Wednesdays

In Class Critique

Aug 23

Negroponte

Murray 1

Ciotat Station

Great Train Robbery

How do we think about communication and representation? How do we think about the task of information design? what is a medium?

Aug 28

Ong, chapters 1-4

Web page with list (or links to) surviving oral forms and/or images of early written artifacts. Give examples of conventions that give order to these particular oral or visual communicaton. (For example, grouping things in threes, writing from left to right.)

Sept 6

Homer, The Odyssey: Cyclops incident

Murray chapter 5 (note section on Cyclops, p. 137-140)

Using any medium you like (except homeric epic!), sketch out a story or game version of the Cyclops story. Change the story tto suit a different culture or to reflect different cultural values, e.g. a Christian hero of the middle ages, a female hero of the late 20th century, a cowboy hero, etc.

Notes on Medium, Code

Sept 13

Murray 2

Unisequential, multisequential, multiform narratives

Notes on Transmission, Genre

Sept 20

View Casablanca.

Read Eco on Casablanca, pp 197-212

Read Murray on Casablanca game

Make a web page or Director project or storyboard illustrating the representational conventions employed in a single scene of Casablanca

(this could be an abbreviated version, with longer or revised version for next week's project.)

Class led by Prof. Robert Kolker

Sept 27

Murray 3

Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think", Atlantic Monthly, July 1945

Project 1: Foregrounding Representational Conventions

Use the digital medium (web page, director project) to present and critique a representational artifact in any medium. Focus on making clear the conventions of representation.

4 properties of digital media

Do new media make us smarter?

Properties of Digital Media

Janet's Notes 3

Oct 4

Describe an immersive experience that you have experienced(it could involve a digital artifact but it doesn't have to). Was the sense of immersion pleasurable or not?what ended it? Was the experience interrupted? What deepened your sense of immersion? What disrupted your sense of immersion? Your description can be written as a paragraph or it can be a Web page or Director project.

Discussion of immersion as an experience and how it is created.

Immersion

Oct 11

Create a visual and interactive object on a web page (such as a rollover that swaps images) that illustrates or evokes the experience Eco describes as "hyperreality". The artifact you create must not have any words and it must display some behavior in response to user input.

War of the Worlds excerpt

Boundary Problems

Oct 18

Murray 5 Agency

Project Critique

(extra time needed for meetings)

Agency; Scripting the interactor

Oct 25

No class this week:

Holiday

Play role playing game.

No class this week:

Holiday

Play role playing game.

No class this week:

Holiday

Play role playing game.

No class this week:

Holiday

Play role playing game.

Nov 1

List the conventions that made the game work (if it did). Where were these conventions drawn from? How did you know what to expect? How did you know what to do?

Hand in the answers on WebX or Co-Web

Think about: an improvement to the game

Extra credit: Make up an original Casablanca role playing game

in class, we design an improved version, based on new scenario

Scripting the interactor with culture, genre, convention

Active creation of belief

Nov 8

PID (handout)

Imagine that you are making a database to contain everything you know about your three closest friends. No entry in any one field can be more than 9 words. What are all the fields that would appear in that database?

Create a mock "front end" to the data base either for entering or retrieving the data. Include representational conventions that make clear the absurdity of the task. Can you make the task seem ominous? Can you make the task seem whimsical?

In class:

After you write this list, you will be matched with two other members of the class and compare your lists. Make a composite list that captures all the categories.

Data Abstraction:

databases, field,

attribute / value pair

relational data base

Nov 15

A classification scheme for the items in your kitchen drawer or top of your closet or stored in your garage.

A critique of what your classification makes visible or invisible

Are all systems of classification culturally biased in some way? Do they hide things as well as reveal them

Nov 22

(day before Thanksgiving)

Remember the Thanksgiving taxonomy due next week.

Nov 29

Project 3 Ontology of a Thanksgiving dinner (solo project)

Make an ontology of all the activities and entities that make up a thanksgiving dinner. For example, the turkey is an object with attributes like how-cooked? (raw, overdone, just right; stuffed/unstuffed), your relatives are also objects with associated "methods" like "cuts turkey" or "argues about sports" etc. Collectively the system captures all of your knowledge about a thanksgiving dinner. (For students from other cultural traditions, you may choose another event, such as an IDT seminar or another family holiday celebration.)

Taxonomies, Ontologies

Refinement of one of the 3 Projects