This project was done in collaboration with Noa Dolberg.

We used six TLC5940 chips and created a paper stripe of 96 LEDs.
Connected to an Arduino board, the LEDs respond to different openFrameworks drawing tools or particle systems apps. Drawing on the one-pixel horizontal line is immediately translated into the LED stripe, creating a dynamic spectacle of lights.

The following web page visualizes the data retrieved from Google’s Transparency Report .

It was done using Html5, JavaScript, and Polymaps.

Click on the image below to see the data visualization.

The practice of prototyping is much the same to development of human character, through learned experience and feedback. As babies, we learn how to be through our parents, mimicking their behaviors, their actions, using them as the mold to what a person should be. Throughout the years, our models switch and take new form, but there are always people we use as gauges to which we internalize their traits and take them on as our own. We are in a content flux, forever revising how we should be, modifying ourselves.

Be Like You explores the parallels between the design-practice, and the process to which we become our ideal self, through the process of mirroring, rapport, and human-feedback. The intention is explicit, so each user knows that the sculpture is learning from them, and could choose what feedback to give. Be Like You is constantly changing, morphing, and evolving in response to the human interaction, learning new traits and characteristics.

EXHIBITION:
November 9TH / 21ST
THE ARONSON GALLERY at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center,
Parsons The New School for Design
66 Fifth Avenue
New York

OPENING NIGHT IMAGES:

About the Interdisciplinary Collaboration:

“Invoking the image of cloud computing, “prototype” here means a state of constant transformation and becoming. Like a cloud, it is amorphous and malleable, unstable and precarious. Instead of achieving a functionalist goal-oriented objective, prototyping-in-the-cloud becomes a mechanism of repetition in difference; always self-renewing and regenerating, revealing its infinite potential though chance, adaptivity and ephemerality in materiality. To prototype therefore is to invent the unforeseeable, to cast a shape that is at the same time formless. To prototype is to imagine the ineffable and to create polymorphic manifestations that are at once crystallized and fleeting. It is as much a way of cultural intervention as a mode of formal exercise in which memories, histories, locations and relations are engendered, tested, reiterated and distributed — each a raw model of its own unique presence and by its own means. The exhibition adapts to the environment in which it is produced. With the cloud database serving as a structural platform for the project, each material extension of the exhibition becomes a prototype in and of itself, and as such, a tangible experience.

The project is a collaboration that takes place between two geographical locations, using the cloud as a communication channel, tool and archival form for the exhibition. New York and Berlin are both centers of global cultural production and significant platforms for local artistic experimentation. The participants come from a spectrum of disciplines including Design and Technology, Communication Design, Interactive Design, Fine Arts, Photography and Illustration. In June 2012, thirteen Parsons students travelled to Berlin to participate in a week-long workshop at the UdK. In November of 2012, a group of students from the Digital Media class at UdK/Berlin travelled to New York to complete the project and install the first of several iterations. A second version of the exhibition will be downloaded from the cloud and take place in Berlin in January 2013. The content of the show will remain dynamic as the participants continue to upload new versions of their prototypes. Future iterations can then be downloaded at additional sites globally. The Parsons + UdK team would like to thank Sven Travis and Anne Gaines in the School of Art, Media and Technology for all their support on this project. We would also like to thank Angelika Theuss in the office of International Exchange at UdK/Berlin for her advice and guidance in the early stages of this project.”

To read more about exhibition and collaboration go to: http://cloud.parsons.edu/index.php

Process and Previous Prototypes

SECOND PROTOTYPE:

Here is our first prototype!

I started by trying to make every different mechanism work by themselves, and hopefully i will be able to join them together. Once is working I will pay more attention to the look and feel..

1.   Roll of paper – the idea is that the paper is unrolling with the pass of time.
 

2.   The mechanic pen – the pen will be drawing on the passing paper – representing the amount of information available in the internet.
 

3.   This is how the drawing looks for now. Hopefully it will be steady. In this case my hand was passing the paper, not at a steady rhythms and the motor was not attached, so it was kind of “dancing”.

Here is a video of how it’s working till now:

The two following sketches were done using OF and are a representation of different aspects of Information in the Internet.

