Artwork/project/reading responses

[jedahan]

Respond to a piece from https://github.com/lmccart/AppropriatingInteractionTechnologies/wiki . Your response can be a couple of paragraphs, a p5 sketch, or a physical sketch. Look on the right sidebar. I recommend the social glitch, or performance pages to start.

Make sure to paste the link of what you are responding to in your response.

[hollyburt]

https://github.com/jedahan/pucd2035d/issues/21

[hollyburt]

https://github.com/jedahan/pucd2035d/issues/21

[mariemoto]

I might re-post about another app later before the next class because I couldn't look at the all applications and readings on the page but for now, I chose the app called "Between."

Between is very private application because it's created for couples, and only allows two people to login to share their images or videos, and chat. I actually use this app with my boyfriend and we found it as a very convenient app. It's not only chatting app between two people but also it tells how many days left till our anniversary or birthday or whatever the events we wrote on the app so that we never forget our important days and have fights over those issue.

Honestly, we do not use this app to communicate that much because there're Whatsapp, Line, and iMessage already. But whenever we fight over text on those other apps, it gets hard to send next message to say sorry since we can still see the previous messages of us fighting. Then we usually switch the app to Between to start another conversation because Between has a lot of cute stickers related to couples and we can communicate with just those stickers, and that makes us easier to start conversation and express the feelings.

[mariemoto]

[abruzga]

This work reminded me of my final project (https://github.com/jedahan/pucd2035d/issues/20), where I also take a mean of communication/self-expression and explore how it works as digital vs physical representation. Here the artists take tagging, an action usually performed directly on surfaces with spray paint or permanent markers and make it to a temporary digital piece. Having people do the same physical action, only now using laser pointers instead of a spray cans and replacing paint with a projection of the drawing on a larger scale, provides a different experience. While we encounter these drawn signatures often associated with vandalism on our daily commutes, city walls, restroom stalls, the same imagery executed with lasers and projectors on a larger scale somehow have more a monumental, contemporary feeling.

http://youtu.be/EFWcAkxzkv4 http://www.graffitiresearchlab.com/blog/projects/laser-tag/

[kumol508]

http://www.sleepcycle.com/

The application I chose to respond to was one of the Self-tracking apps, Sleep Cycle. This app records your movements at night in order to give you charted diagrams of your sleep quality. With the data it collects you can view at what times in the night you were in deep sleep or awake.

The app is very easy to use. It asks you to enter a 30 minute time frame in which you would like to wake up, then place your phone face down on your bed and connected to a charger. During the time you are using the Sleep Cycle app your messages and notifications are muted, helping you have uninterrupted sleep. The next morning, or at the end of your nap, the app's alarm and soothing music goes off at the point in the 30 minute interval when you are most awake. The app even asks you how you are feeling when you wake up

I use this app and find it quite interesting to see the difference day to day. The app also allows you to write in sleep notes about your activities that day, what you ate, or if you had coffee before bed. Users can also compare multiple nights’ data and see if the input information about the day has an effect on the sleep quality or length.

[Sherifa]

[Sherifa]

This piece of artwork was from an interactive art exhibition, that served as an opportunity to ignite participation and encouragement. It reminds me of the makey makey, because the purpose of it is that it can sense if a person is standing near that piece of artwork, just like you can program the makey makey to sense another form of interaction. Just like my final project it involves interaction with the viewer and the artwork itself.

[ghost]

http://www.gotinder.com/

I chose this app because many of my friends is attracted by the way it works. The method Tinder offered to connect people is simple: people who liked each other could start a chat. It is like a way to avoid the process of "letting him/her know I like her" and push people directly into the next stage. It usually works well for many people.

Actually it is not the first time for me to see this kind of interaction. In the Chinese version of Facebook, which called Renren, there was a game is to give scores to other people and also receive scores from others. If two people both received the full score then they could know who the other one is and "start their own business."

I do think this kind of interaction reflects two trends. The first one is our era is getting faster and faster, people even started to try to make knowing people become simpler. The second one is that people will still want to find people who likes them even in the future 1000 years. And this app Tinder is just the best example for it.

