...To the sketchboard!

I love the New York subways. They’re too dirty, too messy, pretty unreliable — but nothing  beats it when it comes to bizarre, awesome interactions with other people you don’t know. It’s got an equalizing factor — you don’t know anything about the person sitting next to you or across from you, but you’re both taking the subway, journeying somewhere, momentarily in each other’s lives.

The subway is also known for something else: MUSICIANS. I bet whoever conceived of and designed the subway didn’t imagine that it would one day be one of the best places for people to listen to a whole variety of music — or for musicians to get exposure to a whole variety of people. It’s just one of the best feelings in the world — when you’ve had a long day, you’re taking the subway and you’re FINALLY on your way home, and while you’re there you get lucky enough to have a musician in the car with you. Most will move from car to car, singing/playing for the duration of one stop, but on occasion you’ll get a real gem: the musicians who stay in one car and treat it like their own private performance space. That’s the kind of luck I had today :)

Ali, Ryan and I (fellow ITPers) were taking the R downtown from school at around 9ish when we got into a car that, luckily, had these awesome guys playing:

(Not actual scene from today. If Ali uploads the video he was filming off his phone, I’ll link to that.)

When we got in, they were playing Bohemian Rhapsody, and really, it was only a few seconds before Ali, Ryan and I started singing along (kinda softly, really just to ourselves). We didn’t know all the lyrics, but we managed :)

Then, moments after we started singing, two girls sitting in the next part of the cart started singing too, and we made eye contact and the five of us all started singing together, louder and more confidently. There were parts to the song that we knew that they didn’t, and vice versa, and we would maintain eye contact to hold through the parts that were mysterious to the other. Awesome!

It looked like other people were going to start joining in on the song with us — a spontaneous singing mob? — except that the musicians riffed halfway through the song and started playing something else (not nearly as recognizable as Bohemian Rhapsody), and just like that, the two girls went back to talking amongst themselves and the three of us got up to sit closer to the musicians — who then addressed us in some of the jokes they made and kept playing.

It really made my day. I was having a pretty awesome day anyway, but right now, I’m having an awesomER day :)

(The musician’s website is http://www.gypsytrane.com/)

Okay, so I’m trying to come up with an idea for Dynamic Web Development (DWD). We’re supposed to come up with a project for a website/something that

 will collect data from its users, and we’re supposed to think about what type of data that would be in order to figure out what would be the best way to develop the site to do that. 

And… I don’t know.

But I DO have some ideas on things that I want to be working on, and doing. So, while this isn’t exactly the assignment, I’m going to use this post to do that.

Neighborhoods in Saudi Arabia

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I’m from Saudi Arabia, of course, and am *somewhat* familiar with neighborhoods and communities there (you’ll understand the * *’s soon.) It’s interesting to me that things have developed so quickly back home, where we went from tiny little towns (if I can call it that?) to major cities… and most people didn’t really settle down anywhere, they moved from location to location, whether because they’re herders, bedouin, traders, or whatever. (Jeddah, Makkah and Madinah are an obvious exception to that, though). I know I’m generalizing here, my objective isn’t to be anthropologically-correct, so bare with my fallacies, thanks.

Settling in one spot is a fairly recent development in Saudi, really due to all the cities and developments from the oil wealth, which has dramatically changed the country in a very short time (creeping on 80 years now, maybe?). What’s even stranger is that in addition to these new large spaces that people spend their lives in, there are also THOUSANDS of people inhabiting these spaces… people that they don’t know, don’t trust, have never had a cup of coffee or tea with. It’s a complete social and cultural overhaul.

While this isn’t the whole picture, I do think that that rapid change is part of many of the phenomena that you see back home in Saudi… how people are overprotective of their families, which translates to men being overprotective of the women in their families, how people can go YEARS living in an area and never know their neighbors… I’m not trying to create a social theory on Saudi, but I think there’s an important aspect of community and neighbors that we lost when we grew big, fast… and that not knowing who’s in the community with you and who’s your neighbor has probably made it worse, and made it difficult for people to trust one another.

Now, I know this an overly simplistic view… and that’s what I would like to find out more about. There isn’t nearly enough research on this, and I think that understanding the new dynamics of society in the urban setting in Saudi, and how it’s changed people’s perceptions of each other and of their neighbors is a big part of why and how the Saudi society today functions the way it does.

And yes, I also have thoughts on tools that might help alleviate that, but one step at a time.

Okay, so when I started working on my Word Cloud, I used dummy text from the Guttenberg Project (The Time Machine) to start out with, and I actually had A LOT more trouble working with that text than I did with the Twitter API.

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For our Physical Computing final, Kim and I decided to create a punchable alien bust with a Processing sketch that would have the alien face getting bruised and bloodied as it was punched. It took us a while to get to that idea — we spent a little too much time brainstorming and discussing stuff, mostly because we didn’t really have a ‘core concept’ that we were trying to go after, we just wanted to do something fun — but eventually, that’s what we stuck to.

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Using adjacent colors.

Now changing brightness.

Now changing hue.

Now saturation.

And here’s the optical illusion I came up with:

First of all, here’s the code that I used:

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Okay, so I’m not a designer. I’m not a photo-shop expert, not an Illustrator expert either, and … I’ve never designed a logo before.

So here’s the logo that I came up with for ITP, the program I go to.

