which made us move away a little bit from having it in close proximity to the home or source.

Questions we asked:

how can a passer by understand what this is all about?

Do we have a speaker or headphones? There is a difference between being subjected to and actively listening in on sound.

Where do we place it? Park, street, square? We decided to actually test all three next week to find out!

We also decided to record the sound and have it play back instead of having a live connection, it’s easier to have relevant content and avoid someone picking up the headphones to silence. The concept is still the same but it’s better for representation.

Ashardeen will work on a logo for presentation, elena will work on the recording device, gaja will record home sound clips, I will edit sound and get an armchair rigged with hidden pouch for the phone and Milan will work on a stand and hook for the headphones.

Today was a good day

-Ice cube

[inkapoeoel-blog]

Fri 22/2

Prototyping day.

After an interesting (as always, thanks Anna) lecture in the morning we started off with choosing which of last weeks ideas we could further work on towards something that would actually function. We came to the conclusion that the microphone/speaker idea seemed like a good balance between fun/weird and actually doable. None of us can really do any programming for the keyboard and waste display, and I don’t even know where we would begin on a lie detector.

We divided the work that needed to be done to get started. Elena would work on drafting ideas for the street speaker presentation. Ashardeen joined her in this task after lunch. How and where would it be placed? How would we present it? They diverged well and care up with a bunch of different ideas.

Milan got the job to research on different devices that could be used to make the sound travel and where they could be found. He found a pair of walkie-talkies for 15€ at a kids warehouse but we thought maybe it wasn’t ideal. He helped Elena and Ashardeen with ideas too.

Gaia and me went to Stichting Wereldhuis kringloop to check if we could find anything we could use for the practical bit. Walkie-talkies, baby monitors, radio transmitters, sound card, mixer. There are many ways to do it but all need some sort of hardware. We didn’t find anything useful unfortunately.

We did however come up with a solution in the end of the day. We could just use a phone call! There would be some issues with mic sensitivity on the phone though, but I did some thinking during the week and I will bring the group an idea next class. We can borrow a røde mic from the digital workshop, hook it to a laptop, Whatsapp call a phone that has a muted mic and connect it to a speaker on the other end. I will try it tomorrow :)

[inkapoeoel-blog]

Today we had a good lecture on identity & privilege by Anna. I already know I’m mega-privileged and today only 2/25 statements were false in the walk of privilege we did. I think it is important to be aware of your privelege. Being ashamed doesn’t help anyone, but being aware makes me at least feel lucky and can help me from complaining about when bad stuff happens to me.

We got cracking with the prototypes pretty immediately, I had found an umbrella in the bins downstairs so we started attaching panels to it to create a portable safe and private space. This idea came with barely any discussions and never having touched the pen and paper. I was really surprised how we got to making so quick.

When we felt finished we had a brainstorming session on the reversed idea of turning the private public. Or purposely infringing on privacy.

We came up with several concepts.

A speaker outside your house that plays all sounds from inside out towards the street.

A keyboard outside your house that lets anyone outside to control the functions of the home.

A lie detector within a game of truth and dare (without dare) to make your game reeeeeally interesting.

A screen outside every household displaying the power/water usage of the home. In a society where water conservation may be the norm, this seemingly benign data would suddenly become sensitive.

It felt like we worked hard today, and we got more stuff done than we have previously. Now I’m exhausted.

Ciao

[inkapoeoel-blog]

After being absent for one Friday I returned last lesson to some changes. I had had a feeling that our group was struggling to find a common direction and topic. It felt a little like we were into the same general direction but in different ways. Being a group of very polite people no one wanted to press on with their own thing but instead we were all carefully trying to find a common topic.

We had a meeting Thursday evening and I was told the week before had been a real struggle with brick wall after brick wall. Our privacy focus on stratumseind had become way to focused on security and surveillance and the group was struggling with getting any useful results. We talked more and agreed none of us really knew what we wanted, so we decided to do another round of diverging with everyone writing down a new set of questions based on what we were interested in.

Later that night I tried to sort up my brain and get to the bottom of what I actually wanted to research. I knew I was interested in privacy, but not nessesarily related to the digital world and advertising, where it usually ends up. I realised I’m more interested in the human behaviour related to privacy. I began to form a clearer picture. And came up with the following questions

Come Friday and the whole group is present. Discussing our questions, Anna came and sat down with us. Seeing that we were struggling, she proposed that we split the group in two. Me, Gaja and Milan in a privacy group and Ashardeen and Elena in a “smart home” group. Suddenly it felt like we had a more focused group. Me, Milan and Gaja went to the area around Heuvel and decided to conduct interviews individually.

At first it was nervous. I’ve been a street charity fundraiser before so I don’t really have problems with talking to strangers, but it was a while ago. The first few I asked declined, because I was nervous and put a lot of emphasis on “record”. I saw them get uneasy and they excused themselves. I know how it works though and after a bit of rephrasing and targeting people on cigarette breaks it went really smooth.

The interviews were semi-structured. I started out from my written questions but added questions based on the answers I got. I had a really good time and also learned a lot.

Coming back to class after lunch we realised that Ashardeen and Elena had gotten answers which were concerning privacy issues with smart homes, so our interviews had brought the group back together again!

We did the crazy sketch storm exercise which yielded some interesting creations indeed. And some really silly ones. I’m looking forward to next Friday and a more aligned group.

[inkapoeoel-blog]

We agreed on stratumseind as location and my question was “how do people change their behaviour around cameras on Stratumseind?” The group agreed to start with this question and see where it took us.

Out on site researching the surveillance on stratumseind. I tried to capture some of the cameras and where they are pointed. I also tried to capture a person from the perspective of a surveillance camera, high zoomed in perspective of an unknowing subject.

I was slightly confused if this afternoon was supposed to focus on photography or the research. And I think the rest of the group was too. We didn’t actually ask people about our question, but we did count the cameras on the bar street from the bridge to the church. 47 cameras!!

[inkapoeoel-blog]

Researching videos about privacy for the discourse analysis assignment I stumbled across this documentary on netflix well worth a watch. Made me even more interested in the subject of privacy.

Hope I don’t sleep in tomorrow.

[inkapoeoel-blog]

Week 2

Today we started off with Anna and an introduction to anthropology. Interesting stuff!

After lunch Pieter gave a really nice presentation into design methodology. I feel more confident going off in an experimental direction now, having been told this is input-driven.

Gaia joined our group and we briefed her on our subject and what we did last week. After that we all went off to write down a couple questions each and then we met up and discussed them for the rest of the class. Reading them out loud one after another and elaborating. We are still having a hard time converging, but we will return next week with one location and one question to make it easier.

[inkapoeoel-blog]

Day 1.

I wanted to work with something having to do with tech and AI, after grouping up with Elena, Ashardeen and Milan and discussing around the subject a little, we closed in on technology and privacy.

For the making of a “thing” we brainstormed for quite a while. Personally I wanted to do something conceptual, to visualise what giving away all your privacy actually is. Eventually we landed on the brush, something that could be a product, that people could relate to.

We spent more time thinking of the concept than making the actual brush, and while it’s not gonna win a prize in beauty or craftsmanship, it was fun making and served its purpose well.

I’m quite happy with the day as a whole and excited for the subject, choosing a location feels a bit tricky though!