Final

For this final I created a robot that personifies a plant to improve its relationship with its owner. It’s a way for plants to communicate intuitively to humans and enriching the experience of taking care of a plant.

The robot is controlled through face tracking using ml5, and is able to mimic the movement of the person in front of it.

WEEK 12

For my final I’ll be working on a project in collaboration with the life in a box class, making a robot suit for a plant so it can better communicate to people its needs and allow people to play with it like a pet. I’ll be using poseNet to control the robot’s movements and Teachable Machine to make it recognize gestures so it can respond.

This is what I have so far:

WEEK 11

This week I have different pieces of a project that I haven’t pieced together, I was experimenting with things like recursive functions, WEBGL and speech recognition, here are the results:

WEBGL + music visualization:

https://editor.p5js.org/rw1693/sketches/3pMFTwiwm

PoseNet + Julia Set:

https://editor.p5js.org/rw1693/sketches/zVadcIZbh

Failed speech recognition:

https://editor.p5js.org/rw1693/sketches/DnreQK-XA

WEEK 07

This will be a really roundabout way of talking about what computation means to me, but I swear there is a point at the end. I have two cats, and a certain behavior cat owners might often see in their cats is that they like to rub their necks on things. The answer to why they do that seems straight forward enough— they have scent glans around their necks, and when they rub their necks against something, it leaves their scent as a way of marking territory. But this way of explaining why cats do it ascribes an intention to cats. It’s unlikely that they understand what scent glans are, or that marking territories in this fashion is a universally recognized gesture among all other cats. I think the more likely explanation is that cats that do this have a certain genetic sequence which gives them something like a permanent itch around their necks. It just so happens that as the cat try to scratch the itch by rubbing against something, it leaves their scent and warns others of its presence, which gave them an evolutionary advantage. The cat might not realize that any of this is happening, which is probably why they equally enjoy getting their necks scratched by humans, even though it doesn’t accomplish anything pertaining to their survival. To house cats, this behavior has become useless. Their survival and reproduction is almost completely controlled by humans, while they still retain the vestiges of what it used to mean to be a cat. Rubbing their scents everywhere no longer serves any purpose, but they still do it because the itch is still there.

When we take a look at human behavior, our own behavior, we often make similar assumptions, that it’s more intentional than it might actually be. Just like how house cats no longer live in the wild environments where their ancestors did, neither do we. What then can we think of as vestiges of past humans, the “itch“ we have to scratch even though it no longer serve the purpose it used to? The first thing that came to mind is social interaction (the second is sex if you’re wondering but that’s not what I’m here to talk about). This might sound ridiculous— social interaction is what defines us as humans, it is one of the main reasons we became the dominant species on earth today. However, while it was true for prehistoric humans, where a tribe of people who socialized and worked together were more likely to prosper and defeat neighboring tribes, this just isn’t how society functions collectively today. In modern capitalist societies, social interaction is a distraction. It takes time away from being productive. It would be nice if we had workers that do all the working and need none of the time off for socializing, which is why we’re seeing automation in different industries. Social media becomes the fix for the “itch.“ It’s like a fast-food version of real social interaction. It’s certainly less time-consuming than actual social interaction, requires less effort, and we do it purely for fun, not because it helps us accomplish anything. Social interaction is what allowed humans to be where we are today, but is not what we need to go where we’re trying to be. To put that into the cat analogy, social media is the equivalent of if cats invented a wearable neck scratcher.

Maybe this is a cynical way of looking at things. Maybe I’m making the assumption that a person’s aspiration will always to be to maximize their productivity. But even if productivity and wealth isn’t a person’s end goal, it directly relates to the quality of “human experiences“ they’re allowed to have. If they wanted to spend a nice weekend with their family at the beach, wealth is what determines whether that beach is covered in trash. If they wanted to enrich their minds with newest forms of entertainment, wealth determines what they can access. We find ourselves living in perpetual conflict between being an efficient cog in the society machine and paying attention to what makes us human, and it seems like we’ve collectively taken priority of the former, heading towards longer work hours with increasing digitization and simulation of human activities.

This puts us interaction designers in a strange position. As designers, we hope to use our designs to either improve work efficiency, or, maybe more so in the case of ITP, enrich people’s lives and experiences. We pay close attention to human behaviors, habits and interests. We try so hard to make things interesting and appealing because everything else is so boring. The only thing that makes modern work and life bearable is if it in some ways resembles environments and elements we were evolved to adapt. After a long day of work at an isolating desk job, people can at least get a taste of what social interaction is like because we design intuitive social media platforms. We design VR experiences for people who don’t have the time to explore actual places because of their busy schedules. We create these “cool things“ that amaze users, only because the users have already been deprived of something they innately need. In a lot of ways, we’re designing to satisfy the vestiges that is human needs. While people try to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of themselves, we designers are here to provide quick fixes to what they really want as humans. This is what I really think about computation. Even though I fantasize in the shower about how everything could be different, I think my time would be better spent preparing to apply as UX designer at Google or something.

WEEK 06

This week I created a sound generator, using bouncing circles on the screen to make sounds. The pitch of the sound is determined by the combined size of two intersecting circles.

One unresolved issue is that while two circles are overlapping, the sound clip plays over and over, when I only want it to play once when two circles first intersect. I think I need to create some sort of array that remembers the previous position of every circle so it wouldn’t play the clip repeatedly while two circles intersect.

Week 04

This week I learned to shorten code with the use of functions, so that the main function draw is simpler and easier to debug. I made a simple version of the ms paint drawing tool.

https://editor.p5js.org/rw1693/sketches/UOVfJSB42

Week 03

This week I collaborated with Hyunseo to create a game where the player has to get the panda to touch a piece of bamboo.

The biggest difficulty was working with rotation, when we had to relearn trigonometry to figure out the right angle for the rotation of the panda’s arm.

https://editor.p5js.org/rw1693/sketches/UDVmXgWjX

Week 02

For this weeks assignment, I made an animation including the following:

One element controlled by the mouse.

One element that changes over time, independently of the mouse.

One element that is different every time you run the sketch.

I’d say the hardest part of this sketch was to randomize the direction and frequency of meteors appearing.

https://editor.p5js.org/rw1693/sketches/VxwpGZfcx

Week 01

What computational media means to me?

I hope to use computational media to augment the way we perceive the world, creating a sense of wonder in people wanting a break from their jaded senses. When basic physical needs are satisfied, people start to create demand for psychological needs. As artists and designers, we are lucky to live in a time where experiences are commodified, allowing artists to meet these demands in different industries. With my background in industrial design, my goal is to combine cool experiences with real life applications, adding color to mundane tasks.