MikeBarnes InteractiveDesign

PRESENTATION

2007-10-18T03:24:00.000-07:00

Today we had our presentations with Tony it went really well and all four groups had produced some really nice work. For our group because we had all indervidualy made and interface for the material each we decided to present our work indvdualy me and Zina both showed our DVD's and Rachel and Erin both showed their websites.
I could not get the DVD onto disc so i had to show Tony it on the computer but i think he got the idea.

MOCK UP MENU

2007-10-14T03:35:00.000-07:00

After going over the survey material from the students that take the cooking course we were able to finf out some valuble information to help aid us in our design some key points were that the students liked using websites that were easy to navigate and get around as well as easy to view so i wanted the DVD menu to be simpile clean and easy to get around in.

I also noticed that Bebo was one of the most popular websites used by the students of the cooking course. so i created the buttons at the top of the menus to be like that of the Bebo site.

PAPER PROTOTYPE

2007-10-13T18:54:00.000-07:00

After listening to Sam Mann (IT) professional about the projects he had done with the Otago Museum such as digital fish and the early settlers of Dunedin it was soon clear that to create this DVD to a proper professional standard that would work and function right for Tony and his staff and students, I would have to do some paper proto typing

for the DVD even to figure out simple things like where the back or menu button would go and how they would work.

Here are some examples of the proccess that i went about to figure out how the DVD would work.

Me and Zina decided to create the DVD menu in the form of the Comercial kitchen floor plan and have the video and other material in the areas of where that food would be created and prepared in but we soon realised that we would run into some problems as some of the different dishes that they prepare and create would be done in several different areas of the kitchen so this idea would not really work.
So me and Zina have decided to make our own DVDs each

DVD MENU

2007-10-11T04:47:00.000-07:00

I started to create some of the mock up menus for the DVD after looking into some kitchen based websites for look and feel of the DVD to give it a metaphor of a kitchen the best website i found in my opinion was the fisher and paykel website as they use simple photos of their products at interesting angles to create really good compositions.
They also used a range of colours similar to their products on the website which also gave the feel of a kitchen

We finaly got the surveys back now we have to code all the information so that its usefull to us

MATERIAL

2007-10-06T04:40:00.000-07:00

After talking to Morgan about the amount of content that we would receive and had already started off with from Tony. It was decided that the best way to go about this project would be to create a DVD for the video based content and then also create a password secure website for most of the other material.
Our group has decided that but having as much of the same material on both the DVD and website it would help give much more easy access for the students to gain access to the information needed when required

Survey

2007-10-03T04:33:00.000-07:00

Our Group the spatulers along side the group the superfriends created a survey for students of the two hospitality courses we want to understand what the students of the two cooking courses liked when using technology and interface material manily being websites.

THE EMBODIED COMPUTER/USER

2007-08-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

-Like most computer users, we have experienced impatience, anger, panic, anxiety and frustration when computers do not do what you want it to, or break down.

-There seems almost a seamless transition of thought to word on the screen. These personal reflections raise the issues of the emotional and embodied relationship that computer users have with their persoanl computers.

-The relationship we have with Pcs has characteristics that sets it apart from the many other technologieswe use.

-Our love affair with computers, computer graphics and the computer networks runs deeper than aesthetic fascination and deeper than the play of the senses.

-There is for many people, a bluring of the boundaries between thee embodied self and the PC.

-Its argued that popular technical representations of computer viruses draw on discourses that assume that computers themselves are humanoid and embodied.

-The attractions of the internet, including its accessibility, are also a source of problems around security and the activities of computer 'hackers' and 'cyber-criminals'.

-A certral utopian discourse around computer technology is the potential offered by computers for humans to escape the body. For couch potatoes, video game addicts and surrogate travellers of cybersapce alike, an organic body just gets in the way. The dreamof cyberculture is to leave the 'meat' behind and to become distilled in a clean, pure uncontaminated relationship with computer technology. The human as computer' metaphor is frequently drawn upon in this attempt to deny the irrationality of embodiment.

-The idealized virtual body does not eat, drink, urinate or defecate; it does not get tired it does not become ill; it does not die. The cyborg has benn represented as the closet to this ideal human. There is a point at which the humanity of the cyborg must make itself felt; there are limits to the utopian vision of the cyborg. While an individual may successfully pretend to be different gender or age on the internet, she or he will always have to return to the embodied reality of the empty stomach.

