Designs near complete!

Finally about ready to start programming everything, which is really exciting for me because I'm a bit ahead of my schedule, which was probably a bit too tight as it is. I went for a retro look like I've been planning all along. I also created a logo I think captures the baseball feel and lets me integrate the typeface into design elements (like team logos). Any feedback is welcome, these aren't 100% final but they're as close as I need to be to start coding everything. I think things will be tweaked but overall they will look something like this.

-Steve

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Copyright and Trademark info

For those of you interested in copyright and trademark for your thesis projects, my mother is a lawyer and she shared with me the laws regarding this stuff. She is not a trademark lawyer, but has done trademark stuff in the past. Either way, this was helpful for me and may be for you!


Copyright protection is provided by the government to authors of "original works of authorship, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works."

Protection is available to both published and unpublished works. Copyright protection exists from the time the work is created in a fixed, tangible form of expression. The copyright immediately springs into existence and becomes the property of the author who created the work as soon as it is fixed in tangible form.  Only the author, or those deriving their rights through the author, can rightfully claim copyright. In the case of "works made for hire" the employer, not the writer, is considered the author. Copyright holders have exclusive rights to reproduce their works (i.e. photocopies, postings on websites, etc.) and distribute copies for sale. There is no requirement that a work be designated as copyrighted to actually be so. In other words, often times there is no way to know whether a work is copyrighted simply by looking at it. The best response is to simply assume that a work is copyrighted.

There is a common misconception that content found on the internet is considered to be in the public domain and therefore is not copyright protected. This is untrue. The concept of public domain, as it applies to copyright law, should not be confused with the fact that works may be publicly available, such as information found in books or periodical or on the internet. The public domain encompasses all works that are either no longer protected by copyright or never were (i.e. works produced by the federal government are not copyrightable).  Any content in non-digital form that is protected by copyright will be protected in its digital form.  For example, books in electronic format are protected by the same copyright that protects printed versions. Websites may be protected by copyright as single works, and the many different embedded works on websites may also be individually protected by copyright.

You should also be aware of the concept of 'fair use'. Fair use is primarily intended to allow the use of copyright protected works for things such as news reporting, research, and education.  Fair use considers: the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit, educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work, etc.

You have created original works, and although you are automatically vested in your copyright work, it is always wise to include the copyright notice.  The required form of copyright notice should include the symbol (©) and the year to be precise. It should appear © 2009 Jessica Floeh.

With regard to trademarks.  A trademark does not have to be simply a word, name or logo.  Almost anything can be a trademark so long as it acts to identify its owner's goods or services, so you should also add the trademark symbol (™) after anything you may eventually wish to register with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).  For instance, each time you use Hanky Pancreas™ it should have the mark.  When you decide you want to register the mark with the USPTO, you will need to demonstrate that you have been attaching the ™ to the mark for a while.  You do not need to have prior permission to use the ™ and in fact it is advisable to just start using it.  Once you complete the application process with USPTO, and the trademark becomes a 'registered' trademark, that is when you would use ®.   It might help to go to the USPTO website for information; this is a very short version of a complex area of law.  I also have a beast of a book entitled 'Guide to Registering Trademarks' that we can refer to once you have a better idea what you want to proceed with and register.  In the meantime, use the symbols liberally.


On the apple computer, if you press the option key then G, you get ©.
If you press the option key then 2, you get ™.
If you press the option key then R, you get ®.

even though i said id stop

i did another project: http://www.stfj.net/index2.php?project=art/2010/if%20Search%20is%20our%20memory

if Search is our memory
 
what does that mean when we are gone?

Searching the Internet has become the way we remember information.

Much of the time when we need to know something, instead of trying to recall it from our memory, we simply search for it online.

As search engines improve, they become more and more perfect at locating exactly what we want to remember. The basis of these search engines' usefulness is the large quantities of information we share with them about ourselves.