[roisinmcnulty]

http://quantifiedself.com http://www.reporter-app.com

I choose the project Quantified Self and the app Reporter. They are both self tracking ideas/projects that I found interesting because they not only produce facts via surveys, charts etc, but through this information it tells you something about yourself which you can then go on to decide if you/your life needs change/improvement or not. Sort of like a diary but more current, sophisticated and evaluative. Especially the app Reporter which helps you figure out what's important to you in your everyday life by quick surveys throughout the day.

There's an artist, I can't remember his name but he tracks his life each year and presents the information differently in a visual booklet each time e.g. how much he spends on coffee, where he travelled to, how many movies he watched etc. I found it really cool that he's tracked his life for several years, and can now seen how as a person he's changed and even possibly figured out what he likes, where he likes to go, how much money he's saving and so on.

Although it seems a little time-consuming I would like to try out some sort of self-tracking for a couple months and possibly figure out something about myself that I don't know.

[brodo020]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhgfz0zPmH4

I watched this video explaining Google Goggles. I've used the image search on the Google search engine, which is similar to this app, but this is much more handy. This app eliminates a lot of steps when trying to access information. It's great for someone who may be too lazy to type into their browser, like me. This app is one that makes getting a smart phone worth it. I wanted to know a little bit more about how the app works, so I found this video, which shows a few samples of how it recognizes the photos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kOotqpJyUg There are certain categories you can choose from to identify your object, which I guess helps narrow down the amount of information the app has to sift through to give you accuracy. For example, some categories are landmarks, art work, products, barcodes, etc. However it doesn't work well with clothes, furniture, and animals. The fact that it does not work well with animals confuses me a bit because I feel they are a bit easier to recognize. In this video, there aren't many impressive results. Most results were close to accurate or couldn't find any matches at all. However, the Goggles did well with identifying restaurants and gave a great amount of information for that restaurant. It's only available to Android users. Hopefully, Google will make an iPhone application soon. In the mean time, there are apps like CamFind that do similar things to Google Goggles. It can scan QR codes, books, etc. Since CamFind does not have its own search engine, it pretty much just uses Google to give you the information you want. After watching the video showing how Goggles ACTUALLY works, I'm disappointed. Maybe Google is waiting for the right time to release a version for the iPhone. Since the application doesn't seem very good yet, maybe after some improvements we, iPhone users, will see a new and improved Google Goggles application than that on the Android store now. I hope for improvements, I would love to have an app like this that works the way the creators promise.

[kaemt]

http://idpw.org/porto/w/000001/

I found this interface through the Social Automation and API section of the given link. This interface is called the "whatever" button and I think that despite the simplicity of the system, It really does carry a deeper message in regards to social media and the users. The idea of this system is a web browser extension which allows 'like' whatever posts that are shown in your news feed on facebook.

In my personal experience of using facebook, I notice many things that have happened in the way we consume information via the platform. I notice how many advertisements there are, I notice the useless quiz results people take, the useless facts most of them being phrased in a way that forces you to be curious about it and click on it. I notice that most of these things are really taking away the original intent of what a social media should be, which is interaction. We are only ever interacting in facebook via comments, and likes. Likes are sometimes a great deal to someone's post. A post with a thousand likes automatically gains more value than those with 1 or 2 likes and this sort of changes people's perception on what is important. I find this "whatever button" to be so ironic, as most of the time we scroll through facebook with the intention of picking out a news section we like or we're interested in, and pressing "like' on that. What Whatever button does, is that it likes whatever is on the page! you don't even have to peek a glance to see what you have liked, do you really care about it to like it? the answer is no its brilliant in that way.

I really think this says alot about society in general, where its just so funny how in real life we are more inclined to go with the flow, we "like" what other people like to be accepted, whereas in social media we are much more careful of what we "like" to show almost like a hidden side to our persona, an online version of ourselves full of what we want ourselves to be perceived like. This project brings real life attitude in society, online. which is just comical

I really like this project and I really see the relation in this, to what I plan to cater my project towards, that being social criticism; irony of human verbal language, and social norms. I personally would love to just install this extension to make people see how much I care about all the posts I see in my current news feed (of course this is to be taken sarcastically)

[ortik455]

http://socialmediacollective.org/2011/07/29/the-oversharer-and-other-social-media-experiments/

Social media had made several impacts on the way we interact with each other and in this example, people were instructed to act opposite of how they normally would act in their homes. It is easy to fall into a trend when you see how hundreds of thousands of people act similarly online, so when someone strays away from the norm, it is seen as a shock. In this case when children act politely and respected their parents at home, the parents couldn't believe that it was real and that they had some sort of mental illness or were acting delusional.

