TED – Sherry Turkle – Connected, but alone?

• Use what we learn in virtual world to live better lives in the real world
• We’re letting technology take us to places that we don’t want to go
• Studied mobile technologies for over 20 years
• Mobile technology doesn’t only change what we do, but who we are
• Texting, emailing at breakfast, whilst their children complain
• Texting at funerals
• Escaping from grief through technology
• Trouble in how we relate to each other, but also how we relate to ourselves
• Capacity for self-reflection
• People want to be together, but elsewhere
• Customise their lives
• Can end up hiding from each other, even though we seem to be connected more than ever
• The goldilocks effect. Not too close, not too far, just right. Technology keeps people at a distance.
• “Someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation”
• Edit, delete, portray the ‘self’ that we want to be.
• Self-reflection is the bed-rock of development for children/young people
• No one is listening.
• People experience pretend empathy as if it were the real thing.
• We expect more from technology and less from each other.
• Technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable.
• We’re lonely, but afraid of intimacy.
• Designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.
• ‘We will never have to be alone’
• Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved.
• Changing the way we think of ourselves, a new way of being.
• “I share, therefore I am”
• “I have a feeling, I want to make a call”
• “I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text”
• If we don’t have connection, we don’t feel like ourselves.
• End up isolated if you don’t cultivate the capacity for solitude.
• Solitude is where you find yourself, so you can reach out to people and form attachments.
• Using other people and things as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self.
• If we don’t teach our children to be alone, all they’ll know is being lonely.
• It’s time to talk.
• Plenty of time for us to consider how we use it, how we build it.
• Develop a more self-aware relationship with our technology.
• Create sacred spaces at home and reclaim them for conversation.

TEDxBrussels – Jeremy Howard – The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn

• Self-Driving cars
• Websites that learn about your behaviour as you interact with them such as Amazon that might suggest a book or film, or Facebook which shows relevant advertisements
• Watson beat contestants on a TV show
• Social structures
• Economic structures

• Deep Learning – a single algorithm that can seem to do almost anything.
• Learnt to see – recognising traffic signs. Better than people.
• Deep learning is now at near-human performance with understanding what sentences/language means
• Computers can now write for themselves, creating captions for images and such
• What would take a team of people 7 years, now takes one person 15 minutes. The computer is not replacing the human, but they are working together.
• Computer capabilities are increasing exponential, whereas human capabilities are more steady/gradual, we’re almost at the threshold where computing capability exceeds human capability.

• Websites that can find and search for similar images

• Technology can be used in medicine to recognise cancer and make predictions as to survival rates and life expectancy, also helping to find new ways to deal with and treat it 

COP3 Subject Matter

I am going to be looking at how technology is changing our perception and transforming human consciousness. I will be looking at both the positive and negative effects that technology and the internet are having on us as individuals and as a collective. Technology is evolving at a pace that is becoming difficult to keep up with. Every week, if not every day, we are hearing about new inventions, software and apps. These terms are used so frequently that they are now widely recognised and accepted as “normal”.

The sudden, accelerated evolution of technology and the birth of the internet in the 1980’s has vastly altered the way in which we interact with each other on a minute-by-minute basis. We now have limitless amounts of information quite literally at our fingertips, that can be downloaded, uploaded and shared with people on the other side of the world. Within seconds.

How is technology affecting our relationships? Both with ourself, and with others. Are we dependent on technology to find a sense of self? What would we do in a world without it? How far can technology take us? Is technology turning us into a bunch of dribbling idiots?

As fast as technology is evolving, rates of diabetes, cancer and many other diseases are skyrocketing. As soon as we come up with a solution, another five problems present themselves. We expect that technology can solve most if not all of our problems. From getting shopping delivered to our door, to planning a journey across the world, there is almost nothing that we cannot do with it. Do we believe in technology as we would in a ‘God’?