-A futher challenge to the utopian vision of the disembodied computer user is the mythology of the bodies that are obsessed with using PC technology: computers 'hackers' and computer nerds

-The bodies of computer 'hackers' and nerds, thus are not transcended through their owners pursuits. On the contrary their bodies are inscribed upon and constructed through the computers they use.

-While computer culture often seeks to deny the human body, the ways in which computer technology is marketed and represented frequently drwas an analogy between the computer and the human body.

-Computers, as represented in advertising, are prone to many life experiences that humans experience.

-In personifying the machine as a unit of organized labour, sharing fraternal interests and union loyalties with other machines, the notice assumes a degree of evolved self-consciousness on the machoines part. Computers are often similarly represented as emotional entities.

-The ascribing of emotions to PCs is a discursive move that emphasizes their humanoid nature

-Advertisements also attempt to portray one's PC as an extension of the human body.

The Frightening Computer

-The overt reasons for portraying computers as human is to reduce the anxieties of computerphobia that many people particularly adults experience

-Most people have not the faintest idea what lies inside the hard plastic shell of their PC

-The user-computer relationship is therefore characterized not only by pleasure and a sense of harmonic bluring of the boundaries between human and machine, but is also inspires strong feelings of anxiety, importence, frustration and fear.

-The apparent growing reliance of humans upon computers has incited concern, as have developments in technology that threaten to leave people behind or to render them unemployed.

-The Mactintosh computer company was the first to develop 'user-friendly' icons in lieu of textual commands. The implications of this design strategy was that many potential computer users were alienated by the technological demands of computers requiring text commands, and thus required PCs to be 'humanized' to feel comfortble with thge technology. Microsoft, for example, has developed a program it has called 'Bob' to challenge technophobic inclinations.

-Drawing upon a nostalgia for a less complicated world, a world in which people were friendly to one another, families stayed together and the most complicated technology they owned was the family motor car. 'Bob' as a humanoid character, speaks their language and relates to them as would a friend.

Risky Computing
-Personal computers constitute sites that are redolent with cultural anxieties around the nature of humanity and the self. To deal with this uncertainty and the time-space distanciationand globalizing tendencies of late modernity, trust has become central to human interactions.

-The euphoria around the 'information superhighway' with its utopian visions of computer users able to access each other globally and 'get' connected has been somewhat diminished of late by a series of scares around the security problems threatened by the very accessible nature of the internet.

-News reports of hacker crimes typically emphasize the growing security risks caused by the increasing use of the internet. The hackers have managed to 'impersonate a computer that is "trusted"by the computer targeted for attack'

-Futher concern has also recently been generated about the links that children may make with the outside world via the internet, particularly in relation to contact with paedophiles, pornography and sexual exchanges over email or chat networks.

-The home is now longer a place of safety and refuge for children, the computer no longer simply an educational tool or source of entertainment but is the possible site childrens's corruption.
Ww invest a great deal of trust in computer technology, espicially in our PC. Many of us have little knowledge about how they wok, relying on experts to produce and set up the technology and to our aid when something goes wrong.

-They take pride of place in our studies at home and our children's bedrooms. The ways in which we depict computers as humanoid, having emotions and embodiment, is evidence of this intimacy.

-The relationship between users and PCs is similar to that between lovers or close friends. An intimate relationship with others involves ambivalence: fear as well as pleasure. Just as they described as friends or spouses in the masculinist culture of computing, computers are also frequently descrbed in feminine sexual or materal roles.

-Computer users are both attracted towards the promises of cyberspace in the utopian freedom from the flesh. But are also threatened by its potential to engulf the self and expose one's vulnerability to the penetration of enemy others.

KITCHEN VISIT

2007-08-04T19:42:00.000-07:00

Today we visited the Otago polytechnic school of hospitality comercial kitchen where they serve meals to the public we were lucky enough to get a free lunch and it was great and yummy very profesional staff and a really nice dinning area.

Once we finished our meal we were able to go out the back and look around the kitchen where they teach their students, the place was really clean with five main areas of where they prepare the food. The areas are Meat, vegies, larder, deserts and the server area.