This showed that people were not usually polite to their families and when they were, it came as a big shock. This sort of experiment shows how people can act out what is usually expected and get an unexpected result or reply. What the people in this experiment were doing is called "breaching" because they were challenging a not so obvious assumption to discover what was accepted as being normal.

This is interesting to me because it almost works backwards to find the result. This can apply to coding because sometimes you have to target different things that you usually wouldn't think of changing to see what results may come of it. It is definitely a trial and error situation. The families could have acted way differently and appreciated the politeness, but in this situation they saw it as a mocking joke that their children were not acting like their usual selves.

I think that the act of being polite was seen as a joke was because people have become so accustomed to acting negatively towards each other because that is what is seen in social media. There is no physical confrontation so people tend to say whatever they want without having to face consequences. This trend has carried over to real life and the way they interact with other people that are physically around them, which is unfortunate but it shows how our way of respecting other people has changed.

[capre733]

http://www.sophiabrueckner.com/amulet.html

At first glance I thought this project was just an idea, a what if type of project but after reading on I realized it was an actual product that these people successfully created. What's amazing is that they got this technology to work and it's not just for a cool effect but it can really help people. Take for example one of the first quotes on the page, "I had hold of the handles of the box today and it overcame my depression a little - just a little...I felt everyone else, all over the world, all who had fused at the same time." Philip, quoted, was referring to the original project which was a box with two handles that when grabbed using hands you could feel empathy.

They go on to mention the current use of the internet and how it has become such a distraction for many. However many go on to sites such as social media sites to feel a sense of connection to other people, to get a reaction from others by posting a picture or a few lines of text. This is a new relaxing way to get that connection that requires little effort and gives enjoyment to the user. It's also a way to help yourself and help other people which is a key part of the design. The warmth the user experiences can be experienced consciously or unconsciously and I'm sure it would be a nice surprise to find people unconsciously sharing heartfelt feelings of warmth with other strangers. What could be better in world where these days Facebook and twitter are filled with violent and sad stories. It's time to bring the warmth back to technology and share connections in a great way like this.

I really enjoyed this article and invention.

[penas326]

The mobile platform I chose to read about was Fitbit, whose objective is based around building products that help transform people's lives through health and fitness. Their devices track every part of the user's day including activity, food, weight and sleep in hopes of creating a better lifestyle. Additionally, the makers of the products have developed a mobile app that connects to the owner's band. This allows easy access to the operators's personal information.

The impact of devices such as the Fitbit have seen a major liking within the past few years. More and more people are enjoying the idea of tracking their everyday movements and documenting their fitness progress over not only a 24 hour period, but also over weeks or months. The convenience of the mobile app has made this product even more successful, due to the variety of user access. People of all different ages are able to open the app view their tracked activity and then log their dietary information, making the company's goal an overall success to the wellbeing of individuals.

http://www.fitbit.com/home

[liuy376]

https://www.uber.com/

Whoever create the uber app is really amazing. You can just order your car service on your phone and track on a real map to see where and when is the car arriving and it will show you the price.car owners can just join uber to become a part of the car service team. Uber is a really good invention, that connects the user to the service so much faster and safer and easier. Uber is growing very fast and spread through out american, soon around the world.

uber is one example that technology connect resources together and unify them and turn it into a product. Also connect the cars with live tracking function, so it provides safety to the user. It eventually might change the world into a world of no Taxi but UBER.

[dikyt916]

http://www.shazam.com/ The idea of shazam is amazing. It's incredibly useful and in this day and age everything revolves around music, and being able to have such quick access to an app that has a huge database of songs is efficient. The circumstances in which this app can be used can also vary; hearing a song on the radio and shazaming it or simply shazaming a song you might already know but want to show in your list so you can find it later. From personal experience, in high school there was someone who wasn't very social and/or easy to talk to but they were blasting music from the laptop during a study hall and I like the song but was too intimidated to talk to them so I shazamed it from where I was sitting. That might have been a bit shallow but I felt like that was a great use of the app. I still credit them in my heart.