No 19: NOISE October Showcase part 3

Edit:15/6/2008
A mock up for the main page of this. This is the sensible, might get it built in time for October version. Involves live gigs, Stickam and Badly Drawn Boy samples.



The less sensible version involves first and second life gigs, a second life elements music mixer and an on screen elements mixer. But I'm still working on these bits.
Edit:15/6/2008

Edit:1/6/2008
My initial thoughts with this is an onscreen sampler with the Badly Drawn Elements and ready made samples that would allow you to remix a track on screen. There would also be the option to upload your own tracks.

So you need tracks to work with we already have a load of tracks on the NOISE site or do you use pre-existing songs. The biggest problem with this is time and resources so this should just be simple fun tool? Serious entries are uploaded to the site. The mixer is just a fun time killer?

The other really exciting thing that is being planned for this showcase is the live performance. Now this is being planned within Second Life but what is being discussed is having the gig in Second Life being streamed into the venue and vice versus so people could attend the gig through Second Life. I really like this idea of crossing over the Second Life stuff with the real life event, I guess there could also be web streaming at the same time. Also the sampling tool can be built into the Second Life and adds an extra interactive element.
Edit:1/6/2008


Elements project gallery
Project allows users to remix tracks by the curator. Key riffs.
How to showcase outcomes, possible live performance, video streaming?

Elements
Again reflect outcome of the project.
Music, musician’s discussions with Vic about visualizing music on screen. Concert streaming

See Red Bull Jam www.redbullbedroomjam.com
Diesel:U:Music

This is a similar problem to the BBC Sound Index, how to visualize sounds. Sound Index is easier in the sense you can map and link users so there is visual material to play with. With this gallery it's harder. I guess the starting point is this showcase doesn't have to show the final outcomes. The sample tracks need to be downloaded from the site and you can post your tracks on the site. So maybe that is the way to develop this section, it should be a mixture of work in progress and final selection for the showcase.
I like this phrase from CCMIxter
Download, Sample, Cut-up, Share.
That is what this gallery should allow you to do.

No 18: MA Site research section

Edit 25/5/2008
Mock up for an MA section of the CAGD website. Split into three sections news, images, text, it would work in a similar way to an RSS reader. Anything posted to your CAGD, blog, Flickr or YouTube account would appear on this page. You don't post here, it gathers group activity in one place. At the top is the memebrs of the group so you can toggle between different peoples feeds.






Posting tool that would allow you to post images, video and text to your CAGD account.
Working in a similar way "Add to my de.li.cio.us" or "Digg this" this would allow you to add and tag without navigating from your current page.
Edit 25/5/2008



Edit 21/5/2008
Some initial mock ups for the IM section





Edit:
OK so this is definitely going to be an RSS reader. What I'd want to do is combine the single page of Google reader, that groups a users post together which could be read at leisure, and the incoming messages of Snackr and Digsby.
See my post here
The idea would be to have a stand alone Adobe AIR package that you could download to any desktop. For example download it at University, create your login then if you wanted to install it on your home computer simply install it and use your log in. It would pull in Feeds from the course website, users blogs, Flickr, YouTube etc.

The flaw with all these feed/bookmark sites is multiple logins. This app needs to allow people to add from the standard web 2.0 sites quickly and easily, this needs to be done in the first sign up. The other issue is being able to add bookmarks feeds quickly nad easily, Digg, De.licio.us do this well, so something similar to this.

Another key thing to remember is the purpose of the RSS Feed is to strip back a website and deliver the key information, but how do you do this with have a heavy image based site like the CAGD site?

CAGD site, MA section. Research area, designed for specific needs of the MA course.
How "research" would work here.

Finding similar people into the same things
A way for designers to find work
RSS feeds
Sky Sports News
Scrolling, updating
Constant updates
Work coming in

Possible RSS Feeds, signing up adding external feeds from awards competitions, design companies, sites, blogs etc
RSS reader collect work, ideas as they come in.
Google layout- redesign elements for the MA make it MA specific?

No 17: How to Tag Without Words

Edit 26/5/2008 part two





Simplified this right down.

Tagging tool for the CAGD site. Instead of tagging with words users are presented with a selction of images from the site. Users must choose a minmum of two images to tag their work with.

The idea is tagging become a way of discovering of new work, tags are no longer literal and descriptive. You would be able to view work which other users have tagged work with the same images.
More info
http://no-bad-news.blogspot.com/2008/05/no-17-how-to-tag-without-words.html

Edit 26/5/2008

Edit 26/5/2008
This is part of the upload section as well. I'm trying to design the search tool but it's impossible without the initial meta data. So how do you start to tag images? Words are obvious but what happens if you use a random selection of say five images taken from the site, you have to pick three that "describe" your work. Should they be random or should they just appear to be random? I guess this also relates to the fuzzy data idea avoiding narrowing down a search to far.

OK so looking at the database Graham sent the following is of use
| title | text |
| description | text |
| subtitle | text |
| summary | text
| keywords | text |
| tags | text |

from here return to the course philosophy

animation, broadcast graphics, illustration, design for print, web design, photography, art direction, advertising, traditional print and digital imaging and editing, typography, letter press and bookwork.

