As I brainstormed for the idea, I wanted to redesign the major arcana cards of the tarot deck. Although I would’ve loved to do all 78, realistically speaking, I could not see myself redoing all 78 cards in a week. I wanted to transform the western designs of the tarots cards to traditional East Asian art forms, especially incorporating the significant concepts of conventional Korean ideas from folk stories or myths.
I was pretty set on this idea, and since I wanted to put it on a digital platform, I was pretty set on redrawing them on a technological device, like my laptop or a phone. However, as it’s been the past month, drawing with my finger on a touch screen is difficult to get precise, so I ordered an iPad and apple pen three days ago (not just for this class; I thought an iPad would come in handy for my future digital artworks as well).
I did not realize the amount of time it’d take to deliver until I ordered the iPad. The Apple pen got delivered two days after the order, but the iPad is not coming until October 21st.
Saddened by this truth, I started to brainstorm for other ideas. It’s not that I did not have pictures to execute; I just really wanted to reinterpret the designs because it’s something I have not seen in the market.
What I decided to do instead was to digitalize a personal oracle deck by making the keyboard the input.
How it works:
the querent presses any alphabetical key to start
the querent types any words that resonate with them OR types any set of letters
the computer feedbacks a comment and a randomized color per key pressed
the querent can take the words and colors as they please throughout the day
backspace is not allowed
One of the problems that I encountered while coding was the opening visual. I am not sure why the opening page text shifts to the left when a key is pressed; below is the link to my p5.js sketch for the code:
On another note, this is the website that I used to pixelized the hand image:
http://pixelartmaker.com/
In the future, I want to continue working on this and incorporate unique letters and numbers so that the entire keyboard can function as a deck, not just the notes. Furthermore, tarot reading is something I do want to continue practicing in the future. When the iPad comes, I will certainly redesign the images of tarot cards as a personal project.
for the tone lab, my codes seemed to have a problem; the “include pitches.h” on the very top of my code was highlighted red every time I tried to upload the code; the screen at the bottom was stuck at “uploading…” and would not proceed. Below is the copy:
I know the speaker is working, since I got it to make noise with a potentiometer. However, my potentiometer was super unstable and the frequency kept changing by itself. Below is the video demonstrating that:
Although it was unstable, when I rotated the screw, the numbers on the serial monitor would show the correct increase/or decrease in number. This should’ve made the frequency change when I rotated the potentiometer, but maybe my circuit was wrong — the notes did not change.
I will update things as progress gets made
I tried the ‘blink’ example to see if my port was working, but it also did not work; the screen is still stuck and uploading stage. I will book an office hour to figure this problem out.
Tangible interaction is suitable for making the users feel like they are part of the art because they are physically making a change in the environment — which gives the user the sense of power and authority. This can provide comfort and ease to the user, for they feel like they are in control. Therefore, tangible interaction would be suitable for creating technology/art that would be beneficial for someone to be in control (similar to like a steering wheel in the car; a person would likely be want to be in control). It would also be good for making the pace of the interaction more individualized to each individual.
What is Intangible Interaction good for? What are the differences between the two?
Intangible Interaction is good for allowing the user to enter a different realm — when technology is not physically controlled by the user, it can feel like the technology/art is making changes on its own, manipulating people to
In the reading, it was clear that intangible interactions were at an advantage during covid-19 because of health concerns and social distancing concerns. Therefore, it seems that intangible interactions may be better for hygienic activities. Furthermore, it was interesting to see that this restriction of space and proximity and the concerns for covid-19 did trigger an expansion of creativity. Because the artists were limited, they had to think outside the box to achieve something within a small scope.
An example of a difference that I can think of is manual scooters vs. automatic scooters. I feel much safer and in control when I am on a manual scooter, whereas in an automatic scooter, I am in a constant state of anxiety that I might be hit by a bus because I would not be able to stop the scooter.
Can you think of any good (or bad) examples/uses of tangible/intangible interactions in everyday life, product design, art project, exhibition design, etc?
tangible: elevator buttons, car steering wheel, unlocking doors with card, daily screener, charging technology via charging port
intangible: tesla auto, traffic light, face ID, the bathroom automatic sensor
For this week’s assignment, I wanted to incorporate the counting ability of the Arduino and the LED.
The concept was that when the button is pressed a certain amount of times, the monitor would display annoyance: “bruh stop pressing me” and ” is this fun?” are just a few of the phrases the monitor will give back to the user.
Then, after a certain number of times the button has been pushed, red LED will light up, indicating that Arduino is r e a l l y mad at the user.
