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CTIN 532
Interactive Experience and World Design

The development of interactive experiences with an emphasis on writing and development. Open to Interactive Media MFA students only.


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INVENTORIES

Thank you for your Inventory Presentations. Please post some aspect of it, with attention to your conclusions/analysis. A few of the categories that came up today were:

CULTURALLY VALUED:
Efficiency & Convenience
Preparedness (also termed: "just in case-ness")
Mobility
Access / Enablers
Communication / Connection
Workaholism
Transhuman Extenders (Memory)
Education
Technology
Entertainment (Games, Music)
Health
Privacy
Multicultures

AXIS
Proximity : closely held vs remotely carried
Opacity/Transparency
Public/Private
Individuation / Uniformity

Please add and comment to this list and analysis with your posts.

CTIN 532 Inventory Analysis

Media Rich and Socially Insulated Urban Landscape

It seems the general theme of the items I carry with me indicate a society in which we immerse ourselves in technology to maintain our connection to the world, yet at the same time we isolate ourselves from the dense social setting we live in by staying disconnected from the sea of people we are constantly surrounded by in our actual physical space. We are trying to interact in a society of thousands when we are more suited to a tribal society of about twenty close knit individuals. As a result we deal with humans as mechanisms of society with whom we do transactions, but shut ourselves off from most of these people emotionally, only reserving friendship and relationships for a select few of the thousands we mingle with over the course of a day.

-----

The items I carried seemed to fulfill several purposes:

1) Transhumanism
-ie. cellphones & computers
-We are striving to reach beyond the physical constraints of our bodies to stay connected through our web of technology.
-Our technology is used as a means of connecting with others despite physical limitations.
-We are immersed in a sea of fellow human beings in this urban landscape but we screen out most of these interactions as mere ambience. The connections that truly matter to us are maintained through our computers and cellphones.

-ie. maps & schedules
-We need items to help us record physical and temporal spaces that we traverse that are larger than we can feasibly internalize.

--

2) Mechanisms for streamlining social interaction
-ie. cash, credit cards, id cards
-These items function as membranes we use to mechanize our interactions with other human beings so that we don't have to get to know people in order to benefit from them.
-It's a way of making humans function as cogs in the social machine
-ie. i give money to a cashier and he gives me goods, I don't need to know him from Adam, I just need a valid form of identification and currency that we both acknowledge as legitimate.
-We live in a society of thousands necessitated by the needs in our lives that these multitudes fulfill, but we don't want the investment needed to actually foster a friendship/relationship with these individuals in order to benefit from the goods they supply. As a result we use money and technology as intermediaries for transaction.
-These items ease social transaction while avoiding social investment. It allows you to transact with people without taking the time to get to know whether you can trust them to maintain their end of the trade.

--

3) Fear of others
-ie. Keys
-We are immersed in this sea of fellow humans, but there are too many out there for us to get to know and trust.
-Social disequality and high social density create an environment in which we fear theft and so we protect our goods with locks, necessitating keys.
-Our society is composed of public and private space our keys are our means of access.

--

4) Striving for individuality
-ie. keepsakes, ipod, clothing
-We live in a society where outward appearance is valued, ie. clothing.
-We want to distinguish ourselves from the masses, keep a sense of our own uniqueness in this sea of "others".
-We want icons of our own little island of personal contacts/friendships/family/relationships so that we can convince ourselves that we have a unique purpose and are not just another cog in a social machine.
-These items give us hope, love, and emotional anchors to put our own life and day to day struggles into context. We need these emotional attachments. Even if we insulate ourselves from these attachments with most members of society we still need a small pocket of close friends and relationships.

CTIN 532 Inventory Analysis

h3. Efficiency and Convenience

The society we live in clearly values efficiency and convenience: if we can do it faster and neater, then we should. Not only do we manufacture a great many items in rectangular shapes for quick and simple storage, we make use of a great many technologies that hasten the process of entering a premises or exchanging information. The number of “cards” one carries around seems almost absurd – my wallet had far more items in it than the rest of my bag combined.

From identification to “frequent buyer” cards to regular transportation passes to simple paper cards with contact information on them, you would think that these little items would be pretty easy to lose track of, but in fact people seem to stockpile them in their wallets and forget to clean old items out. Cards are definitely a standard way to compile information.

