Design Studio II

Reflective Documentation | Kendra Xu

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Extension 2: App (Joe Marianek)

After a lot of rethinking (especially about the name, which went through so many discarded variations from “Glean” to “Mosaic” to “Remix” to “Trashy”), I came up with a proposal for an app called Scrapbox. This app allows you to send deleted files from your system to a registered community, either by your own conscious choice or through an automated algorithm, and through this system you can challenge your friends (and be challenged) to create new works out of certain files that you send them, and check out their progress in a communal grid gallery which allows you to swipe through the different stages of a file’s evolution from its initial discarded state. Meanwhile, there is a communal file dump that features a list, updated in real-time, of recently trashed files that you can then swipe and download or forward to others. The app also comes with a character profiling section that learns your preferences and profiles you based on your digital waste patterns, giving you badges with funny names when you deserve them and telling you when your naming sensibility is completely nonexistent. Scrapbox is intended to be an app that facilitates creative community-involved thinking by limiting source material to what others have discarded, and encouraging a cross-pollination of thought among various types of people by exchanging digital debris in a virtual, inter-relational junkyard. This app proposal was interesting to work with because I made some decisions that I would normally have avoided purely for “safer” aesthetic reasons. For example, when I first came in with my initial batch of prototypes in week two, I had chosen colors that I thought were more modern and clean (white and a gentle teal) and the interface was heavily modeled after social media feeds like instagram and facebook, which took a lot of focus away from the actual goal of the app. Dinah promptly reminded me that what I need to accentuate should be the type of work that is generated from the economy of digital waste, and I thought that was a really valid point because it’s so easy to get carried away with trying to coddle the audience by planting trivial social incentives. Afterwards, I completely changed the voice of the app by picking a bright blue that was as close to RGB blue as visually possible and typeset everything in Lucida Sans Typewriter, inspired by the blue screen of death aesthetic which I think speaks well to the realm of digital malfunction and therefore the world of floating computer detritus. I went to class quite unsure of whether the decision was a good one, but I think I’m far more satisfied with this version than the noncommittal tone of the previous prototype, and I’ve definitely learnt a lot more about managing the nuances of creating a feasible, usable UI interface while keeping an eye on the real philosophy behind the app. 

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Extension 2: App (Joe Marianek)

The word I was previously given to work with is “delete”. Initially, I was debating among a lot of options for ideas to work with, such as an app that helps you get over a breakup, an app that sends push notifications back to the senders (to question the idea of passive consumerism), or an app that slowly deletes less important calendar notifications and reminders from your phone (to reinstate a healthier, less cramped and more natural lifestyle). I eventually decided to work with the idea of “digital recycling”, to rethink our relationship with deleting items and files from our computers. Where do they go, and are they truly erased from existence? How can we reuse this unwanted data and turn it into something useful by employing the spirit of web-based outreach?

The above is a series of screenshots of people’s trashcans which I crowdsourced over the course of a week. It was interesting to note the different file naming systems and categorization styles on everyone’s desktops, and I began to think about the possibility of adding a waste profiling aspect to the app.

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Extension 1: Automation (John Caserta)

The main challenge for the final product was to find a way to convey all the complex information of this new universe in a more natural and comprehensive way, embedding the prototypes I made in sketch without giving them an air of work in progress. After extensive discussions with Dinah and Tim, I decided to try my hand at coding a prototype version of a tech article site called Techlite, modeled after extant sites like Tech Crunch and Tech Insider, which could offer glimpses into various aspects (as categorized in the news feed) of this new hypothetical world. I sourced for relevant imagery and wrote 6 articles in an attempt to touch on some broader categories, such as satire, economics, the opensource coding community that finds new creative solutions, the hacktivist movements that aim to re-democratize information, and novel uses for mindware such as spirituality and meditation. As I was relatively new to html and css (I’ve only really done it during John Caserta’s web programming workshop), I was actually pretty nervous about how it was going to turn out and was so worried that everything would fail because the code wouldn’t work. Thankfully, it went rather smoothly, and I learnt a lot from the entire process both in terms of content generation (an extensive thought experiment) and the actual gritty details of coding in the html/css language. I intend to continue working on this idea over the summer as a personal coding project.

