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Technology, Culture and Creative Practice - Blog

Internet of Things

Body: Name an ‘Internet of Things’ product you may design, what is its connection to Internet of Things represents

Device that is able to ready emotional status of the user, like a built-in distance tracker in your smartphone. This emotional tracker could also be a possible built in app, this app could be used for mental health or therapy to help track patient’s stability if unwilling forthcoming and open.

 Smart Home: Name an ‘Internet of Things’ product you may design, what is its connection to Internet of Things represents

Smart Lamp, Lamp with build in AI that acts like a google home, alexa etc. Being able to control weather the light is on or off and the brightness the lamp glows also being equipped with wireless charging.

Smart City: Name an ‘Internet of Things’ product you may design, what is its connection to Internet of Things represents

Smart Traffic control, rather than sensors that detect weather a vehicle is present replace them with smart sensor based traffic lights to increase the reliability and ease of lights at different stages of the day as nowadays if you are on the wrong set of lights at night with no other cars on the road sometimes the light sensors don’t detect your car waiting so the lights don’t switch which is extremely annoying and time wasting.

Ethics and Design Bias

The ethical issues that may present themselves through ‘Smart Home’ includes privacy, informed consent, autonomy, obtrusiveness, equal access, and reduction in human touch. In the schemes of ethical issues privacy and equal access can be a big problem with known issues that have already raised through smart home technology such as ‘Alexa’ where amazon openly admitted that employees were listening to customer voice recordings to gain better ‘speech recognition’ for the echo or any other Alexa powered devices but ultimately gained conversations that were quite disturbing and confidential to the customer which can be seen as a complete violation of privacy and possible wrong use of equal access by employees.

Systems

An example of the systems that are engaged with or relied on smart HUE LED lighting. Firstly, a smart device with a said application that uses a wireless connect of internet or Bluetooth that the lights use to connect to the smartphone through a said app. With this you can program the lights to personal preferences, lights can also be interactive/reactive to things such as music changing and flickering light based on the sounds it's interpreting.

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Final Project

As this project has come to an end, we set it up with canvas against a wall up toward the ceiling, to symbolise the future of looking up - presenting all our animations in their respective age groups at the same time, I think that our project turned out really well and that it was a success. There are obvious improvements that could have been done with more time and resources but as a whole im proud of our team and what we accomplished within this project

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Animating

My first animation I decided to tackle was the adults animation, at first I thought it would be the hardest so I wanted to do it first. I wanted to stick with the theme of minimal and simplicity, I found it quite challenging creating a volcano and a fit landscape to put it on. I was also torn between using shades of greys or reds to symbolize death for the near destruction of the world. Overall, I liked the way this animation turned out, there are obvious improvements I could have made, I would have liked to add an earthquake that split the island in half before the volcano exploded. That would have been a cool added effect, I did love how I interpreted the earth exploding and the end of the animation.

The next animation I tackled was the youth’s animation, this one intrigued me the most as it was the most relatable as I am also categorized as youth. I had fun with this animation also going for the simple, minimal look. I wanted to create something familiar that people would know and recognize but also something unique and special, something that I created. Through the duration of this animation I was fairly happy with the results, I am glad on how it turned out, I think the only thing that I might have changed would be the type of jar I used to house the brain at the beginning of the animation and maybe add some more detail to the factory once animation zooms out onto a much larger scale.

Finally, the last animation, Kids. I wasn’t too happy with the results of this animation – for starters the whole idea of a frame with the adults disappearing and only being kids was a hard task in its self, but during the animation process nothing was going correctly, and it ended up turning out really eh. I did like the disfiguration effect of the adult within the picture but other than that not my finest work.

For the process of the animations I used a mixture of photoshop and after effects, creating the initial backgrounds a design in photoshop, then dragging it into after effects to create the magic (animation) making the things move. I think I had a good balance between PS and AE, using both the software’s and their attributes definitely made my life a whole lot easier.

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Compiling

Before we started animated, we needed to compile all the surveys – we decided that the best way to do this was to find the most repetitive words and create a word cloud and display them. The most frequent words being large than the less frequent words. We used this to create a base for our animations. We also saw a frequent trend in all ages for pastr and present as it has either happened or is happening, so we decided not to animate past and present, showing people what they already know. But what they wouldn’t know is how different people interpret the future which is still every interesting.

From these word clouds and the surveys, we split the animations making four animations from each age group; children, youth and adults. We then randomly picked amongst the group what we would be doing to make it fair, meaning we didn’t have a choice in what we got – so that one person couldn’t pick all the ones they thought were easier or more interesting.

From this I got:

1.      Kids: All the adults disappear and there’s only kids left – heaps of fun

2.      Youth: Digitized Existence - Brain in a jar connected to server/computer with a Robot controlling it/Cryogenics

3.      Adults: Earth Extinction - Fiery flames bursting through Earth's ground, zooming out to Earth exploding like the sun

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Animation

After the crit presentation we really knuckled down on how we were going to present this project and the tools that were necessary in accomplishing the task. Our main goal was to find a way in which we were able to animate what people interpreted the future to be. As a test I myself did some animating to see how difficult is would be and the time we would need to allocate animating if we were to do it.