Also in this category is my car’s Smart Key, which is automatically detected by my car when in range and allows me to unlock the car door just by putting my hand on the handle. Another similar convenience item is the BART EZ Rider card, which can also be swiped without needing to remove it from the mini-wallet that I keep it in.

h3. Preparedness

Four different mediums for money (cash, credit cards, an ATM/bank card, and two paper checks) implies an extremely well developed economy where the exchange of cash for material goods has become both extremely complicated in its excessiveness and oversimplified in process. Depending on what one is looking to purchase, one method of payment may be more appropriate than another and some institutions have rules about accepting this but not that. For an individual to be carrying all variations of payment at the same time suggests a need to be prepared (or at least feel prepared) for any situation in which one may be required to “buy” themselves out of the crisis.

A freshly purchased blank notebook and palm sized moleskin, along with a variety of pencils and pens, have two associations. By keeping such items, we place value on information and – especially – the task of giving it a permanent form. At the same time, we demonstrate distrust of the functionality of our own human brains. We acknowledge that our memories are fallible and that we are not always able to remember all things we hear or see reliably and accurately, so we are more comfortable in writing/noting down the things that will be important to recall later.

h3. Communication

There is only one item that ends up falling into this category, but it implies a whole boatload of possibilities. My cell phone (which happens to also function as a pretty decent camera in brightly lit areas) contains a list of friends, family, and other contacts I deem important enough to merit storing their phone numbers. This single item suggests a dire need to be connected with other people, or at the very least a need for the ability to become connected to any of the people stored in the address book. Conversely, as the item is left on all the time and only turned silent during meetings (i.e. class time!), the cell phone indicates a willingness to be contacted by others, to be available to their queries and concerns.

I find it interesting that I actually make very little use of my cell phone, and yet I feel rather vulnerable without it. Just having the ability to contact others goes a long way in making me feel more secure. The fact that the cell phone has become an increasingly common item for everyone to carry around is telling of the sort of society we are becoming: increasingly dependent on nearly instant access to just about anyone.

My messenger bag also comes with a pocket especially for a cell phone, which is something that many bags are doing these days, making it easy to access when it needs to be answered.

h3. Workaholism

The laptop suggests that our society values technical proficiency and that we enjoy widespread technology that is relatively advanced and available to us at all times. The portability also implies that people value the ability to get work (and play) done anywhere and everywhere we might find ourselves. The power adapter suggests that it is not unusual, or that individuals are at least prepared, to spend extended hours away from wherever home is and will want to keep busy for the duration.

The iPod shuffle, another increasingly common technology item in society, can mean a number of possible things. One idea might be that people use music to avoid from feeling idle when walking or waiting. Another is the distaste for silence and requiring music to fill it in. Yet another theory is the desire to isolate oneself from unknown others: a stranger is much less likely to approach and make small talk with you if you are wearing those signature white ear buds. (Here’s a paradox in the making: we are tightening the bonds with those we consider friends while simultaneously increasing the gap with those we want no connection with.)

My Inventory and what it doesn't say about the world!

This is a visualization that encapsulates how I'm thinking about the objects in my immediate surroundings in relation to the world I inhabit and move through.

I tried to employ a system of color and proximity to the body to informationally display how these objects relate in terms of use and relation to interaction with the body.

No earth shattering realizations there except that I decided to add some terms to the ‘keywords-that-describe-inventory’.. well Inventory!

Some that I particularly like are Superstition and Relevance, a third favorite is Opacity.

Superstition: I hold a rock in my bag to bring me luck. It's also a memory holder; it's a ssociated with stories about being in a place where it got picked up and recontextualised in others it traveled to. It's an irrational object.

Relevance: since I'm split between two worlds I carry things that I inherit from engaging with them. Although, they're persitient objects with actual functions, they're irrelevant without their context. eg. keys, ID ...

Opacity: a black container such as a bag that holds objects of value fades into the background, invisible.

(For the full resolution, right click and save)


Ala-Diab-Inventory.jpg

Inventory Analysis Presentation

I uploaded the Power Point presentation file of my analysis. If you download the file, please click the button below.

Download file

Analysis of things I carry with me

Analysis of things I carry with me

for CTIN 532

• Appearance – 23 items of clothing, make up, accessories. 4 kinds of lipstick, gloss, balm, etc. 3 perfumes, 2 scented lotions. Might need to change or refresh appearance throughout the day. Indicates that society has standards and expectations for ornamentation and appearance.