And here are the sketches I drew up while I was trying to come up with this…masterpiece.

So after scouring the internet for a logo that I think is inspiring and meaningful, I came across this one…

Yep, the Rolling Stones logo.

It’s got an interesting story. John Pasche, a design student at the time at London’s Royal College of Art, was commissioned to design a logo for the Rolling Stones after Mick Jagger was disappointed with the designs that their record label, Decca, had put forward. So he looked for a design student to do the job instead.

I’m not clear as to how John Pasche was selected, but I do know that Mick Jagger went to his final design show as a graduate student and that it took him a week to produce the logo, and he was initially paid 50 pounds — that was in 1970. In 1972, after the logo had received a lot of success, the Stones paid him an additional 200 pounds.

I like the story about how the logo came to be most. In their initial discussion about the logo, Mick Jagger spoke of the Hindu goddess Kali (above), the goddess of destruction who’s known for destroying ignorance. Most images of Kali are of her sticking her tongue out, because she’s meant to be fearsome and there are tales of her sticking her tongue out to drink the victim’s blood while she’s in battle (and evidently, she gets drunk on the blood and turns even more malevolent.) I read that Hindus used to make human sacrifices to appease her, and then cover her body with the remains of the sacrifices.

Anyway, back to the logo: so John Pasche wanted a logo that conveyed anti-authoritarianism, sort of taunting, … like sticking your tongue out. But then there’s this excerpt from an interview with John about who he modeled the lips after:

“I wanted something anti-authority, but I suppose the mouth idea came from when I met Jagger for the first time at the Stones’ offices. I went into this sort of wood-panelled boardroom and there he was. Face to face with him, the first thing you were aware of was the size of his lips and his mouth.”

The V&A actually bought the original artwork for the logo a few years ago — 2008 I think? — for 50,000 pounds (or roughly 92,000 dollars).

My brain is fried. Literally. Spent too much time infront of this computer trying to do my ICM final project and not enough time doing…. well, everything else. I haven’t really started documenting, so that’s what this post is going to be about.

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So, for our assignment on signs/visual communication that are badly done to the extent that they’re confusing or misinform, I went to the Museum of Natural History …. and this is what I found!

The main hall of the museum has three of these Roosevelt quotes on the wall — and none of them have ANY punctuation! I think that makes it very confusion. Especially that first line, it took me a really long time to figure out he wasn’t talking about Gameboys.

After the main hall, we decided to consult a map to see where we should go for the exhibitions that we wanted to see… this is what we found:

It was a really confusing map. The actual ‘map’ section of it was TINY and ineligible… but also, the pictures of their exhibits (designed to be user-friendly, I suppose? So you don’t have to keep reading??) were just confusing. They had them all lined up that you couldn’t tell what was what and you didn’t really want to bother with figure it out. I barely saw anybody refer to these legends.

What also didn’t make any sense was why they even bothered to have the floor map for the floors that you’re not on? that just crowds it with information that isn’t necessary for the audience on that particular floor.

Here’s a close up of the floor map for each.

The map itself, upon closer inspection, is confusion. No clear ‘YOU ARE HERE’ marked. It’s also not clear what the symbols on the map refer to — all the really useful information that you would expect to see on a map (like where the toilet was, where the exit was, etc) was missing. Instead, it was inundated with hall names — which isn’t really of any concern to anybody reading a map, especially when there isn’t a link made between the hall names and the particular exhibits that is easily decipherable.

Here’s a wide picture of that map, which shows another element of confusion.

(Forgive my horrible photo skills. Straight lines aren’t my strong point). But here’s another bit of signage that’s confusing: the additional ‘stuff’ that’s on floor 2. When I saw that, it looked to me like BEYOND PLANET EARTH was on both floors 3 and 4 (it wasn’t, that was just an ad) and that floor 2 had an internet cafe of sorts. Well, upon closer inspection, that ‘extra stuff’ on floor 2 was…

Just bulletins on the museum’s Twitter, Facebook and WiFi accounts. Seriously, it looks like those are specific for the 2nd floor!

Anyway, moving on… we went on the elevator, then came out and… blank wall (Should have taken a pic of that). When we turned right, we came across this:

It’s very confusing, because the arrow isn’t actually pointed in the direction that you ARE going, so you have no idea where continuing to take that right will take you (as you can tell in the pic, the sign is on the right side of the wall but pointing left). However, on the LEFT side of the wall, there was nothing. Blank. It’s counter-intuitive to look right to find out where you’re going if you go left.

Some other confusing signs….

Is the water fountain the fire hose??

Is the fire extinguisher in the trash??

And let’s try and figure out where the Exit is…

And let’s find the cafeteria…

And finally, a video of one of the halls with WAY too many decisions to make!

That couple is trying to decide where to go….

But the actual signs are here:

Okay, so our first assignment for 2D design was to look for a website we liked and then see how it measured up against the concepts of visual communications/design that we learned in class. I had one in mind from class, but wasn’t able to find it (it was really cool: I don’t recall the brand, but it was basically a website that was just an online coloring book, and on each page of the website there was a palette that you could use to color things on it. If you know which one I’m talking about, please let me know! Agonizing!!!)

Anyway, I found a good one despite that: Coca-Cola! Specifically, the website they created for their arctichome campaign (www.arctichome.com).

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