KE DING

Parsons MFA-DT Fall2017

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

MS2-Play-Project-Heros of D12

In game development, designers usually follow a process called “Cerny Methods” intentionally or unintentionally. Cerny Methods is similar to the idea of MVP (minimum viable product) in product design, which requires a functional low budget prototype to validate if the user would be satisfied or not in a very early stage of development. Cerny Method is a modified version of MVP that it focuses on a “playable” prototype to testify if the gameplay is working.

That is the reason our team abandons the first idea about a meta-game of the buttons since a game focusing on story-telling would require a more completed prototype to go through this process, and like the “Environment” and “Object” projects we only have around 2 weeks to work on it. According to Jenova Chen, the director of the award-winning game Journey, he founded out any of their prototypes for Journey cannot present the idea or the emotion they expected on the players unless they fully polished the game to a certain level.

We switched to a traditional board game quickly so we can put more time on iterating a solid gameplay instead of trying to solving a bug in Unity. And this time we have a new member Radu onboard (Yessss) who is an awesome UX designer. In this play project, I am taking care of the gameplay design, Nick and Radu are focusing on the illustration and digital version of the game. So I will focus more on the gameplay design in this documentation.

The iteration of the basic gameplay is designed by following steps, each iteration I added a layer to the game so it could have more diversity:

1. In the beginning, I was trying to create a simple minimal guessing game - a card is placed in front of the player, and the player has to guess whether this card is black or red.

2. Then, providing meaningful feedback to the player’s choices. This is the process that defining this product really as a “Game” instead of a generic interactive experience. Following the iteration#1, by getting the black card player will get 1 point; getting the red the player would lose 1 health. When the player has x points, claim the victory; when losing y health, the player is defeated. The X and Y require play-test to decide how much it should be.

3. Adding the possibility of “Bluff”, which is one of the core experience of any guessing game. Let another player giving out the puzzle (a card facing down) so the rest of player can use the card giver’s previous behaviors to anticipate his/her next move.

4. Dealing with the situation I assumed that some player will abuse the rule by only giving out red cards during the game. So if other players don’t wanna guess this card, the card giver would take this card by him/herself. By adding this layer, it established a punishment for the players since he/she has to take this card and lose health if no one wants it. At the same time, a player can use this rule to play smart so he can take back his black card by making others believe that is a red one.

5. So far a playable prototype is done! I used memo card and put black and green colors to represent the “good cards” and “bad cards”. By executing playtest I have to solve 2 problems:

 - What are the X and Y should be in the iteration#1? 

 - How many good cards and bad cards should be in the deck? What is the best ratio between these 2?

6. After several playtests, I decided to let the player start with 3 health and the winning condition is 6 points. And I realized that the number of each of the colors could affect the macro level of the progress during a game.

7. After more playtests the deck ended up with 25 black cards and 15 red cards. As long as the game keeps on playing, black cards would be restored as points with the players so the number of black cards in the deck will significantly decrease. Hence the players will meet more red cards when they are approaching the end of the game so they have to be more careful deciding whether they should take a card or not. This mechanism will automatically speed up the overall progress in each one of the games making the game gradually becomes more challenging. This is a crucial requirement in “Flow Theory” that a game can keep its player engaged. Also, by having more black cards than red at the beginning, the players won’t be instantly killed at the early stage so the overall game is more involving and friendly.

Right now we have a stable and balanced gameplay. At the same time, it is still super easy to learn because all you have to do is to make choice should I take this card right now and what color should I give out this round. The points and the health would be recorded by the cards and calculator so the players don’t have to remember extra information but can spend all their attention focusing on guessing and bluffing.

Obviously, it is still not so fun playing with blank cards with a black dot and green dot. We create a story for this game which is “Heros of D12″ that you are actually a student of DT. We want to make fun of the little subculture on this floor and the people working here (because why not). By giving out a card you are “presenting a project” to the others and this project can be good or bad. If it is bad it will hurt your sanity(the health), if it is good the others will learn something from it(the points). And we design 6 professors with different abilities so they can help you once during the game to give you more advantages(actually 7 but Gina and Claudia are always teaching together so unlike the others they are on the same card).