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Extension 1: Automation (John Caserta)

After week 1, I received really great critique about what I should focus on and I decided that what mattered more, instead of fleshing out the product itself, is actually the universe in which such a future technological mindware scenario is already convincingly in place. I shifted gears for the second week and thought hard about how the universe would work, including the sociopolitical issues that would arise from the commodification and privatization of the learning process. I created the companies Quartz, Apex, and Tidbit, which are modelled after Adobe / Apple, Samsung / indie companies, and T-mobile / Sprint / lower-income suppliers, as well as a hacktivist collective called Magpie, and drafted up a lot of notes about how these companies work. This sort of world-building felt very invigorating and I particularly enjoyed coming up with names for new file types, such as Mind Encryption Memo, because it felt like a thought experiment in generating new terminologies for a world that has become accustomed to a technological state we can hardly comprehend in our current capacity.

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Extension 1: Automation (John Caserta)

A preliminary keynote presentation proposing a product (for commentary purposes) that automates the learning process for a hypothetical future scenario in which information can be downloaded and synced directly to brain. The Information Suite, whose namesake is a parody of Adobe's Creative Suite, is a system that sells bundles of skill sets tailored for a variety of specific professions with the possibility of expanding into character profiles, which can be purchased in the form of subscriptions and downloaded to equip an individual with all the necessary skills to excel in a chosen field. By touching on extant divisions in price ranges, tiers of quality, and the prospect of commodifying and monetizing a necessity such as skill or knowledge, the Information Suite is a concept that aims to critique capitalist culture and demonstrate some of its social implications (low-income earners are unable to afford the monthly package and therefore lose out completely in the race), as well as provide the setting for a dystopian scenario in which the learning process is encrypted into a digital process. Can a human mind function like a computer, and what are the possible ramifications? Do we want to give people the option of programming their entire lives out, as long as they have the money to purchase the necessary "skills"? Much like real-life examples of high-income parents hiring tutors to supervise their children's playdates and instill social skills in them since young, or the expensive crutch of tuition needed to excel in the Asia's academic scene, the Information Suite digitizes this scenario and carries the embedded social issues to a more abstract, futuristic platform. What would living in a world like this be like? 

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Unit 10: John Caserta [General Reflections]

This was one of the most exciting units in my opinion, partly because I’m generally biased towards future thoughts about technology and civilization (I didn’t actually start the semester thinking I was particularly interested in it). In this presentation, I focused on the idea of automating memory and storage, and the question of whether the human mind could be treated similar to a computer system. I was inspired by some personal events happening at the time that made me wish I could control memory (eg. delete some specific part of it), and drew upon references such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Harry Potter’s pensieve, 1984, and Moon. These are some of my favorite popular fiction and media works, mostly because they deal with such innately, profound human themes that I think are becoming increasingly relevant in a technologically advanced society. This unit made me realize that I actually had a latent passion for investigating how the human condition could change with the technological and scientific conditions of its environment. 

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Unit 9: Rich Rose [General Reflections]

I was actually very excited for this unit but quite frankly it didn’t really turn out well, partly because I was not that used to designing for campaign projects and took a long time thinking about aspects that probably weren’t as important. My campaign was gun safety, which I chose over my other option (clean air) because I thought it was more of a challenge due to its serious tone and sensitive nature. Even though we only had to create names and logos for the week, I encountered a lot of issues from the very beginning, even at the stage of coming up with a name. My friends were giving me a lot of pun-filled suggestions but I kept feeling like those were too playful or insensitive for the topic, whereas something that’s too serious risked being pedantic, aggressive, or hoary. I think the fact that this unit turned out a little bit of a failure was useful in that it made me reflect on how important it is to tread carefully when it comes to designing for sensitive political issues, and how hard it is even just to come up with a name, which essentially encapsulates so many facets of an identity system. I still wish I could have extended on it or taken another shot at maybe an easier theme, just to familiarize myself with the steps again, but it was still a valuable learning process and I may try to pick up campaign design again over the summer when I have a clearer mind and more time to conduct proper research.  