Although I got the computer to say phrases in the monitor depending on the amount of times the button has been pushed, when I tried to run the code for turning on the Red LED, the USB ports on my laptop suddenly started to not work. After multiple attempts of unplugging and plugging for an hour, I decided to try again tomorrow morning and hope that my code for the LED is correct. This paragraph is in Comic Sans because my life is a joke at this point
For future developments, I want to incorporate using arrays and random function so that the computer can generate random statements from the possible sayings in the array. I would also like to have a green LED that would be on until the user has pressed the button enough. When the user reaches the limit, the green LED would go off, and the red LED would turn on.
also, I’m not sure why the photo qualities are so bad — even the screen screen capture ones. Here is the code that I did:
int lastButtonState = LOW; // state of the button last time you checked int buttonPresses = 0;
void setup() { // initialize serial communication: Serial.begin(9600); // make pin 2 an input: pinMode(2, INPUT); pinMode (3, OUTPUT); }
void loop() { // read the pushbutton: int buttonState = digitalRead(2); int led = digitalRead (3);
// if it’s changed and it’s high, toggle the mouse state: if (buttonState != lastButtonState) { if (buttonState == HIGH && buttonPresses <30) { buttonPresses ++; Serial.println(“Button was just pressed.”); Serial.print (buttonPresses); Serial.println (“times.”); } if (buttonPresses > 10 && buttonPresses <30) { Serial.println (“bruh stop pressing me”); } if (buttonPresses >15 && buttonPresses <30) { Serial.println (“is this fun?” ); } if (buttonPresses > 20 && buttonPresses <30) { Serial.println (“go work on your homework” ); } if (buttonPresses == 25&& buttonPresses <30) { digitalWrite (3, HIGH); delay (100); digitalWrite (3,LOW); delay (100); digitalWrite (3, HIGH); } if (buttonPresses == 30) { Serial.println (“goodbye”); } else { digitalWrite (3, LOW); } } // save button state for next comparison: lastButtonState = buttonState; }
update: it’s the morning and the laptop still can’t read my usb port 🙁
second update: after resetting my Arduino by pressing the reset button twice (thank you Yeseul), my computer was able to read the port again.
However, my LED was not working, and with my intuition I got the led pins out and saw that the long leg was connected to ground. After changing it, it worked yay! Here is a video:
At first, ‘designing a ritual was a concept that I could not fully grasp. Before taking the class, I have not even thought of the word ‘ritual’ in-depth — I only associated the word with a religious tone, assuming that any rituals had to be something related to religious practice.
However, after learning the taxonomy of rituals, I realized that a ritual isn’t exclusive to religious purposes. It can be rites of passage, seasonal, political, religious, and interpersonal. What was interesting to me was that I was already familiar with the examples of each ritual category — I just never thought of them as rituals. For example, elections and parades were definitely events and human behaviors that I was familiar with. However, before learning about ritual taxonomy, I did not know that I could categorize those behaviors as rituals. Learning about the types of rituals opened my eyes to see so many of our human daily life behavior as a ritualistic approach, which was both intriguing and odd.
Starting My First Meditation Journey:
With an open mindset, I started to brainstorm what I do as a ritual in the physical world, and I jot down some ideas and how they make me feel or why I do them (some of them have a question mark because I am not sure why or how). I thought, ‘maybe if I think of analogic rituals, I could turn them into digital rituals’ :
writing diaries when feeling down (more like ranting to myself)
feels validating?
clicking the same button multiple times
makes me think that it’s going to make a process faster?
putting on perfume or brushing my bangs
makes me feel comfortable with how I present myself to others — I feel more confident
reciprocating yawning or checking time
provides a sense of community and belongingness?
Brainstorming notes
However, I wasn’t very fond of these ideas — they seemed too basic, and I did not want to settle with the very first ideas that I had. So I decided to take more time to reflect and think.
As a result, my second option was having a love-language ritual on the internet. As silly as it sounds, I even thought about perhaps dating an online person on my gaming platform. This could’ve been a real person or one of those 2D Anime boyfriends: Choose Your Own Adventure! Type of game.
Though the idea of it sounded fun, one, I thought it was a bit too weird to flirt with strangers online in my gaming platform (I play Super Animal Royale and Animal Crossing, so all characters are animals), and 2D anime dating took a little too long to get enough ‘affection points’ for me to date them. So I decided to give myself more thought.
Then a couple of days ago I was calling my friend, and with a pen and paper in front of me, I just started to take notes and doodle — similar to how people walk around when they talk. This behavior has been influencing me for as long as I remember. It seems to provide me comfort, or a sense of ease, while I call. It keeps my hand and eyes busy, while my mind and mouth can concentrate on the call. Maybe this is because I have a hard time just sitting down and talking. This might be why I hate movie theaters: I have to sit still for two hours. Taking ‘notes’ and doodling entertains multiple senses of my body, which helps me feel focused and not bored.
Notes and Doodling:
It really is interesting — I distinctively remember witnessing my mother draw the most random shapes with faces and wings when she called; I was around seven or eight when I saw my mother doodling while calling. Maybe the younger me thought, ‘wow! that is one cool activity to do’ when I first encountered doodling. Or, maybe I wanted to impersonate my mother (who I look up to back then and now) to get a greater sense of connection to my mother (maybe this is a social bonding instinct?). Whatever the reason may have been, it stuck with me for over a decade, and I still find myself taking notes and doodling on many occasions.
Doodles and notes I took during a call with a friend. There are to-do lists, random words I wrote down that was being said during the call, and snippets of images.