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

MS2-Object-Project-Dice

Before I moving on to design I was majoring in psychology in college. I never being trained by any professionals in design or ever work in a design agency. I never know what a design process is. I learned by watching other designers product, trying to mimic their aesthetic approach, and trying to catch the sense of those brilliant ideas behind. At the time I start doing my own design works there were ridiculous amounts of barriers I met during the process. Not to speak of the lack of experience in all design tools, I got stuck in the project because of running out of the idea, have little or no visions of what the next step should be. I did not have any tutor or predecessor to consult with, but can only browse other people’s works on portfolio websites such as Dribbble and Behance again and again. Instead of the sense of achievement, I felt more pain and struggle during the design process and I heavily relied on my intuition and my design always ended up with a lot of unexpected elements and randomness in it.

(My partner Nick made a super cool cover page for the slides. For me, it looks a little bit too “confident” compared with the origin of the idea :D)

Those barriers are not appearing as many as before since I am getting a hand of design these years. It still exists but bothers me way less than before. Not until I got into Parsons I finally accept a fact that even a pro designer cannot produce ideas and solutions like an assembly line in the factory. I am totally OK with it. And thinking about myself in 4 years ago as a rookie designer, I can envisage that confusion and pain I had, and start laughing at it. It might sound cheesy but the dice is my very own objectification of this short journey of the heart.

This is also why I would like to categorize the dice as a “ritual object” instead of something else. And it is not a toy or a magic 8 ball, the context is way more specific that it is looking for designers, at least those who are still struggling with the design process and trying to echo with their anxieties. 

Tips on the dice (example):

Duplicate (That you duplicate the current object for like 100 of times)

Scale (When something is mediocre, make it 100 times bigger)

Flip Upside Down (You never know what it looks like on the other way)

Delete (Just get rid of this stupid thing)

Transparent (Because it looks cool)

Go Get a Coffee (If you can’t afford one I am so sorry for you)

These are the tricks that pushed my design a step forward every time I got stuck. And I would like to clarify that they are NOT like specific instructions how you should use the software. You don’t have to scale up the oval you are working on right now when you get the result “Scale”. Instead, it gives a direction you might have lost sight of, that you might want to think about if scaling can make a change in your current design. If I am working on graphic design, is everything in a meaningful size? would changing the size make such design in vain? 

Using my major studio 1 final project “Singularity” as an example. It is a puzzle solving game featuring weird level design. I spend tons amount of time designing the level, thinking about questions such as what should I put in this scene? What would I want the player experience in this scene? How should the player proceed to next scene?

In this scene, I SCALE up the supercomputer to make the player looks weak and tiny and create a solemn and mysterious feeling.

In this scene, I DUPLICATE the player to give a hint that he is not the first one who is traveling through the maze. Also, I FLIP the wall in the previous level so the player can walk on it to proceed to the next level.

Here I FLIP the direction upside down where the tree grows so it can lead the player to the next level.

At the final stages designing “Singularity”, I drew a roulette on the paper with all these tricks I can think of to fast generate ideas during the level design. I would like to say that was the first prototype of the designer’s dice, although it is not a “dice” it worked, and it worked pretty well.

I and Nick later made 2 paper prototype during the class. We lost one of them and I hoped it is because someone found out they have same issues as we do and sneakily took it home.

Somehow I felt regret a little to bring the dice idea to the object project. As the class moving on we were asked to push this idea forward by adding more features and interpretations on the dice. In my opinion, the dice would be just fit in this minimal form of a cube since the idea is very simple and it is meant to be simple. We even decided to wipe one of the six faces because we believe the user should do his/her own introspection and put their personal symbol on it. I don’t blame my professors that have the wishes it could go up to the next level as an “object”. It is just a dice, with 2 young designers’ frustrations on its 6 faces, and it might not fit the required depth and complexity well of the “Object Project”.