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Unit 8: Joe Marianek [General Reflections]

I really enjoyed this unit even though it was a hefty quota of work to fulfill especially within a week, and in some ways it was actually a pivotal assignment that informed my later extensions and ways of thinking throughout the rest of the semester. To begin with, I was very happy with the word I received, which was “delete”; I thought that it was a word that contained a lot of interesting conceptual potential and found myself unable to be satisfied with the most direct, simple interpretations of deleting (eg. canceling something in the conventional way). It was a particularly exciting moment when Joe asked us to project 20 years into the future and think about these words in a future context, about how gestures would be different, how actions would take on a different meaning and humans would interact differently with one another against the backdrop of new technology. Even during this unit (before the extensions), I never truly realized how much I enjoyed this sort of future thinking. It took a while to develop, and then I went all out during John’s assignment later on.

For this keynote assignment, I remember being most intrigued by the performative aspect of the word “delete”, which I discovered after directing a friend to make some hand gestures that I imagined would correlate with deleting something on a future interface (eg. a floor-wide screen, or actual desktop surface). I also wanted to explore the sociopolitical aspects of deleting, such as the rejection of a friend or of an entire immigrant race, as well as the implications of deleting within a system. All in all I really appreciated the conceptual rigor of this unit, and the amount of work we had to do within such a short amount of time forced us to generate quick ideas that focused on breadth and imagination, which was good exercise because I’m generally a slow thinker and prefer perfecting things for a very long time.

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Unit 7 general reflections

I appreciated Dinah’s unit because I’ve never really thought much about the relationship between graphic design and the narrative prior to this exercise. I used to think that narratives belonged more in the department of illustration and film/animation, and while I’m interested in exploring the narrative in my fine arts projects, I have never really attempted incorporating it consciously into my designs. This assignment was enjoyable because it gave us the freedom to revisit a narrative that we really liked and therefore felt for (I chose Spirited Away, one of my favorite childhood films), which is something we seldom get to experience in conventional design projects. I feel like I unearthed a more human side of graphic design, the side that reaches out into an emotional playground and exercises its influence on a more intuitive type of communicative fabric, and the project opened up more conceptual design possibilities in other areas I’m also interested in, such as writing and making video art.

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Unit 7: Dinah Fried

This is a screen recording of the entire Spirited Away movie sped up to about 1000x its original speed. I was interested in observing how speed changes our perception of the movie, and how certain palettes and patterns of movement (or general direction of scenes) emerge when everything is shortened into a cursory glimpse. I also chose to record it in a strip instead of the whole screen because I wanted to see if the events would still be recognizable after taking away about 90% of the visual information on screen. To someone like me who has watched spirited away at least about 8 times starting from childhood, it is quite easy to recognize all the scenes and figure out what is going on in the narrative, whereas another person unfamiliar with the plot may only be able to obtain a general sense as evoked through colors and movements. I received an important critique about how it would be better if I reduced the visual information even more, perhaps to the level of 1 tiny strip of pixels, to see if any interesting effects could emerge from pushing this abstraction a lot further and pursuing the gesture to its limits.

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Unit 7: Dinah Fried

Spirited Away as a story features a lot of entrances and exits between interior and exterior spaces. The architecture of the story unfurls around the character development of its main character Chihiro as well as that of some miscellaneous characters; each time she enters a new space (especially interior spaces), Chihiro seems to undergo events or encounter personas that prompt a change in her character. Some of the most significant developments occurred when she left the bathhouse altogether and embarked on her journey to Zeniba’s house. I carefully documented screenshots of all the doors, made vectorized illustrations out of them, and compiled them into a sequential accordion, exploring the idea of abstracting the entire plot into a series of doorways that instigated change. 

