Coding Woes

Today I attending my coding studio and panicked. I hadn't done any exmple work and I had forgotten all I knew about loops. This was going to be one of those days where everything flies over my head. Everyone else also required tutor aid also so my needs were not going to be met; Ben was once again talking in ridles; and only ten days are left until hand-in. Darn.

I managed to open up the pattern maker example again and try to replicate ome of my drawn ideas, but this too was proving difficult.

Sometimes you just cannot grasp something, and must leave it alone and come back another day.

Freehand Noise

In an atempt to grasp the nature of our second project I have attacked some paper with my ideas as crazy as they may be. Fluid and solid, symbols and shapes, patterns and noise. This is a starting point for me to be able to convert some of what is seen on here into a composed processing form.

Noisy Ideas

Beer Cans

Tonight I was filling beer cans up with cement. Tomorrow in our Studio I will take these in (dependent on whether the cement sets in time.) and experiment with strapping them to my shoes and to see how other people feel about the off balancing of my shoes. 
Problem solving now comes into it as I start to prototype. I am yet to discover if cement is the ideal material to use, If it turns out to not be the best material I will investigate metals and others.
Tonight I had to overcome the problem of getting cement into the cans but did this using a mixture of pushing wet cement into the cans and pouring powdered cement and water into the can and mixing it up inside.

There was also the problem of emptying the beer cans...

Pattern Maker

Today we opened up Pattern Maker, a code created by Ben Jack.
With this code you can enter your own code for a shape in a certain place. When played your coded shape will be repeated, forming a pattern.

I played around a bit with this function as well as some other functions, including the random number function, colour function, and the 3d shapes functions.

The random function allowed me to randomly gerenate different strokeWeights and line positions.

In the images shown below I have used red and blue. I have also played around with other colours and tones. I found out that I can pick a colour using photoshops colour selector and then enter in the Red, Green, and Blue values into processing to give me the same colour.

Random strokeWeight and line orientation, elipse and line tool.

As above, but with colour change.

Seemingly random small circles on circles of different blue tones.

As above, but with a varying line.

3d spheres and rectangles. Experiements with depth.

Over the next few days I will experiment with some of these features to make further patterns.

Storyboard And Words.

Storyboard

My interaction is to do with how we treat our feet. Most of us do take our feet for granted, we think of them as smelly and gross, but we do not take time to thank them for their job of co-ordinating our everyday movements.

We learn to walk once and from then on never think about it again, it becomes second nature to us. What happens when our feet (or shoes) are altered? We lose our co-ordination with the way we walk.

I want to experiment with how we humans learn to adapt to changes in the weight of our feet and therefore how we learn to walk in a new way.

My interactive object is a pair of shoes that have attached to them different weighted objects. On one shoe is a heavy brick, on the other shoe some lightweight aluminium cans. In order to walk in these shoes you must make sure that you place even weight on the cans to ensure that they do not crumble under your weight.

The idea is to acknowledge the unfamiliarity of wearing differently weighted shoes, the crushing of the can when the user fails is a way of measuring this.

Weighted Shoes

One idea I have is a pair of shoes that appear to be regular shoes but once they are on the user realizes that they are both different weights, one light, one heavy. This will play with the users preconceptions of footwear.

I have inestigated some materials that I could attach to the bottom of the gumboots.

My first thoughts are bricks on the heavy shoe and aluminium cans on the light shoe.
Bricks are obviosly heavy and aluminium cans are lightweight and strong enough to support your weight if you distribute your weight on them evenly. The cans will crumble if they are stood on with an uneven weight; this will show if a person has failed.

Other objects I am yet to investigate are toilet paper and cardboard; these could potentially be on the light shoe as materials that will support a person and are lightweight.

Gumboots

 I will most likely be using a large sized pair of gumboots for my final object. This is so people of most sizes will be able to use them, and also so they can slip onto a foot without being moved.

Images found at

http://moon-boots.blogspot.co.nz/2011/09/gumboots.html

Tug-Of-War

A concept I had for an interactive experience is a reenactment of a tug-of-war. An unpleasant experience that I myself has had as a child is when competing in a tug-of-war the other team lets go of the rope resulting in you and all of your team falling over in surprise on top of one another.

There is the feeling of pulling a rope and feeling it resist your pull; and the feeling of pulling a rope too hard and feeling the rope release at the other end resulting in your fall.

I wanted to create an object that allowed you to feel these two sensations of when the rope is tight and slack.

Firstly I thought this could be done using a large wall with a hole in it. Through this hole the rope is threaded. A peg is threaded through the rope on the hidden side, this prevents the rope from being pulled furthur. Randomly the peg would be removed, the next pull on the rope would result in the user falling over.

A model could be made of this using smaller materials to test it out.

Another idea is that there are three ropes, each with a different length of slack rope, if you pulled each rope as hard as you can, the shortest one would pull back against you, the longest one would be too long and so you would fall over, and one would be in between.

Again, these would need to be tested.