Still, I and nick are effortlessly iterating this product from our own understanding of it. On the 2nd iteration, we 3D printed it and build a mobile app that you can toss the dice on your phone by shaking it. On the 3rd iteration, we tried making a laser cut version and even tried to apply AR technology on the dice (so the app can explain the meaning for the user) but fail, since the symbols are not optimized for camera recognition. All these enrichment we tried to endow with the dice feels really extra right now, but it worth a try.

inspirations & precedents:

The idea of EDC(every day carry) https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Everyday_carry

The “Totems” in the movie Inception http://inception.wikia.com/wiki/Totem

A cube that has all kinds of button

https://thefidgetcube.co/

Magic 8 ball

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mFOracFClBg

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

MS2-Environment-Project Rosebud

The first project starts with a vague idea of the “environment”, which confused me and my partner Nick for a while. In Schwartzman’s book, I noticed that a lot of installation art projects she mentioned is built for external observations, that even the artist is burying his/her head inside a glass tank or clothes, the audiences are still standing “outside” the product to look at it. What’s “inside” the product, or the content, is always being avoided or just not being served as the main focus in the design. By doing so, artists and designers deconstruct the relationship between the content and environment and narrow down the environment to a tiny, personal level of experience.

Laptop Compubody Sock, 2008, Photo by Becky Stern.

Following Schwartzman’s opinion, I and Nick tried to put the setting of the environment to a current time. Our domain starts with “Mind”, specifically the Alzheimer’s Syndrome (since it is a personal experience and the others usually view it externally). We did a few research on the clinical manifestations on it and found out that a patient’s cognition system is heavily damaged. In an Alzheimers patient’s eye, the world could be another reality, at the same time their responses to such alter reality are perceived by people like us. The discussion is logged here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yfHWJIfV-ClC1MQ1Yd7L3Hd6OUavAKMwsewp9noE4e0/edit?usp=sharing. (Blue: Ke, Green: Nick)

We were thinking about if there’s a way to make a game and let healthy people understand the world an Alzheimer’s patient lives in, hence raise their awareness of this fatal disease. As an ex-psychology major student, my concern of this idea is that it could be really biased since we are approaching this altered reality with a totally different cognition system. The idea is also being criticized hard in class for lacking narrativity and the solution with a game wasn’t sold. We decided to abort this idea but still focus on the human mind.

Instead of making up a story we tended to use an existing story because it would be more completed and make us to think and design for existing problems than creating our own. Inspired by BBC’s mini-series, Sherlock, we realize by reediting an old story and put it in a new time (like right now or in the future) could be interesting to explore.

In Sherlock, we can see the famous detective from age Victorian is using modern technology to investigate the murder case in the 21st century. 

During our brainstorm process, we decided to use the story from the movie Citizen Kane but transplant it to a near future scenario. What would people think of this billionaire? How would the journalist research the meaning of “Rosebud” in 2040? Our first mission was to review the whole movie and generate the important moments in it. The job checklist and our detailed discussion can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_tvQVPQLkZLiP5kzMs0U3371tIuEiUeOyTYp-VKbYxg/edit

The answer to the idea is straight-forward, as a journalist in the future, he can just dive into Charles Foster Kane’s mind and dig out what Rosebud is. There will be a memory extracting device to construct the virtual world of one’s memory and people can be immersed and walk around in it. The investigation of rosebud could probably be an adventure in a strange, bizarre world of mind.

However, the time is limited since we have only 2 days on it. For fast prototyping the memory device and the world is constructed, we decide to use Cinema4D to quick model the levels and Google Tilt Brush for the details in the world.

The 6 levels represent the significant moment in Kane’s life, including the Xanadu castle, the old house, the Inquirer, his governor campaign speech, his ex-wife and a vault contains his ultimate secret. Since the prototype is made by Tilt Brush, so we can use VR headset to simulate an immersive experience which allows the user to walk around in this virtual world.

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

D4TC-All-Response+Moderating-Link

https://kd-parsonmfa-dt.tumblr.com/tagged/Response

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

D4TC-Week12-Response

It is weird that today in 2017 we still keep putting a lot of emphasis on environmental protection in the design process. I mean not to criticize it’s not important anymore to mention climate changes in the design process, but on the contrary, it is supposed to be the basic standard that shouldn’t be kept bombarded around today. Around 2010, the idea of responsive design just appeared and every web designer advertises it as a great selling point in their web design outsourcing. However, no one today still does this anymore since every website has to be responsive to the different platforms. The strong voice appealing the climate change problem and environmental-friendly approach is, in fact, a sign that it has not become a mainstream in design method. 

