itp-blog

Week 4

There are no labs this week!

Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen

I think personal websites are so great. I used to be very into IndieWeb style personal websites but became overwhelmed by my own perfectionism.

Tom’s writing is interesting to me because I was writing a game earlier today, which itself is an interactive experience/interactive art.

I feel that affordances are a great way to add meaning, or lead an audience to certain conclusions, when designing interactive systems.

The comparison of interactive art design to that of directing actors is one made my Anna Anthropy in Rise of the Videogame Zinesters as well.

Within this framework: the person interacting with your designed system is like an actor, you are like a director, and the entire experience can be seen through the lens of theater.

Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook

Okay. So this book is about optimizing for the best user experience possible. This optimization visualization reminds me of gradient descent visualizations.

gradient ish

This is gradient descent visualized! I think these images are similar because they both depict the process of optimization.

gradient descent

Anyway. I think optimizing the user experience is something I might need to worry about later on, because I’m working on something that might not be physically feasible.

In other words, I’m more worried about hardware than software.

Midterm Project

This webpage has not been updated since 2023. Are midterm assignments supposed to be Halloween themed every single year? I would not be able to tolerate even three years of that if I were a lecturer.

If you or your partner on this exercise are waiving Intro to Computational Media, that means you’re good enough programmers to create this project in a desktop programming environment on your own.

Is this a way of saying - you should be able to write the code for this project? I think I can, sure.

There are three features missing from my phone:

  1. texting in areas without WiFi
  2. phone calls (inbound, outbound)
  3. connections to 4/5G WiFi

Additionally, I am troubled by the environmental cost of manufacturing these devices.

I could focus on solving 1. for the midterm project and solve 2. for the final project.

Midterm Project Scope

Okay. I think I’m going to create

for my midterm project.

I can stop there.

I don’t think I can complete my (relatively new) vision of making a DIY functional phone by the midterm deadline.