Will technology ever feel, the way we do as human beings? Will it ever understand what a relationship is, or what it means? Robots are now being presented as solutions for looking after the elderly and children. We first saw this in the 90’s with the introduction of Furby’s, Tamagotchi’s and the robot dog AIBO. Where do we draw the line between what is real and what is not real. Are we at risk of losing our humanity to machines?

Sherry Tuckle states in her book, Alone Together:

The idea of a robot companion serves as both symptom and dream. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by “solving” it without addressing it. The robot will provide companionship and mask our fears of too-risky intimacies. As dream, robots reveal our wish for relationships we can control.

Rather than confront issues directly, we now propose technological solutions that can solve them for us. Such as in the case of robot companions. From the perspective of a hard-working parent who is constantly occupied with a high pressure job, a robot companion may appear to be an ideal alternative to looking after their children who need constant attention.

The companion may take the pressure off the parent, but what damage is it causing to the child? How is it going to affect their ability to learn and create real relationships with other human beings? We often hear the phrase that “ignorance is bliss”, and in many cases it can be. Until the house burns down.

We get on the bus or train in a morning to find the majority of people on it staring at some form of screen. We go to the cafe at lunch and find the same there. We walk down the street to the shopping centre and find the same there. Everywhere we go, we’re surrounded by signals, screens, devices and a variety of other gizmos.

Hordes of security cameras track our every movement. Google and Facebook map and monitor us through a constant connection to our mobile devices. Electronic doors slide open before our eyes. Distance sensors on cars bleep incessantly as they are parked. Self-checkouts dish out instructions as if we were brain-dead. People tap away on laptops in cafes. Other’s float along the streets with headphones on connected to iPods. The person behind the till puts through our purchase on a touch-sensitive screen that works out how much change we’re due.

I’m not criticising technology, in many ways I’m applauding it. The ways in which it can enhance our lives and save us time that we could of otherwise spent with our family, friends or doing something that we enjoy.

In “You Are Not A Gadget” by Jaron Lanier he explains:

Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomenon that towers above individuals. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.

My interpretation of this, is that technology has otherwise demeaned the value of human interaction. It’s so much ‘easier’ to text someone, or reply online with an anonymous comment or behind some kind of alter-ego with which the real ‘you’ is never truly presented.

We are becoming a part of this ‘hive mind’, in which we move and act as a singular unit. Ideas and concepts are presented, which then spread through the forms of ‘memes’.

It’s gone viral, have you seen it?

Trolls run rampant. People argue, insult and barrage one another with useless comments, each one trying to dominate the other. There are seemingly no rules on the internet. This doesn’t go to say that the entire web acts this way, there are places where you can have an intelligent conversation or debate and there are huge amounts of resources that we can use to educate ourselves and expand our perception.

Jaron Lanier writes:

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to standardise tests so a student will look good to an algorithm.

Which comes back to the idea of us believing in technology as if it is a ‘God’, or some kind of superior force that is beyond what we can comprehend of perceive. We buy into technology, we invest ourselves quite literally into it, trusting in the machine as if it were some flawless, perfect ‘thing’. We’ve bought into it so much, that we’re beginning to become moulded by it – as with teachers standardising tests so that they can then feed those results into a computer which will process, analyse them and feed back some kind of result.

Those who got result A, please line up here. Those who got result B, please line up here.  This is not necessarily a negative thing, but I think that it’s highly important that we question the validity of these processes. We are human beings, not machines. How can we be defined by something so simple.

So, after touching on a few different concepts, I need to really narrow down my question and pick something more specific..

Bazyli Golinski – Logo & Business Card

After our initial discussion, Bazyli gave me some keywords and information as to what Shiatsu is, as well as some images and designs that he liked.

circular shape – continity, infinity, perfection/imperfection

earthy colours

flow, fluidity, wave, dance

Energy, Ki, Prana

Simplicity

Zen, emptiness, moment, presenceThese come to me first when I think about the logo.

