Conflicts

The conflicts you see and how you will tackle with it could make who you are and where you go...

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Working Thesis for Project 1

Photo editing software such as Photoshop help people, mostly designers or artists, to create interesting works. While, they cause some controversies: other users such as some facebook/twitter users who would merely use Photoshop to “polish” their icons, longing for more fame or attractions.

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Brainstorm for Project 1

Below links are some pins in Pinterest to show how photoshop changes photos:

http://pinterest.com/pin/213569207298742049/

http://pinterest.com/pin/275141858454143211/

http://pinterest.com/madmark99/my-photoshop-stuff/

Early History from Wikipedia:

Early history

In 1987, Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended that Thomas turn it into a fully-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six-month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program. Thomas renamed the program ImagePro, but the name was already taken.[9] Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a "total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped" this way.[10]

During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988.[9] While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing code. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.[11] ("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoshop#Early_history")

Photoshop nowadays:

Photoshop can help the people with impulses of creativity especially for the photo-editing users. No matter they merely would like to polish their photos to make they “look better”, or they want to impress people by composing a poster, Photoshop could extend possibilities for those people’s intends.

As designers:

Designers always seek all possible tools to show their ideas and be accepted by public, or to say, clients. Photoshop, creating visualized pictures for people, increases their chances to present to the clients. 

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Response to "the Instagram Effect"

The culture is a culture, based on internet, where people post photographs they took everywhere in the world. In this culture, people share a same interest, knowledge of taking photos instead of other capacities such as morals, beliefs, and custom.

  We could call this a culture because it is a community where people share same hobbies, even though this happens in an abstract and intangible world: the internet community.

  Instagram creates such a community where provides those people who loves taking photos as a platform. People share and communicate with others here. Also, they feel like they can see another world, or to say, more to see things in different angles (not only seeing things in different angles) now. Especially, the set of filters offers tremendous fun to the users to create another feeling with their photos. That’s why so many people are fascinated by it.

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Defining Culture

       According to Edward B. Tylor, culture is “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Moreover, he believes that culture is learned, shared, patterned/integrated, adaptive and based on symbols. In another words, people learn culture through everyday life by seeing others behaviors or ther own experience.

       Not like other animals such as bees, human do not inherit specific abilities but capacities. With the capacities, human can learn skills, experience from parents and acquaintances. From my point of view, that’s why usually culture is divided geographically. Human could not learn customs or knowledge form far-distance and disconnected places. What is learned is shared by a group of people with common languages and custom through interacting in daily life. Symbols are vital in all different cultures, they distinct from othercultures. Among all elements of symbol, language is the most important feature. Same symbol in different arrangement can have varied meanings. Also, symbols change through time, so language is flexible due to the variations of symbols.

       Subculture is an interesting definition appeared in human history. As time past by, the increasing numbers of technologies change people’s life a lot. Most technologies reduce the distances and increase chances to communicate with among all differentiated cultures. The definition of subculture is to “share some features with dominant culture, but have attributes of their own”.   This usually happens in diverse societies in which people have come from many different parts of the world. They usually retain much of their original cultural traditions while adapting to the new culture of a bigger content. For example, in United States, there are several Greek villages, Korean Towns, China Towns and so on.

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Questions About First Project.

First, I have some general questions about the 1st project:

1.    What is culture?

For resolving this question, I might read through the slideshow posted by Ms. Platt and do online research about it.

2.     What culture I am belonging to?

For my standpoint, I have experienced a few different cultures. In China, I think I have met two different cultures, since my hometown Changsha is in Southern middle part of China while I have studied in Beijing for about one year. After that, I moved to Michigan, where lays a striking change in my life. So, it is hard to define what part culture I am in right now. I have been commented “I am Americanized” by my several American friends. Especially these days, I am in China for my summer vacation, there are a number of increasing things I could not understand and feel frustrating. For example: when people discuss about train schedule here, they tend to give you an approximately time which might have two-hour varied. Or after I refused to accept something and showed my sorry, there are still complains such as “I spent much time to please you, why would you accept that.” I really do not like that kind of food or cloths, why I am supposed to accept what others think what I should accept?

3.     I could find the answer for this question “What kinds of digital technology-related artifacts are used in the cultures you are part of? Which are 
NOT used? Why?”

There is probably not a typical artifacts I could come up with belongs only to my culture. I think they are pretty universal.

4.     How to introduce an artifact to people totally unfamiliar with it?

I would like to find one of my friends who does not know that much design, or to say, graphic editing things. Then I could evaluate whether my paper works or not.

5.     I do not know what the users of the artifact’s lives like.

They vary, so I might not have a typical answer for this question.

  Additionally, here is another more specific question I have in my mind right now:

How can I categorize picture editing (like Photoshop) and photo generating software (such as AutoCAD and Google Sketchup) as one class?

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Introductory Post About Myself

     My name is Na Li, and usually people call me Na. I am currently major in Landscape Architecture. I guess there will be some people not that familiar with Landscape Architecture, so I would like to quote a definition from ASLA, American Society of Landscape Architecture: “Think of iconic places like New York City's Central Park and the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C. But also consider your downtown square, your local park, or even your own backyard. Green roofs, urban farms, corporate campuses—all define landscape architecture. Types of projects include:

School and college campuses

Corporate and commercial grounds

Public gardens and arboreta

Historic preservation and restoration

Hotels, resorts, golf courses

Hospital and other facility sites

Interior landscapes

Land planning

Landscape art and earth sculpture

Monument grounds

Parks and recreation

Land reclamation and rehabilitation

Residential sites

Security design

Streetscapes and public spaces

Therapeutic gardens

Transportation corridors and facilities

Urban and suburban design

Water resources” (http://www.asla.org/design/)

    I went to Michigan State University at my nineteen’s, before that, I was born and grew up in Changsha, capital of Hunan, a southern middle province in China.

    Writing for me is a way to communicate my ideas with people. Especially in our design projects, pictures themselves do not speak ideas for us. There needs additional words to illustrate our ideas.   

    If there is a chance, I would like to be switch places with my mother for a day. Her efforts to providing me a good life is an attracting experience I really want to go through, but only once in my life.

    Since I am a designer student (Landscape Architecture students deal with a lot graphics while we also tackle with engineering in projects), I am familiar with Photoshop, InDesign, the Microsoft Office suite and use google sketchup and AutoCAD now and then. Also I used Illustrator, iMovie a couple of times but do not practice with them a lot. Although I am not a pro for neither twitter nor facebook, I am a practiced user for Chinese version twitter and facebook.

    My comfort level with online work is around 8 or 9. However, our course website is blocked which has a great potential to bring my comfort level down to 0. It is a simply frustrating procedure to try to across the “block wall” (Chinese government block a few websites including facebook and twitter due to censorship, and Chinese Internet users call the block “Wall”). Therefore, how to access to our course website has been my biggest concern so far.

    Blogging in English is a pretty awesome chance offered in this class. From my standpoint, I would like to learn different ways to communicate people with my ideas and express myself flawlessly and effectively in English writing.