godiva - in - progress

Interdisciplinary Interaction Designer (looking for a job)! MFA 2018 Media Design Practices @ Art Center College of Design BFA 2012 Painting + Art History @ Washington University in St. Louis

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This map presentation takes the viewer on a journey through Los Angeles, visiting the apartments in the order that they appeared in Ed Ruscha's original publication.

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Locations of all the apartments photographed by artist Ed Ruscha in his 1965 book entitled Some Los Angeles Apartments.

If you want to see the map I made to learn how to use ArcGIS, you can visit the web app here!

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tfw you put a lot of work into applying for a job...

...and don’t even get past resumé stage.

I recently applied for a UX position at Esri that I didn’t even get close to getting. But in order to make what I thought would be a good application, I decided to learn how to use their ArcGIS Online tool by making my own project and doing a mini-UX/UI sprint (1 day to make the project, 1 day to deliver lo-fi prototypes) to encapsulate my experience with it as a user and a designer. 

Apparently, that didn’t to do trick...but hey! Now I have a decent mini-case study on Esri’s ArcGIS Online tool now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

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Finally took photos of the actual book I made!

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For those of you interested in actually reading the book I made, you can check out a digital version of The Blue Dot: A User’s Guide on Issuu!

I’m trying to find a publisher/press where I can get a larger run of this book printed...so keep your eyes peeled for the physical version!

[godivareisen]

Time flies when you’re the MDP Post-Graduate Fellow...

Although I made a concerted effort to chronicle the 14 weeks of my Post-Graduate Fellowship, competing commitments made it impossible to do the work AND blog about it without making my head explode.

SO, with my head intact, I’m going to share some of the highlights (and struggles) from my fellowship:

I co-organized and designed the spatial experience for the Antiracist Classroom’s first conference: Reconstructing Practice!

This was something I thought I’d be able to do in the “free time” I had outside of my fellowship (hahahahahahaha). Each week, the time I invested in it ballooned to the point that I couldn’t even work on what I had officially declared as my fellowship work...sooo I reclaimed it as part of my fellowship. As a co-founder of Antiracist Classroom, I had been working on this as long as I had been working on my Thesis work. In many ways, it made sense that it became part of the fellowship.

I tried to apply for jobs! And became disillusioned in the process...

While I am grateful that I was awarded the fellowship, I would be lying if I said it didn’t suck watching all of my close friends get interviews, offers, and start their professional design journeys WITHOUT ME 😭I took a few weeks in the middle of the summer to apply to a bunch of places and...*crickets*. I won’t dwell on this too much right now because the Job Search will occupy the majority of this blog until I get hired 😅Follow me on LinkedIn?

I made (wrote, illustrated, designed, and hand-bound) a book! A real book!

Making this book is what I originally proposed as the bulk of my fellowship work. I had written most of the content before I graduated, but I just didn't have enough hours to make a book AND and exhibition. I designed this book as both a companion to and an extension of the interactive installation of the same name that was exhibited in the 2018 MDP Thesis Show. It complements the physical and spatial experience of the installation by serving as a written meditation on the historical and cultural dimension of our user relationships with Google Maps. Both incarnations of The Blue Dot revolve around a broader question: How do technologies reshape how people are able to use the world around them?

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Fellowship WK02 + 03: more sensor sourcing + Mapbox Locate Conference

After spending WK02 (finally) finalizing my order of sensors for the Autonomous Authorities project, I rolled through Memorial Day weekend into WK03 by attending the Mapbox Locate conference in SF.

The conference was structured primarily around Mapbox’s new product releases (like Maps for Unity to bring a map experience into AR and VR)  and partnerships (like...Tinder Places...but also Mobileye). The panels, sessions, and demos that filled the two-day conference were also comprised of people using Mapbox products in interesting ways across multiple contexts, people working with (or adjacent to) location technology, or people who otherwise work with the technical or cultural dimensions of mapping.

I took copious notes during the conference (mostly via Twitter), so if you’re reading this and are interested to see my slice of attending the conference, find me on Twitter @godivareisen and look for my tweets tagged @mapbox #explorelocate

P.S.

Having been to mainly academic conferences before, it struck me as odd that so many of the keynotes and panels felt choreographed—complete with fashionable electronic music the background, dramatic introduction, and...no Q & A’s from the audience??? Maybe it’s just me (someone who isn’t very good at going up to a speaker cold to ask them a question one-on-one), but I always feel more engaged and like an active participant in talks that carve out time for questions. Makes it feel more like an exchange of knowledge rather than a performance of knowledge...

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Thanks to working on the Autonomous Authorities project, I’ve been getting really into LIDAR imagery/visualizations lately...

(See image captions for sources.)

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Google won the last maps war. Self-driving cars give other mapmakers a chance to find their own way

Autonomous cars need up-to-the-minute maps of every conceivable roadway to move. Whoever owns the most detailed and expansive version of these maps that vehicles read will own an asset that could be worth billions.

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Fellowship WK01: Autonomous Authorities + revisiting my thesis booklet

/ MONDAY + TUESDAY /

I kicked off the week of the Post-Graduate Fellowship by starting to research with Sean Donahue on his summer research: Autonomous Authorities. He’s interested in creating alternative narratives that look at autonomous mobility through the lens of power, access, and authority.