Shiatsu is a work with energy, we remove the obstructions in order restore the flow of life force (Prana, Ki, Chi). Hence the flowing motion, dance etc. we also have to be present in the moment and grounded in order to create the space for clients self healing. I also think simple designs are best (less is more)

I started to draft out some ideas. I decided to use the shape of the hand, as the hands are the medium through which shiatsu is given. To create a feeling of flow and energy I used a gradient of colours. I also kept the form as simple as possible, experimenting with a variety of different styles and presentations.

1. In Buddhist symbolism the lotus is symbolicof purity of the body, speech, and mind as while rooted in the mud, its flowers blossom on long stalks as if floating above the muddy waters of attachment and desire. It is also symbolic of detachment as drops of water easily slide off its petals.

Me and Bazyli were mostly working together, in person. So I don’t have copies of communication between us. I found that working this way was much easier as we could make changes in real-time then and there and also allowed us to develop our relationship and understand each other better.

The ideas below, I experimented with taking the letters F and T and blending the form together. This funnily enough created a heart shape that seemed to work quite well as a ‘badge’. However, Bazyli thought that this looked more like a wedding organisers logo.

He sent across some more visual ideas to help stir things up a bit:

What we liked from these examples was the idea of imperfection. They have a much more ‘hand-made’ feel to them. They come across natural and ‘organic’, as Bazyli put it. From here I started to develop some new ideas around the idea of the ‘zen brush’ or ‘zen stroke’ – if you see below, top left, I have created a few different variations of this stroke which embodies ‘imperfection’.

I then started to take these shapes and work them into a more iconic logo. At this point we were on the right track and Bazyli was responding very positively to the ideas that I was coming up with.

 

After some more reflections and evaluation, Bazyli decided that he wanted to try using one of the other concepts from the designs above. I started working on these ideas:

We liked this concept as it almost captured a ‘thumbprint’ in the design. We leaned more towards the red/brown as it is more iconic of the traditional Japanese design, whilst retaining the ‘earthiness’ mentioned in the initial conversation.

I printed out some to-scale versions of this design and then mocked it up for the client to get an idea of size. I’m also due to do a small photography shoot for the client so that he has images for his new website that he will be creating.

GIDE Banner Competition

CV Design Idea Generation

Daniel Harvey – CV & Project Booklet

Daniel Approached me around August last year wanting to re-design and update his CV. Originally the brief that was given was to create a simple, 2-sided layout, as you would expect.

Skills and Software involved:

• Layout
• Typography
• Printing
• InDesign
• Photoshop

Daniel Harvey CV 2010 (Daniel’s old CV)

I am not suggesting that these CV’s should be copied, I need something more subtle and professional looking but they are worth a look.

– Daniel

In our preliminary discussions via email, he provided me with these examples, as well as his current CV and project booklet. He asked me to come up with some ideas, an estimation of time and cost and then get back to him. After some thought, I decided to propose going for a Bauhaus style. I sent over some images to him and my thoughts.

As for style, what immediately came to mind (or heart), was Bahaus. I think the red/black work well with each other to both grab attention and convey professionalism. I think that navy blue, shades of gray and green could also be possibilities. It really depends what ‘feeling’ you want to communicate. I have attached a few examples to illustrate my thought, I will not be giving a literal interpretation of this style, but will take inspiration from the layout, colour and typography. We can tweak it endlessly until you are 110% satisfied with it.

– Joe

To which Daniel responded with:

I love the Bauhaus idea that is genius I particularly like the first two posters you attached. I like the idea of red and black but not stark black and bright red as this is quite ‘engineering’ and can look quite hard. The Bauhaus seem to use a more cherry red with a slightly off black black to reduce the starkness. I agree the introduction of other colours could be interesting.

– Daniel

 

I quickly put together this design to get the ball rolling.

Working with Daniel was highly enjoyable, yet unexpectedly challenging. As an architect, he was very precise and picky about what he wanted. It took a great deal of time and reflection before we even started to get close to something that we were both happy with.

