#readingrespone

[ideationandprototype]

Reading Response: IDEO Human Centered Design - Mindsets - 2/27/19 9:35am

In this small chapter, we discuss the mindsets and mentality that a successful designer should have such as creative confidence, making our ideas tangible, empathy, learning from failure, ambiguity, optimism, and iteration. After reading this section, I would say that I completely agree with every one of these points. Through personal experience, I noticed that I often do better in projects and in fleshing out my ideas when I’m more comfortable and confident about my skills. I have a bad habit in that when I believe I have more experience or am technically more skilled than those around me, I tend to become more confident in my creativity and create great projects, but when I’m the one who feels like those around me are technically more advanced, I often shrink away from the scene as my confidence plummets and I’m often left with a lackluster end product. Since then, I’ve improved my creative confidence and became much more stable, but reading this reminded me of how maintaining this confidence is critical to creating new ideas and that I shouldn’t worry about it, because as long as I still create new ideas, my creative confidence will continue to grow. With the other aspects that were mentioned in the reading, I’d say that I also rely on learning from failure, ambiguity, and optimism. However, I was never great at the iteration process of design. As an introvert, I love staying hidden in my room and working on projects all alone with no feedback from others. I, myself, know that with input from others, it would really help develop aspects of my projects that I would have never thought of, and the text in the reading supports this idea as well. I’ll trying coming out of my shell more and asking other people’s perspectives of my design in order to create better projects in the future. Although I didn’t learn anything new in this reading, it did reaffirm my beliefs in the types of mindsets designers, including me, should have. 

[sensingthelandscape]

Reading Response: Data Visualization as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime/Contemporary Sublime

For me, the sublime exists not in the object nor the space, but in the human and personal connection between the space and us. The expanse of a landscape, the intimacy of a room, can be sublime. But it is only sublime because our minds perceive it as such and it is not a trait that is inherent in any particular object in and of itself. This agrees to a certain extent with some of the philosophical theories that Simon Morley mentions in his essay, on the fact that the sublime is “not so much a formal quality of some natural phenomenon as a subjective conception - something that happens in the mind.” (Page 3) Thus, from this perspective, I would be looking at Manovich’s point of view of data and the anti-sublime.

In Manovich’s point of view, data visualisation is contrary to the Romantic idea of the sublime as it attempts to render something beyond the scale of the human senses into something within reach. However, I would argue that instead of being anti-sublime, data visualisation propagates the sublime. For when one compares the “indescribable” emotions that we get in exploring subliminal landscapes and experiences, it is often because we see, feel or sense something tangible and within our reach. But yet because we are able to sense these things, we come to the realise that there is a much larger phenomenon that we would never truly be able to grasp. (Morley, on Kant’s philosophical theory on the sublime, page 3)

The grand Yosemite mountains visually reveal their strength through their size and height but we could never truly logically nor emotionally grasp the micro and macro geological expanse and intricacies that have build our landscape over the course of the life of the Earth. Similarily, the subliminal beauty we get from viewing images of the Earth or the solar system from space is because we have technologies that allow us to see these images, but yet there is a whole expanse of things we cannot perceive or grasp with the limitations of our minds and current technology. Therefore, in my opinion, the sublime comes about only because there is something tangible to represent something intangible. Which is exactly what the data visualisations that Manovich discusses aim to do. On Data Mapping: With regards to the arbitrariness of data mapping, the consideration of mapping has been on my mind since the start of the class and I have come to the same problems that Manovich mentions in his text. What decides the method in which I map and present my data? Ultimately what choices should I make and how or why should I make those particular choices?