Stop. Interact.

A Perspective of Interaction

2009-11-12T19:44:00.001Z

Now that I'm in the third year of my course I should be writing my critical paper and obviously doing research from books and other sources. So I had a book the other week which had a quote right at the beginning which was about interaction and it was from a perspective that I'd never looked at it from before. I really enjoyed it so I wanted to share it.

"During [the Twentieth] century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’ "

- Douglas Adams, 1999

Hope you like it as much as I do.

FoWD Bristol and Tale of Tales

2009-10-27T17:37:00.000Z

It's been about 7 months since I last posted, which is bad of me! But I've never really been much of a regular updater, I'm too forgetful.

Anyway, I've been meaning to write a post about FoWD (Future of Web Design) conference in Bristol at the beginning of September. Unfortunately I can't remember everything I wanted to say about it now. Overall it was a good day full of several talks and a speed networking session were myself and Craig were trying to plug the graduate show for our course, but I don't think we really managed to get much interest.

The most interesting thing that I noticed and really wanted to mention about it (being a bit of a social networking nut) was just how many people there were on Twitter. Right at the beginning of the first talk, which was given by Elliot Jay Stocks, he asked if everyone could send a message through Twitter to say Happy Birthday to his friend and most of the room ended up tapping away into their keyboards or getting out their phones. Then on top of that I noticed quite a large amount of people with some sort of Twitter desktop application open on their laptops. I myself tweeted during the day, making some sort of an account of who was speaking and what they were talking about.

Since then I began my third and final year of my Interactive Media course. We're about a month into that now and working on our Final Major projects and Critical Papers, so I may write a few blog posts over the next couple of days about all of that. But I felt like writing a little bit about the guest lecturers we've had in uni over the last week.

Firstly, last wednesday we were invited to a lecture that was set up for the Games Design course, which was delivered by a guy from Eddo Stern, a company who make games. This is the Eddo Stern website. Personally I didn't actually find most of the work he presented relevent to me. The one project that I actually did find interesting however was one called Darkgame (Link directly to the games' webpage). He explained that basically you and your avatar, who you control, are somewhat disconnected, and the state of each affects the other, so when you are strong your character is weak and when your character is strong you are weak. The idea of the game is to catch the other player and there a robots within the game which affect your senses. The main one of these which he showed was blindness; if you caught a blindess robot the whole screen would cloud over. And in a normal game you would avoid these things, but in this game when you are weak your avatar is strong. So when you lose your "sight" your avatar becomes faster and stronger and sounds become louder for you so you can hear when the other player is close to you. And your avatar can send out a sort of sound detection beam to find out where exactly they are coming at you from. You also have a head piece which gives you pressure whenever your are close to something, I thought that was kind of interesting, but it's really all that natual since you don't actually feel pressure in your head when you're getting closer to something. It's quite a unique game but I don't if games like that would ever catch on in the mainstream market.

We also had a talk yesterday from a couple of people from Tale of Tales. Tale of Tales Website. They create games with unique interaction. Or what they call unique interaction. Perhaps it was the way they explained their games, but most of them didn't actually seem like games to me. They have made something called the forest which is an online multi-person environment, which they call a game. For me it wasn't, for me it wasn't really any more than a digital environment you can wander around with your deer character (which looks like the deer from Princess Monoke), there aren't even any ways in which you can interact with the other "players"; they have to make it all up as they go along. For them the games are made up by the "players" as they find tasks for themselves to do and tend to design their own way of communicating with each other by moving in different ways. The closest to a game it became was where they put in spells which allowed the users to change the skin of their character, the spell distributed the skins randomly so groups of people would spend ages all trying to get the same skin so that they all looked the same. The Little Red Riding hood game could have been a game but they put more emphasis into explaining the characters and how they were designed rather than the interaction within it. Their artwork was very pretty though.

Anyway that's all for now. I feel a bit mean for almost ripping these people to pieces, I could say much more but this is already quite a long post.

Over and Out.

To the Dark Ages and Back Again

2009-03-12T21:27:00.003Z

The last couple of days have been quite interesting. On tuesday I came up with an idea for my 3rd year Final Major Project, which would be a social networking based project, but I'm not going to go into that now. but myself and my boyfriend dicussed the possiblities that as part of research I could document my social networking habits for 40 days and then document myself going without my social networking for 40 days. (I am on quite a few social networking website and people who know me genereally seem to view me as a bit of a Facebook addict!). And yesterday I got an unexpected chance to experience life without social networking...

Without ANY electricity in fact... for 24 hours, we literally got it back about an hour ago and I felt the need to blog the experience. Both myself and my boyfriend found it incredibly weird living out without electricity which has become a basic human comodity. We were both constantly going to turn on lights to be able to see as natural reactions. Without use of our computers we were both at a loss as to what to do with ourselves and thoughts I had were "Well lets go and play some games on the playstation" then realising that too ran off of electricity. That in itself raised some interesting questions in my head about my association with my computer. At first my head seemed to have been thinking more about the disconnection with the internet, and associating my computer with the internet, rather than the fact all the electricity and power had gone from our house.

