In continuing work on my capstone design, Give a Crit, I present the fourth iteration.

Expert Review and Critique

After my last iterations, I decided to have other designers look at my work and provide a review and critique. They gave me some great feedback that lead to more whiteboard sketching.

Designing through sketching

After a critique session by fellow designers, I headed up to a fantastic whiteboard room in our design studio. I went to work by sketching larger than life versions of my design. By sketching out my design in a larger-than-life fashion, I was able to notice patterns and details that I might have missed out by sketching in a small notebook. I was then able to pair these sketches, find similar elements, and find interesting deviations. This in turn sparked many new ideas which I promptly sketched as well. Furthermore, I had now read and reviewed multiple literature sources and theories that I was able to use in my designs. This helped inform my decisions and hopefully had lead to a better iteration.

4th Iteration

In this iteration I have pulled some interaction styles from Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop, with which most photographers are familiar. The screen shown below shows a critique in session. On the top right you can see a criticizer recording video and audio of his thoughts. Furthermore, this design allows for a criticizer to ‘edit’ photos in order to show what might work better for a particular photograph. There are selection, drawing, and note taking tools on the bottom right had side that allow criticizers to directly annotate particular features of a photograph in order to better explain their thoughts. A criticizer is also able to pull up two photos for side-by-side comparison or pull up ‘before edit’ and ‘after edit’ versions of the photograph being critiqued. My intention is to allow for easy and powerful critiques that the photographer or other’s can learn from and converse about.

Weaknesses

I think some potential weaknesses in this iteration could be non-scannable critiques (critiques take considerable more time to digest here), too little conversation between the criticizer and the photographer, and no real comparison of a set of photographs (besides the strip of thumbnails along the bottom of the screen). Furthermore, the design doesn’t really allow for a photographer’s intention to show through, which I’ve recently found through user research can be very important.

I would love further comments and feedback on this iteration, especially from photographers.

The Process of Effective Critiques

• Newcomers lack photographic vocabulary
• Put forth a criteria for critique
• Critique is about suggestions and not absolutes
• Show examples of good work
• Talk about characteristics
  • Focal point(s)
  • Prominent elements
  • Unity
  • Rhythm
  • Balance
  • Technical innovations
  • Color
  • Composition
  • What does the photo communicate

Whittington, J. 2004. The process of effective critiques. Computers & Graphics 28, no. 3 (June): 401-407. doi:10.1016/j.cag.2004.03.007. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0097849304000330.

Give and Take: A Study of Consumer Photo-Sharing Culture and Practice

• Kodak culture vs Snapr culture
• Photo sharing on Flickr is equal to photo blogging
  • Has traditional photo aesthetics
  • Some critique and photo hints
• Snapr culture participate in an active organization of photos
• Tagging photo is done for ‘others’ sake
• Flickr is not Kodak culture, but rather “art photos”

Miller, Andrew D, and W Keith Edwards. 2007. Give and Take : A Study of Consumer Photo-Sharing Culture and Practice. Methodology: 347-356.

A Structure for the Critique of Student Photographs

• Critique does not equal an ‘evaluation’, stay away from the term evaluation
• Critique is a two-way communication
• Post-facto -> a priori (crit happens after a photo is taken and informs the next photo)
• Critique should talk about artist intention, subject, technique, composition
• Likert scale works well for critique
• Critiques should appreciate the formal and the technical
• Critiques should involve an active participation which leads to a “re-education of the perception” (Dewey)

Cary, Rick. 1985. A Structure for the Critique of Student Photographs. In Annual Meeting of the National Art Education Association.

Using Design Critique as Research to Link Sustainability and Interactive Technologies

• Critique as a method of research
• Focuses on the particulars instead of generals
• Critique adds to design discourse
• Critique can be used as a tool for design
• Critique is a comment on the ultimate particulars

Blevis, Eli, Youn-kyung Lim, David Roedl, and Erik Stolterman. 2007. Using Design Critique as Research to Link Sustainability and Interactive Technologies. Communities: 22-31.

Double Blending: online theory with on-campus practice in photography instruction

• There is both a factual and interpretive meaning to a photo
• Should use critical theory in ‘read’ a photo
• There is a second meaning to ‘good’ photos
• Reading photos impacted taking photos
• Common criteria for critique
  • Focal points
  • Quality and direction of light
  • Composition
  • Depth of field
  • Relationship between foreground and background

Abrahmov, Shlomo Lee, and Miky Ronen. 2008. Double blending: online theory with on-campus practice in photography instruction. Innovations in Education and Teaching International 45, no. 1 (February): 3-14. doi:10.1080/14703290701757385. http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&doi=10.1080/14703290701757385&magic=crossref||D404A21C5BB053405B1A640AFFD44AE3.

