At present we are two weeks into term two. Let's have a run through what term one was about.
In term one we came up with the original idea focusing on the key question "How can physical interaction interact with virtual animation?" In answering this question we talked about the audience's relationship with the screen and the feeling of separation between the world on screen and the physical existence of the audience. To be honest I'm not sure if this separation is a key theme to the project. I think it may give a reason to asking the question, but not necessarily the soul or substance of the project. I think that will come along as we move along in making the artefact.
The artefact itself is composed of three components. The first is a non-traditional interface with which you will interact with the content on screen. This is the set of mechanical parts such as gears and levers. The second is the "bridge" where the input from the mechanics go through and transformed into some kind of output an animation on screen, that is the third part. Basically, the bridge is the communication between mechanics (part 1) and the animation (part 3).
A later development was to craft the mechanics from ice and using the different states of water throughout the three different parts. However, we were so fixated on the idea of the ice and states of water that it stunted the branching of ideas and possible developments.
There were also several original intentions that have now been changed:
-Having all three of us working on all three aspects of the project. We tried this so that each one of us would know clearly what's going on with all three parts. However, I think this stunted our growth because we were all interested in doing a different part of the project and even on the same part we had our own ideas on how to approach them. Thus, ideas clashed and didn't quite match up. It felt unnatural. Now we have split into our areas of interest. We all have our own main focus while we will also pitch in on what the other group members are doing in their own part. Jenny's main focus would be CAD and fashioning the mechanical parts. I will be focusing on the bridge--this means Arduino and a bit of programming. Finally, Edrian will be on the animation part of the project.
-The changing states of water as a key idea. I can't speak for other group members on this, but I think we were focusing so much on the states of water that it was stopping us from developing further. The idea was festering like bacteria in still water, it wasn't as fresh or as inspirational when we first thought of it. Motivation went down. I felt it was also pulling us further and further away from the question we wanted to answer about interaction and animation. As a result we have now stripped away this restriction, all considerations on what to put into each part, and so on that we can think more on what this project is about rather than what it physically is.
-Video blogs as documentation. Seeing as nothing much was happening there wasn't a lot to document. However, I did do some small experiments and I found that video documentation wasn't doing it for me. I find documenting on my blog (like now) and on paper in journals is better for me. It allows for greater detail and doesn't require me to convert or summarise my written work into a short video. I feel it fits how I work much better compared to video documentation. In terms of group work we will still do group video blogs every once in a while, but individually I will be doing my documentation on my blog and in my journals.
Overall term one didn't see much content being generated because we were being held back by a restrictive idea and certain ways of working that didn't actually work for us. In this term we have split up each part of the project to work with on our own. The intention is to get each part working on its own independently. We're not going to think about how it's going to all fit together yet in favour of developing the parts individually first. I predict that because all three of us are so different in our ways of thinking, interests, and skill sets, each part that we work on individually will have diverse personalities. Especially because at this stage we're not thinking about joining them together yet. It might be seen as a disadvantage or maybe even a problem, but on the flip side it could be very interesting if we still go along with this in the second semester. Since each part will likely be very different it could be interesting to see how we can combine them and what we can come up with.
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