Week 9
Time has a funny way of working itself into almost everything. Our daily lives are so rushed, we're constantly moving and in a hurry. Living in New York, especially, made me realize how fast-paced we expect our lives to be. I'd often find myself walking down streets as if I'm rushing - even though I wasn't late or in a hurry.
Our relationship with time has definitely changed since our lives transitioned online. It's easy to get sucked into the internet - one can spend hours scrolling through Instagram without realizing or fall down a YouTube rabbit hole. And thanks to the internet, the more globalized the world becomes, the harder it is for us to manage time.
Sometimes, minutes can feel like hours and hours can feel like minutes. Time is a concept too complex for us to truly understand. And as humans, we are often at the mercy of time.
Week 8
I remember reading about Google’s Material Design Guidelines when they first came out (2015, if I recall correctly). It was a revolutionary way of thinking at the time - people hadn’t really considered how we interact with to all three dimensions on a two dimensional plane. As the digital world expanded, I think it was imperative that we learnt how to translate our knowledge of the physical world onto the 2-dimensional screen. Material Design was the closest set of rules that modeled our
real world and let us truly interact with “material” as if it were in space.
Looking at these guides now, we would think that they are rather obvious. But designers studied material and our interactions with them for quite a while and took several aspects of both our behavior and object behavior into consideration
before coming up with these rules/guidelines. At the end of the day, that is a major factor in determining good design. Good design is invisible, it models the physical world so well, that sometimes you forget it was designed.
Week 7
I agree with a lot of what the author talks about in this reading. I remember reading another article that talks about how one photographer's "art" was taking photographs of other photographs. Framing them exactly the same way, such that the duplicate photograph looked exactly like the original. I think a similar concept was brought up in this reading, as well. On the web, sometimes the original work gets disregarded, it gets taken for granted and doesn't retain it's original value. The internet has a great way of manipulatiing content and taking it out of its original context.
Can artists really control the way their work is presented in that case? Does art lose it's meaning if it is an image on the web? Or does it gain some alternate, more profound meaning when almost anyone can access it? More importantly, how can an artist's voice be heard through the chaos of the web?
Week 6
"As a design strategy, it is defined by playfully designed sets of rules and conditions that stimulate collaboration between participants and lead to unpredictable outcomes."
Conditonal design focuses on process and process is also it’s main output. Its takes form of a game, with strictly defined rules. To me, web design or any form of coding is essentially "conditional design". We give the computer a set of instructions or rules to follow - and when these instructions are executed, we see the specified output, often predictable and unpredictable at the same time. The user becomes the input–– the raw material. Based on the user's actions and previously determined rules, we see an output as the product of input, process and logic.
I think that living in a digital world requires a new set of abilities and literacies. It is crucial to be able to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving or simply to play - being able to approach design playfully can be helpful in all fields, regardless of the medium, physical or digital. It will also spare us and the people viewing our work from being bored.
Week 5
"As an image disperses, it becomes poorer; every rip, every edit, uplaod and share further pushing it towards a kind of visual abstraction."
Everyday, we look at "poor" images, but we don't usually think twice about it. Images on the web now come of the format ".webP" - compressed and specifically for the web, such that it doesn't take up too much space and can load on a webpage quicker. All this, supposedly without losing quality. How does this relate to what the author is trying to say? Is the web promoting the "poor" image? Or are we simply learning to see an image for it's message/visual value? After all, language and images are for communication - and it's meaning is hindered depending on how "poor" or "rich" the image is. As the author mentioned, high-quality images have a completely different interpretation in society than low-res images.
Week 4
My Website is a Shifting House..
Nowadays, businesses and individuals have become intertwined. People want to "brand" themselves. They want to be
treated like a fully functioning company; they want to market, advertise and sell themselves. How does such a heavy reliance and need for a "personal brand" manifest in the web? Personal websites are no longer "personal" websites. Infact, sometimes they involve a whole team of people: someone to create the content, someone to design how the content looks on the page, someone to code that very design, and many more. The web was meant to connect people together through computers, but everyday, the web becomes more impersonal and distant from individuals.
My favourite part of the reading was the several different metaphors Schwulst used. The one that I resonated the most with was the "website as a plant" metaphor. Every time I design and code a website, I expect it to be perfect on the first try. Schwulst says that plants can't be rushed: we have to provide them with adequate care and slowly, they evolve. What I think is decent code today, could later be viewed at as terrible. A website is never "done", we have to be open to visit and re-visit, change content, change layouts and change our thought processes.
I realize now that our final goal while creating a website should be to code a good "structure" - to provide the right soil, water, and sunlight, that allows the website to grow over time.
Week 3
Gerstner talks about how the architects of the cathedral used a “design program” which adheres to the same constraints and
variables in order to produce different ornamental designs which feel like they belong together. Visual components can
be derived from logic and instructions; and to “design”, as Gerstner describes, is to simply pick out determining
elements and combine them. With the context of the digital world and the web, the reading made me think of generative art
and visual art derived from code. We can use a “program” that can generate millions of different permutations of posters,
logos and more, all based off rules and algorithms. After all, code is a program itself. It is ultimately giving
instructions to be executed, and simply “designing” an algorithm; and the designer is ultimately the “programmer”.
Gerstner also talks about the program as a grid, and uses it to relate to typography.
I found this part of the reading extremely interesting. Typography means to write or print using standard elements;
“to use standard elements” implies some modular relationship between such elements. This relationship is two-dimensional
and therefore typography simply means the determination of dimensions which are both horizontal and vertical; a grid.
Can design be reduced to just determining a system of working? Can we use an exclusively methodological
approach to solving design and visual problems? What happens when we remove the “pathos” from design and art?
Week 2
I think that displaying information in the form of a table is an extremely efficient way to describe data––
especially information as dense or detailed as Roma Publications’ catalog. The author mentions reading
“vertically”; however, I think when in table form, not only do we read exclusively horizontally or vertically,
we treat the information like a matrix. We subconsciously break each intersection of the row and column down
to a single cell that contains information that corresponds to it’s x and y co-ordinates. And the cell
becomes the building block of our grid, our table and our system.
How does our interaction with data on a large scale change with the web, or with computers? I’m sure we’ve saved
millions of hours and millions of human errors. But, as we gain perfection and efficiency, we lose the magic of
data and it just turns into complicated sets of numbers or words. We lose a more honest, approachable, graspable
way to understsand and present data.
After reading the article, I think we should be ready to question the impersonality of a merely technical approach to data,
and to begin designing ways to connect numbers to what they really stand for: knowledge, behaviors and people.
Week 1
How does Artificial Intelligence threaten the DIY (handmade)
nature of the web? Are we moving towards an age where all
websites are coded not by hand, but by other code?
As the internet grows, are print and digital getting more
integrated or more separated? On the one hand, I feel like
we are moving towards an exclusively digital age. Print media
is slowly losing it's value, or has digital copies. On the other
hand, I think that print and digital are now so intertwined,
we can't separate one front another. Print media is usually,
conventionally linear. While digital can be circular,
branching outward like a tree or take almost any form.