Clock exercises
https://editor.p5js.org/runxinz/full/LmkJpfQsi8
Cross Studio: Discussions
Student ID card
- as an interface between the person and the security system – this building, as the personal information
- multiple layers of interface
- ID card, a collection of personal information, security system, the physical building
- names, unique student numbers, university, photo
- rearrange the information visual, the recognisable colour palette, size of the card, weight of card, fits to any wallet and pocket – easy to carry which are a set of human considerations
Is everything an interface? And does that make this word meaningless?
A New Program for Graphic Design
David Reinfurt
There is only one power, that of saying and speaking, of paying attention to what one sees and says.
Interface
Vocabulary & Definitions
- a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned.
- An anachronism is a chronological inconsistency in some arrangement, especially a juxtaposition of people, events, objects, language terms and customs from different time periods. Wikipedia
Cyclical
- occurring in cycles; recurrent
Exorcism (from Ancient Greek ἐξορκισμός (exorkismós) ‘binding by oath’) is the religious or spiritual practice of evicting demons, jinns, or other malevolent spiritual entities from a person, or an area, that is believed to be possessed.
- ek·suh·si·zm
primordial
- existing at or from the beginning of time; primaeval.
Notes
Whatever lies between is called interface. Whatever allows us to link to different elements, to reconcile them, to put them into communication.
Rosetta stone
a shared surface which facilitates communication between otherwise irreconcilable languages and cultures.
Rosetta Stone records three different languages all relaying the same message. The recovery of this “shared surface” in 1799 allowed the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Clocks
- A public clocktower in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, the centre of a merchant city
- the clock is the interface between man and time
- clocks mark the separation between work time and free time
- algorithm and hermeneutics – rationality and philosophical discourse
- The mechanical clocktower is obscured by the digital information time, the absolute acceleration of the discontinuity in the contemporaneity of computer time.
- Extreme formalisation of the message and infinite production of meaning, i.e. alphabet
- Think of the surface of the clock as an interface: zodiac, clock hands, Roman numerals and Arabic digits – they are all interface decisions
- The interface is also contextual and provisional – they are the collective decisions based on ‘shared conversations, assumptions and history from that setting’
- Interface is both technical and cultural decisions
- “Interface” is an extraordinarily elastic word
- a shared boundary – for example, the invisible structure in our course
- a contact surface
- a border condition
- a process or active threshold
- Interfaces in fashion design is the thing added between two types of fabrics to add structure
- An interface is a thing itself – they may transmit a point of view
- “A computer is a clock with benefits” – Paul Ford (2015), “Code: An Essay”
Apple Watch
- Is it some kind of cutting-edge anachronism?
- Jonathan Ive:
- “while new, is somehow familiar”
- Swiss Railway clocks designed by Hans Hilfiker in 1944
- what the clock looks like is essential for the two clocks to be linked and synchronized by radio signals consistently and accurately – interface is part of the function
- “Apple Watch is of both the future and the past”
- Apple Watch are made from “interface design changes” – again new but somehow familiar
Zapotecs &
- A walk-in clock
- An astronomical observatory used by Zapotec astronomers to read the stars and sun and then tell time
- time-keeping was divine act for Zapotecs
- A Mesoamerican calendar – the writing system that combined logographic, ideographic, pictographic, even alphabetic glyphs
- Logographic: a writing system where glyphs stand for words or meaningful components of words in a language
- Ideographic: a writing system where glyphs stand for ideas or concepts, not specific words in a language
- pictographic: a writing system where glyphs resemble the objects that they stand for
- alphabetic: a writing system where glyphs stand for sounds in a spoken language
Pulsars
- A pulsar is a rotating neutron star which emits light at a very regular radio frequency
- a cosmic clock
- Standing Wave, a sculpture by Naum Gabo in 1919
- A rotating sculpture that becomes three-dimensional when moving
- a third dimension as dependent on movement
- Threater, a photography by Hiroshi Sugimoto
- lens open for the full running time of a film
- 172800 photographic afterimages – an two-hour movie
- “Only if you could change the speed of your eyes, you might even be able to watch it”
“A regular, periodic movement produces their form”
Electronic digital wristwatch
- you have to “read” an digital clock
- “its visual rhetoric stakes a claim to precision”
- it LOOKS more accurate
Olivetti’s Interfaces
- Olivetti thought it was important to understand typewriter within the culture context of writing and the way that writing affects society and coversely, the way in which society shapes writing.
- The typewriter is the interface between letter and human
- Is it dehumanising to use a machine? Maybe. I’ve found writing difficult nowadays because I am so used to typing. I can type a word on a keyboard but not necessarily spell the word when writing it down on a piece of paper. Using a machine has made me ‘mindless’ to some extent like what Olivetti was suggesting.
- “Using a machine too long or too mindless, a person might start to adopt the logic and mindset of a machine” – this is exactly happening to almost every one of us.
- “better design leads to better society” (p.194)
- “Design, he argued, was a medium for reconciling work and life, technology and people” (p.194)
- “Design could broker our relationship with machines, and the careful consideration of design let us work with the speed and convenience of increasingly automated machines while not losing our essential humanity” (p.194)
- this also applies to artificial intelligence
- When Photoshop first came out, people thought it was the end of painting
- I think humanity is an important factor in any good design
- “Design could be a medium for mitigating this complex and fraught interface”(p.194)
- Artist vs. Designer – a good designer sometimes is a good artist and vice versa
- the cultural dividend – something extra, not necessarily functional – joy, surprise or pleasure, this extra is a gift – it feels human and particular
- Design mitigates, eases, facilitates and makes “working with a machine a bit more human” (p. 197)
- Programma 101 vs. Apple Watch
- using the familiar “social furniture” of a watch to make the machine more understandable and palatable
- The letter ‘g’ in the display is curved, which makes the display letter less machine and more human (p.199)
- Design as platform or lever (p.202)
Bruno Munari
- Design as Art
- The typical Danese shop layout though looks rather relentless, definitely repetitive, does a good job amplifying the serial production of these design objects
- Serial production is not reproduction. Reproduction implies that there is an original unique piece, which as such cannot be reproduced, but which production techniques try to imitate as closely as possible. Therefore, the reproduction is always inferior to the original.
- Tetracono – “to see the universe as an invisible unit of pure energy, which is constantly undergoing transformations.”