11 areas there, now not to limit it to far search through the published text and search for key or related terms. Bring up one image for each of those terms.

Or is this too complicated? Do you just want a random selection of images that you choose to tag with? Neil tagged this "Apple Poster"
Also number of images. Deliberately restrict images to 1,000? so they could relate to the above terms?

So ten(?) thumbnails tag with three images.
edit 26/5//2008


Alternative tagging systems, purpose of tags.
Collecting information for user later on, curation, pushing people to use. What meta data are you collecting, why are you collecting it what are you going to do with it.

Is it possible to tag with images, sounds, colours?

Image from BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio Labs. From discussions with BBC Backstage how to visualize these tags, how do you develop more interesting ways of viewing tags.

No 16: NOISE October Showcase part 2

Adobe/Peter Saville/Computer Arts brief
Gallery outcome, needs to work online and offline

1.Adobe
Stand alone interactive application (Adobe AIR) that could be distributed with Computer Arts Magazine.
Needs to be able to reflect:
Print A3 portrait posters and A6 fliers
Screen 30 second television advertisement
Online Innovative online banner ads or virals

No 15: Fuzzy data

Chris Heathcote mentioned this at FutureSonic. Fuzzy data, the idea that narrowing peoples searches is not useful, what people like is data that is more open to interpretations

The outer circles are the "fuzzy data"

From designing Dopplr

We’re sitting on the grass in the sunshine with a bunch of early Dopplr users, including Stowe Boyd and Stephanie Booth - when Stephanie is the first to voice something we’ve heard a lot from Dopplr users since: “make my trips more ‘fuzzy’”.

By which, she and others meant that they would like to see coincidences in the surrounding area of ‘social spacetime’ to their trip - i.e. “show me if there are going to be people I know nearby the stated destination of my trip when I’m going to be there, as I’d probably like to change my plans a little to see them.”

This is a cornerstone of our goal to help optimise travel for Dopplr users - surfacing information about such near coincidences to let them judge whether to alter their plans to make their trip more worthwhile.

We’re going to be releasing a lot of functionality to exploit fuzzy, social spacetime through the early part of 2008, but the first part of it has leaked out into the journal.

How to do this visually/ graphically. Use exsiting sites and services such as Amazon, Last FM, Google etc

No 14: Calendar

Following from Chris Heathcote's talk at FutureSonic

Who what where
(meta)
Last FM collects meta data, no one else does this. Why?
Time- Designing for the future
What are you going to do ?
what have you done?
Rare to find sites that map what you intend to do
flickr maps records what you have done, when you did it
Real calendars vs virtual calendars,
How people interact, time slots, chunks, blocks of time

Design development of a site/tool that allows you to map what you intend to do, move away from standard chunks of time eg outlook.

What do you doing the course of a day week month. How can you plan what you intend to do?
Blogs, Flickr, even Twitter document what you've done are doing what about what you intend to do?

No 13: MA Publication part 2

Change of heart with this. This is going to be my proposal for the outcome of the collaberation on the Graphic Arts blog. I need to trawl through my posts on there but there's some intersting discussion about playing with the role of curator, how this relates to current web 2.0/3.0 ideas, repliacting this in a gallery space.

No 12: NOISE Mapping and documenting users

Edit 8/6/2008
So this has changed quite a bit(and may start to fit in with the fuzzy data proposal) Last week I had a meeting with the head of BT regions in the north west about the NOISE website. One of the things that kept coming up was how we document where users are submitting from, which postcodes are creative hot spots, where users are signing up from and so on. Eventually how do you tie all this information together and make some sense of it. For this proposal I'm going to create a series of maps or documents that illustrate users on the NOISE site and how they use the NOISE site. These will be in form of visuals, similar to the Dopplr images below and the work of Edawrd Tufte.

Next step is to start selecting which data to use. The simplest starting point is to use the data on the NOISE admin section and start to work that up. Also start to visualize the information on Google analytics. I need to select the key information that is going into these reports. Again this comes back to this idea of selecting and choosing data, what do you want to do with it five or six stage later. What is the final outcome? Start from there and work backwards. These need to be ongoing documents, so creating a template that new data can be dropped in and compared weekly or monthly
Edit 8/6/2008


No 12: NOISE Festival Arts Council Evaluation Document








Design and visualistion of how NOISE Festival was used in 2008.

This information sheet introduces the idea of self-evaluation for artists and arts organisations. It provides a brief definition of evaluation, explains why we think it is important for everyone and suggests some approaches to self-evaluation. Finally, it lists resources to help with self-evaluation, many of which are downloadable from the web.

1 What is evaluation?
Evaluation involves gathering evidence before, during and after a project and using it to make judgements about what happened. The evidence should prove what happened and why, and what effect it had. The evidence can also help you to improve what you are doing during the project and what you do next time (Woolf, 2004).
2 Evaluation helps artists and arts organisations
Evaluation is a valuable tool for learning and involves critical analysis of your activities. Artists all make evaluative judgements about their work and evaluation makes the ‘reflective practice of creative work explicit and conscious’ (Moriarty 2002).