What is unique about this type of memory is that we are no longer storing it in our brains, where it is inaccessible and irretrievable after we are gone. Instead we are collectively storing it in a public space. Where you once had to write a book or erect a building to leave your mark on the world, all you need now is an email address.

Searching the Internet has become the way we remember each other.

As Google is holding fast as the most used and most accurate search engine, one could now say, 
"You're never really gone until no one Googles your name."

If machine memory is replacing and superseding conventional memory in this way, how does machine remembrance relate?

If the only thing that now stands in the way of the immortality of our ideas is whether or not we are Googled, how much does it matter who or what is doing the Googling?

What is the significance of being remembered by a machine?

What is the significance of being forgotten by one?

if Search is our memory is a robot that once a day remembers a name from it's list of names. It does this by Googling that name, browsing around in the results, and saving the information it found temporarily to it's own memory as a file. This file is then replaced with a new memory the following day. It never shares what it has found with anyone, only briefly retaining the information for it's own pondering.

if Search is our memory is currently remembering 9 people.

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I also started planning out my exhibit. I laid it out in sketchup and discovered that i am asking for 15-20' of wallspace, which is kind of intense
Installation

-zach

new pdf

I just created this new pdf for testing, feel free to try out signing up, chatting with Josefina and looking at her profile page. A small note is that when it is "Calling Josefina" please just click your right arrow key for the next page. The idea is that once Josefina answers she would automatically appear.

Thanks for your help :-)

Hilary

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converso11.pdf (423 KB)
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Duct Tape Prototypes

I created 3 different prototypes for Beth's design solutions out of duct tape. This is a quick and easy way to figure out functionality and form, I think I will continue doing this until I feel comfortable with the design of the objects. I'm hoping to meet with Beth this week and also reach out to other women I met last week during the support group meeting for young diabetic women. All of the women there wear this pump, the Medtronic Minimed, and would be good user testing subjects.

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Brainstorming Additional Ideas

Quick secondary post: while I've been writing I have also been thinking about additional things I could make. Most are just starts of ideas, or issues that I think would be interesting to explore. As always the names are mostly internal and the first thing that popped into my head:

  • Search Roulette: We operate under the assumption that search engines have no agenda and are impartial in returning content to us, but this is not the case. We prioritize content based on Google's ranking system without understanding how it works or it's agenda. Google prioritizes advertised results at almost every available opportunity and uses abstract ranking algorithms which are actively exploited. How do we know that the 1st result on Google will really be more informative to us than the 100th? What are we missing by operating under Google's assumption of reality?Jia Zhang's (DT '09) thesis Googlist is a great precedent for the types of questions I've been asking myself with this. The initial direction I thought of focused on the idea of randomizing or shuffling Google's search results for a given query. Without having Google's ranking system to rely on, would we spend more time analyzing results ourselves and making our own judgements about what is useful for us? Unfortunately Google's Search API is written in AJAX. My only familiarity with AJAX is the cleaner, not the programming language, so it's taking me some time to figure things out.
  • Sleepy: I have a few prototypes that explore the availability of data but this one has it's own agenda born out of my own experiences. Having instant and any-time access to data is seen as positive, but what are the side effects of this availability? It's like dining at a 24/7 all-you-can-eat buffet: if no one tells us to take a break, will we stop on our own? I was thinking about this idea of down time, and how we only see it implemented on the web in an abstract form - when adminstrators pull sites temporarily for "site maintenance" purposes. I thought it would be interesting to create a website that goes to sleep and wakes up like people do. It was inspired by my amusement over Gmail's 8-bit theme, which alternates between a "day" and "night" version of it's backdrop depending on the time of day. Returning to my eating/gluttony metaphor, it would be a way to prevent "midnight snacking" and help make people aware of their usage patterns. I envisioned an animation of digital sheep hopping over a fence, with each sheep counting down to the time when the site would be "active" again.
  • Back to the Future: At the Transparent Text symposium I attended last semester, one of the speakers asked a great question in jest: "What was the great tweet of 2009?" I interpreted it as a commentary on how short our attention spans are and the virtual "shelf-life" of the content people are producing. It led me to consider an experiment based on several questions: how interesting or relevant is my Twitter feed from 6 months ago? If I followed this time-delayed feed on a daily basis over a week, let's say, would what I discussed then still be important to me now? I'm going to just go ahead and see if I can grab that data to see what my stream from 6 months ago looks like. It led me to consider a service that would subvert our emphasis on real-time: What would Twitter be like if we could write tweets now but they wouldn't appear on our feed until 6 months later? Would we still write about mundane events of our day, or would we take the time to write about more thoughtful and engaging content? I think this could be really interesting as a commentary on the effects of real-time communication on the content we are producing.

