So uh.
What’s up?
Cool party huh?
…
………………
Well I mean, this is what I wrote for this job I gotta interview for:
My goal as a designer is to be disruptive to people’s assumptions about the limits to what they could experience in their life by creating work that pushes people to expect something greater from the future state (societally, technologically, etc.) of their world and of themselves. I believe that work that allows people to interact with themselves and the world in ways that they didn’t previously imagine can cause them to set a higher and more expansive standard for what life could be, influencing their future decisions about which products, experiences, and ideologies they support. Once I graduate, this work and affect on people would be my focus, primarily through multisensory design of experiences and products to draw on less often utilized senses to create unexpected experiences. Multisensory design also allows me to engage with material, architecture, lighting and other sensory effectors to design more complete experiences, making the shift to the unfamiliar feel feasible and possible. I hope to collaborate with a broad range of designers and engineers but also historians, sociologists, and urban planners – people who can help deepen my understanding of how people’s current expectations and worldview were set over time, and how they could potentially be changed for the future.
And once I kind of wrote it all down and read all of it and made some changes and read it again, I kinda believed it.
Which I know isn’t much but for me it’s pretty magical.
So maybe this is what I’ll tell people when they ask:
Hey, I’m Franklin, I’m a 3rd year Design student at Carnegie Mellon studying experiences and environments with a secondary focus in visual narratives. It’s honestly pretty fantastic. I love the people there. I want to create experiences that people don’t expect and haven’t imagined before so that they see a little more of what the world could be and who they could be, and they believe in it.
I guess that wasn’t so hard actually.
This Donald Glover quote is also pretty important to me and what I wanna make:
“I’m trying to make the best product possible…I believe the people deserve quality and when they taste it, they see their own value and they don’t ask for less.”
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Thanks for your patience! Here’s all the stuff you’ve all been waiting for:
Spring 2021 Studio – Reflection 01
‘A Survey of Presence and Related Concepts’
The idea of testing a VE’s effectiveness is interesting to me, as they always seemed to represent this more abstracted form of being that, as long as its ‘technical’ side worked without error, couldn’t be measured up against one another. Taking the distinct purpose of the VE, transporting your feeling of ‘presence’ to a space separate from your physical place and measuring its effectiveness may be fairly subjective but many experiences are, so as long as you measure with a consistent sample size I realize now this could be a great way of measuring the effectiveness/success of not only VE’s, but experiences in general. Find their ‘primary goal’ in terms of how they affect the user, and then measure it across people and comparable experiences. Another interesting way of measuring VE could be to consider what ‘place’ you are attempting to transport their presence to – if you are attempting to bring them to a Rainforest while they are in a bathroom (maybe that’s too much water), then how does it compare to actually being in a Rainforest? This introduces another question for me – if the purpose of a VE is to transport your presence to another space how much is accuracy included in that goal? Transporting someone to a Rainforest and making it feel like they’re in an actual Rainforest versus transporting someone to a Rainforest while they are still aware of their presence in a bathroom are equally reasonable goals for a VE, depending on the purpose of the designed experience. Shifting the level of your ‘immersion’/the transportation of your presence then becomes a tool to be used in the design of the experience relative to its specific goals, rather than an accurate unit of measurement.
“A second important flaw regarding the use of presence as a universal VE effectiveness measure, beyond the difficulty inherent in measuring presence, is that it has not been conclusively demonstrated that more presence is necessarily a good thing.“
They addressed it there^^^ but not necessarily as a design tool that can be manipulated.
Another important aspect of VE that the paper mentions is fidelity, which can also be viewed as a tool, although the paper more readily acknowledges this, and can be changed based on the goal of the experience. I think the point of having a ‘high degree of fidelity in low-immersion media’ is important, as it acknowledges that fidelity/realism (of a real-world or fantastical scenario or something in between) can be used in different ways and situations. Reversing this scenario as using ‘low degree of fidelity in a high-immersion media’ would be really interesting, as the low fidelity could serve as a potential low barrier to entry (or become a hole in requiring user to significantly suspend disbelief) that would then help users to reach high-immersion.
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Reflection 02
Paper: ‘Social Immersive Media: Pursuing Best Practices for multi-user interactive camera/projector exhibits‘
“Socially scalable. Interactions are designed to share with others. Furthermore, interaction, representation, and users’ engagement and satisfaction should become richer as more people interact.“
“One common critique of Boundary Functions is that there is no response with a single user. In one sense this is a failure to fully satisfy the socially scalable criterion. One argument in favor of this technique is that a work explicitly about social interaction should indeed have no response except in a social environment. Another argument is that, like the power of silence in music, there is a power in non responsiveness or a blank screen if used to convey meaning.“
“We challenge designers of physically active video games to reach beyond two players alternating in turn, and focus on users’ collocated interactions with each other.”
It’s interesting how many of the principles for collective, or individual, interaction that are given here mimic the inherent aspects of person-to-person interaction. In a non-digital game or story-telling experience people’s interactions with each other are often inherently connected, just by being around one another. But once this experience is reframed digitally or remotely, with a presence that is not inherently connected to that of others, that interconnection between actions/presences needs to be expressly designed for. On the other hand, for some story-engagement experiences / media experiences (such as watching a movie) interacting with others doesn’t necessarily happen and is definitely not inherent to the base experience. However, when a story-engagement experience is placed within the context of a remote presence, collective presences, etc. interaction is much more inherent and assumed. So there’s some aspects of person-to-person connection in social remote interaction/presence that designers must consciously work to incorporate and others that our part of our base assumptions about the experience.
“Experiential (Boundary Functions) and performance (Deep Walls) models promote open-ended experiences with long total interaction time; while episodic (Three Drops), and game (Fear) narrative models encourage constrained, shorter experiences.”
Paraphrase: “Using an abstracted representation of a character/presence (such as a shadow silhouette) is often more effective than a direct ‘full color representation'”
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