• Just in case items – band-aids, shout wipes, pain killers, tampons, etc…. it’s necessary to carry things that there is only a slim likelihood that we’ll need or use. This indicates that there are certain minor dangers in our environment that might be harmful, and these items offer protection and remedy.

• Money – the wallet is full of club cards, items with little to no utility or purpose. They serve as a reminder of where to spend money. I also carry 5 different kinds of money (cash, credit, debit, etc..), as there are many opportunities to spend money, and each may accept only certain kinds of currency.

• Supplemental memory – laptop, iphone, USB drive, business cards, journal all store information that we might need to recall at any point in the day.

• Weather – glasses, sunglasses, cleaning kit, sweater. We need light protection from the elements. These items are more about comfort than about protection from danger, Although the sunglasses protect from harmful UVA/UVB rays.

• Sustenance – tea in travel mug, granola bar, gum. We are mobile creatures and carry food with us. There might not be places or opportunities to stop and eat.

• Variety – there are at least two of every kind of thing, signifying a glut of choices and things; also 2 kinds of id, 5+ kinds of money may signify a lack of security or confidence in our society. When we're asked to identify ourselves, we're often asked for 2 forms of id. We carry extras in anticipation that things might not work.

• Garbage – Almost every item, or daily transaction has a disposable element that generates waste – chewing gum, food wrappers, receipts, parking tickets, disposable containers, etc. There is an overwhelming amount of disposable waste in our daily lives. It’s only appropriate to dispose of these things in designated trash or recycling bins, which is not always convenient. Hence, this garbage ends up in my bag.

Society, You, and Your Personal Belongings

(This is a response to the CTIN 532 Inventory Homework assignment, http://interactive.usc.edu/members/peggy/archives/009175.html)

Seeing as this is a blog post, it is going to be more ‘bloggy’ than my actual presentation. First off, I think it is silly to assume you can get a complete picture of a society by the items one person carries on them. Even the items of Average Smoe is only a picture of the world of Average Smoe. I’ll agree that it gives you a picture of part of society, particularly (for us) a slice of the Electronically-Advantaged Graduate Student. We only had items with us that had to do with our daily lives at school. I mean, books and games are a big part of my culture and I had neither on me. And for the world, TV is a supreme beast of our (or at least America’s) culture and I doubt any of us had a portable TV on us. I don’t applaud the strong presence of TV, don’t get me wrong, but you can’t deny its sickly grip on everything.

Anyhoo, I’m getting off topic here. Plus making myself a wee-bit of a hypocrite (I like to watch *some* tv after all. And play games on it! Squee! TV, you’re my bestest friend, let us never fight again!)

First comment will be that I was surprised, when you itemize everything on oneself, how much more you carry in your pockets than your backpack. Although having small things like credit cards, more credit cards, individual keys, etc, count while not counting each individual sheet of paper in a notebook may not be a fair. But whatever :^) All I can say is the wallet is a wealth of items, as I am sure the happy thief is aware of.

And now onto the actual assignment.

I’m not sure how to talk about climate as clothes would be a good indicator of this but... with A/C it totally screws up your results. I would say, since I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, that it was 70-80 degrees out (knowing my taste for clothing, I am not sure what another person could say about it. For example, I used to wear shorts in Massachusetts when there was four feet of snow outside. I was teased about it, but anyway, the point is that one would have assumed the temperature to be toasty and warm when in reality it wasn’t and I was just being a silly (and possibly lazy?) girl. Dang, this is a run on parenthetical statement of doom. To summarize: it is difficult to tell the overall climate from clothing without knowing a little bit about the person wearing it. This is why we do giant studies on thousands of people and don’t just look at one person as the overall average is generally fairly correct). Back to the point, with A/C (and heating) I can’t tell you anything about the real climate. It could have been below freezing or above melting outside but I’d be dressed for where I’d be spending the majority of my life - in climate controlled wonderfulness. Which is maybe the point. But there is no way to tell I was dressing for A/C and not the climate of the location just from the items I was carrying with me. So I feel I must say that my clothes tells me that the day the inventory was taken, I expected to spend my time in a moderate temperature and a dry climate (no umbrella, raincoat, etc, so rain was not expected - again, I either live in a dry place, had a weather forecast, or was spending my time indoors).

I do have some interesting, and true, observations from my belongings, although again, I stress that had I not known that the overall judgement from these belongings were generally accurate I would have to have my caveat that a single sample is not an accurate description of the whole group).