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

D4TC-Week13-Response

I would argue that the explosion of information in this century is, in fact, providing more examples and cases for normal people in their daily life. When asking a man whether is a woman can be called “beautiful” or “pretty”, his standard would be way more picky than 30 years ago when there wasn’t any internet or social network system. Today, with more access to pictures on the internet and SNS, as well as the invention of phone-camera, there are exponentially more images flowing into the overall database, a man can see more “beautiful” images of women which invisibly increased his standard selecting future partner. On the other hand, the increasing amount of the photo data gradually changed the standard of beauty for a woman and today more of them decide to use surgery to fit herself into the “new” standard of beauty. This is the way who information explosion alter the way we live today.

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

D4TC-Week14-Response

This week’s idea extrastatecraft reminds me of recent news in Beijing China that the government executed a strict and cruel law enforcement on so-called “low-end population” whose occupations are mainly categorized as physical labor. They were forced to move out from their affordable living space hence most of them have to go back to their hometown since they could not find another affordable residential space in a short time. The government claims that these people occupied the precious resources in the capital of the republics and by doing so can save more space for other “high-end population”. However, the infrastructural services such as express delivery and food delivery were immediately shut down since a large proportion of the service industry heavily rely on these people they just expelled. This is a seriously bad case for mis-assigning public space without a careful thinking or basic respect for humanity.

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

D4TC-Week10-Response

   Surveillance, the biggest problem every citizen facing right now. The essence of surveillance is a distrust between individuals or authorities. In the article  Eyes Over Compton: How Police Spied on a Whole City, sheriffs use a drone to fly above Compton they can monitor all the activities in this county.The physical form of surveillance has been lasted hundreds and thousands of years in human history, while the merging of the technology pushes it to the next level. Big companies such as Google and Facebook track their users' behaviors and even using algorithms or A.I. to analyze such behaviors and hence sell them for money.    Such result has happened as fait accompli. Neither yelling or crying asking those supervisors who watch us behind the monitor to stop doing this is unrealistic and naive. There is nothing we can do to alter the roles of watching and being watched. As I designer, what we can do is to try our best to design a “black box” mechanism to secure these data avoiding it to be leaked to someone up to no good so such data can be really used in a good way. Also, we should focus on technology which can empower individual’s anonymity such as blockchain and encrypted messenger. The solution is not simply to overthrow on a side in the surveillance system but to empower the weak side so it can remain a dynamic balance.

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

D4TC-Week9-Response

The idea of ASI is totally underestimated at this very moment. Right now people think A.I. is just a higher complicated software to play chess and provide precise voice feedbacks like Siri. Instead, our perception of intelligence is distorted since we ourselves are among one of the higher intelligence. Does the dumbest human have a huge difference from Albert Einstein? If IQ85 can be identified as “dumb”, has 130 IQ does not seem so outstanding from the numbers. However, only with the difference of 45 in IQ can seem so different, what if we have an A.I. that has IQ175 (or even higher)? Research shows that that the smartest chimpanzee could have the same intelligence close a 4-year-old human kid approximately. However, even the smartest the chimpanzee cannot understand the simplest task performed by a human. If so, how can we be so sure we can understand all the behaviors that an ASI performs with higher intelligence than us? The only thing that we can be certain, is that all those imaginations about the A.I., mostly with humanoid appearance and emotions, are poetic and sadly, not true.

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

D4TC-Week8-Response

Donna Hathaway’s Cyborg Manifesto reminds me of the movies series of Blade Runner and it’s original work “Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep” by Philip K. Dick. Both of Hathaway’s work and the movies had a serious discussion on the boundary between machines and intelligence.I would like to argue that right now in the 21st century with the blooming of technology, we are actually theoretically all cyborg with the addiction on mobile device and internet. Does the cyborg have to be implanted with chips or exoskeleton? In general, hardware and software do not necessarily to be built in our body but with the widespread of the user of device, phones and other smart gadgets had already became an extension of the human body. Then What’s the difference between us and all those cyborgs and androids from the sci-fi movies? It doesn’t matter how much the human and machines blend with each other, but the direction of evolution matters. Are we doing math function addition on the human? Or are we developing a super complicated neuron network system that can learn things much efficient than the human being? If we see evolution as a vector, the cyborg might be the perfect center point between.

