#hcid

[butterflyhunt]

How to Make a Zine: A Simple Guide Zine for My Students

I‘ve always believed one must try to do the walk, not just the talk. Or as we used to say back in the prehistoric days, we need hacking, not just yacking. My module’s coursework requires creating a zine, so I made a quick how-to zine for my students. I made this quick-and-dirty zine to show students that creating a zine is indeed possible. You can make it with very basic resources. This may be…

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[butterflyhunt]

Download the 2025 Design Justice Group Presentations Zine

I hadn’t documented this here so here it goes. This academic year I also led the INM317 Design Justice module (2024-2025), MSc Human-Computer Interaction Design, City St George’s, University of London. Assessment includes a student group presentation and the creation of an individual design justice zine. Before students submit their zine, I made one myself, as a souvenir of their group…

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[terasbiker]

HCID, Sebuah Identitas Bagi Pecinta Honda dan Banyak Manfaatnya!

HCID, Sebuah Identitas Bagi Pecinta Honda dan Banyak Manfaatnya!

TerasBiker.com – Halo Sobat Bikers… Tidak sekedar kumpul hobi roda, Main Dealer sepeda motor Honda Jakarta Tangerang, PT. Wahana Makmur Sejati (WMS) mendukung kegiatan komunitas sepeda motor Honda agar lebih bermanfaat dan penuh dengan kegiatan positif. (more…)

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[iwan-fadila]

Ayo Daftar HCID, Dapatkan Banyak Manfaatnya !

Ayo Daftar HCID, Dapatkan Banyak Manfaatnya !

motogokil.com – Assalamu’alaikum wa rochmatullohi wa barokatuh, semoga kita semua selamat di perjalanan sampai ke tujuan. MPM Honda Jatim mengajak member baru komunitas Honda Jatim untuk daftar HCID dalam aktivitas bertajuk “Kopdargab Gas Daftar HCID“ yang berlangsung pada hari ahad kemarin. Bertempat di MPM Riders Café Sidoarjo, Acara ini diikuti oleh 31 bikers member dibawah Paguyuban Honda…

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[butterflyhunt]

HCID Research Seminar: UK Coronavirus Dashboard: From Concept to Reality by Pouria Hadjibagheri [February 17, 2021 11:00 AM GMT]

You're invited! HCID Research Seminar: UK Coronavirus Dashboard: From Concept to Reality by Pouria Hadjibagheri [February 17, 2021 11:00 AM GMT]

I am pleased to invite you all to the following  City HCID Research Seminar on Wednesday, 17 February 2021, 11:00 – 12:00 GMT, via Zoom. Title: UK Coronavirus Dashboard: From Concept to Reality Speaker: Pouria Hadjibagheri,  technical and development lead of the UK Coronavirus Dashboard, Public Health England Everyone is welcome but requires previous registration at…

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[pertamax7]

Honda Community ID Bagikan Poin Spesial, Sambut Hari Pelanggan Nasional 

., salam pertamax7.com, Honda Community ID Bagikan Poin Spesial, Sambut Hari Pelanggan Nasional

Poin HCID Hari Pelanggan Nasional

Info resmi dari Yogyakarta – PT Astra Honda Motor berkolaborasi bersama Astra Motor Yogyakarta sebagai Main Dealer sepeda motor Honda wilayah DIY, Kedu, dan Banyumas menggelar program spesial bagi pemegang keanggotaan Honda Community ID. Program ini dilaksanakan untuk…

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[tania-ostanina]

09: Conclusions. Creating Meaning

Short summary:

Our journey from the early variety of themes to the final proposal - focussing on the themes of:

Past-present-future, ‘dumb city’, tiny monuments, nostalgia, death and loss, forgotten and fabulated narratives

Challenges we faced:

Complexity of the chosen subject matter

Finding access to the foreshore

Researching the mudlarks

Working remotely in a pandemic

The changing meaning of physical and digital spaces in a pandemic:

Regulation of public space during the pandemic has exceeded anything our group could have imagined

Online platforms have become a live monument to our complex relationship between individualism, consumerism and regulation

Digital death and loss have become a daily occurrence

The deserted, inaccessible Thames is now a symbol of our lost freedom

Who is this project for?

Our project took a meandering route that did not have a specific group of uers in mind

We have placed mudlarks centre-stage, but are also not designing for a modern-day mudlark

Instead, we are speculating on how mudlarks could fit in a possible future

We are not offering solutions and are leaving open-ended strands.

Our main audience is today’s Londoners - we are challenging them to think about our key themes, and to think about ways in which we humanise physical and digital space in order to create meaning.

