11.24.2009

After talking to a couple of advisors in week 12, it became crucial that I started mapping out my journey, identifying strong themes and roads. It seems like I have 3 roads that stand out.

One, the formal exploration ending up at the vacuum-formed electronics.

Two, the attentive nature of an electronic as a functional maid/servant.

Three, the personal life of an electronic object which shows expressive qualities.

The goal: To marry the functional and expressive or emotional aspects of electronics.

Personally, I’m the most interested in the “personal life of an electronic object” at the moment. Elements like “down-time” of an electronic object, “needing people to finish a task,” and electronics having a “relationship with creatures other than humans” are some sub-topics that particularly stays in my head. My only concern is that I may be going down a slippery slope down “mere personification of an electronic object.”

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After the Thesis Advising Committee Review #2

Some of the advises I got from the committee was to really drill down one area of interest that is popping out. Without the luxury of having three terms to spend on my thesis, I do agree that this is definitely something I should be doing, no questions asked.

Some interesting topics from today’s discussion includes the relationship or position of the user, and possibly the idea of privacy, leading onto the idea of “feedforwarding,” a concept that explains what we can know from different signals of an object. I have been doing experiments where the user is a viewer other than when the object is completely functional. It’d be interesting to see the different directions I can go to by giving different stances to the user in respect to the object.

The idea of labor and play is something that has been popping up a lot during the comments on “Stringer” and “Paper Cutter.” The language and behavior of objects quickly became a topic that we were talking about. The spirit of a behaviors such as following, watching, attending, participating and etc can definitely be used as a metaphor that fuels my future explorations. I liked the suggestion of using metaphors as a strategic language and going back and forth between different stories, elements, and functions caught in the process. Funny. I am having flashbacks from that time I heard “add values, not functions.”