Fred Truman

Design & Code Creative

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Applications – Week 14

December 7, 2010

So here we are. Smack in the middle of finals and it was now time for my group to spend a week coming up with a concept and producing a presentation in front of our entire class in reaction to last week’s guest speakers, Water Canary. My ideas for my other finals were still a work in progress and needless to say that the timing of adding this on top of the pile couldn’t have been any worse. Immediately after the talk my group members Frankie Cheung, Anna Pinkas and Jamie Lin all got together for some drinks to discuss what we thought of the presentation given by the Water Canary representatives.

Based on what we collectively gleaned from the presentation, we had lots of thematic ideas we could focus on:

1. Free has no value
2. End user’s goals are often not what the designer originally expected
3. Political implications of performing tests on something as vital as water
4. “Design for the greater good”
5. Open source hardware
6. Crowd sourced data as shared vs. proprietary information as a business model and the ethical implications of this
7. “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be right” – qualitative sufficiency
8. One hurdle at a time as a process. Knowing only enough to take you to the next stage of development and then sourcing experts to help solve the next challenege

As we discussed these, we were also burdened by a sense of obligation to give closure to the semester. I was personally in a snarky mood throughout our initial discussion of our reactions based almost entirely on the pressure that this presentation added to my finals schedule. I felt that my work would suffer because of this, and I wanted to make sure that if I had to go through with it I was going to take the piss right out of it.

Later that week, we met with the other group to discuss any possibility of collaboration – if we wanted to send off the class with a bang, maybe we could combine forces and blow the place up. After talking it over for a day or two, we realized that there wasn’t any way we could work together but now we had the added pressure of knowing that the second group had an incredible idea. They were going to get the audience to collectively create an image by choosing a single pixel on a square grid and determining that particular pixel’s color. Once all the pixels had been enter, the resulting image was to be tattooed onto one of their backs. They actually went through with this on the stage when the time came. Incredible.

Anyways, backing up just a bit, we decided that we wanted to do something that spoke to the abilities of ITP students to work as individuals, in groups and collectively to create impressive pieces of different scales. I forget how we ended up at the material, but we decided on using Legos to get everyone to create sculptures of scale.

We also wanted to remind everyone of the journey they had been along during the semester. There were some interesting presentations form the beginning and middle of our semester where the presenters would source different information from the group. Most notably, group one asked the entire group to “write down something they believe to be true” at the end of their projection, and group [?] sourced skills that each member of the audience could both teach and would like to learn. We thought it might be really meditative to build something in the present while being exposed to the ideas of our not-so-distant past.

To help us do this, and also to automate the instruction process we wrote a script and then used OSX’s text-to-speech functionality with some add-on Britsh voices from iVox HQ. We used the woman’s voice to handle the instructions, and when it came time to read the sourced information from previous presenters we used the man’s voice and treated the pieces as poetry. The effect was plainly hysterical. From there, it was really just figuring out the logistics of getting 100+ people to complete these tasks within the allotted time. So here’s how it went:

1. As people entered, we asked them to sit with their groups from the weeks prior. Each group had seats designated for them and each seat had a bag of 10 Legos waiting.
2. When we were ready to go we asked them to shuttup, listen carefully and to build a sculpture with the given Legos. As they built their piece, the man came on the loud speaker and read to them “things they believed to be true”.
3. We then asked them to turn to the other members of their group and create something using all their parts, and as they worked the man returned with yet another poem that was a transcription of the skills they thought they could offer and skills they would like to recieve.
4. After this time had elapsed, we asked that each group designate a single member from their group to represent them in the construction of an even greater masterpiece. By two and according to the week that they had presented, the groups came to the stage and worked to contribute to a large Lego structure, and as they worked the man returned to read an editorialized reaction to the speaker from their week. So, for example, if groups 3 and 4 had reacted to Clay Shirky, we asked them to come to the stage and work while we said something like “Hey, remember Clay? He was really smart.”
5. Once each group had contributed, we then gave the entire audience the binary choice of either keeping the resultant Lego sculpture or to discard it by  booing or clapping. I believe the clapping may have been louder, but we were pretty set on destroying the sculpture so Anna put on her helmet and goggles and smashed the sculpture with a sledge hammer while we played some completely insane music in the background.

BAM. Catharsis. I would say that overall, it was a success and luckily the other group agreed to go last so we didn’t have to follow what turned out to be probably the most memorable Applications reaction from the entire semester. Thankfully, my group got along great and we had a lot of fun preparing and performing. Well worth it. It might have even lessened the pressure I felt during those couple weeks of finals (I’m now writing this on December 22nd) by letting me have some fun. Here’s the text we used for instructions and for the “poetry”:

1. instructions
2. things they believed to be true
3. skills
4. speakers

all contents ©2009-2010 Fred Truman