At first, I did not make much meaning into it. However, I was walking back from one of my morning classes thinking of what a ritual was, and I thought about which of my behaviors make me feel a certain way. What were the repeated actions in my everyday life that were considered ‘purposeful’? When I got home, I pulled out my notebook to review some notes — and upon seeing my doodles for the second time, I realized that this was an analogic ritual that I participate in almost every time I call someone.
With this idea in mind, I started to digitalize my ritual, and these were the two approaches that I had:
facetime while I show the other party the notes that I’m taking physically
zoom call with my friend and screenshare the notes I take digitally
The first option did not seem too digital — in the end, the only digital transaction was me being on the phone, and I didn’t feel that it was a fully immersive digital experience. The second option was going to be my resort, but the laptop and broken last Thursday, and I did not own a stylus, so I decided to look for an alternative option. Therefore, with the only functioning device that I have being my phone, I decided to call my friend, screen record my phone, while sharing a miro board with my friend.
DIGITALIZATION?:
Thankfully, there was a miro board app that I could download onto my phone, so I proceeded to do that. We called, and I started to jot down notes. At first, it was a bit odd and uncomfortable — it felt weird to write things with my finger rather than a pen. I couldn’t record the actual voice call, but I thought it would also be interesting to see what people assume the conversation topics were purely based on my notes and doodles. Here I am on a call with my friend, Tom, and the 20-minute conversation that I had with him is all digitally (and visually) recorded on this video:
Through digitalizing my doodling ritual, I realized my tendency to disassociate while doing an activity that only utilizes one part of my body/sense. Although I don’t particularly think that getting ‘distracted’ is a negative thing, I do think it portrays my strengths and weaknesses. For example, I think my behavior shows that I am capable of doing multi-functioning things at once, or I enjoy participating in activities that I can truly give all that I have to. In other words, I strive to not only contribute mentally (‘intellectually’) but also physically (hard labor). Nevertheless, others may view it from a negative perspective and comment on my lack of ability to focus on one simple task. To be frank, I can’t really argue with that side either. However, I do think the reason why I get distracted doing a simple task is that it bores me in a way — I need something to stimulate multiple parts/senses of my body.
Regardless, both physical and digital rituals of doodling had the same effect on my body. Both provide me a sense of ease and entertainment or this feeling of being occupied. I can’t solidify exactly how I feel when I do these, but I think I might be enjoying the feeling of being ‘busy,’ which then my brain translates to work being done. Therefore after finishing the call, I would have a greater sense of achievement — this feeling of getting more things done in a limited time, or this feeling of getting two birds with one stone (although I’m really not getting anything practical done). Then, because I enjoy this sensation, I repeatedly generate these “behavior with intention”, which then creates this positive feedback loop that has been affecting my mind and body for at least a decade.-
It was also intriguing to see how my friend was interacting with my behavior. Contrary to when I doodle on a physical paper (where no one but me can see it unless I decide to share), sharing my semiconscious thought process with another person gave me a different sensation. I didn’t particularly feel like I was being watched. However, my friend did ask from time to time about why I made certain chooses, like why I chose to write down a word or why I chose to draw a worm in the color purple (p.s. we were not talking about worms). These questions made me reevaluate the unconscious choices that I was making, which was an interesting self-reflection that I’ve never really done before. The digitalization of my ritual made it possible for me to somewhat ‘interact’ with an audience and publicizing my ritual gave me a lot of thrill in a way because I felt like I was opening up something private that I’ve never really shown to anyone.
The Korean Grandma video showed a clear example of who the technologies are geared towards: younger generations with some proficiency in both interfacing technology and English. There is also a lack of instructions. As Korean Grandma complained at the end of the video, there is no human helper aiding anyone who may struggle with technology next to the machine. This shows that there is a huge assumption about the consumers: the companies assume that the person ordering fast food would be of a younger age who has experience with digital technology like laptops, TVs, or phones.
The words “take out” and “French fries” were not directly translated to Korean — Korean Grandma mentioned that “take out” should be written as “포장,” which is a direct translation from the English word. However, on the screen that she was using, both “take out” and “French fries” are written as to how they would sound in English but only spelled with Korean letters.
take out = 테이크 아웃
French fries = 후렌치 후라이
Furthermore, I realized that visual components, primarily pictures, play a critical role in expanding the audience for technology. This was clear when Korean Grandma tried to distinguish different food options from each other purely based on pictures presented, and even then the system failed her, and she ended up getting coffee instead of coke. Similarly, font size plays a huge role too. The reason why Korean Grandma opted to use pictures as references were not that she is not capable of reading. Rather, it was because the font size was too small for her to see, making the accessibility of the machine much lower to those with bad eyesight.
The font size struggle was clear when Korean Grandma accidentally ordered coffee instead of coke. I believe that this is because “coffee” and “coke” in Korean start with the same letter (and they both have two syllables), making them hard to distinguish.
coke = 콜라
coffee = 커피
notice how they both start with “ㅋ”
Lastly, it was intriguing to see that Korean Grandma made an instant connection between how the fast-food chain operated to how banks operated. Could this portray how every domain of our lives would be transformed to interface technology in the future? Will everything be unified into one method?