Read more: 

Now that this project is nearing an end, I am stepping back from it for a critical reflection upon our design journey and its destination. We explored a vast array of possible themes, and chose to zoom in on the themes of past-present-future, ‘dumb city’, tiny monuments, nostalgia, death and loss, and forgotten and fabulated narratives. We illustrated the evolution of our creative process, as well as its final results, using physical and digital pieces of work.

Image: From the early variety of themes to the final proposal.

Challenges we faced

The challenges to our creative journey were numerous: embracing and controlling the complexity of the subject matter; finding access to the foreshore; researching the elusive mudlarks; finishing the project remotely in the midst of a pandemic lockdown. The latter was especially tough for us, as our proposal was rooted in physical space. We accepted compromises to ensure that the project was still deliverable, such as abandoning any physical printing, giving up foreshore visits, choosing not to ship across our ‘mudlarking finds’ and instead simply to photoshop them into the image of the final interactive soundboard. We communicated through Slack and held our final meetings on Hangouts and Zoom instead of in person. My own working hours were severely affected by losing access to childcare in lockdown. On Twitter, I joked about needing a new ‘smart city’ invention: an army of remotely operated robot nannies to help self isolating parents cope at home. Perhaps this is for my next project.

Image: My ‘robot nanny’ Tweet

The changing meaning of physical and digital spaces in a pandemic

As I write this, London is in its fourth week of the lockdown. Access to many parks and recreation areas has been prohibited in order to control social distancing, while the PLA has blocked all recreational access to the Thames foreshore. A police helicopter hovers over my local area of East London multiple times per day, on the lookout for illegal social gatherings. The level of regulation of public space in the UK has taken a leap well beyond my group’s wildest fabulations.

In his documentary The Century of the Self, Curtis discusses the rise of individualism and consumerism in the Western world: “Although we feel we are free, in reality, we — like the politicians — have become the slaves of our own desires.” Today’s pandemic feeds on this Western individualism and consumerism, driving many to panic buy essential goods and to ignore social distancing for their own selfish reasons. In parallel, there has been an explosion of spontaneous individual surveillance activities: neighbours spying on neighbours, lone walkers taking pictures of groups in parks, public naming and shaming of panic buyers. Much of this activity is immediately uploaded to social media, which is fast becoming a live monument to our complex relationship between individualism, consumerism and regulation. My group’s regulated mudlarks seem tame by comparison.

Since the lockdown, the Facebook mudlarking community has had a sway of posts urging its members to respect the law by forsaking their visits to the foreshore. A few posters have shared that their friends or relatives have died of COVID-19; these posts have been immediately flooded with an outpour of digital messages of support and love. Undoubtedly the Facebook profiles of the deceased are now full of posts and comments, grieving for them and promising to remember them forever. What I have started researching at the start of the project, has now become a daily occurrence.

All the while the Thames still flows, still is. The river's iconic silhouette, devoid of boats and people, now regularly featured in the drone news footage, serves as a symbol of nostalgia for our lost freedom, our lost access to public space. The humanised Thames has changed to reflect the change in us.

Who is this project for?

Our brief encouraged us to embrace the mindset of “artist-designers”, in the words of Bill Gaver. Our project therefore took a meandering route that did not have a specific group of users in mind, unlike the more conventional HCID projects. We made the mudlarks centre-stage, honouring the bottoms-up ‘dumb city’ rule we had set for ourselves from the get-go. We decided not to be limited to designing for modern-day mudlarks, instead taking a longer view and speculating on how they could fit within a possible future. We were adamant throughout our design process that we were not offering solutions and were happy to leave open-ended strands, embracing the uncertainty of our speculations.

So if not modern-day mudlarks, who is this project for?

For me, our main audience is today’s Londoners. I would like them to be moved and intrigued by this project. To reflect on the taboo subject of death, and to consider what digital death means to them. To contemplate our obsession with nostalgia and the repercussions this can have on our world. To pay attention to the ways in which the Thames and other regulated public spaces fit into our lives and the ways in which we occupy them. To think about how we humanise the physical and digital space around us in order to create meaning. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, “Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”

[tania-ostanina]

08: Evolution of Our Group Proposal

Short summary:

Finalising our group proposal:

The fusing of historic London (mudlarks) with the technologies of the future

Physicality is important for our group pieces of work

Evolution of the group narrative piece:

Image: Narrative piece summary.

From QR codes to giant poster to folded paper to booklet

The final idea involved a giant booklet with translucent pages, gradually revealing the river silhouette

The final narrative piece:

Designed and created by me - digital only (physical printing not possible due to the pandemic lockdown)

The underlying structure is the map of the Thames, with marked geographic locations: Wapping, Greenwich, Silvertown, North Woolwich Pier

Word shapes are created using Doves font

Juxtapositions and combinations of images and text serve as a form of storytelling

Location signs are inspired by the iconic Thames Path signage

The interactive soundboard:

Image: Interactive soundboard summary.