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Unit 7: Dinah Fried

One thing I noticed after re-watching Spirited Away is that the animation features a lot of food in significant parts of the plot, and almost all of them have their own symbolic meanings. For example, Kamaji’s lunch was very simple and humble (shrimp tempura with rice, soup, and vegetables) and really bespoke his modest character, whereas the food that turned Chihiro’s parents into pigs was lavish and well-adorned in terms of appearance, smell, and taste. I wanted to compile these important, defining moments of the story into a narrative retold through its food, and so I made a menu booklet, gave fictitious names to most the dishes that I picked out from the movie, and added descriptions to explain their symbolism in a way that integrates into a faux-restaurant scenario. The hypothetical restaurant is also named “Sen”, which is Chihiro’s altered name after she signed the contract with Yubaba.

One of the main challenges I faced in making this item is how to typeset content in Japanese (many free Japanese typefaces had missing Kanji or punctuations in their incomplete repertoires), and whether illustrations or graphic imagery are necessary to explain what is already there in words. In the end I decided to keep everything plain and clean because I felt that Miyazaki’s movies have a simple and pure quality in general, and bound it in the style of a traditional Japanese book.  

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Unit 6 general reflections

Clement’s unit 6 was an interesting and rigorous exploration into the many different ways we could parse an object into a multiple meanings. At first I was a little confused by the demands of the assignment and was quite unconvinced by the fact that the point of reference is an arbitrary object from the RISD museum, but throughout the project I realized that it’s actually incredibly important as a designer to be able to devote immense amounts of time and energy into examining a single mundane object, quality, or idea, and then redirect that same energy into making interpretations that can capture an audience who is unfamiliar with the subject matter. It’s almost like packaging content in such a way that it becomes palatable no matter how dreary the original state might be, and I think that is one of the main roles of a designer when it comes to communicating information and helping others navigate a certain subject or system of ideas. The assignment reminded me of the conceptual rigor that is required to create a world of interpretation around something we think is simple, and whenever we think we’re running out of juice, there’s always something more to be seen, derived, understood and manifested. I found it very exciting that we got to both respect the originality of the source material and exercise intellectual and aesthetic freedom in subsequently generating our own content out of it.

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Unit 6: Clement Valla

Given the historical context of the band, which was heavily influenced by the Situationists of the 20th century and played upon a lot of the movement’s ideals in their attitude towards music-making, I wrote and designed a nonsensical movement called Anti-ergonomics, which supposedly opposes sensible design and embraces illogical designs (eg. if Jim Lambie’s chair installation were actually furniture meant to be used). It was quite fun writing a silly nonexistent manifesto drawing on Dadaist ideologies and imagining how it would respond to a modern world obsessed with efficiency. I was hoping that this reading would put Lambie’s installation in a different light, with a philosophical, ideological function.

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Unit 6: Clement Valla

Two fake concert posters advertizing a hypothetical concert, with visual elements (color, form) abstracted from Lambie’s installation and the background context of the band. Referenced some prominent poster designs from the time period and tried to format the page in a similar way. The title of the concert / band is also another deliberate misspelling of the artwork’s name, speaking to chain misspelling as a little joke playing upon Lambie’s verbal title supplement.

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Unit 6: Clement Valla

As a response to the material (found material) and context of the installation, I thought it’d be interesting to recreate a chair installation using found chairs in the college building. While these chairs are not manipulated in the way Lambie’s are, I wanted to probe how the context of the installation changes with its environment (standardized, uniform chairs in a school classroom) and how that affects the reading of an installation made with similar types of found material.  

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Unit 6: Clement Valla

As Lambie’s chair installation was an abstraction of the structure of The Durruti Column’s music in general, I wanted to see how I could digitally make an animated piece, following the forms and meanings of Lambie’s interpretation, that would reflect the quality of the music in playback and respond to the same structural foundations. Using P5.js,. I coded a real-time visual representation based on the amplitude, rhythm, and frequency of one of the band’s songs, and chose the shapes and color patterns (all taken from Lambie’s installation) after analyzing the structure of the music. The yellow grids, like the yellow chair on the bottom, symbolize the strong, steady bass and regular divisions in rhythm, followed by the orderly teal bars that show classical structure but allows for more varied nuances, and finally the one red melody thread that represents Vini Reilly’s experimental guitar solos. This was one of the most challenging interpretations to make and took about 3 hours just to get the code to work in a satisfactory way.