I have very specific ideas with what I would like, and have found some examples of well-designed CV’s that I have found on the internet. However I am open to any suggestions. The CV’s I have found are for graphic designers. Obviously being an architect I will need a different feel and extremely professional and clear and impressive design and layout and choice of colours. The examples will help as a starting point and it can evolve from there. I need to come across as a strong designer as well as a strong team leader and experienced architect and this need to be seen in the first 6 seconds of someone receiving my CV!

– Daniel

My deadline for the presentation to the university for this project is next Monday so after that I intend to work on the CV. However I have has a few ideas just now. Previously I created a cv booklet that contained a CV plus a mini portfolio with examples of my work with a cover letter presented in a top quality envelope. This proved very successful and I wish to do something similar.

 However I was wondering whether a better approach would be to create a standalone CV which was a double sided piece of thick quality card (I will get this printed professionally) where the design of the CV ran from front to back with key lines, block of colour etc lined up on both front and back. Do you know what I mean? Someone will hold it and think how clever this is… (lets employ the fellow)

 The mini portfolio of work will be a separate thing that can follow the same design principles as the CV.

 Also I was thinking about colour. I still love the Bauhaus idea but I have been been a fan of red and black. The company I work for now is red and black and it just doesn’t work.

– Daniel

RIBA Journal (PDF)

He provided a page from the RIBA Journal (linked above) to give me a better idea for the colour, style and layout for the CV.

Here’s another image to illustrate:

So as we can see, there is a lot of white space, the imagery becomes the focus and the typography is simple, crisp and clean. At this point we were beginning to think about a project booklet, rather than just a CV by itself as Daniel had a large amount of projects that he wanted to present to his potential employer, all in the same place.

Projects 2010-2013 (PDF) Here is the original project booklet that he was using.

It was at this point I realised I was not just designing a CV. I had misunderstood the original emails that had been sent to me. I thought that we were going to have a couple of projects from the booklet on his actual CV, but as things developed we decided it would be much more effective to have them in a separate section. This would quite literally ‘add weight’ to his CV.

From this point I started to re-work the CV with different colours and a much lighter style that was more similar to the RIBA Journal that he provided me with (I also had a physical copy of it temporarily to find inspiration and guidance from).

Project Booklet Draft

I also started drafting the project booklet at this point, in-line with the new style that I was developing for the CV. I sent over the mockup example above to collect feedback.

You are a master.

I will look at it properly tomorrow but at first glance I love what you have done and so does lilley.

Glorious man.

– Daniel

He then sent over some visual feedback at a later date:

Up to this point, I was still working on the CV in Photoshop. This presented more problems than it solved. I had been avoiding using InDesign as I didn’t have much experience with it. I decided that now was the time to learn. I started re-building the CV in InDesign.

 CV 1 (InDesign PDF)

I mailed this over to Dan who came back with:

Joe, each time you send an update it looks better and better. This looks great. Please find some initial comments attached.

I am wondering if we need another colour like fuchsia pink for the main headings?

Also what would it look like if we shuffled it all up on the right?

Is this in InDesign now?

Thanks

– Dan

I made some more changes:

CV 2 (InDesign PDF)

Needs designing as 2 pages together possibly with colour running over both pages?

·   Only needs ‘daniel harvey chartered architect’ on fist page

·   Remove blocks of text on second page to give more space. Use the text left over to set ourt and I will refine text over the weekend.

·   Only need address and details at bottom of each page

– Dan

By now we were starting to get somewhere. The working relationship was developing well and we seemed to understand each others ways of doing things, there was no friction at any point.

After a lot more pinging ideas and designs back and forth, we ended up with this. The style started to change quite dramatically when developing the project pages, which then influenced the CV pages. We were now starting to lean much more towards the style of the RIBA Journal.

CV & Project Booklet Development

Hello joe

Just seen and love it!! Keep going, nearly there!

Will call tomorrow morning?Sent from my iPhone

From this point it was a case of collecting all the images and information that was to go into the project booklet. The CV text was also revised several times before we finalised it. Eventually, we met up and Daniel passed over to be a folder with all of the projects that he had worked on. This made it much simpler for Daniel to then refer to specific projects as we were not going to include all of them in the booklet.