I had $2 bucks and 3 credit cards and a debit card in my wallet. I think this points to the culture I live in to be a fairly cashless one, and I’d have to agree. How often do we use cash for anything? Seems to me, we don’t if we can help it. I theorize that it is the natural evolution of our society in an attempt to not make us liars when we tell beggars we don’t have any cash on us. :^) In reality, this is more likely because physical money is loosing its worth, and a natural result of the transition from gold -> money representing the gold ‘in the bank’ -> money representing digital money ‘in the bank’ -> the digital money.

The cell phone is the most interesting ‘cultural-item’ I had with me. It gives us the ability to talk to anyone else out there in the world with a (working) phone, no matter where in the world they are - at any time. This is supreme access! The fact that I, and every other person (I think...) in the class has one just shows how prevalent a cellphone is in our society. Indirectly, it also speaks of our affluence as we can all afford the evil service fees. So, we’re all middle-class and above people, I’d say.

The computer is another thing we all had on us. If that doesn’t speak of affluence or horrible indebtedness, I don’t know what does. Anyway, the computer speaks volumes about accessibility of knowledge in our society. You, again, have to extrapolate beyond the mere ‘computer’ object and actually go in to its usage, but I think it is fair to consider the internet as a derivative of the computer. But you can also consider the past were only the wealthy and the priests could read and write, and now any of us could write a book! But back to the internet - anything we want to know, be it how to make chocolate dipped ants to how a nuclear reactor works, is at our fingertips (although I hope we take into consideration the source of such knowledge to gauge its validity).

The fact my backpack has a special pouch for the computer and a little strap to keep it tucked in and safe leads me to conclude that our society is so computer-centric that we make special considerations for it. By a company mass producing backpacks with such things means that computers are very prevalent in our society, as is our desire to keep them with us and keep them safe.

My bottled water (and lunch, although it was in the fridge, I still brought it with me to school) shows that we are a mobile people, going far away from a source of food and water and hence having to bring some with us. This of course disregards restaurants, cheap/forgetful people who skip lunch, and stuff like that. But if I were to look at the items themselves, this is a conclusion I would draw. I would also say that the fact I had to bring bottled water with me means I expected to find no source of drinkable water anywhere near me, so this would mean that clean water is probably an issue in our society. In truth, drinkable water should be a better term. Why does the fountain water taste soooo bad? Minerals in the source or chemicals they put in it to clean it. Either way, there is no source of drinkable water for me at ZML unless its in a packaged little bottle from some random town’s water reservoir.

We are also a society consumed with fear. Sure, anyone can say this, and it would still be true. But what items, dear public, do I possess to draw this conclusion from? I had no weapons on me (even my leatherman knife was in my closet), no mace or anything like that. What I had was a set of keys. Sure, I’ll admit it is perhaps exaggerating a tad, but we all lock our cars, lock our houses. We are afraid that we will be robbed in our absence (in fact, we generally lock these things even when we are in them, but I have no object that can point to this). We seek to protect that which is ours (hence my screen protector for my beloved mac and its hard cover case). Not that its bad - we’d never have a society that would be free of people breaking in and robbing stuff (note though that locked doors hardly deter a determined thief, but it does give us peace of mind and discourage the standard thieves to go find someone with an unlocked door). But look at how our technology is making better and better locks to safeguard us - my car key is backwards, a rectangle with a center part carved down to make it unique and un-duplicatable by standard means. My apartment key is electronic. No longer are standard keys (and their locks) what we depend on anymore.

Then there is my little CPR kit I’ve carried with me since High School. It contains gloves and a little rectangle to use when doing mouth-to-mouth so you don’t get any nasty germs when saving someone’s life. I mean, again, its good, there are diseases out there you can catch with blood and saliva contact. But I am so safety-conscious I have it with me. This also speaks of society as a whole - we are aware of diseases and we have lots of them. It also speaks on how connected we are as a people - diseases and illnesses that were constrained to one part of the world are now found anywhere. While before we only had to deal with stuff from our climate or whatever, we now have all (or at least many.... and we made some new ones ourselves to boot) the diseases and illness of the world (mad cow, avian flu, apparently still the Bubonic Plague, etc) to contend in.