Designed and created by a fellow group member and me

Early ideas and first prototype reacted to hand touch

Final design uses greycard with cut-out silhouette of the Thames, and spaces for ‘mudlarking finds’

The ‘mudlarking finds’ placed upon the soundboard speak with the voice of the past owner of the object, telling their story

The imaginary ‘mudlarking finds’ of the future:

Each member chose several objects of significance for them, as candidates for the finds

‘Future cultural probes’ - we fabulated that they would be discovered by the mudlarks of the future

They challenge the taboo of talking about death, tying in with the theme of nostalgia, where in the future even the most mundane modern-day objects could become infused with interest and mystery

The written narrative:

Image: Artifacts to accompany the written narrative. 

A speculative future in which imaginary commercial or government entities attempt to shape and control the human relationship with memory, digital death, and the river

The distant future’s Ministry of Memory is hunting for a ‘sunny glow of yesteryear’ in the form of historic mudlarking finds, to sate its population’s craving for packaged nostalgia

The mudlarking craft of the distant future is heavily regulated by the government, reflecting the modern-day trend for increasing regulation

The mudlarking finds are from our own corporate near future, placed there by Mori-Industries  - a tongue-in-cheek representation of our current corporate and consumerist reality, and a reflection of the very human desire to be remembered after one’s death.

Supplementary output - the video:

Created by a fellow group member for our final crit, the video is a documentary inspired by Adam Curtis and old footage of East Woolwich and Silvertown.

It uses old archive footage to avoid a polished feel of stereotypical smart city videos, and has a dreamy nostalgic quality to reflect the themes in our project.

Read more: 

By this point, our group gathered enough information to start finalising our collective proposal. We felt that due to the physicality of our project we should create some physical objects as part of our submission. At the forefront of our minds were the motifs of memory and death, ‘dumb’ small scale physicality in contrast with the polished smart cities or monumental interventions, the flow of time, forgotten and fabulated narratives. My earlier musings on the re-imagined ‘task-artifact cycle’ (post 03) led us to blend the historic London - the mudlarks - with the technologies of the future.

Gradually, we settled on producing two primary pieces of group work: a narrative piece explaining the progression of our research and ideas, and an interactive digital device (interactive soundboard). These would be accompanied by a written narrative that would pull them into a coherent whole.

The narrative piece

Evolution of the narrative piece: 

Image: Evolution of early ideas about the format and presentation of the narrative piece. Numbers are referred to in the text below.

Our early ideas included everything from dramatic performances to QR codes scattered around city locations (1). With the emerging focus on the Thames, I was keen to use the iconic river silhouette as part of the imagery. My initial idea was a giant poster of the Thames with zoom-in sections for specific locations (2). One of our group was keen to incorporate a ‘hidden’ quality to the piece, so we experimented with various ways of folding the paper (3, 4). Another of our group introduced the idea of a booklet - a series of large translucent pages which would initially show a jumbled up overlay of many images detailing our design progression, but would gradually become clearer and clearer as the viewer would flip through the pages, until finally ‘The Proposal’ would be revealed (5). We settled on this idea, thinking that we could print the pages on A1 translucent paper, to form a booklet with a solid cardboard backing (7, 8). Unfortunately, due to the pandemic physical printing was no longer possible, so we settled on a digital version of the booklet instead. 

Final narrative piece:   

Image: a snapshot of the final narrative piece.

I volunteered to build the booklet using Photoshop and Indesign. These are the visual techniques and sources of inspiration I have used, while regularly communicating with my group for feedback: 

The underlying structure of the booklet is the geographical map of the Thames.

Using word shapes to convey meaning and create art. This was inspired by the work of Paul Soulellis and of the Russian poet Mayakovsky and the Constructivists.

Image: examples of word shapes by Soulellis and Mayakovsky

Using the Doves font to invoke the spirit of mudlarking and to reflect on the Thames’ rich history. The beautiful, filigree font is perfect for creating word shapes. The way it is laid out on some pages invokes the Doves type being scattered down the river.

Creating a visual structure and content with juxtapositions and combinations of images and text, to convey our group’s story to the viewer. The pages start off as a jumble of overlaid images and text, and gradually become more ordered to reflect the narrative of confusion giving place to order as our group thinking progresses. The silhouette of the Thames starts off being barely visible, and is revealed through the progression of the booklet.

Four geographic locations are highlighted on the map: these are the real places where access to the foreshore is possible, and/or where we have visited in person. The locations are poetically and visually associated with the design stages of our project:

Location 1: Wapping - Brainstorming and the Underground 

Location 2: Greenwich - Diverging Themes: Critical Fabulations

Location 3: Silvertown - Death

Location 4: North Woolwich Pier - The River 

The visual style of the location signs mimics the iconic Thames Path signage

The interactive soundboard

Evolution of the interactive soundboard:

Image: Evolution of early ideas about the format and presentation of the interactive soundboard. Numbers are referred to in the text below.