That's all for now, feedback would be appreciated, I know it's a lot to read but hopefully there's some interesting nuggets in there! Thanks.

Concept Brief Writing & Additional Research

Since my presentation last Tuesday, I've been focus on improving my concept brief and refine my argument so that it is focused and articulate. Based on how I was responding to questions raised during my feedback, it became apparent to me that the statements I was making were still too broad or provided the wrong intention. In order to revise my concept brief, I tried to answer the questions laid out in the Concept Brief .pdf located on the thesis site in 1-2 sentences each. This is my first attempt at answering them, and once I had this down I moved on to brainstorming in Sharpie on a roll of trace, and then I'll re-visit this exercise again:

  1. What is the premise or known circumstances you are addressing?
    “Web 2.0" designs value the information content of the web over the individuals producing it. They encourage the production and aggregation of dehumanized metadata.Therefore, our assumptions and expectations about online interaction are based on a machine-centric view of technology whose cognitive effects we are only beginning to understand.

  2. What core question(s) you are trying to answer?
    How can we be made aware of how we take technology for granted?How can we shape technology to fit our needs, rather than the way technology currently shapes us?

  3. What is your argument/for or against something? What are you arguing for with the making of your thesis project?
    Cognition has not been a priority for designers of technology; even though our target audience is human we are creating technologies that cater more to machines.

  4. What is your thesis- or how and why do you think this project will provide an answer to your particular question?What: My thesis is a collection of critical design pieces that playfully undermine our logical expectations of website interactions.How: By subverting contemporary methodologies of web development, users will be made aware of their assumptions of online technology and its cognitive effects.

  5. Why and to whom does your thesis matter?
    Web designers: by questioning the machine-centric priorities of existing development paradigms, while offering models of interaction based on humor and irrationality.Web consumers: reveals how we take technology for granted by subverting our expectations of online interaction. Encourages the user to question their dependency and assumptions about technology.

  6. What are your criteria for success?
    Presenting a curated collection of critical design pieces that encourage discourse about the design and priorities of online technologies.Providing thoroughly commented open-source software modules for each piece for peers to modify and implement.

  7. Provide a list of ways that your thesis will be used and make an impact.
    The functional implementations of each piece will encourage discourse about the validity and priorities of contemporary web design methodologies.Open-source software modules of each piece will encourage experimentation and inspire fellow designers to rethink their focus on information over the individual.

  8. Provide a domain map of the fields you are studying
    Media Theory, Cognition, Web Design, Internet Art, Critical Design

  9. What are the mediums you are working in and why is this the design and technology approach the best way forward?
    Working in purely online mediums because my interest is in promoting the awareness of our assumptions about technology and reforming the priorities of designers of such technologies.