LANGUAGE OF NEW MEDIA

2007-08-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

From Lev Manovich

Interface
-Ridley Scott commissioned to make Apple Mac GUI offered powerful visions of the future.
-With the progressively of the internet computer moved from being a technology to being a filter for all culture.
-Last 10 years the image has changed the form of computer interface.
-Everything on the internet passes through interface of browser.
-Learning interface is learning new language of code.
-The interface shapes how the computer user conceives of the computer.
-Cut and Paste
Makes scale irreavent makes spatial temporal media irrelevant.
-We use the same interface for Work and Play

-In 1980s many critics described one of the key effects of "postmodernism as that spatialization.
-The hypertext reader is like Robinson Crusoe, walking across the sand, picking up a navigation journal, a rotten fruit, an instrument whose purpose he does not know.
-Th printed word tradition that initially dominated the language of cultural interfaces is becoming less important, while the part played by cinematic elements is becoming progressively stronger.
-The computer fulfills the promise of cinema as a visual Esperanto. The orignal Esperanto never truly popular. Cultural interfaces in contrast, are widely used and easily learned
-Users are able to acquire new cultural languages, weather cinema a hundred years ago, or cultural interfaces today. Cultural interfaces in turn draw an older cultural forms such as ciema and the printed word. Important case of cinema's influence on cultural interfaces the mobile camera. it beacme an accepted way of interacting with any data represented in three dimensions.
-The Gutenberg galaxy turns out to be just a subset of the lumieres universe.
-Since the renaissance, the frame has acted as a window onto a larger space that it assumed to extend beyond the frame.
-The onscreen space is habitually perceived as included within a more vast scenographic space.
-Virtual Reality interface, often promoted as yhe most"natural" interface of all, utilizes the same framing, As in cinema.
-This frame creates a distinct subjective experience that is much closer to cinematic perception that it is to unmediated sight. VR interface, are often discussed a sthe logical successor to cinema and potentially the key cultural form form of the twenty-first century as cinema was the key cultural form of the twentieth century.
-But the undoubtedly can be observed is how virtual technologys dependence on cinema's mode of seeing and language is becoming progrewssively stronger.
-The designer of a virtual world is thus a cinematographer as well an architect.
-With a VRML interface, nature is firmly subsumed under culture
-A particularly important example of how computer gamesuse-and extend-cinematic language of a dynamic point of view.
-The incorporation of virtual/camera controls into the very hardware of game consols it truly a historic event.
-Element by element, cinema is being poured into a computer: first, one-point linear perspective; next, the mobile camera and rectangular window. Rather than being merely one cultural language among others, cinema is now becoming the cultural interface. What was cinema is now human-computer interface.

HCI: Representation versus Control
-The development of the human-computer interface, until recently, has had little to do with the distribution of cultural object.
-Today as the computer is beginning to host very different applications for access and mainpulation of cultural data and cultural experiences, their interfaces still rely on old metaphors and action grammars.
-The history of the human-computer interface is that of borrowing and reformulating, or, to use new media lingo.
-The computer screen also functions both as a window into an illusionary space and as a flat surface carrying text labels and graphical icons.
-Cultural interfaces try to create own language rather than simply usingthe general -purpose HCI
-We are witnessing the emergence of a new cultural metalanguage.

The Screen And The User
Contemporary human-computer interfaces offer radical new possibilities for art and communication. VR, telepresence, and interactivity are made possible by the recent technology of the digital computer. The screen has been used to preesent visual information for centuries.
-What are the ways in which computer displays both continue and challenge the tradition of the screen
-Rather than being a neutral medium of presenting information, the screen is aggressive.
-In television the act of viewing is often integrated with other integrated other daily activities until recently. This stability has been challenged by the a rrival of the computer screen.
Some television sets enable a second channel to be watched with a smaller screen perhaps TV sets will adopt the window metaphor of a computer.
Both situations - window interface and VR - disrupt the viewing regime that characterizes the historical period of the dynamic screen. Thus the era of the dynamic screen that began with ciema is now ending.
-The principles and technology of radar were worked out independently by scientists in the USA, England, France, and Germany during the 30s. Next to photography, radar provided a superior way to gather information about enemy locations.
-The screen becomes an all-encompassing concept that covers the functioning of even non visual representation.What is the price the subject pays for the mastery of the world, focused and unified by the screen?.
-The imprisonment of the body takes place on both the conceptual and literal levels
-With perspectival machines, the imprisonment of the subject also happens in a literal sense.

Design Analysis 3

2007-07-25T19:08:00.000-07:00

The site i looked at was http://www.dfwlighthouse.com/v2/

It is an interactive website for gig venue and bar i guess it would be like Refuel or Arc here in Dunedin.
The website is controlled by a Palm pilot like device on the left hand side of the page which once selected you can simply scroll up and down choose where you want to go then click and the page changes.