Before this, he was sending over projects 1 at a time by email and it was becoming confusing keeping a track of all the content.

Laying out such a large amount of content was certainly a challenge. Making sure that everything looked balanced, even and easy to read. I’d never done anything quite like it before and was kind of like doing a jigsaw. Once I had come up with the basic layouts for the pages, I was then able to duplicate sections across and tweak things as necessary. Many hours went into this part of the project.

Over the course of the development we also discussed different ways in which Daniel could print and present the booklet. Looking at things such as:

http://flippingbook.com/?gclid=CPr18oaP2sICFezHtAodc0IA5g

We also discussed different papers and printing techniques such as gold foiling.

Once we had the CV and booklet finalised, Daniel sent a digital copy off to a company that he was hoping to meet with. There was then a period of silence as we were both busy with other things. When we came back together, Dan had got a copy printed off for us to go over in person to make some more final amendments.

Final Revision

 

 

Mode20 – 1920’s Research

Beth was quite clear on the fact that she wanted to base the style of the brand around the 1920’s. We discussed it and decided to create a more modern take on it. What I found most notable about this style of design is it’s simplicity and the use of simple shapes to create patterns. Black, white and gold were prominent colours and gave a sense of elegance and refinement.

Blending these concepts with the website design was quite challenging.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh Scottish (1868-1928) Ladies’ Luncheon Room from Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearooms, 1900 Glasgow Museums, Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove.  

Art Deco was an eclectic style that flourished in the 1920s and ’30s and influenced art, architecture and design. It blended a love of modernity – expressed through geometric shapes and streamlined forms – with references to the classical past and to exotic locations. Its elegant sophistication made it the fashionable style of the wealthy during its heyday.

 

Art nouveau embraced all forms of art and design: architecture, furniture, glassware, graphic design, jewellery, painting, pottery, metalwork, and textiles. This was a sharp contrast to the traditional separation of art into the distinct categories of fine art (painting and sculpture) and applied arts (ceramics, furniture, and other practical objects).

Jackson Lee @ Morning Gloryville (Event & Networking)

I have been working with my friend for a few months now on developing a ‘character’ that he has created called ‘Jackson Lee’. This will otherwise be his mask or identity.

Music, Education and Astrology will all be involved. We plan to teach in schools, setup a club night/event in September and I’m also helping him get going with his Astrology services. We’ll also be creating t-shirts, postcards, stickers and other assorted merchandise to help boost and promote the brand. We’re planning a weekly video that will address specific topics such as, “Who are you going to vote for”? – as well as a potential weekly Astrology video.

We saw Morning Gloryville as a fantastic opportunity to get out there and promote our services. I take care of all the design and web/internet ‘stuff’, photography, etc. Chloe organises, comes up with great ideas and has the gift of the gab. Jackson Lee has the vision.

We met hundreds of people and had a huge amount of interest in the Astrology, we found that we were booked up for the entire morning within 10 minutes of starting. Whilst Tareck was giving readings, me and Chloe were talking with people, giving them information and making sure that everything was running on time.

Competition Brief: Concept & Development

I spent the afternoon brainstorming and visualising ideas. I have decided that going with a website is the best and most suitable option for this project as it will have the most potential to get out there quickly and easily. The internet is a powerful tool and can be used to spread messages to millions within a matter of days, if not minutes. It also saves paper and any additional costs that might be incurred through printing a booklet or infographic. It is also time-effective as I will be utilising skills that are already strong and building upon them.

I did some research into what websites are out there already dedicated to promoting awareness of hemp, but there aren’t a great deal, and from the ones that I could find they are all american. I think it this supports my idea to create a website based in the UK / Europe to raise awareness on the other side of the pond. We are all familiar with hemp – but how much do we know about it – if we knew the true benefits and potential that this plant holds, would we not be more active about getting things rolling?