#david womack

[feli-artblog]

AFTG Quotes 11/?

Sticker sheet

[stacja]

David Womack on Space

[theorypluspractice]

Thesis Object & Agency

Following last week’s assignment of describing our thesis characters, is a new exercise which goes into more detail about one particular character’s experience interacting with Contextus. He has a question, uses Contextus, finds the answer himself and proudly shares his theories. Again, a useful assignment preparing me for storyboarding my user journey video...

After he bought the ingredients for tonight’s dinner he is cooking for his girlfriend and her parents, Pat McDaniels relaxes on a park bench, wondering what he’ll talk about with them. Trina and her parents are originally from Haiti, a country he knows is quite poor but knows little else about. Eager to impress them and not put his foot in his mouth, he wants to learn more about Haiti and hopefully have an intelligent conversation this evening. Wikipedia is just a long list of facts and figures, he thinks, if I read about Haiti’s history through that, I'll probably just fall asleep. I heard about this app called Contextus that helps teach visually through maps. Pat pulls out his iPad from his backpack and downloads and opens Contextus.

He is a little hesitant at first glance. Maps are great for getting directions for travelling somewhere, but I'm not going to Haiti tonight… I'm going back to Brooklyn, he thinks. The first thing Pat notices is a big, bold featured question of the day. Its about why did the Europeans and not the Chinese discover the Americas. He finds that an interesting question, but not for the task at hand, so he bookmarks it for a later reading. As he starts browsing through place, time and subjects, Pat notices how information is organized and classified—economics, politics and history are linked to each other and viewing a timeline of Haiti as a histogram shows a spike in information around 1500, 1800 and 2000.

With his search criteria of Haiti (place), economy (subject) and 1700–present (time period) selected, Pat is presented with a series of overlaying thematic maps in which he can change the opacity, rearrange their order and get more contextual information for each. He begins to see the relationships between natural geography and its effects on a country’s history as well as manmade decisions. Sifting through rainfall, wind pattern, elevation and topography maps, Pat can better understand how Hispaniola’s bisecting mountain range prevented much rain from reaching the Haitian side of the island, thereby reducing arable land and crop diversity. Their history of importing vast amounts of slaves for plantations and a subsequent slave rebellion which banned foreign investment and land ownership had an equally profound effect on the nation’ development.

Pats spots a feature simply called “What if?”. Intrigued, he taps on it and is taken to another map where moving a slider for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from Haiti’s current state of 0.2% to 5%, causes graphics on the map to reflect that change. Bars representing infrastructure, GDP, unemployment rate, poverty rate and life expectancy move up or down in relation to the FDI’ value. I had no idea how connected these things are, Pat thinks, the correlation between foreign economic investment and a person’s life expectancy surprises me. Eager to share his theories, he types his responses in the answer forum as he browses through other people’s thoughts on the subject. I get it now, Pat believes, the answers are never that simple and can be quite subjective, but maps are good at showing a ton of complicated information in an uncomplicated way. Armed with knowledge for conversation, Pat heads home for dinner with his possible future in-laws.

[theorypluspractice]

Contextus characters

The following was an assignment for our Narrative & Interactivity class to develop a character who uses our thesis product. I imagined four of them, all within different contexts having different motivations. This was helpful in getting me to start thinking about my final user journey video and how I would storyboard it...

Watching the evening news on CNN after long day at work, Guy Moretti slumps down on his couch while seeing disturbing footage of the recent violence in Syria. Guy feels like he cannot keep track of all the events taking place in the Middle East lately. Its about dictators backed by the U.S., the price of oil, refugees from Iraq, exported Saudi Wahhabi extremism, sectarian conflict and economic sanctions. Its about all of these things and more. “This shit is fucked up,” Guy thought as he nursed his beer, “I wonder why the Middle East always had so much trouble…” He reaches over to his messy coffee table and grabs his iPad, launching his favorite new app Contextus to try to find an answer to that very question.

Amy Li is a senior at the New School majoring in Urban Studies. After her morning class, she decides to wander over to the East Village to enjoy the crisp Spring weather. Amy often finds herself in this neighborhood, but usually with friends at night going to clubs or restaurants. Today, she notices the East Village in a whole new light as she passes by the John Varvatos boutique on the Bowery. “I can't believe this used to be where CBGBs was,” she thinks to herself. “I always read about and heard from some of my teachers what a gritty, creative and interesting neighborhood this used to be in the 70s and 80s. How come it looks like a shopping mall now?” Sitting down in Tompkins Square Park, far away enough from the punks and homeless (but not so far as to look like she is avoiding them), Amy pulls her iPad out of her bag and starts sifting through the maps in Contextus.

Its not everyday that a man meets his girlfriend’s parents for the first time. This thought made Pat McDaniels slightly nervous as he was buying ingredients for tonight’s big home-cooked dinner with Trina Pierre-Louis and her mom and dad. Trina and her family are from Haiti and immigrated to Miami when she was twelve. Pat was always interested in travel and other cultures, but never had any interest in visiting Haiti, perhaps because of all the bad press that unfortunate nation gets. Not wanting to look ignorant or unable to hold an intelligent conversation, Pat sat down on a park bench and began swiping his way through history in Contextus.

