Positioning Meeuwis

The first six weeks of data design where interesting because it gave me more knowledge in the opposite of what data is, which lead to a broader perspective. It also made me understand the flaws of the use of data. That fully working with data has its blind spots and that these blind spots should be challenged in order to prevent exclusions, like discrimination.

With the visit to the NXT museum we were offered interesting ways of storytelling based on data. With lights and sounds the visitors where engaged in abstract visualizations of what data is. NXT was interesting and inspiring but sometimes I, and I think other students had this as well, felt something was sometimes off. It felt like the connection of the data they said they used, and the visualization was missing sometimes. Some of the installations where cool visuals but missed the story they wanted to tell (Just a small critique).

An installation I thought was interesting, was one that tried to mimic the feeling of nature. It used 3d scans from nature and morphed it into abstract screen projections. With sounds of nature added, it gave some feeling of being there, but still there where things missing, like the smell and touch.

At the assignment we did physically on school with ‘Little bits’ I came to understand more on how to work with data. How you get an input, change whatever comes in and create a different output. This helped me get a grip on how to process the data we collect and think of and end result in a very basic way.

The talk of Miriam Rasch helped me even understand more about the digitizable and also that we shouldn’t try to capture the indigitizable, but more embrace it, and try to get as much perspective in the data research as possible.

Our personal research, which I do with Peter, is based on the notion that physical classes still have benefits over digital classes. We are especially interested in how eye contact plays a huge part in how group conversation is flowing and how the interaction changes, or even disappears. Our main question for now is ‘What are the possibilities in digitize the feeling of distance in conversations?’. Sub questions that came up where, what is this ‘feeling of distance?’ and ‘Does personalizing the viewing point of the conversation change the interaction?’ We’ve created a first experiment where we wanted to find out if the experience for the participant changes if it has its personal perspective of the call. With multiple smartphones we called 4 people and placed them in a space and started playing hangman.

We asked them to track how much they got the attention and afterwards to fill in a questionnaire. We noticed that after the experiment our questions for them were not really sharp enough and that the result can be more interesting if we asked the right questions. To create the right database, we need to know what is useful to find out about our participants. Doing this research in retrieving the right data from them is something we need to focus on right now.

Positioning
Peter

When I chose this practice I had none to a little bit of experience with designing with data. I made some projects where I used data to prove a point, but I never had a full idea of how I can use data, what the possibilities are and how to make them effective as possible.

A few weeks back we went to the Next Museum. I saw the days before a lot of posts coming by from social media where I saw projects from the museum. They were beautiful, stunning and appealing. It made me excited, especially because I had in mind that it had do with data.
When we came to the museum everything was in the details, from the nice daily paper workwear of the employees to the visual identity. When we walked through the museum with the group of 6. We saw again as already said beautiful, stunning and appealing projects. But that was it. When I read the concepts I was overwhelmed with the work process., the communication from concept to final end result was completely lost. I could not see the data, or understand where it went. This was to be honest a little bit disappointing, but interesting to think about. How can you tell and involve the user in how you used the data to visualisation?

Me and Meeuwis were talking about online classes, and how it feels different than a normal physical class. When you’re in your physical class you are aware of your surroundings, you see when the teacher is looking at you, hear other students typing. you feel the atmosphere: can we talk or do we have to be quiet? Do we have to pay attention now? Do we have to take notes? All these feelings and thoughts are your collective feeling with the other students. That get lost when you try to translate that to the digital world. In a team or zoom meeting you can turn off your camera and there are no consequences to that. You cannot make yourself invisible in a physical class. When a teacher is looking at you, you cannot simply ignore him. ”How can we make the digital way of interaction more engaging through better senses of solidarity”

We came with a the idea to make a prototype where the “host” has to look into different camera’s. Each camera is connected to an individual person. Here we hope to create a more interactive way of looking at each other. Because when the host is looking at person 1, he’s not looking at person 2. But you get a more intense eye contact en interaction We put four phones to four different chairs, and played the game hangman.

We made a questionnaire for our first prototype that had to be answered by our participants for prototype 1. There we had the question: How often have you been looked at? The answers are hard to use because we did not give the participants measurements to measure when someone has looked at them. Therefore they all used their own measurement, and that resulted in useless data. The question that got interesting then was: How to gain the most effective data?