The site also has a really amazing photo and image section of bands that have played at the lighthouse it uses a system where instead of using something like a simple arrow or slide tool to change the image the user simply drags and clicks the on the image give the user a much more realistic feel of real photos this type of thing is similar but much more basic to likes of Microsoft's new surface program coming out next year.

The contact page for the lighthouse is really just a metaphor of sending real mail to someone by using a postcard image and the user just fills it out like a real postcard by filling in an address which is an email address and then users simply fill out the card like a real postcard

LASER FORCE

2007-07-24T19:50:00.000-07:00

After playing Unreal tournament in the morning on the computers in class we then were able to go down to laser force and play several rounds of the game.
We were split into two different groups i was in the green group my character was called Shadow.
I had played the game several times before so I knew the floor plan pretty well.
It was really interesting to play the game straight after we had been playing unreal tournament it helped me to understand the direct link of how unreal tournament had created an interface to mirror a game like Laser Force.

UNREAL TOURNAMENT

2007-07-24T05:15:00.000-07:00

Morgan placed Unreal tournament onto all the computers for us to play on. I had heard if the game before but never had played it the game is in the style of of a first person shooter.

The hole class played against each other in a hosted game it was fun each person got to create their own character and name give you a very personal feel to the game giving you more of an interaction with other game members.

The Game starts by choosing Single player, join game, host game, instant action, community and settings the best area to play the game as a single player would have to be instant action as it has heaps of great games where you are instantly emerged into the action the games are

Assault
Onslaught
Death match
Capture the flag team
Death match
Double Domination
Bombing Run
Mutant
Invasion
Last man Standing
Instagib CTF

This is a screen shot of some on the left of the game play in unreal tournament as you can see by having the game play in first person mode it gives the player a much more realistic feel of the game making the user feel as if they are right there involved in the action

Design Analysis 2

2007-07-23T04:04:00.000-07:00

The site I looked at was for the band tool it was an art site from the band at.
http://toolband.com/

The Home Page is mostly black except for the whirling colours behind the Tool name which once clicked gives you the option to go to different areas of the site. The use of black space works well for the style of music the band makes.

To me the site seems to be like a dark journey through a dream like status with nothing really making much sense at the best of times the information is always in the centre of the black screen and doesn't have much link between one page to the next, the music is also very strange with crazy sound effects on the site

Once you click into the Dissectional area of the site the home page for this area has no information on screen other than four or five different coloured symbols so from there the user must choose a symbol to click onto only going by colour and shape creating a really interesting idea of the user searching for the information they want almost like some type of game, instead of the pictures and information straight in front of them.

One area once chosen is like a listening post to hear beats by the drummer but you have to search for the music by strolling over a strange figure/face.When the user rolls his pointer across the area and finds where a beat is yellow ripples move out from the area where the sound is showing the user the area on the screen where the hidden sound is.

To me the site seems like both a mirror and a window I would say it more leans towards the mirror style not so much because of the interaction on the site but because it seems so much like a dream like state that it doesn't even feel like a web site and seems more more like a dream or some type of journey that you explore.

In the main art gallery the names of the work float around on the page and move towards and back from the screen with no real direction to them.

There is no previews of the artwork so the user must click on every single name to under stand the meaning behind the word making the user explore the website much to understand the information. This type of web design could be handy to make users explore company's web sites more.

Design Analysis

2007-07-22T20:00:00.000-07:00

The site I looked at was Nike 6.0 at http://www.nike.com/nke6/v4/

With the Home page I really liked the style they used this is because the style they used is to appeal to my age and gender.

The middle of the page has a compass that when the arrow is moved different icons appear on the screen there are six different areas that bring up
different icons to things such as forums,videos, images, team profiles etc.

But one problem i found is that each icon loads up a new window to view the content which I thought stops the flow of the site, which means that you had to close that window and go back to the original home page when you want to go back to the home page.

The main elements is the Central compass which everything seems to revolve around and the small icons after that each section doesn't have much of a link to the next page and with this type of layout i found it easy to get lost in the site.

One area is heavily creative with the likes of pages that seem like a real book that you can flip through and shoes that you have to click on in areas to get the information about them. But then some areas seem really dull and boring and seem nothing more than a blog which is a really weird contrast to look at.

To me the website is like that to someones scrapbook with all sorts of different pages and images all over the place and with the icons on the homepage how they move across the screen

( Above and below the huge contrast in
styles on the site)
To me the the site is a mix of a window and a mirror creating an interesting mix of media shown in the two example images one shows a story about the shoe which has realistic turning pages they give you the feel that you are reading a real book. And the other shows users of the shoe in a blog like format.