Future Readings

Discursive Design; Designing for negative emotion; revisit climate emotion readings;

"The question remains, how will you engage with your target audience in Indonesia while in Singapore? Have you made a plan yet?"

2.1 Grad Project — Informal Feedback

Andri showed this project from BA2 that combines plastic bags together into a large fabric! The texture was really interesting to me as it doesn't feel like plastic even though it visibly is. Materiality is something I should start looking into.

2.2 Grad Project — Round Table Session

3.3 Prototyping — Material and Sound

Form exploration using plastic polythene bags and placing a colorful lightsource underneath.

Forms were heavily inspired by Robert Janson's abstract plastic sculptures. I really liked how he was able to create these surreal, alien-like forms just by some plastic bags together. Forms will be a big part of my project and I'm definitely aiming to experiment more in creating surrealist influenced shapes like this.

Sound Bank

I was setting up a google sheet to categorize my sound collection and I realized that the categorization didn't make that much sense. So far, I was recording just for the sake of finding the loudest and most annoying sound possible while not thinking much about the action involved in creating said sound. My current categories of action to produce sound from the objects are: friction/rubbing, scratching, crushing, ripping, and squeezing. I made up the categories on the spot last week while thinking about various ways a person could interact with an object, but is that all there is to it?

Reading "What in the World Do We Hear: An Ecological Approach to Auditory Event Perception" by William W. Gaver (1993)

Bill Gaver is a Professor of Design and co-leader of the Interaction Research Studio at the University of Northumbria, London. In his book, he created a 'map' of everyday sounds that are first derived from the 3 fundemantal sources — solid, gases and liquid. The book looks in-depth into the taxonomies of everyday sounds and focuses on auditory categorization. The book establishes 4 basic-level events that are fundamentally the sources for different sounds. I found the map really interesting to look at because it lists the additional attributes that effects the sound produced, or reversely, the information we could potentially derive by listening to it. For example, through the act of scraping an object, it conveys information about its texture, material, speed, acceleration, and force of the action. I believe this book would be a good resource in the future if I decide to push for sound-producing interactions based on everyday objects!

Here's my working spreadsheet. Sources of sound are based on Bill Gaver's category of the 4 basic-level events: deformation, impacts, scraping, and rolling.

4.1 Cohort Presentation

Some of my peer's presentations!

Colors & Music

I loved the bursts of colors in Afiq's presentation, which is the main focus of his topic. To my knowledge, he is exploring the synthesis of colors and music, and his experiments include translating music scores into gradients of colors. I particularly found one of Afiq's main figures of inspiration, Brian Eno, quite interesting. Brian Eno's Ambient Music for Airports album explores generative systems-created music which is a continuation of the artist's experimentation on using a tape machine as a composition tool.

Brutalism

Kelly's topic is super interesting to me as well. Although I don't know much about brutalism or brutalist architecture, I appreciate its aesthetics and very dystopian-like vibes. Her explorations into the topic are what caught my eyes the most. She mentioned about exploring the 2 extremes of brutalist aesthetics and try to incorporate it into website designs. I think very html-like sites definitely have a unique look to them, similar to the solar-powered websites I've been looking at (but will put off attempting it for now because of time pressure!) I also liked how she drew the connection from old computer icons to brutalist aesthetics.

4.2 Weekly Roundup — Questions

What do I want to achieve by weeks 14 & 16?

Can you situate your reaserach topic stand within the rest of the world?

Nuance: what specific values should the individual or community adhere to?

So many questions and currently not much answers. Nadine brought up important pointers for during the briefing before the presentation. Are the outcomes creative? What did you find out from you research? There should be a connection between whats being said and what was made. I think I've not put aside some time to think about the aesthetics of my overall project that should be cohesive all across the outcomes, which is something I have to give more attention to now.

But of course there are some progress too! The experiments with the tech, materials and forms helped me to solidify what the final prototype would look like. By dissertation draft submission, I hope to start a bit of my discussion with some user-testing with the prototype! Next week will be focusing more on structuring my dissertation make changes from the RPO. Looking far into the future, I also hope that my trip home to Indonesia during December break will give me a fresh point of view on my topic. I feel a biit bittersweet about ending up with plastic waste as a topic after all the research I did around climate change, but there is a reason it continues to be a problem even with it being such a saturated topic. I hope that I will be able to contribute to the discourse through my project and plant a seed for a positive change in the future.

Extra: as a personal note I realized that I say the word "interesting" too much so here are some synonyms for my future reference — fascinating, compelling, thought-provoking, inspiring, intriguing, informative, appealing.