With the Internet, everybody can create information; binary information generated by a bit – in this case a drawing by pixels. The on-line information is ephemeral, nobody knows for how long will exist, it dissolves, but is also permanent, we are leaving traces behind, we are keeping copies in our computers, in the sent folder of our e-mails, in computers that are tracking our movements. As here, we are keeping images that are saved without our knowledge, in an automatic way.

In this sketch, every particle represents on-line information to which we have access, infinite and different information. But because of time restrains and personalized algorithms used by search engines we can only see and grasp very few of it. The rest of the information is kept far away but near. We think we can access everything but the truth is we only have accese to a few, and that few starts becoming similar.

Before the Internet, the way in which we informed ourselves was by word-of-mouth, going to libraries, reading books, magazines, and newspapers. We would skim through books while searching for the information we were looking for, move to the next aisle, or move from one page to another in an encyclopedia, finding ourselves in places we didn’t even know existed. The amount of information we had available depended on where we physically were in the world, but we knew this.
When the Internet was developed, it seemed to be an open source of information. It meant, for most of us, that our physical boundaries would diminish and that we would be able to acquire information from all over the world. To some extent that has been true for the past years. But is it still today?
Statistics show that today over 80% of Internet users choose Google search as their main search engine. For the past years, Google has been implementing personal algorithms to respond to our searches. While in their advertising campaign it is framed as something that would help us to find, for example: a plumber that lives in the same city from where we are doing the search and not miles away, whom they believe wouldn’t be helpful to us, in reality it means that each of us gets totally different results by searching for the same word, not only plumber, but any word. It means that by typing a word we are creating our own Bubble: The filter bubble called by Eli Pariser where we only have access to what “google” thinks we want to find, to buy, to see.
 

 
An interactive interpretation of the text:
 

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American Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Center & Parsons The New School for Design, as part of the Collaborative Course: Systems & Games, worked together developing games around the subject of disaster preparedness in the Zambezi River Basin area.

After the semester was over Ramiro Corbetta and I were selected to go to Namibia with Professor Colleen Macklin and Red Cross to play the games designed by the class.

We traveled to Namibia during the last week of June. We went to several villages and worked hand by hand with Red Cross volunteers and the villagers playing the game Ready (Designed by Ramiro). Everyday after playing Ready we met and modified the game according to the experience we had during the day and the needs of the villagers. Each day we played a new iteration of the game learning more about design as an iterative process: that begins with an idea, followed by a prototype to test the idea – in this case PLAY testing – to come back to the concept and improve the design.

I also learned the relevance of Games as an educational tool and as a way of facilitating a message. In this specific case: the use of games to bring awareness of climate change and to help on natural disaster preparedness in the Zambezi River Basin area. Games have the ability to increase the learning process by engaging the players, allowing them to elaborate ideas, to think “outside” the box, to come up with their own solutions, to generate discussions, and of course, to learn by having fun.

American Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Center will continue using Ready as a tool to generate discussion and we will keep collaborating with them during this year.

Who? What? Where?

During the spring semester I worked designing the game: Who? What? Where?

Who? What? Where? Is a charade game designed to share information and generate discussion about preparedness for natural disasters (what to take, whom to care for, where to go)

Download the rules and the cards template here (Images retrieved from Google Images)

Cards Templates – Images retrieved from Google Images

Play testing during class – Spring 2012

The data comes from NYPD reports and the people stopped & frisked are put into one of the following groups: Black Non Hispanic | Hispanic | White, Asian & other.

The visualization is done using three mediums: print, interactive, and physical.

Print:

Interactive:
For this interactive representation I used Processing, Google maps, and Tile Mill. Each red circle stands for a NYC precincts and its size is in relation to the number of stops that where logged in that precinct.
When the user hovers over the circle three bars appear, each of them representing a different race: Black Non Hispanic | Hispanic | White, Asian & other. The length of each bar is in relation with the number of people stopped of each race.

Object:
On this object each of the three sections represents a race group: Black Non Hispanic | Hispanic | White, Asian & other. The amount of powder on each section stands for the percentage of each race in New York City (census 2010).
By inverting the object the powder passages from one side to the other. The amount of powder that doesn’t pass corresponds to the percentage of people of each race that was stopped by the police.
The object establishes an analogy with a sand clock, referencing the pass of time: the data used are the number of people stopped and frisked during a whole year.

Video: Thanks to Mariana Garay, Felix & Fede Redondo | Music Stereolab

To read more about the project click here