Ethan Kennerly

I was going to comment on each person's blog/thesis site individually, but as I scrolled through the entries on the Thesis Preparation blog, this became a daunting and intractable task. Noone (not me either) has a recent post whereat comments may be posted. So, I'll just make a post here based on the 5-10 minute presentation from yesterday's class before the weekend erases my impressions.

These are short impressions for short presentations. To start off with, I personally would benefit from studying each in detail, rather than making a short-attention span traversal of 11 projects in 110 minutes. In my personal opinion, such rapid fire presentation and comments leads to hasty and shallow feedback, low investment by both the presenter and the audience.*** I apologize if I criticize something that you already have, but just didn't have time to delve into within the 5-10 minute constraint.

Here they are, not with the title given by their presenter, but with a word that I remember about the project; I mean all of them respectfully as feedback on what echoed in the mind of one listener. Roughly in the order of what I remember of the presentations.

Jamie Antonisse - "Story collector"

+ The prototype is fully interactive and testable.

+ The mechanics combined adventure game key/lock mechanics and set collection.

- In the current incarnation, I'm intimidated by the time investment-to-emotional payoff ratio of playing.

- I'm not yet associating the mechanics with any story.

RJ Layton - "Walk to the death chamber"

+ You evoked a psychoanalytical experience that reminds me of Timothy Leary's Book of the Dead audio recording, or one of the death pseudo-rituals of Carlos Casteneda, or shamanistic traditions from ancient times to modern LSD trips.

+ The prototype was rehearsable.

- Partly, because of the identical user interface for each decision (yet disregarding the paper prototype's construction), the consequence of the decisions felt like one of those folded paper flowers, capricious.

- As presented, I suspect that you'll face a combinatorial explosion of assets that plague branching narratives.

Andrea Rodriguez - "Cardinal poses"

+ The cardinal colors, symmetrical architecture, ritualistic compass, and mysterious user expectation evoked a mystical, almost religious, mood.

+ The prototype clearly indicated a space and an artifact.

- If dance is essential to your thesis, I did not associate this with dance.

- As presented, the technology of interaction seems nebulously defined.

Maya Churi - "Face/displace"

+ Familiar faces are visually and socially engaging.

+ The prototype clearly showed an example configuration.

- As presented, I wasn't sure what my motivation as a user would be to interact with the piece. Many ideas were brought up, but nothing stuck in my mind.

Mike Rossmassler - "Time sink"

+ Novel mechanics of space-time.

+ The visual cue helped me correlate avatar time-rate to virtual environment interaction.

- The presented prototype did not evoke the visual cue.

Andre Clark - "Panorama stick figure war"

+ The stick figures provided entertainment in their own form. I had fun with a shadow puppet play.

- The mechanics of flag capture felt ill-defined. Overall, I wasn't convinced what depth of tactics the simulation would support.

Al Yang - "Casual MMO team alchemy"

+ The focus on casual MMOs made sense.

+ Research was authoritative.

- I didn't understand what the mechanics were, so I wasn't confident they'd be more fun than the mainstream class models.

Jack McMahan - "Sound sniper"

- There's no protype in the core modality: audition, so if someone asked, I wouldn't be able to say what the audial experience is. Even a manual rehearsal or recorded sound would provide a low-fidelity aural experience.

Diana Hughes - "T-shirt display"

+ The diagram of the t-shirt drew my eyes in to its technically-motivated grid.

- I haven't heard what emotional or social problem the t-shirt solves better than an alternative portable device in a way that motivates me to wear one.

- I can't currently imagine an example of the user experience.

*** Looking forward, I've had positive experience with a class that focused on each project for at least half an hour each and required the presenter to have submitted documentation 3 days before class, which the was class was required to read before discussion. Taking turns, only three works were due each class.