Design for Discomfort / Pitch for Final Project

For my final project, I want to start a conversation for the in vitro fertilization community. It’s a roller coaster ride of emotions and physical discomfort when a person or couple begins their IVF journey. The first steps is how do I choose a doctor or practice and how are we going to pay for this? Then, there is the anxiety and stress that comes from the actual procedure of countless injections in the stomach, buttocks and arms for over 10 days with cocktails of hormones and endless blood tests for monitoring appointments. Once the shots and surgery step is over, the waiting game begins for the results and whether or not to go to the next steps. And if it ends in a negative or failed response, it becomes an outpouring of sadness, anger, envy, depression and even self-blame with the eventual decision to make on whether or not to start the whole arduous process over again or take the difficult steps to stop and look for other options to have a baby, like adoption or donor sperm/eggs or to make that painful decision to choose a childless path. I want to figure out a way to create an interactive experience to give people an outlet to exchange advice and talk (or scream and cry). It’s sometimes hard to talk to your partner, or family and friends who have never gone through this because they might not understand what you are going through and sometimes they say the wrong things in the efforts to make you feel better, but it makes you feel worse. Being able to connect the IVF community can put people in touch with others that have or will go through that process. Since the community is spread out, I see this design as something that is web or mobile based or even in a game-like medium. Having seen some Facebook groups and message boards for these communities, I find it hard to sift through all the comments to find something in particular that you are looking for. Because of this, I envision a visual mental map of a person going through the IVF process with the terrain of the actual IVF procedure. In this map, a user can immediately go to the spot on the map that they’re on in the IVF process and be able to to engage immediately with people that are in the same stage of the procedure. And as I try to think this through to the end of the journey, I have the images of lanterns being released into the night sky as a symbolic way to cast away one’s grief and ill-fortunes, like in the Thai tradition of Loy Krathon to help in the grieving process.

ROUGH SKETCH FOR THE END OF JOURNEY:

Design for Discomfort / Journey #2

Journey #2: Visual Discomfort

For this journey, I wanted to explore visual discomfort by focusing on the fear of holes, which is  known as trypophobia. Images of honeycomb, certain plants, cheese grater, inside a chocolate bar, corals or in some skin diseases can trigger this phobia.

What is trypophobia?
Trypophobia is a fear or disgust of closely-packed holes. People who have it feel queasy when looking at surfaces that have small holes gathered close together. For example, the head of a lotus seed pod or the body of a strawberry could trigger discomfort in someone with this phobia. The phobia is not officially recognized. Studies on trypophobia are limited, and the research that is available is split on whether or not it should be considered an official condition.

 

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▪ Form: Visceral
▪ Goal: To alter the initial thinking patterns through prolonged exposure of the image to help trypophobe people learn to separate their initial thoughts from what’s real and not threatening
▪ Design approach:  Augmented Reality – Create an AR piece that takes the holed patterned and wraps it on a body part or fills in the holes that can be seen on a mobile device.

SOURCES:  WikipediaBusiness Week

Understanding Networks / Week 4 / Traceroute

PROJECT: In exploring Traceroute, I choose to look at news/media sites and everyday websites that I frequent from 3 different locations (school, work and home). My main intention was to plot the hops on a map in Illustrator or Processing, but I ended up plotting the points on Google Maps in order to see the paths on a more detailed map that you can zoom in and out of to analyze and see patterns.

NEWS SITES: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian

COLOR KEY:
The New York Times = Blue; The Washington Post = Yellow/Orange; The Guardian = Green

 

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EVERYDAY SITES: Chase, Amazon.com

COLOR KEY:
Traceroute from: Blue = School; Orange = Home; Yellow = Work

 

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As I was gathering the data for this exercise, I was trying to purchase tickets to shows that sold out in second after tickets were released (on Ticketfly) or the site broke down (on Eventbrite), so I did a traceroute on the sites out of curiosity.

SHOWS & TICKETING SITES: Eventbrite, Ticketfly

COLOR KEY:
Eventbrite = Blue; Ticketfly = Yellow/Orange
 ——
NETWORK LOCATION TOOLS USED:
https://www.yougetsignal.com
http://www.ip2location.com/  (*NOTE: this site was able to give me more information when the the yougetsignal.com couldn’t find info on an IP address)
DATA COLLECTED:

Design for Discomfort: Journey #1

Journey #1: Start from Form
Attending networking events or parties by myself and talking to strangers causes me and lots of other people social anxiety. I wanted to create a journey in the form of a game on a mobile phone to simulate a party, a conference, or networking scenario to help a viewer/participant mentally prepare for the uncomfortable situation. Instead of playing a meditation or mindfulness app to help bring the mind to a calmer state, I’m hoping that a game to play before an event can help the user figure out conversation starters and maybe alleviate their anxiety with repetition of a scenario that could possibly rewire the brain as to not be so anxious.