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

Ideas in Form Journal

1D - Browser against Humanity

At the beginning, I was trying to generate my ideas from the domains I’ve been experienced from 2016 - 2017. After my college graduation, I spend a year in China running my own startup company. Those days were extremely busy and I was struggling with my anxiety from my work and graduate college applications. I did not have a large piece of time to read but all the recreation in my part-time turned kitschy and superficial, involving watching random YouTubers’ streamings and playing online games. In the 1D process of this project, I was brainstorming around domains such as “Streamer”, “Meme”, “Online Game”, “Gamify” and “GDC(everyday carry)”, etc.

The result of my 1D ended up with a quite “finished” idea, that I wanted to make a game which uses a browser as the media. However, this browser has no concern for user’s privacy or security (this would be notified to the user). Unlike simply “playing games on web”, this browser could access user’s data and browse history, even using the camera to spy on the user’s expression and hence apply these data into the game. For example, the browser could generate a random word - which is usually NSFW (Why? because people who have negative energy would think it’s fun) - and can track how many times that word appears on the user’s screen in the next - let’s say 30 seconds. Friends can have a little competition with each other to see who will get more words.

For making this game works, I have to code a whole new browser which seems impossible with my current coding ability. As a result, I change the directions a little bit in the later form of this project.

2D - Big Brother is Watching

During my gap year, except indulging into works and shallow recreations, I’ve noticed the government in my country were increasing the force on controlling and monitoring individual’s access to the Internet. Ironically in some place in the world, the idea of “Browser against Humanity” is no longer a joke or fun thing to laugh about (though it is supposed to be a joke). When I talked about my 1D idea to some of my friends from China, their feedback was quite like “is it that what we are experiencing right now”?

It actually provided me more insights on the upcoming 2D project. Instead of coding a new browser, I could probably focus on one part of the huge “Bowser against Humanity” project, which is the surveillance. In the original idea, when the user is using the browser, other people can spy on his/her screen too and the user would get a notification which tells him he is being watched.

The eye is the best metaphor of monitoring and surveillance. I was thinking about if I can use the eye as a notification telling the user if they were being spying or not. At this 2D process, I drew an eye using black and red color for the later project. Also, I was looking into any solution that can build up a connection with human-face and 2D graphic. Eventually, I found out that OpenCV library for Processing could be the way in my 4D and 5D ideas in form.

3D - Bring it out from Screen

My 3D stage is the most struggling one since all my previous works are screen-based projects. On the other hand, simply printing out all the UI elements putting them together is meaningless for this project since all I was dealing with is only an eye notification. Then I changed my understanding of 3D a little bit. Should the 3D form of the idea just be a paper model of product? I think not.

In my creative coding lab, I was using a progammable LED ring with Arduino for lighting. I wondered if I can bring that notification into the real world, what would it be like?

For the better lighting effect, I put a balloon filled with water on it the ring in the first prototype.

However, no one wants to carry a balloon full with water walking around everywhere. Even let it stay in the room could be dangerous since I don’t know when would the water leak and broke my Arduino. By coincident, I found out that the LED ring’s size perfectly matches an used air-freshener's case.

With Arduino IDE I made the LED blink as a police car’s siren.

4D - Watch and Being Watched

Before starting doing the 4D process, I had some conversations with my classmates about what kind of form their 4D project would be like. The answers are mostly making an introductive video since our instructions on 4D is “adding time to the prototype”. I wanted to use the video format in a little different way by just “making and playing” one at the same time put more emphasis on the concept of surveillance. The only way to achieve both these goals is by live streaming.

https://go.twitch.tv/kdmfadt

During the live stream, I open my prototype created by OpenCV+Processing on the screen so it can interact with those who put their face in my Macbook’s camera. At the same time, with the OBS screen recording software, their faces and activities are steamed to my channel so everyone in the presentation who has the link above can see what’s happening.