  10. What is the previous work or model(s) you are building on and advancing?
    Advancing the work of critical designers and Internet artists who produce work by subverting or manipulating aspects of online technology. Examples include:

    • Steve Lambert's Add-Art plugin for Firefox

    • Michael Mandiberg's Oil Standard plugin for Firefox

    • Hoss Gilford's It's a Clock application for the iPhone

    • Aram Bartholl's “Are you human?” art installation and business cards

    • Matt Sly & Jay Patrikios' FutureMe.org:e-mail your future self online service

I know these answers are still dense and abstract, but I'm working on refining them so I can clearly articulate my positions. Part of that process has been doing some additional research into media theory focused on the Internet. I've started reading 2 books: The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) by Jonathan Zittrain and You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier. The latter I've already found useful, as it is Lanier's manifesto against Web 2.0 designs. His focus is much more socialist and economical than mine, but I believe I will be able to draw upon his rhetoric for my own purposes.

New Vis Work

I've been working all weekend on putting down a solid visualization of baseball games that gives an informative overview of exactly what happened in a game in the least amount of space available. I want to give a variety of ways to view a game in order to get the most out of it, but first and foremost I want to provide a simplified overview of all game events that shows the flow of the game and allows people to see exactly what happened.


I started by trying to classify events and think of how that I can rank them each in a way that will allow me to show them in a linear way that both unifies them per team as well as shows the magnitude of each event. In this idea I thought about the major possible events and ranked them according to the impact they have on the game, form the perspective of the batting team.

Tier 5: Homeruns,
Tier 4: Triples
Tier 3: Doubles
Tier 2: Singles
Tier 1: Walks/Stolen Bases
Tier 0: Outs


I had to revise this several times after experimenting with it, mostly due to issues wtih classifying walks/stolen bases and singles. At first I thought that I could get away with putting them in the same tier, since they all result in the player moving up one base. I then realized that there is a clear difference between the two. While walks and stolen bases both advance the runner towards scoring position on the diamond, singles put the ball in play, which can result in RBIs. Walks can sometimes result in an RBI if the bases are loaded but even this is restricted to one run, while a single can drive in up to three runs.

After coming up with this classification, I began to work on a circular visualization of events that classified them according to a number of criteria. While in concept this made sense to me, in reality it turned out to look somewhat interesting but really show a lot of nothing with a simple look. I also attempted to create an organic shape from this visualization just to see what it looked like, and while this too proved interesting I dont' think it was very successful in showing anything.

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I then moved on to the next logical step, visualizing things linearly. I continued with my key of dashes and colors, and while linearly things made a bit more sense it was still not working very well IMO. I experimented with representing outs as negative events at this point as well but I don't think it read the way I intened.

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At this point I also created a more organic flow diagram from these charts. I think this actually worked out really well and is a great overall representation of the flow of the game. While it doesn't really show exactly what I wanted from the first overall view of the game a user is presented with, I think it is a great sub-view and something that I'm going to continue to investigate

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This is where I realized I was sorta getting caught up in doing the same thing over and over, so I decided to give it a rest and move on the next day.

Today I started working again and had some major breakthroughs. I spent a lot of time working on various visualizations, trying to bring down the amount of data ink used (as per reading Edward Tufte) and began to really simplify everything. I did a lot of different experimenting, and came up with a visualization I think finally works pretty well. I did some quick testing with a few casual baseball fans I know (obviously need to do more user testing but something is better than nothing and I just finished it!) and I was pleased that they could easily recreate the narrative of a game themselves after a very brief explanation which wasn't repeated.

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I then worked on some alternate views for this data, all of which I think could compliment the simple overall view

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All of this needs more work I know, but I put in a crapload of time this weekend and I think that I am definitely making progress. I also worked with a real data set vs just making things up, which was a bit of a pain in the ass at first but really helped me a lot in the long run. I hsould have been working like this before and I'm glad I am doing it now.
Thats it for now, I also did a good amount of work on the otehr sections of the application but I don't feel like they are ready to show yet so that will be another post.

If you read this please check everything out and let me know! I don't know how easy it will be to match things up in line with the way posterous posts images, so if they are in a gallery and not separated I'll also be posting this on my blog (http://www.vargatron.com/blogatron/) so feel free to check it out there

Thanks!

-Steve