Category: Leon Eckert

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Final Communications Lab Project – Reflection Post – Taylah Bland

Final Communications Lab Project – Reflection Post – Taylah Bland

Project Title: The Phenomenon of Catcalling 

Partner: Julia 

Design

The final project “The Phenomenon of Catcalling” takes the form of an infographic which aims to inform a general audience about what catcalling is, its prevalence, societal and individual effects as well as resources to use to take a stand against it. The chosen phenomenon is actually very prevalent around the world, its transnational and doesn’t discriminate, although usually experienced by women. The website has inbuilt distractions that are intended to mimic the catcalling that someone might actually experience (on scroll events, hyperlinks and alerts).

The project features a ‘wikipedia’ style approach where content is presented in a page scroll format with hyperlinks integrated within the page (as seen below). There is also a selected Tweets section that Julia suggested for inclusion as it illustrates the phenomenons prevalence in today’s world.

However, the website presents a number of distractions and interruptions such as the alert which is called every 10 seconds.

  

The website also presents a youtube video redirect ‘onscroll’ at position 2050 pixels. The coding that I did for that section is presented in the screenshot down below.

The website also has hyperlinks that contain important videos and information on catcalling. They are presented in a way that looks like you have stumbled or invaded the privacy of someone else’s viewing. For example, one of the videos pops up but plays halfway through, as if you have interrupted. This is meant to mimic the invasive nature of catcalling. In another example, you read what appears to be the conversation of two individuals experiencing catcalling.

Process

The process of making the project was actually really enjoyable. My coding skills are by no means professional level but Julia and I decided to play to our strengths and do something that was not only important to us, but something executed simply but effectively.

We split up the work, with Julia doing the CSS styling and HTML and I did the Javascript and HTML. I also wrote a lot of the content for the project which was really interesting and I learnt a lot in the process. This worked really well as I was able to concentrate on the interactive elements of the project. I created the wolf-whistle on load of the page, the scroll position and all of the hyperlinks as well as the function that enables the alert to play every 10 seconds. Content writing and the interactions is definitely my strength and Julia has a really strong writing style and creativity side which suited her perfectly to the CSS.

The code for those elements is found here:


We both worked together on the project and by having clear tasks it meant that it was a smooth project to create.

If I had to do it over again, I don’t think I would actually change anything in terms of work distribution or the process we took in making the project. We definitely could have added more interactive elements and changed the styling of the index page but this is something I will address in the ‘future’ section.

In terms of discoveries, I definitely discovered the ability to make really deep and meaningful metaphors and connections by using HTML and Javascript elements. I was really proud that I was able to use the skills I had learnt in class to produce a project that I am very proud of. Simple things like adding the wolf-whistle or the on-scroll youtube popup meant a lot to me. Even though they aren’t necessarily difficult coding concepts – I discovered a new confidence in my abilities to really just try to do something that I ordinarily wouldn’t do.

Future

Given more time, I definitely agree with the feedback provided to myself and Julia by the critics and also the class.

The feedback included: 

  1. Add vocals to make more of an impact, window popup of eyes looking at you
  2. More visual elements
  3. Present huge chunk of text in a better information structure to encourage viewers to read it
  4. Draw more attention to links as they are essential to the website
  5. Add more features that emphasize catcalling- maybe more pop-ups or longer lasting Pop-ups

I would like to expand upon the use of popups and change the text each time an alert is called. I would also change the design of the text on the main page into smaller more reader friendly paragraphs.

In addition, I would love to add a pair of eyes to the page to make it look like the reader is being followed. The more realistic, immerse elements to really transform the page would be my priority action items.

I am a really focused writer so content creation was key for me, in my next pieces of work I definitely think that I will look to examining the more creative elements to really transform the work. I would love to revisit this piece.

The final project really reinforced that I am able to combine content creative with web expression. Communications lab has taught me so many skills that I will definitely be taking into other works. Thank you so much for the opportunity to learn and develop in an area that I would never had looked into. Thank you to Julia for not only your expertise but being such a great partner to collaborate and work with! 

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Project Reflection – Madi Eberhardt

Project Reflection:  World Music Playlist 

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~mne234/FinalComLabProject/startingpage.html

A. Design

When you first open my project, there is a simple introduction page to offer quick insight into what the rest of the project will be about with a title and a start button. After clicking this start button, you will be taken to a hand-drawn/edited map of the world with specific locations marked with a flag. When you click on one of these places flags, a pop up will appear asking you about the mood you are in. Once you decide on a mood and input your answer, a song will appear in the corner and you can play it. This song will not only represent the mood you are in, but also the place and culture in which you chose before. You can pause and play the song to your liking and then begin the process again by clicking a new place to explore the music too. 

