Lab 19: Project Prototyping + Interaction Design

Outline

In this lab you will:

1. continue implementing your prototype
2. explore interaction design in the context of your prototype

Introduction

Welcome everyone! This week you will continue working on your prototypes. You will have to do a little research about interaction design for your blog post. This is intended to guide and shape the realisation of your project and strengthen the connection to the theme/provocation.

If you haven’t done so already…

do: …fork and then clone the Mini Project Template Repo and open it in VSCode.

Getting Inspired

do: Find some sources of inspiration of dynamic interactive visuals or music related to the prototype/project theme which communicate a certain emotion or evolve over time in interesting way. Your blog post should discuss how you might apply the techniques of these artists and musicians in your own work and put your own spin on it.

Short listing

COMP1720 Inspirations:

• Week 9
• Week 10
• Week 11
• Week 12

Some artists who may be relevant to the theme:

• Hsin-Chien Huang
• Suggestions?

ANU Library Resources:

• Processing, Reas & Fry
• Algorithmic Art
• Generative Art

Artists referenced in Articles:

• Generative Art Guide (article)
• The Reign of Generative Art (article)
• Algorithmic Beauty (article)

Affordances

Interactions are mediated between the human and the computer through affordances. They show “how technologies can be used. by whom, and under what circumstances”. Affordances can also be hidden/secret or revealed only when needed.

think: What are the affordances (hooks/hails)? (hails) What are the actions required of the viewer/listener? What are the rewards for engaging? What will the viewer/listener invest/emotionally experience from this artwork? How could you create these types of interaction in p5.js?

Documentation

1. Refine and clarify your interpretation of the theme for the mini project.
2. Identify any sources of inspiration you want to include, and what you might take from them. Include the names of the artists/musicians and the names of their works (if you can find them).
3. For one key inspirational work, identify the affordances. What actions required of the viewer (and how will they know)? What are the rewards (to the viewer) for engaging?
4. Can you identify the emotional investment required of the viewer by the artwork: Will this work make you feel a certain way and why? What do you find interesting and why?
5. How might you incorporate some concepts or techniques from the works above when creating your Mini Project in p5.js?

Summary

Congratulations! In this lab you:

• continued implementing your prototype
• explored some inspirational sources
• explored interaction design in the context of your prototype

More-Than-Human

The Project Provocation/Theme for this year’s project is “More-Than-Human”, inspired by the book “The Spell of the Sensuous” by David Abram.¹ The following quotes are from this book:

“Our strictly human heavens and hells have only recently been abstracted from the sensuous world that surrounds us, from this more-than-human realm that abounds in its own winged intelligences and cloven-hoofed powers. For almost all oral cultures, the enveloping and sensuous earth remains the dwelling place of both the living and the dead. The “body”—whether human or otherwise—is not yet a mechanical object in such cultures, but is a magical entity, the mind’s own sensuous aspect, and at death the body’s decomposition into soil, worms, and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born”

“Of course, our human-made artifacts inevitably retain an element of more-than-human otherness. This unknowability, this otherness, resides most often in the materials from which the object is made. The tree trunk of the telephone pole, the clay of the bricks from which the building is fashioned, the smooth metal alloy of the car door we lean against—all these still carry, like our bodies, the textures and rhythms of a pattern that we ourselves did not devise, and their quiet dynamism responds directly to our senses”

“They know well that if humankind is to flourish without destroying the living world that sustains us, then we must grow out of our adolescent aspiration to encompass and control all that is. Sooner or later, they suspect, our technological ambition must begin to scale itself down, allowing itself to be oriented by the distinct needs of specific bioregions. Sooner or later, that is, technological civilization must accept the invitation of gravity and settle back into the land, its political and economic structures diversifying into the varied contours and rhythms of a more-than-human earth.”