DSDN142 Creative Coding: Inspiration

At the beginning of the course we had a look at openprocessing.org to get an idea for what can be done with the Processing application. There was a lot of very cool stuff on there. Two of the sketches I liked were:
Processing code: Visualising Text by Diana Lange
Flickr: ‘Visualising Text’ Images

This is a video clip of her code in action.

I liked that this sketch is a visual representation of a poem’s words, as reading is one of my favourite activities. There is something beautiful about the way the sorting of the text becomes a sort of circular web.

The second sketch is by Teodor Michalski called Triangle Party. This one I found fun as the viewer can interact with the triangles with the mouse. It reminds me of a Chinese dragon in the way it twists, and the triangles are reminiscent of dragon scales.

DSDN 142 Creative Coding: Form Manipulation

So I am still getting used to learning exactly how to use Processing. It’s going slowly, but I think the issue is I haven’t finalised a form I want to manipulate for the project and I haven’t sat there and played around enough with the application.

This is the form I created today’s studio.

Processing Sketch 1

I manipulated the distance between the points of the square to make it 100 pixels wider in height and width each time.

It’s not very adventurous. I need to push past the limits I impose upon myself.

DSDN112 Interaction Design: Idea Generation

I like the idea of doing something that has tactile and scent qualities as sense of touch and sense of smell are my favourite senses. But I am open to doing another sense if a good idea for it crops up.

A few ideas that I have had are:

• Olfactory and Tactile Senses
  • Mood enhancer balls: like stress balls but incorporating scents that are supposed to enhance mood in some way. Whether that be wanting more pep or for relaxing the scent released while squishing the ball will help with that. I also thought that perhaps the balls themselves could have a tactile quality to them depending on what mood they are for. They could feel stimulating with little nubbly bits or something, or be smooth and soft feeling to create a sense of calm. I also think colour could come into play as well, given that colour theory suggests that colour may have an effect on mood too.

• Auditory and Olfactory Senses
  • Smell tunes: Smell tunes is based on notes in music being used to categorise scents. The scents would be paired up with a musical note that best matched the scent, and the idea is that you make music from scent. There are a couple of ways to approach smell tunes:
    • sound and scent combined: using a keyboard (or possibly even some other type of musical instrument…) music is made in the usual way but with the sensory addition of smell.
    • scent only: so no sound generated with this one, only pushing keys to release scent and combine them to create scent “music”.

• Tactile Sense
  • Sculpt the object you feel in the box: an object is placed in a box that has two holes in it for a person to put their hands in so they can feel the object and then attempt to sculpt it in plasticine, without having seen the object. This one is all about touch.
  • Match the textures: try to match the textures of a variety of things by feel alone. They need to taken out of their usual context so they all have the same surface area and  a number of the textures feel like each other making it harder to match the correct ones up.

• Visual Sense
  • Kaleidoscope mirror: wouldn’t even know where to begin with this one, but the idea is that instead of it being a kaleidoscope of colours it’s a kaleidoscope of the person looking through the viewing glass.
  • Detect your presence with sight and sound: using a panel on a wall that detects a person when they are a certain distance from it and starts to make a sound that grows louder the closer the person gets to it, it also detects the motion made so it becomes faster or slower in tempo depending on the speed the person is moving. The sight part also works the same way using LEDs. It’s a hazy, only partially thought out idea.
  • Magic glasses, make the invisible visible: these are just like the Ocular Device from the National Treasure movie. A pair of spectacles with multicoloured lenses that show hidden messages depending on the lens colour or combination of lenses colours. They remind me of an activity in a book I had as a kid that had a whole heap of fun play spy stuff in it. The activity was to read the secret messages that overlaid each other but in different colours so they were difficult to read without the right colour of cellophane. Red cellophane, for instance, rendered the red coloured message invisible so you were able to read the blue coloured message.

DSDN112 Interaction Design Inspiration

Came across this while surfing YouTube. Other videos of theirs are also very interesting from the interaction design standpoint.

DSDN142 Creative Coding: Reflections on the lecture and first tutorial

Tuesday’s tutorial was primarily to get administrivia out-of-the-way and introduce us to the idea of the amount of breakdown needed to create a set of instructions that someone could take away and create an object from, or that could be used as an instruction set for a computer program. I don’t know why I picked my glasses to try write a set of drawing instructions for, as they turned out to be hard to describe. I think the major problem for me was trying to describe the type of curve that needed to be drawn to represent the curve of the frame. I had no idea how to do it. I ended up trying to describe it using length and the word curve and how far above or below the end point should finish in relation to the start point. As it turned out when my partner for the exercise tried to draw the image from the instructions, things did not go well and while there were curves in the drawing they were nothing like my glasses. There were also no verticals as there should of been. Kind of makes me think I have a bit of practicing I need to do in instruction writing, particularly in clarity and perhaps more breakdown of the task too.

The lecture on Thursday was good as we delved into form and the use of parameters to change the structure of the form to create new variations of it. It was useful to see some of the project boards that had been done previously to get an idea of the sort of thing we are going to be doing. I feel clearer about the idea of the form but nervous about the coding part of it. Hopefully after today’s tutorial I will feel less nervous. I also need to think about the type of form I want to start with, it’s tempting to go with a circle made up of lines maybe but perhaps something simpler would be better….