This piece of work was spearheaded by one member of my group. He designed and built the first prototype that reacted to hand touch, producing a sound as it did so (1, 2). During a pub session, he drew a quick doodle in my sketchbook (3) and this became the basis for the final design (4). It includes a cut-out silhouette of the Thames, as well as several cut-out spaces that correspond to map locations. 

Once a physical object  - a ‘mudlarking find’ - is put upon one of these spaces, it interacts with the conductive paint and produces the sound of human voice, telling the story of the object and its previous owner. The interactive soundboard allows the user to feel like a mudlark who has found the object and is able to listen to the memories attached to it. 

My role in the production of the piece was sourcing the modelling materials, setting up the A1 pieces of card, cutting out the shape of the Thames and the spaces for the ‘mudlarking finds’, and painting the piece. I then sent it off to the fellow group member who assembled the final electronics and filmed the piece in action. 

Image: my work-in-progress interactive soundboard, and a work-in-progress picture taken by my fellow group member

Image: a snapshot from the video of the interactive soundboard in action

The imaginary ‘mudlarking finds’ of the future:

Each member of our group selected two or three objects to be the candidates for the ‘mudlarking finds’ to be used in the interactive soundboard. These are documented below:

Image: our group’s imaginary ‘mudlarking finds’

The objects each of us chose were meaningful to us personally, and were a mixture of historic objects (such as the real mudlarking finds from our trips to the Thames) and modern ones. For example, I chose my son’s toy Lego car as one of mine. We were imagining that these objects would be deposited in the river in the near future and would be found by the mudlarks of the distant future, becoming future cultural probes. We broadly wanted to stay true to the spirit of mudlarking - not making the objects too easy to find or to interpret, instead allowing the mudlarks to enjoy their craft of finding and researching. However, in our future world view, the amount of regulation of this activity will increase - in line with the current trend - and therefore the mudlarks will operate under a governmental framework rather than as individuals. 

Our ‘mudlarking finds’ attempt to subvert the taboo of talking about death as they will tell the story of their long-deceased owners. This ties in with the themes from my digital death study in post 05. They play on the idea of nostalgia, where in the future even the most mundane objects such as a Lego car from 2020, could become infused with interest and mystery. In the words of Milan Kundera, “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” The mudlarking treasures become tiny monuments to individuals - small scale, personal, ‘dumb.’ 

Image: My Photoshop of the finished interactive soundboard to include the groups ‘mudlarking finds.’

The written narrative

This accompanies the primary pieces of work and describes a speculative future in which imaginary commercial or government entities attempt to shape and control the human relationship with memory, digital death, and with the river itself. The distant future is framed within increased regulation, in which even the free craft of mudlarking is heavily dominated by the government, and the mudlarks are employed and trained by the so-called Ministry of Memory to track valuable finds. The Ministry of Memory is hunting for a ‘sunny glow of yesteryear’ in an attempt to sate its population’s craving for packaged nostalgia. Their ‘yesteryear’ is, in turn, defined as our own near future, populated by enterprises such as the Mori-Industries - a tongue-in cheek representation of our current corporate and consumerist reality, and a reflection of the very human desire to be remembered after one’s death. It is Mori-Industries that place the ordinary citizens’ ‘mudlarking finds’ in the river for the future entities to discover. 

Image: A diagram of future inter-relationships, a Mori-Industries calling card and a Ministry of Memory form that the future mudlarks must fill in to document their finds (created by my fellow group members).

One member of our group has created the story and named the key players in it, and we have all contributed to editing it. The illustrating artifacts were created by two of my fellow group members.

Supplementary output: the video

A fellow member of our group has produced a video which was presented at our final crit.

Image: A still from our group’s final crit video

The video has served as an intermediate point of reflection on our progress. It has been made in a documentary format inspired by Adam Curtis, the music videos of Bill Wurtz and old footage of Silvertown and Woolwich, among others.

The documentary is the most suitable format for the video because it allows for an information-packed voiceover accompanied by images depicting our design journey. This is intermingled with archive footage, giving it a distinct Adam Curtis-like feel. Whereas, in the words of Gillian Rose, documentaries about smart cities tend to depict “a future which seems to have no past but also no sense of its own time passing, since nothing in [their] urban environments seems to have aged,” this video swings in the opposite direction by using old archive footage even of modern digital technologies, thus reinforcing the idea of a ‘dumb city’ that our group has embraced. The video has a dreamy, nostalgic quality, linking it with the themes of nostalgia, the past, memory and death.