GRAPHIC DESIGN, Art 752a, Networks & Transactions 2
209 Green Hall Thursday 1:30-5:30

This class explores the dynamic relationship between data and visual form by making connections between multiple networks of information and people, all of which are in motion. The overall focus is on experimentation, visualization, and designing new ways of working with dynamic content. We also discuss how to site, show, or publish work in ways that are appropriate to each student’s thesis. Assignments are completed in Junction and Messenger. Previous experience with Flash not required. Prerequisite: Graphic Design 742b or permission of the instructor. Dan Michaelson

Syllabus (PDF)

“I was a real amateur at it but I learned what his feeling for chess was…. He said it wasn’t a war game, it’s an aesthetic game, and you feel the shape of the board as it begins to shift its pattern and you make it become beautiful, even if you lose.”

- Julien Levy remembering being taught to play chess by Duchamp

For me, some of the most interesting and lovely possibilities in design, arise when design’s job is to connect multiple networks of information and of people, all of which are in motion. You will complete two assignments in this class, both of which involve the qualitative design of systems for two-way communication between people.

We will also discuss how to site, show, or publish work that is inherently transient, in ways that are appropriate to each student’s thesis.

LABS

1. Chess board and pieces: Object-oriented programming and inheritance
2. Messenger source code v1 (Tomas)
3. Messenger source code v2: Typography in Flash (Dan)
4. Single TextField approach to Messenger

THINGS MENTIONED IN THURSDAY’S INTRODUCTION

• Alan Turning (1912-54) and the Turing Test (1950)
• John Searle (1932-) and the Chinese Room from ‘Mind, Brains, and Programs’ (1980) (see also: when does communication become active rather than descriptive?)
• Edsger Dijkstra (1930-2002): ’... the question of whether machines can think … is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.’ (1984)
• Ad for Spore

SOLUTIONS

• Daniella: Foreground-to-background postcards with neices
• Hilla: Morphing typographic personas based on relative difference
• Hyounyoul: Overhead projectors
• Jensen: Non-verbal ‘Oto’ moji chat ? or echoing?
• Mary: Diptychs with grandmothers
• Neil: Disruptive reminders to stop chatting
• Rachel: Completely editable chat
• Roon: Automatic interpretive drawing
• Tara: Human filter/Hyounyoul filter
• Wolasi: Packet chat ? or ephemeral chat? or echoing?
• Yeju: Stuttering chat (revealing deletions and pauses)

PROJECT SCHEDULE

• October 2
  • 12:45: Lab 1: Object-oriented programming in Flash
  • 1:45: Individual meetings: First ideas, sketches, and research: Try multiple things freely. Remember your thesis is one of the most important aspects.
• October 9: Dan overseas, Tomas Celizna will present Lab 2
  • 1:30: Lab 2: Default chat application
• October 16: Individual meetings: Develop a single design approach in a way that seems achievable with the available technology. Begin to consider algorithm, in addition to visual design and experience.
• October 23
  • 12:45: Lab 3: Typography in Flash
  • 1:45: Individual meetings.
• October 30: Group crit. Consider how you present and discuss this project, as well as what research or images help to contextualize and deepen the value of the project to yourse
• November 6: Individual meetings
• November 13: -Group crit- Individual meetings
• November 20: Individual meetings

• December 4: Final crit

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Remainder of semester

Design and implement a system for two-way communication between people. The system should enable continuous back-and-forth conversation to take place. It can connect two users at a time, or more.

As with the chess project, remember that your domain is graphic design. The goals and focus of your solution should lie within that domain: a typographic and movement form, a system for the structuring of language.

What interface will you create for sending and receiving messages; and what are the possible typographies for these messages? How do these two aspects influence one another? Graphic design is always about technology and technique (techne); in your project, how do modes of transmission, processing, and typographic display affect language and communication?

Remember that your solution should be essentially adverbial or qualitative: what is communicating like in your universe of messaging. The questions of what communication takes place or why it does, are important to think about as you try to understand your users; but to try to directly influence answers to these questions may not be productive.

I will provide sample code in Flash for you to build upon. Flash is a good choice because its language (ActionScript) is syntactically similar to both PHP and JavaScript, and because it has excellent engines for both real-time programmatic typography and real-time network communications.