Yael Feldman is deeply engrossed with her iPad. During her morning commute, she starts to plan for her upcoming business trip to Germany. Will the debt crisis in Greece affect the exchange rate? What about her company’s interests in the region? Even more importantly, how did the European Union get itself into this situation? As she wonders if she should bring her daughter along for the trip, Yael browses related topics in Contextus, getting a sense of how politics, history and economics are intertwined. She starts to see not only what already happened, but what could happen in the near future.

[theorypluspractice]

“It’s easier to extrapolate from small to large than it is from large to small.”

David Womack

[theorypluspractice]

Thesis setting

Contextus is an iPad app that helps people learn about subjects through a geographic lens. By its very nature, the iPad is location and context-agnostic. Contextus is here, there and everywhere. It can be used in the local café while reading the paper. It can be used leisurely while sitting on a park bench observing other people, or during a meeting at work to research a particular subject. It's walking down the street looking at the NYC skyline wondering what was here fifty, one-hundred years ago. It's in a classroom augmenting a lecture or just as easily reading a story in bed. Its watching the news on TV at home or on the bus during the morning commute. It's all about geography and geography is everywhere.

All of these settings affect the characteristics, tone and impact of using Contextus. It can be relaxing or purpose-driven. It can help alleviate boredom as well as satisfy the inquisitive. Learning from Contextus can be an active learning experience, no matter the setting. Using Contextus can take you outside of your own world, whether to a different continent or just down the street. The information contained in Contextus can be as global as the history of human migration throughout the millennia or as local as what building used to stand at a particular intersection.

One can spend time unwinding and dive deeply into Contextus or they can pick away at it a few minutes at a time. It can be used in a quiet setting to explore an earlier ongoing subject of interest just as it could to answer questions that arise on-the-go. Contextus is always available and usually appropriate.

[theorypluspractice]

Shaping narrative

We recently started David Womack’s seven-week course Narrative and Interactivity which aims to complement our theses through exercises that create a story around our individual projects. The first small assignment was to create the narrative arc of our thesis story, where we identify its introduction, conflict, climax and resolution along axes of time and tension. After thinking about it, the climax of Contexus from the user's point-of-view happens when he or she realizes that they're indeed making connections between various subjects and are able to find answers for themselves. I also charted the narrative from my point of view, as seen throughout the entire thesis process.

[theorypluspractice]

Thesis Meeting 4

This week's thesis meeting had me quickly catching the group up on my prototyping tests (almost done with round one!), plans for my next prototype and an idea that Sera put into my head of using iBooks Author not as tool for making my process book, but rather a tool to use as a prototype or finished piece. But what I really wanted to get feedback on during this time was the feedback and criticism I got from Liz and my classmates after our impromptu thesis presentations the other day (only half an hour to prepare for!).

With five categories to judge each of our presentations from, I ‘scored’ better on craft and process, did okay on concept, and fared poorer on communication and empathy. This wasn't much of a surprise to me as I'm fully aware of what a struggle its been to have a unique concept and to be able to present it clearly. One common critique I received was that if my intended user types include serious researchers, they would most likely NOT be using Wikipedia as a research tool, so in attempting to bridge the gap between Google Maps and Wikipedia would either be the wrong tool or the wrong audience. In hindsight, what I struggled to communicate was that the examples of Google Maps and Wikipedia are intended to be more metaphorical than the literal action of dumping Wikipedia's content into a Google Map. I meant that I could take a vast ocean of knowledge and integrate contextually within a dynamic interactive map to present information geo-spatially.

I brought up the issue of audience and presenting the user story to Dave and Tina, but they steered me into the direction to think more about what form, platform or framework my product would take. The reasoning was that if I could find a compelling use to bridge these two technologies, then the users would reveal themselves. We then talked about interesting analogs and approaches to this:

My thesis could be a ‘suite’ of products, with an iPad and grip as the frame displaying them, a lens to look at the world, or to get more information from seemingly static objects, such as maps, globes or museum installations. Combining, adjoining or organizing these physical products can produce new and unique results, much like the Sifteo Cubes.

The above idea can be enlarged into a bigger display, sort of window onto the world. This suggestion reminded me of a half-baked idea of mine presented last semester to David Womack.

Reactivision tags imbedded in seemingly ordinary objects could create augmented reality displays of information. A base layer map of Mexico for example, used in conjunction with an iPad, could visualize layers of demographic or weather maps over it.

Perhaps the solution isn't digital at all. As Brett Victor explained at length in his diatribe Pictures Under Glass, our hands are amazing sensors in and of themselves. A great example of an analog solution to aid a digital product, one can look to Vitamin’s instruction manual for Samsung phones.

To sum up: think about how my product is different from existing ones, accentuate the unique opportunities for interacting with it and its audience will present itself.