B. Process

When first beginning the production of this project, there was trouble with the idea of how to simply go about it and put my ideas into reality. An interactive map that one could click and navigate through was ideally what I wanted, specifically one that I created myself. Although, my artistic skills are not the best and neither is my extensive knowledge in coding past what has been taught in class. So the project had to be critiqued in some places to make everything work. The creation of the map as an image and allowing the user to click on certain places actually worked quite well. Initially, I was worried about this aspect of the project, but was able to easily figure it out with some guidance and looking up coding techniques. The coding for the transparent buttons over the places looked like this.

 

One aspect that didn’t work as well was the music player pop up. With more time spent in coding, I believe this could’ve turned out in a better style and design. I had trouble making this and the mood player pop up according to the specific place (such as block and none in the coding aspect). This took a lot of time to understand. The code ended up being written like this. 

    C. Future

Given more time to complete the project, there are a few aspects I would like to add and change in order to further improve it. One of the first things I would like to change is the music player. I would like this to be more interactive with maybe more of a selection of songs (not just one per mood) that you could scroll through by album cover. In the future, I would change the overall style of the about page/introduction start page in order to apply more to how the project was more personal to me. The styles were different and didn’t cohesively match, as the critics mentioned, so this is something I would like to fix and work on in the future. For example, I should in the future make sure every aspect of the website (buttons, fonts, backgrounds, etc) all follow a similar aesthetic. Also, I would love if every capital city could be clicked on. Instead of just the selected countries I chose, I wish I could’ve had every capital in the world available for people to navigate music through. 

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Final Project Reflection: The Wanted by Jamie & Clover – Jamie (Ziying Wang)

Our internet art project: The Wanted is a fictional detective game based on a catastrophe happened in real life. The user is a detective who has been after a criminal for almost ten years, through analyzing past crimes, she suspected that the criminal is going to commit something big soon, despite the police department plans to officially close the case in three days due to the large amount of money and effort wasted on this criminal over the past 10 years, the detective decides to look into the case for one last time and try to take the criminal into custody. The user, as the detective, will submit an information form with the information of the upcoming possible crime he/she deduced from the previous profiles, the results will decide whether the user has performed the right deduction.

Clover and I went through lots of iterations when constructing this project. We started off with Clover drawing four images for background story and I making an image for the timeline page with photoshop. We designed the timeline according to the vague schedule we listed before starting, which includes 10 years (2009-2018) and two of which don’t have crimes, the rest is a crime per year.

Then as we design our cases, a hint we wanted to offer is that the crimes happen in geographic order on the European map, therefore I appended clickable map of Europe on the timeline page.

As the user is required to fill out a form as the final evaluation for the performance, we designed clickable items on the timeline page, one of which leads to the submission page and the other is a screenshot of the sample form.

Originally, the user clicks open different documents and goes back to the timeline to check out others, then we realized that the limitation doesn’t work when the user can click open all windows and has unlimited deduction time. Therefore, I coded the page open time as 20 seconds, when the time is up, the window closes itself. After every eight profiles the user checks, there is audio informing it’s the sleeping hour comes out, indicating that a day has passed. After 24 times checking the profiles, the timeline page will automatically direct the user to the submission form page, where the user has to fill in their deduction result for the upcoming crime.

The evaluation of the results leads to three endings, one of them is the good ending, where the user successfully stopped the crime from happening and took the criminal into custody. The rests are both bad endings, one is the case that the user gets the right time but the wrong location, the ending is that the user arrives at the place in search of the criminal but instead sees the news of the catastrophe happening in another place; if the user gets the time wrong, the ending is only the news on the catastrophe.

Given more time, there would definitely be things I want to improve. One of which is the submission page. Theoretically, according to my current code, the user can open multiple submission pages and try unlimited times, I haven’t come up with a better solution for this because I want to give the user time to think and not set time limit for their submission. Another is that the crimes should be perfected, right now they are too deliberate, and look like something purposely designed so that the user can figure out the hints. The storyline is something I definitely want to put more effort into. After presenting it to the class, we learned that we should have changed our cursor into a pointer when it hovers onto clickable elements so that the user will be clearer about what to click on.