aram’s blog

Stacking books on book shelf, stacking dishes on dish racks, replacing drained AA batteries with new ones or refilling rechargeable batteries to your charger…
There are similar motions that remind me of reloading magazine of M-16 rifle I had carried when I was in the army in South Korea, and this made me come up with my midterm idea for ICM - THE FOUR.

‘Four’ only means that I chose any physical interface which contains four, identical empty ’space’ for refilling the objects. It was a bit embarrassing to show three movies in the class, though. (I will come up with one more video soon…)

Movies starts showing three videos in horizontal strip, all hands in each movie briefly shows what kinds of actions will occur. Once any numbered key (1, 2, 3, or 4) is pressed, it plays the movie of doing four-times of generic action. (see the movies below)

All movies can be stopped at the point where each actions divided by pressing key 1, 2, 3, and 4.

For coding, I used ‘time’ however Danny pointed out that I would have used ‘jump’ instead.

//********************************************************************************/
//* Author: Aram Chang */
//* Description: ICM Midterm Assignment Ver 1. Wednesday’s 12:30 PM Class */
//* */
//* Date: 10/24/2007 */
//********************************************************************************/

float stopframe=0;
float mt;
import processing.video.*;
Movie theFour;
Movie theFour2;
Movie theFour3;

void setup() {
size(720, 180);
frameRate(30);
theFour = new Movie(this, “four batteries.mov”);
theFour2 = new Movie(this, “four books.mov”);
theFour3 = new Movie(this, “four dishes.mov”);

theFour.noLoop();
theFour2.noLoop();
theFour3.noLoop();
//myMovie.loop();
}

void movieEvent(Movie theFour) {
theFour.read();
theFour2.read();
theFour3.read();
}

void draw() {
background(255);
image(theFour, 0, 0);
image(theFour2, 240, 0);
image(theFour3, 480, 0);

theFour.play();
theFour2.play();
theFour3.play();

mt=theFour.time();
if(theFour.time()>stopframe && theFour.time()
theFour.speed(0);
theFour2.speed(0);
theFour3.speed(0);
}else{
theFour.speed(1);
theFour2.speed(1);
theFour3.speed(1);

}
println(mt);
}

void keyPressed(){

if(key==’1′){
stopframe=3.5;
}else if (key==’2′){
stopframe=7.2;
}else if (key==’3′){
stopframe=10.9;
}else if (key==’4′){
stopframe=13.9;
}
//stop=!stop;
//myMovie.pause();
}

The night before the class, I was watching my cat dragging a poly bag with his claw. He does that everyday so I always took it for granted, but this time, since I was desperately seeking an idea for ergonomics design, his movement seemed more worthy to notice.
When cat’s ‘using’ his claw, it looks very efficient ‘tool’. On the other hand, the claw could be switched as a weapon anytime he needs.

When it comes to ‘nail’ of human beings, the usefulness has decreased so that not many people could believe it as a lethal weapon except some martial arts performer.

I asked three of my ITP friends for their immediate reaction and there were very interesting opinions from each person.
Sanjay loved the beauty of the thing saying ‘a total gangsta’, Taylor thought it reminded her of great-great-great grand mother’s belonging, and lastly, Jong-min didn’t say a thing but spent longest time just to keep staring at it!

It is interesting to experience that designing sometimes brings a totally unexpected reactions even though I desperately hope that the users will
understand my intention.

Letting users define possible functions, even if one could say it’s a ‘decorative’ rather than functional, taught me (to be continued)

Looking back past six weeks of classes assignments I have done, now I get to realize that they lack ‘consistency.’ On a first week, I made a ‘thing’ in a very last minute putting a short amount of effort. Though I tried not to make this habit a pattern, honestly, I did some more jobs done in the very similar way - building a thing in last minute. This have kept me from continuous thinking about the past works, and made my ‘things’ to be inconsistent in a way.
However, I did learned valuable lessons in class participation, rather than in process of fabrications. It is great things to notice myself becoming more comfortable with the other’s presentation, so that I could understand more and better about their works. Often my peers could make better comment about my work than mine, and that feedback helps to organize fragments of my thoughts. This is how I define, rate, critique, and revise my works. Not always from ‘myself’, but from the others.(to be continued)

Assignment 1: What is “energy”? Create a piece that communicates your relationship to energy.

What is energy? What does ‘energy’ mean to you?
While working on this week’s project, I tried to focus on above questions rather than coming up with ’sustainable’ design which doesn’t seem familiar to me.Among several readings in class lecture, I was heavily inspired by ‘needles and nerves’ and immediately came to recall my past experience of studying O-haeng in Korea years ago.

I’ve got my back hurt severely when I was in the army. After being discharged, I had to look for any possible solution to fix my back.The ’solution’ had to come with no-surgery or any physical modification on my body, this was very important to me.

Luckily, I had known a friend from same university, who was already deeply involved with this new type of therapy - it doesn’t require any surgery, unnecessary medicine and best of all, it shows some approaches that can actually change my body and mind to one step further: balanced.

Whole process(I’ll call this ‘journey.’) takes long time so some would say “it usually takes 10 years to change one person’s constitution.”
Learning O-haeng also requires some static knowledge such as basic anatomy of human body, acupuncture.

I’ve sort of classified my classmates in O-haeng chart making each to belong any one of six elements. It was interesting to observe that many guys belong Mok as a group(7 people out of 17!!). This, in fact, explains why I’ve been feeling that most students in this class are very good at presentation as well as giving feedback, asking sharp questions. In O-haeng theory, it says Mok means scholastic, educational ability so people with Mok-qi often are capable of certain extend of presentation.
When it comes to ‘energy’, however, I should point out that the whole flow of human energy-qi is not well-balanced in Softness of things class. This is just a O-haeng based fact, so there are no solutions for this or not even necessarily should there be any. Assignment 2: Keep a log of all your “waste” and propose alternatives to your consumption/waste patterns.

-Click the image below to see the actual log-

I’ve never thought this ‘garbage log’ would actually help me reconsider some irresponsible patterns that I have kept. Some classmates and professor recommended me not to smoke so that I don’t make any cigarette butts garbages, best of all, enhance my health as well. Throwing away too many tissues also can be changed to use handkerchief. All made senses. Only the practice have left.

Taylor, Liz, Yasmin and me teamed up for making Networks. On a first-time meeting, we’ve came up with so many ideas of building networks, and it didn’t take too long to decide just one of many - connecting each person’s traveling traces.

It was interesting to have three female students who have more than enough experiences traveling throughout all over the world. Obviously, I was the only one with few flights.

We started collecting data by taking notes of all place’s name . A few intersections were found.
New York city was most-visited place among many other cities in the world. We t-pinned each city that we have visited or lived.

Some people asked us why we painted the globe white. I also didn’t agree with the painting idea, but other three shared the same opinion to make the globe more personal rather than keeping the typical format with actual map on it. Finally I agreed(gave up!).

One thing I regret a bit about this project is that we didn’t have a chance to go further with more ideas. These ideas include having more interactions such as audio narration. I was thinking that we tape each person’s story about any place and make the t-pin point triggered by conductive thread, so that the audience can listen to the story when the thread is ‘connected - networked.’

As I stated on last post, my old arduino board died leaving only digital I/O. So, I bought a new one from NYU bookstore, not from eBay for this time. Also I made sure that they will swap the board in case not working.

I brought some of my old toys from Korea to see if these are good materials to do physical computing works. The toys includes a Radio remote control box with two servos and one digital receiver.