Since my thesis project has been adjacent to the problems of mobility and autonomous vehicles this whole time (after all, mapping and location services are key to creating an autonomous vehicle future) I thought this research project would be a good fit.

So far, I’ve been sourcing LIDAR sensors and accessories to make some technological prototypes that can get into how the perception systems of autonomous vehicles work:

As part of this research + prototyping I will also be making a DIY lidar spinner (which I’m pretty excited for, even though I’m not sure where it will lead):

/ WEDNESDAY + THURSDAY /

I’ve arranged my schedule so that I’m working on Sean’s project at the front half of the week, so that I can dedicate the back half of the week completely to my own work. I definitely had a slow start, but I at least got the existing page spreads for my thesis booklet up on the wall...

Having had some distance from these spreads (which I was scrambling to do amidst all the WK13 + 14 chaos) I’ve realized that I REAALLLLLYYYY need to rethink the layout and format of this book (if for nothing else than to make it something I can ACTUALLY accomplish over these 14 weeks).

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MDP Post-Graduate Fellowship

The Monday after graduation, I found out that I got the MDP post-graduate fellowship! Which means that I get a stipend + studio space to continue my thesis project, and also contribute to a faculty research project. That starts about a week from today (on May 14).

So for now, that’s what will be keeping me busy...in addition to helping to organizing the Antiracist Classroom Reconstructing Practice Convening...and most importantly, FINDING A JOB.

[godivareisen]

WK14: final show + graduation

Right as I entered the post-symposium, pre-final show scramble, my family came into town for my graduation! Which was exciting but also a little stressful (at first). Luckily, they and my partner provided plenty of opportunities for me to take much needed breaks amidst all of the last minute additions to my installation. Here’s a peek at my *final* final installation:

For more documentation, check out my website!

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WK13: symposium (2 of 2)

As part of the symposium, us students had three minutes each to present a deep dive into our thesis projects...here’s mine!

[presentation transcript coming soon!]

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WK13: symposium (1 of 2)

Against all odds, I actually got *something* resembling my ideal final installation up in time for Symposium Day. It was 85-90% finished, which was good enough for being able to share my project with the symposium respondents/panelists.

To give some context, for the past 4 years, MDP has invited external designers to respond to thesis students’ work. This year, the respondents were:

Miya Osaki Co-founder of Diagram Office in New York and MDP alum

Daniela Rosner Assistant Professor in Human-Centered Design & Engineering at University of Washington, Seattle

Rosten Woo LA-based artist, designer, and educator

After some behind-the-scenes “matchmaking” each respondent is assigned a group of students. My respondent was Daniela Rosner! Although our conversation was relatively brief (only 20 minutes), she seemed to instantly “get” my work. Which isn’t too shabby for talking about it through a not-quite-finished installation. 

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WK 12-13: installation time (a.k.a. in which I make crappy cardboard templates of my objects so that I don’t completely mess up the final objects made out of nice cardboard)

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WK 12: trying to get past STEP 01 / getting analog with GPS

One critique from my WK09 review was that STEP 01 (the one which accounts for how the GPS receiver in your phone works) didn’t give a sense of how triangulation/trilateration works. When your receiver can “see” three or more GPS satellites, it can calculate where it is (and therefore where you are). If we think of the GPS satellites as “known” points, and of yourself as an “unknown” point, then the position of three or more “knowns” can determine the “unknown position” (i.e. your location). At the end of STEP 01, your location is represented as a blue dot.

One of my adjunct thesis advisors, Richard Wheeler, gave me some excellent references and ideas for approaching how to show how GPS works in an analog, more embodied way. Type “BBC time clock” into the YouTube search bar and you’ll find...

The Clock That Changed the World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-g27KS0yiY

...which is where I got those screenshots at the head of this post. The BBC World History host simulates how GPS works by comparing his time to the time of three clocks at three fixed points (i.e. the “satellites”). Sitting on a boat in a lake, his location is “unknown”, but by calculating how far he is from each of the three clocks based on the difference in the time on his clock, he is able to “triangulate” his approximate position in space.

Of course, GPS is a little more complex because it can also calculate altitude (i.e. how high above the surface of the Earth you are); trilateration is the proper term for how location from GPS satellite position is derived.

My first attempt at showing how triangulation/trilateration works in a very basic sense was...boring to say the least. I was trying to show the different distances between you and the satellites, showing that the common point of these radii is your current location. The 3D nuances of how this actually works got mushy in the 2D representation.

My second attempt used a similar approach to the first—except the distances were different lengths of string coming from each satellite. The action performed was similar to the one that the BBC host used in the video. Drawing the overlapping arcs allows you to “discover” the common point...but I felt it was still extremely lacking.

My third attempt (thanks to some brainstorming with my partner) was significantly more successful than either of the first two attempts. It is essentially a mechanical computer that can “calculate” how the changing distances between you and satellites results in a different location. (The “readout” of this computer is something that I ended up resolving later on...)

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WK 11-12: making plans, slow and steady

With the symposium coming up WK13, I needed to ramp up production on my installation. I was still very unsure about how some of my proposed “steps” would play out, but making drawings, building maquettes, ordering business cards, ordering “blue dot” buttons as giveaways, and ordering an absurd amount of cardboard for my final build made it seem like I was making progress...