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LCC6211 Digital Aesthetics (Spring
2001)
Class Hours :
Monday 12-2 Lecture/Full Group Meeting
Wednesday 12-1 or Wednesday 1-2 Section Meeting
Office Hours :
Monday and Wednesday 2-3 or by appointment
Aims of the course :
To ground the design of information spaces and
procedural environments in clear principles of design, based on
an understanding of the computer as not merely the inheritorof
formats and conventions drawn from older media, but as a medium
of representation with its own affordances. To develop the designer's
stance, in which every individual design problem is seen from
the vantage point of inventing the medium itself -- developing
the digital environment as a coherent and evocative medium of
expression. The two foci of the course are information spaces
and procedural environments. Among the topics covered:
data abstraction, segmentation and granularity, encapsulation,attribute/value
pairs, archives, metadata, databases, controlled vocabularies,
searches, and navigation; and interactivity, scripting the interactor,
agency, instantiation, modularity, conditional branching, objects
and behavior, inheritance, state.
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Readings
The text for the course is Janet Murray's Inventing
the Medium: Principles of Interactive Design
-- a mss in progress.Draft sections and outlines will be handed
out in conjunction with lecture topics.
In addition, the following books are highly recommended:
Terry Winograd Bringing Design to Software
(1996) paperback Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201854910, Chapters
2,3, 4, 6, 7
Michael J. Hernandez Database Design for Mere
Mortals (1997) paperback Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201694719
Chapters 1-5, 7,9, 12,14
Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, Information
Architecture for the World Wide Web O'Reilly paperback O'Reilly
& Associates; ISBN: 1565922824 (Chapters 1-5, 8)
Jennifer E. Rowley, Organizing Knowledge.
paperback: Hampshire En gland:: Gower 1992(2nd Edition) ISBN 1-85742-00505
. Chapters 12-18
Donald Norman The Design of Everyday Things
(1990) paperback Doubleday Books; ISBN: 0385267746 (Chapters
1-4)
Phil Gross and Jason Roberts, Director8 Demystified
(2000) Peachpit Press ISBN 0-201-70920 1. especially good
for explaining Director's faulty design in terms of more helpful
computational concepts
Lingo in a Nutshell (O'Reilly series).
Reference book for coding.
Recommendations on an XML text to come....
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Requirements
1. Class participation
including regular attendance,
active participation in discussion,
constructive contribution to design critiques. 15%
2. Project I Flag Controversy 25%
3. Project II Innovator/Innovation NOW
OPTIONAL
4. Project III Character Assignments (multipart)
50%
5. Overall Ambition and Originality 5-10%
6. Helpfulness, resourcefulness, contribution
to course functioning 5% bonus points
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Schedule
| week |
date |
|
Read/View |
Submit for Wed
class: |
| 1 |
1/8
1/10
|
Designer's Stance
Affordances of the Medium
Abstraction and categorization
|
|
Project I begins
Abstraction Exercise: Tuesday's NYTimes and
AJC web and paper.
7 words that contain it all
|
| 2 |
(1/15)
1/17
|
Monday Holiday
Categorizing, Labeling, Collocation
|
Web,Library, Lexis/Nexis
|
3 representative online artifacts on issue
of State Flag Controversy, drawn from online newspapers and
Lexis/Nexis; declare groups for project I
|
| 3 |
1/22
1/24
|
Granularity,
Metadata, Structured Documents
|
handouts
design
examples
|
Overview of State Flag Controversy, showing
categorization and labeling schema; Display of same item of
information in multiple contexts;
|
| 4 |
1/29
1/31
|
no class |
handouts
responses
|
(individual
assignment) same item displayed at 2 or more levels of granularity,
with metadata at each level: post by 2pm Wednesday to <yoursite>/pid/week4/index.html |
| 5 |
2/5
2/7
|
Review
of Information Spaces
|
Review
assignments from Week 4 |
|
| 6 |
2/12
2/14
|
Abstraction of behaviors
Eliciting behaviors with props
Visibility of behaviors and states
|
Review and critique class
projects
|
Project
1: Reinventing Information Spaces (group or individual)
Post by wednesday 9am to <yoursite>/
pid/p1/index.html
|
| 7 |
2/19
2/21no class
|
Simulation, emergence, resource allocation,
timestep
|
Sims
Review Director
|
Sims assignment to come...
|
| 8 |
2/26
2/28
|
Characters
as Objects with Behavior |
Look at Sarah Cooper's "The
Contingent Kiss"
|
Sketch a better Sims
<yoursit>/pid/sims
|
|
3/5
---> Georgia Tech Spring Break Week
|
| 9 |
3/12
3/14
|
State,
instantiation, variables, scripting interactor to induce change,
making change visible |
Individual
Objects |
Project II. Characters with behaviors
Design a character with a behavior that is
elicited by the interactor's action or use of a "scripting"
prop
II_a. Make a character in Director
with no images, only buttons, textfields, text ; The button
can represent any user action, such as a prop that can be
manipulated (e.g. dog food), a particular action performed
with a prop ("give dogfood to dog"); a verbal behavior
performed by user as player or other character (say "bad
dog")
|
| 10 |
3/19
3/21
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Variables; State; Replay
|
Individual Places |
II_b. Add images to your character,
and make the images and actions satisfying by introducing
a variable that changes with the interactor's intervention.
Implement the variable as a variable in Director associated
with an cast member swap within a sprite.
Script interactor to induce change in variable;
make change visible
|
| 11 |
3/26
(3/28)
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Replay and abstraction techniques for variation;
branching, state, substitution system
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Project IIC due on Wednesday 3/28
Janet *will* be in class (contrary to earlier announcement)
|
Project IIc
Using a character and props drawn from the
previous assignments, design a world in which something can
happen in multiple interesting ways, a world that invites
Replay.
|
| 12 |
4/2
4/4
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Game Structures for time, space, state, interactor:
Time steps, rooms, global variables, state
of the game, model of interactor,discourse model
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Wednesday: Present Preliminary design
(storyboard of variants)
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Project II_d Prelims:
The last 4 weeks focus on combining multiple
characters and places within a common narrative world.
Collective Place with Characters with State
with Variant Events
|
| 13 |
4/9
4/11
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Objects, class, inheritance, messages
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Wednesday: present
collective architecture |
Project III collective
architecture presentations |
| 14 |
4/16
4/18
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Presentations
Presentations
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Monday-Wednesday: demos
|
Project III DEMO
VERSION for NMC opening April 20 |
| 15 |
4/23
4/25
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Review
Presentations
|
Wednesday: final version
due |
Final version of
Project III |
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