And somehow my conclusion from looking at my inventory is that we live in a world that is actually really small, with the use of our technology in a mental sort of way with phones and computers, but also in a physical sense with planes and such (sadly, I didn’t have a plane ticket with me. I did have a receipt from a airport restaurant though, does that count?). It’s like we have made ourselves all squeeze into a two-bedroom apartment even though there are like 50 of us. Sure, I can find out what all of us have to say on what to have for dinner, but such close company makes me think you are all giving me diseases and are going to steal my crap the second I turn my back. And it actually does increase the chances of my getting sick exponentially (although I don’t take into consideration medicine, as in reality we live a lot longer now than a hundred or especially a thousand years ago, despite the increase of exposure to diseases). Yay!

Although I reiterate that looking at one day’s belongings for one person is never an accurate description of the society that the person lives in. And one must know something about the items and the society they belong to in order to draw any correct assumptions. Although with many samples you can draw some conclusions, but how 'correct' they are may never be determined (of a society you know nothing about).

Thank you for reading all this!

For Week 3:

Declare (POST) your world:
1. Name it.
Provide a brief description including
broad intention
genre (in the sense of literary genre: fantasy, sci-fi, history, biography, non-fiction...)
media (game, sculpture, installation, architectural analsysis, monument, interactive narrative etc)


2. Place it:
Describe (and sketch) the external boundaries.
Describe (annotate) its context, external and internal forces.
(What is outside those boundaries?) Where does your world reside?

3. Define your audience.
Are you designing for a solitary or group experience?
Are you offering a first, second or third person experience?
Begin to define the agency your reader/viewer/visitor will have in your world.
What do you intend for your visitor?

4. Motivation
Briefly, what is your motivation to create this world, to create this experience for your visitors?

World Building / Space Bibliography

INTENTION

Word for the week = INTENTION
The Spaces Around You
As you move around this week, think about the spaces you enter in terms of the designer's intention:
Was this space (or object or tool) designed for its current use?
If not, how was it transformed to serve another purpose? What are the clues (visual and otherwise)?
Were any compromises made or did the original space provide useful/unusual features?

Your world proposal:
Set an intention for your world design, taking into account your motivation, i.e. your intention as a designer and student as well as considering your viewer's experience.
As a designer, what is the broad intention of your space or world?

A World of Definitions

worlddefs.jpg
"world." Kernerman English Multilingual Dictionary. K Dictionaries Ltd. 01 Sep. 2008.
cited in Dictionary.com

Week 1 CTIN532

This is your class blog
Please check it regularly and use it to post assignments, and any observations / musings relating to class and space. (i.e If you happen to wander into a space that was originally designed for a completely different purpose - use this space to record your observations about it..)

WEEK 1 ASSIGNMENT

1. ATLAS
Begin thinking about the world and the space you will design for it this term.
Begin with intention. Are you:
Creating a setting to experience/deepen/cause emotion? (Memorial/ sadness/grief/memory, Utopia/hope, Dystopia/despair, Monuments/Pride..
Modeling/simulating/exposing an inaccessible region? (Visualization, Exploration)
Facilitating training / access / information gathering / meeting? (Beacons, Negotiation Spaces, etc)
Analyzing land (physical or metaphorical) use? (Public/Private)
Creating a setting for a narrative, play, challenge, competition, cooperation, negotiation?

You will commit to an idea by Week 3, September 10th.

2. INVENTORY
Work on your inventories. What do the things you have (had) with you this morning say about the world we live in?
Address the environment and landscape in terms of climate, ecology, physics, dimensionality, mobility, knowledge systems, access, identity, economy and culture. What can you add to this list? How do they overlap? Represent your analysis in any media, but it must include some written text and indicate relations and value of the qualities depicted. Please post a version of your analysis and prepare for an in-class presentation for next week, September 3rd.

3. SPATIAL ANALYSIS
Week 3: September 10th: Brandi Wilcox / Cynthia Nie / Bryan Jaycox / Ala’ Diab
Week 4: September 17th: Peter Van Dyke / Taiyoung Ryu / Ian Dallas
Week 5: Septmeber 24th: Nahil Sharkasi / Lulu Cao / Amanda Tasse

4. Reading: Jared Diamond excerpt for discussion next week

Syllabus (note: new version with dates for FLATWORLD changed)
Atlas
Spatial Analysis
Jared Diamond excerpt

::poke::

Just a test post to ensure that crossposting to 532 works.

08CTIN532

This is the 08 CTIN532 Class Blog