HILLA’S POTENTIAL ALGORITHMIC APPROACH

All chat styles would be defined by one chat class that defines the basic attributes of all the default type 1. typeface 2. type size 3. type color 4. background color (behind type) 5. type opacity

Each person would have their own class that would expand the basic chat class in order to override any of the default typeface features (e.g. Jensen will always be a monospaced font. Roon’s type color will always vibrate with whatever color the chat board is.)

All chat boards would have one class that would define basic features of the chat board 1. color 2. size (static by default) 3. placement in window (static by default)

Each person would have their own custom class of chat board that could override any of the default chat board features. (e.g. James’s chat board size will contract and expand.)

The default display class would define the default way the chat classes would be displayed on the chat board 1. position of chat text on chat board (static by default)

Advanced display classes would expand the default display class to override and/or add more features: 1. movement a. scrolling b. rotating c. blinking d. getting bigger/smaller 2. display of type a. backwards b. upside down c. letters scrambled d. words scrambled

The two (or more) people who are chatting would call up the custom chat board.

? How to deal with a chat that morphs over time? How to change how the history of a chat is displayed over time?

SOLUTIONS

Chess pieces as….

• Daniella: Heads vs tails
• Hilla: The future: Pieces mutate to show all available destinations
• Hyounyoul: Nearby weapons
• Jensen: Assemblages of scanned desk objects
• Mary: Opening gambit: Strategically designed chess set
• Neil: The present: Pieces mutate to show the nature of an attack (check, fork, pierce, pin, etc.)
• Rachel: 6-sided dice, with an aberration
• Roon: Correspondence notation for face-to-face games
• Tara: The top vs the slices
• Wolasi: The past: Pieces mutate to show their histories
• Yeju: Decision-making music

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Three-week project

No technology is required for this assignment.

Step 1. If you don’t know how to play chess, please learn how to.

Step 2. Combining your knowledge of chess – its rules and other aspects of the game’s strategies and poetics which you identify through research and personal practice – together with your own thesis, design a set of chess pieces.

Your chess pieces should be two-dimensional. If Calder’s or Ernst’s chess sets are about the nature of sculpture (through the lens their own artistic practices) in equal measure as they are about the game of chess (its rules, strategies, and poetics), then this is a project about the nature of graphic design/typography (through the lens of your own thesis) in equal measure as it is about the game of chess (its rules, strategies, and poetics).

You can take some liberties in that your pieces don’t have to comprise a usable game, a familiar vernacular, or a marketable product etc. – but they do have to obey the rules of chess (e.g. 16 pieces per side in 6 genres [king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, pawn], the bishop moves diagonally, etc. etc.).

Consider the relationship between the game’s visible aspects (game pieces) and invisible aspects (rules, strategems, opposition). How does each uniquely reveal, influence, or engage the other?

You may wish to consider this brief from Duchamp:

The standard chess sets now in use, the FRENCH set and the STAUNTON, are both somewhat confusing in the similarity and intricacy of their forms. In the French Set for excample, the Bishop is a little Queen and the pawn a little Bishop. Cannot a new set be designed, that is, without a too radical departure from the traditional figures, at once more harmonious and more agreeable to the touch and to the sight, and above all, more adequate to the role the figure has to play in the struggle? Thus, at any moment of the drama its optical aspect would represent (by the shape of the actors) a clear incisive image of its inner conflicts. In the complicated modern game the figures should inspire the player instead of confusing him. They should whisper to him at the right moment: “Move now to QB4. ... Break through the center. ... Pin the Knight. ... Let me win a piece. ... We can exchange Queens, the pawn will be metamorphosed into a new Queen. ... to mate the King.”
and
they should never make a
MISTAKE.

It’s your choice whether you want to in any way consider existing vernaculars of chess sets. You could ignore the “Staunton” standard style of chess pieces altogether and focus only on the nature of the game (for example, what Duchamp calls the potential to reveal an “incisive image of its inner conflicts”), and your thesis, as design factors.

Sketches due in individual meetings next time we meet.

GRAPHIC DESIGN, Art 752a, Networks & Transactions 2
209 Green Hall Thursday 1:30-5:30

This class explores the dynamic relationship between data and visual form by making connections between multiple networks of information and people, all of which are in motion. The overall focus is on experimentation, visualization, and designing new ways of working with dynamic content. We also discuss how to site, show, or publish work in ways that are appropriate to each student’s thesis. Assignments are completed in Junction and Messenger. Previous experience with Flash not required. Prerequisite: Graphic Design 742b or permission of the instructor. Dan Michaelson