For the animation I did a simple forest landscape and slowly overtime trees would disappear with the center of the animation being a lake, with the water levels slowly falling overtime aswell. I also changed the colours going from vibrant bright colour to dull browns and greys as a visual representation was pollution etc. What I found is that animating this was very time consuming. Not only did I have to animate the trees, water and colours I also had to design and create the landscape which is also very time consuming, even with the added inspiration of ‘firewatch’ which I used as reference in creating my landscape – more of a slick, simplistic look to minimalize the detail making the animations easier to make; and even with the added support it was still very hard. As a group would need to allocate a lot of time toward the animation and a good base of team work would be needed aswell to pull of the task. But we all agreed even though it was a task that was proven to be difficult we still decided to tackle it.

As for the actually presenting our initial idea was to use these plinths that are around our room, stack them randomly on top of each other to symbolize humanity – the building blocks of society, even though they don’t fit perfectly together they work together to provide stability to all the cubes. We prototyped this and found a software called ‘signage’ with is a projection mapping software allowing us to control the display and what we want to project onto. So that it is seamless, and you don’t see image on walls or parts of the cube we don’t want you to see.

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Crit presentation:

This Crit presentation was designed by our lectures so that we could professionally criticize other classmates work in order from them to benefit off the feedback and improve on mistakes and keep things that were overall good for the development of the project. Our overall feedback from the presentation was good, there we some design flaws in our project that we hadn’t accounted for that was addressed by the other group which we ultimately fixed after being addressed – some presentation errors we didn’t think of.  

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Survey and testing

We are creating a survey that people could take to express what they though the past, present and future, sounded like, and looked like. We split the survey into four different age groups. Kids, youth, adults and elderly.

Through the next week our main focus was to get as many surveys complete so that from that information we could display what people thought of the world and to see if our statement is correct.

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Talking to Lectures:

So instead of going to the usual lecturer that we go to, we decided to go to our other one to see what he thought of our project, or first ideas involving time travel and the environment and our current ideas of beyond context. He loved ideas. He also said that we were wrong to get rid of our tie travel idea and that he liked it. He also said to use a different perspective to the situation, so instead of spreading awareness to the problem tackle it from a different area.

From this we decided to combine our ideas. We went back to our environmental idea with projection mapping but instead of showing people what we’ve done, we would express what people think of the past, present, and future – what their perspectives are and how age can possibly effect out creativity and perspective of the world.

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Idea struggle

Some of the ideas we had were:

1.      Having a project that displays something without context and with the passing of time adding context to see people’s reactions of how they initially interpret what they are seeing from what it actually is at the end. An idea was to use an earthquake having little boxes shaking around everywhere slowly added essentials such as earthquake noises, projections of buildings crumbling etc.

But we liked none of the ideas enough to expand on them.

Since we had so many problems and going to our lecturer wasn’t an option as we already knew what he was going to say we decided to get some fresh eyes and a different perspective of our project.

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Rethinking Ideas

Rethinking Ideas:For a start, we got rid of environmental implications, and due to this we went back to the drawing board thinking of new ideas. A good couple day of thinking and we came across two subjects that were really intriguing, ‘context’ and ‘perception against reality’.

With this we went back to our lecturer to see if we were on the right track of accomplishing this project. He said he likes our base ideas, that we need to think of a ‘sentence’ – statement of intent, something that describes what our project is and what its meant to provide/accomplish. He also said that we need to filter our ideas down, get rid of the bulk and get a good couple of ideas that we could expand from.

From tis talk we decided to go with our ‘context’ idea. This is basically trying to show that without context certain things can be interpreted differently from what they are meant to.

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Slowing down to think

We decided to slow down, as we thought our pace was a little too fast and we weren’t thinking of more possibilities cornering ourselves with the idea of projection mapping. We decided it would be best if we developed our initial ideas further before trying to find a way too present as that could potentially limit what we could do with the project. To help we went to our lecturer. He also said that we were going to fast and that we needed to slow down and develop our ideas more. He also said that our ideas were very cliché and problematic due to that fact that we were addressing a problem which is all well and good but what is the point of spreading awareness without a solution?

So, from this feedback we went back to the drawing board trying to find a possible solution or more realistically a new idea.

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Initial Themes and Ideas

With the ideal themes that we wanted to achieve within this project of ‘space’ and ‘sound’ Ashton and tim had an original idea before creating our group of an interactive photo, within a photo frame. Their initial idea being a photo from WW2 – within a concentration camp with both Jews and Nazi’s. The whole idea is that when someone came into contact with the photo it would produce different sounds being gunshots or laughter depending on where you interacted with the photo.  

But as that idea was really dark and due to this did not what to go anything further with the idea, we started thinking more environmental, being to address a problem – spread awareness.

This came about ideas about projected three different time periods weather it was to show a happy family looking from the outside and then showing that it’s actually an abusive family when no one is looking, and that their can be abuse in a family, but no one knows because they can act normal. Or an environmental idea of showing three time periods past, present, future and showing what man kind has done to nature and our environment since we have been there, projecting this through animations.  

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Solo or Group?

With everyone in the class submitting their proposals, people started walking around and talking to other people within the class grasping ideas other people had and linking with people with common ides and goals for the end project. 

For me, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tackle this course solo or with a group. I knew doing this project on my own would present a lot of difficulties and challenges as much so as being in a group but that sense of challenge inspired me, especially since I couldn’t find anyone with similar interests as me. 

A couples days later of thinking and talking to different people I stumbled across someone who also wanted to do a sound and image installation and was interested in some of the ideas I had which helped me come to the conclusion of joining with him and creating a little group. Our group consists of five people being Ashton, Flynn, Tim, Bell and I