5D - The Light and the Eyes

With all the 1-4D pre-heating, the result of my 5D seemed pretty straightforward - I have to connect and integrate all the previous products I made so far. The light in my 3D process should be triggered once the camera detects a human’s face. At the same time, those eyes should track the movement of this face. In order to realize that, there were some areas of knowledge I had to dig into and make use of them.

Processing - Drawing eyes around human’s face

Arduino - Taking control of the LED

Firmata - Connecting Processing with Arduino.

OpenCV - Facial Recognition library

AdaFruit NeoPixel Library - Extra Arduino APIs to control the LED ring.

The coding part was a pain in the ass. Since Firmata can only write simple instruct to Arduino and hence it cannot use external add-on instructs such as NeoPixel Library at the Processing end. In order to do that, I have to rewrite all the functions to make that LED work properly and implant these code into the Arduino-end Firmata scripts.

The Final result looks like these:

By connecting the camera, the screen, and the light, the final product turns into an indicator which is super sensitive being watched. It uses the camera to capture whats happening in front of the screen and the software will tell if there is a human-face-liked object moving around in the video. If yes, it will send a signal to the light and the alert will start spinning.

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

D4TC-Week7-Response

This week’s readings warn me the power of anonymity as well as publicity. I spent some time watching the film “Zero Days” mentioned in the article US Cyber Weapon: Our Devil Pinball. With the power of anonymity, any rule or law is in vain but the capital and profit will dominate everything. We never know what’s under the water, what do the remains of the iceberg looks like. Even though I am currently typing on the most complicated and precise machine that human-race ever built, without seeing the physical flow of the data, I would have no chance to know what is happening up in the air or, in other words, the servers.

The Anthropocene has evolved into a brand new level. With the emerging civil use of high-end technology, the human has become increasingly reliant on the convenience that provided by the gadgets, software, and internet. Imagine if all these smart-phones, computers and tablets suddenly being useless, what human-being would be like? Anxiety and nervousness would be the least problem we would have. The existence of cyber weapon shows us that there is a possibility that such digital apocalypse would totally happen if we do not pay attention to it. It is true that cyber weapon or cyberwar does not directly harm an individual physically. However, it could easily shut down any current social system with a single thumb drive, which is even more dangerous than a nuclear weapon.

The only counter-solution to such anonymous activity is to bring it under the spotlight and test it with democracy. No matter Stuxnet or Nitro Zeus. With the supervision by the public, there will be (hopefully?) a constraint to such projects.

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

D4TC - Week5 Response + Moderation - Summary of “Cyber Weapon”

The article “US Cyber Weapons: Our Demon Pinball” is a review of Alex Gibney’s documentary film Zero Days, providing more background information about the software worm Stuxnet. In June 2010, a network security company from Belarus firstly detected its existence, which has already infected more than half of the personal computer in Iran. Not until 2012, an officer from U.S. government had admitted that the virus, a.k.a. Stuxnet is a cooperation project conducted by the United States’ NSA and Isareal, which as a result sabotaged  Iranian centrifugal machines that could be used in their nuclear weapon development. Stuxnet was developed based on a few “Zero Day” bugs in Siemens’ PLC system which was widely used by Iranian nuclear industry. However, leaking from Isareal, an updated version Stuxnet later struck almost half the world even the NSA. The Stuxnet revealed that the war between countries has no longer limited to physical weapons but also appeared to be on technology. In the film Zero Days, an NSA officer (starred by an actress) claimed that the United States is working on another project Nitro Zeus that aims at bringing down the power grid which could bring this cyber weapon to a next level. Due to its anonymity and un-traceability, a cyber weapon could be even more lethally dangerous than nuclear weapon considering its mobility and maintenance cost.

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

D4TC-Week7-Readings

The Cloud, the State, the Stack; Benjamin Bratton in Conversation w Metahaven, 2014

Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street, Judith Butler, excerpts, 2011

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

Spy Alert Final

Cooperate with processing, using OpenCV for the facial detection and Firmata for Arduino+Processing workflow.

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

Spy Alert(with case)

[kd-parsonmfa-dt]

CCLab Arduino Final

Inner Structure. The Spying alert light that made out of a neo-pixel 24 led ring and an air fresher’s case.