Even so though this was not the first concern for either of us, especially me who was not at my computer at the time but in the shower (with conditioner in my hair!!!) but was actually the issue of the fact that we had no form of light. It was about 8 o'clock when the electricity went so it was dark outside. We had no torches and at the time we had no candles. Luckily though the spar down the road stays open til 10pm and we managed to find some tealights, which are crap at lighting rooms, but at least we had some light. Not that it made much difference as I still missed the last step going down into the kitchen and poured wax all over my thumb, despite the fact the tealight was in a ramikin, luckily it wasn't actually hot still by the time it reached my thumb. We did however spend the first hour in the dark using the light from our mobile phone screens to look at the fuse box, we flicked all the switches and had come to the conclusion that it was all buggered but the landlord did not seem to want to accept this!

Which then brings us on to our 3rd problem. Both of us had low batteries on our phones, so we started off using mine to contact the landlord but by the end of the night after the many phone calls and text messages my phone battery was dead and Craig's had only one bar left. So when the landlord had decided there was no more he could do that evening in the way of contacting someone to come out and take a look and it would be first thing in the morning that someone would come and when we would next get a text from him we turned Craig's phone off. And this morning was spent turning his phone on and off until about midday when it decided it had no more left to give. Luckily though just before this we got the text message saying someone was coming at 5:15 rather then the 3:30 from previous texts.

And they came and concluded exactly we had concluded and rang the electricity board for us and about an hour or so later the first man appeared, deduced that is was buggered and most of it needed to be replaced, called the technition and he went away. Another hour later and technition one arrived shortly followed but technition 2. After mini explosions, fireworks and lots of banging and screwing suddenly the lights came on!

It was an interesting experience and proved just how much we rely on electricity. I couldn't finish my shower properly since the water ran cold the moment the electricity was turned off; dinner was fish and chips from chip shop since we could cook nothing in the oven as it has an electric spark; we were not prepared for a blackout as we had no torches or candles and could only buy tealights from the spar because we had no holders for the taller candles and they didn't sell them; we were at a loss as to what to do with ourselves in the dark without much light and no computers to use, no games console to play on and no power on our phones to ask for more help, so we read comics by tealight!

Although it was quite stressful because we were worried about whether all of our newly bought shopping was going to defrost, we had to laugh, I guess it was quite funny, but we also didn't want to go mad. I guess people on the dark ages were more prepared than we were!

Inter-Semester Brief

2009-02-01T16:43:00.006Z

So at the beginning of a 2 week break between semesters our lecturer set us this task-

As you will be working for external clients for the upcoming IM4 module it is important to be able to effectively present yourself in a positive light. Your task is to prepare and present a one minute description of yourself as an interactive media designer, discussing your skills and your best work. It is important to keep this description short and simple! You should prepare one image that sums-up your practice to be data projected and present yourself to the group. Whilst presenting you should not use notes, prompt cards or any other aid, just talk about yourself, your work and your skills as a designer for one minute.

So I've been working on this for the last few days and I have finally finished it. The original concept for it was going to be based on an avatar creator that I made for one of the modules. I was going to make a sort of action figure version of me and surround myself with images of the projects I've done so far... Which aren't many to be fair since we've only completed 3 modules.

But as I picked the photo of me to use it kind of lent itself to one of the projects from my first year where we had a the company Mitel come in and give us a one week brief where we had to design a communication device either for hospital or retail use. We worked in groups and I designed the interface for our concept and this is what I have chosen to show in the image. So far I think it has been my favourite project so it seemed suitable.

So this is the final outcome...

My Portfolio Website

2009-01-29T20:01:00.006Z

I started my portfolio site as part of the brief for my first module in my first year at Newport and the original site that I put up then is still up. It's only an image map at the moment because I just threw up the photoshop mock-ups that I did. It's all Lorem Ipsumed and just generally not great.

So this is the template for the original website

At first I really loved this design and it's still pretty nice but I looked at it again over the summer and I added a few extra little tweaks to try and make it that little bit better

This was the result I came up with

Just a few little changes that I thought gave it just a bit more oomph and brought the different elements together. I added a line underneath the black header in purple with a height of 3px and changed "Gee Murrin Design" to "Gee Murrin Portfolio". That may change again when I revamp the website.

So that's where I'm at at the moment with the website, I'm intending to 1. Make it properly, not just an image map and 2. Possibly change the design completely. The one thing that will definitely change is the colour; although it is my favourite colour and I've not really seen many portfolios (or any websites for that matter) in purple, which may make it stand out more, I've found that there aren't actually many other colours that go with it. I discovered this when I tried to make this blog match up with my website! I found that the choices of colours that worked with the kind of dark purple that I like were pretty much just variations of purple and I discovered that actually I don't like a lot of purples! I like the purple I have for my website, Cadbury's purple and the purple of the Man City away kit (which is/was LUSH! But I'm not a follower of football so it may have changed now!)

Another change I am mostly likely to make to the design is to move the navigation from the left hand side to along the top underneath the banner. Other than those changes I'm really not sure what it should look like, I would like it to reflect the work that I do, but I'm not really sure what my specialist area is at the moment and I really don't want it to look like everyone elses portfolio!

Enough rambling from me! If you read this and think you may have a good idea, comment me!

First Blog

2009-01-27T21:47:00.000Z

So this is my first blogging experience, this blog will hopefully be a space for me to show development of my work throughout uni and a place for me to post up interesting stuff that I find.