It’s Open, Come In…
The participant goes through the doors and is given choices:

A. Start Mingling
B. Head for the beverage and snack table
C. Run to the Bathroom
D. Look at phone

If the player starts mingling with the guests, the more conversations he or she has, the more points the player earns. And with each guest that the player converses with, the more personalities (whether outgoing, shy, into science, pop culture, politics, religion, history, etc…) the player is exposed to for conversation starters. Also through these interactions, there will be a ongoing conversation throughout the party about finding the mystery guest who has all the inside knowledge, like which waiter has the good bottle of wine. If the player can find the mystery guest and the waiter with the good wine (recommended by the mystery guest), the player wins the game.

Alt Docs / Assignment 1: Found Object

TITLE: Found Object

DESCRIPTION: Working with a negative sheet as our data set, our story is a live performance of two detectives’ search into the story behind these captured images.

GROUP:
Christina Hall
Anne-Michelle Gallero

PROCESS:
1. We were tasked to create a non-fiction narrative about 24 film negatives that were found on the street.
2. After getting them all printed. We took some time to see if we could come up with the story from the negatives.

3. From looking at the photos, we saw that the they were taken on one day at a gathering, possibly a wedding. With this in mind, We decided to tell this one woman’s story since it seems like the camera could have been hers, we call her Andrea:

4. We decided to do a live performance/skit where two detectives are tasked with finding the missing person’s case of Andrea Leandro. She was last scene at this wedding and in the skit we go through the images and slides, and through her life to try to determine what happened to her. We developed her relationships with the individuals in the photos and added some more background information to portray the complete picture of Andrea.

LIVE PERFORMANCE:
Here are our analysis of the photos and the stories we developed around them.

Here is the script of the detective and how they portray Andrea’s life by trying to figure out what happened to her.

For an interactive component, we handed out this sheet for the viewers to be an active participants in the search for our missing person.

 

Piecing It Together / Week 13 / Final Project

FINAL PROJECT: Mechanical Reproductions

 


DOCUMENTATION:

Week 1-2
Week 3


Week 4: Putting the pieces together for the final presentation
1. Painting with matte & metallic acrylic paints

 

2. Laser cutting last little details

 

3. Improvising after the laser cutter that you booked for 2 hours is broken and the one working machine is booked for everyone else’s finals and thesis projects. Went to Blick and bought a bunch of wooden dowels and a cutter. Luckily, I had some wood scraps from my mid-term project and some test printed gears, so I was able to scrape together the final details.

 

4. The moment that it came together, along with an illustration for the inspiration and model.

 

•••

NEXT STEPS:
Figuring out how to make the gears actually work together to create more movement and integrating it with the pipe line.

Nature of Code / Final Project

TITLE: Case by Case

DESCRIPTION: Case by Case, my Nature of Code final project came from the idea to distinguish lowercase letters from uppercase letters for little kids to use. This was inspired by a parent-teacher meeting for my 3-year old. The teacher told me that my child was really good at identifying uppercase letters, but not lower case letters. When we read, we are deciphering many strings of lowercase letters, so I wanted to figure out a fun exercise to help him learn in preparation to learning how to read.

MAIN GOAL: To explore and understand the initial steps of letter and number recognition in a machine learning system using Shiffman’s Neural Network with p5 example of handwritten numbers and applying letters to his sketch.


 

PRESENTATION:

CASE BY CASE PRESENTATION

 



DOCUMENTATION:
Continued from last week’s Final Project: Step 1….

1) To distinguish between upper and lowercase letters, I needed to creating the handwritten letter dataset to add to Shiffman’s Neural Network.

ASCI_TEST

 

TEST WITH DECORATIVE LETTER

 


NEXT STEPS: To keep exploring this method and eventually build this kid’s app that could not only create testing data from what the child writes, but could also be a fun way for kid’s to practice writing their letters and identifying the letters case by case.

 

SOURCE CODE: 

Piecing It Together / Week 12 / Final Project: Progress

PROGRESS:
1. Bought Materials: wood, tubing, metallic paints, gesso, 1/2″ diameter copper plumbing pipes, pipe cutter (the best cutting tool ever), marbles

2. Building 12″ x 24″ frame, laser-cutting pieces and figuring out the design to make a marble move through the pipes and system.

 

NEXT STEPS:
1. Finalizing Design.
2. Adding an interactive component to it, like a motion or touch sensor to trigger sounds.
3. Painting and piecing it together.

DESIGN INSPIRATION: Zachmann Kinetic Sculpture, Soundtrack

 

THE PIECE…so far with 1 week left to finish