What Do You Notice? What Do You Care to Notice?

Yesterday, I presented my Communication Design 2 experiential space. The assignment was to translate one medium into another – I was asked to translate an interactive website (tenbyten.org) into an exhibit/experiential space. The twist was that I also had to convey my point of view as how this pertains to me as a Media Designer.

Getting to the presentation seemed like quite a journey. Sketches, exhibit space investigations, more sketches, mini mock-ups, writing and rewriting my process and ambitions, scanning, reading, searching, editing, designing, printing, cutting, wrapping…And through this all I rehearsed in my mind what this whole process meant to me, and I had to take note of the changes emerging in my understanding of the entire experience.

About the Exhibit
The exhibit was titled “What Do You Notice? What Do You Care to Notice?” I wanted people to see how the affordances of a 3-D space could allow people to feel more engaged about the news. I attempted to translate the flat space of the news (particularly in newsprint and web-based news) into an actual space. I also attempted to convey how the physical engagement with the news articles could assist in developing a closer, more personal experience with context that often seems so distant from many of our own lives. The exhibit was meant to also redefine the intentions of traditional headlines. If a headine’s purpose is to catch a reader’s attention, how can scale, context and tactility do the same, or better? The experiential space opened up opportunities to think about other ways to push this idea further. What if these cubes were digital? What if every side changed out every hour? What if you could sit on these cubes? E-paper? OLED screens perhaps? And where would a space such as this exist successfully? And can we, as designers, compel people to interact with them? How would such a space change conversations around current events, or change social interactions with one another and with objects in space? The questions are endless, but that only means there are more possibilities to push this further so it might one day (cross my fingers) exist in the real world.

How might one enable the viewer to continue to explore the message beyond the experiential space?…by giving away takeaway cards!

These were printed on newsprint and mounted on cardstock. The flipside said: “We are captured by the provocative. Our ambitions and interests allow us to delve deeper, beyond our curious first impressions. We seek to know how the world is evolving around us. But how do we seek for answers?”

This side of the box focused on significant words pulled from the headlines.

People were free to move the cubes around in order to configure and display their own point of view

The Process has been a B&#%$!

photo: a mock-up idea for my exhibition space. Be on the lookout for the real thing in a few weeks!

What’s your point of view? What message do you want your audience to leave with? How does light play into this? What size would be effective? Are you incorporating interactive technologies? How are you going to get your audience to understand the initial idea? Where are you putting it? Why are you putting it there? What materials are you going to use? What’s the form? Why that form? Why not this form? What research have you done? How does that matter? Is there sound? Color? Smell? Tactility? Why? Why not? What’s the spirit? What will happen? What do you hope will happen? Why? How do you know people will react that way? Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

How am I going to get people to understand?

ARGH!

Communication Design 2 (an MDP Required Course) is mentally grueling for me right now. I have been asked to reinterpret an interactive web site (www.tenbyten.org) into an exhibition space. The twist is that this exhibit space is not a literal interpretation but rather one that clearly includes my point of view and my objectives – an interpretation that reflects my thought process and my firmness in my experience.

For the past few weeks, I’ve had to struggle with answering all the questions above…and then some! I think the most important one that I’ve been thinking about so far is: When it comes time for me to pursue my thesis, how will I deliver a solid argument – one that differs from the rest? And how is this project helping me understand how to prepare myself?

I know this question can be answered in hundreds of ways. Each one of us in the course has struggled to interpret and translate our initial media into a new media form. I know I’ve struggled to find a balanced interpretation that is a reflection of my beliefs, but foremost a catalyst for conversation and self-reflection.

The process for this project has been somewhat grueling because I couldn’t control when exactly I was going to reach a miniature epiphany or just a huge wall. There were even moments that I thought I was on the right track, only to find out later that I needed to go back to an earlier sketch or veer off down another path of ideas. I think most of us are programmed to think everything must go forward and onward in order to reach a goal, but moving through a process that is non-linear from start to finish, that has twists and turns and reverse actions, can also help you reach your goals as well. That’s what the design process is all about. Oh, the process!…it’s been a struggle…it’s been a blast.