Formalism and Structuralism

From Clive Bell, Wolfman, Hebdige, and Polhemus

• Formal elements are intrinsic to the artifact
• Formal and stylistic characteristics may be conceived as structures
• Formal qualities can account for most visual culture
• Formalism neglects contexts such as class, gender, and ethnicity
• Significant form
• Style is the consistency in the treatment of formal qualities
• Structures of formal qualities equal pairs of oppositions
• Structuralism can help account for social context, mainly through the notion of style and relation

Formal elements: elements of an artifact that are intrinsic to that artifact

Style: a collection of formal elements used to intentionally communicate a message

Barnard, M. Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture

Technology as Experience

• Formal tools influence pragmatics while social context shapes use
• Going from rationalism to practice
• Culture must engage with felt life
• Experience as a totality of acting, thinking, feeling, and sense making

Intone: how individual’s make acts their own

Aesthetic Experience: simultaneously sensual, emotional, and intellectual

• Aesthetic experience consists of: cumulation, conservation, tension, and anticipation
• Dialogics?
• Dialectics?
• Dialogue between self and other: I can only imagine your pain, I can never experience it.

John McCarthy, Peter Wright. Technology as Experience

Dewey’s Four Threads of Experience

• Sensual – concerned with the senses
• Emotional – qualities of particular experiences, value judgments
• Compositional – relationships between parts and the whole
• Spatio-Temporal – relating to the space and time of an experience

John McCarthy, Peter Wright. Technology as Experience

Gadamer’s Aesthetics

• Truth as a hermeneutical experience
• Art is a form of truth
• Art is not a representation of truth
• Art uncovers truths about ourselves
• Art gives us access to truth
• Art raises our sensitivity
• Truth is not how A represents B, but is rather in how humans perceive A as B, an experience

Lawn, C. Gadamer’s Aesthetics. In Gadamer: A Guide for the Perplexed, 87-104.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Flow: “a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity”

• 8 components of enjoyment
  • We confront tasks we have a chance of completing
  • We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing
  • The task has clear goals
  • The task provides immediate feedback
  • One acts with deep, but effortless involvement, that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life
  • One exercises a sense of control over their actions
  • Concern for the self disappears, yet, paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over
  • The sense of duration of time is altered.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1991. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Design Issues 8, no. 1 (January): 80. doi:10.2307/1511458.

Understanding Affective Interaction : Emotion , Engagement , and Internet Videos. Emotion

• Provides a methodology to understand affective interaction
• Triangulate data sources to see and understand how each “tell the same story”
  • Physiological
  • Emotional self report
  • Open ended prose
• Behavioral
• An Experience
• Purposeful progression
• Contient synthesis

Bardzell, Shaowen, Jeffrey Bardzell, and Tyler Pace. 2009. Understanding Affective Interaction : Emotion , Engagement , and Internet Videos. Emotion.

The Form of Human Experience: Interpretation

• Experience is interpretative
• Synthesis of temporal passing

Experiences: synthetic process of imaginative interpretation

• Phenomenon express in calls to action
• Memory and expectations shape meaning

Russon. The Form of Human Experience: Interpretation. In Human Experience, 9-20.

Staying open to interpretation: Engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation

• Multiple interpretations can be good
• Comes from
  • Expansion of computing (work->home)
  • HCI’s interest in the arts and humanities
  • Sociology of HCI
• Alternatives to a single interpretation
• NOT an “anything goes” interpretation
• 6 design strategies
  • specify usability
  • support space of interpretation
  • block expected interpretations
  • unfold new opportunities
  • downplay system authority
  • thwart consistent interpretation

Sengers, P, and B Gaver. 2006. Staying open to interpretation: Engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation. Proc. of DIS 2006, ACM Press: 99-108.

Activity Theory in a Nutshell

“Activity theory proposes that consciousness is shaped by practice, that people and artifacts mediate our relationship with reality. Consciousness is produced in the enactment of activity with other people and things, rather than being something confined inside a human head. Activity theory began in Russia with the work of Lev Vygotsky in the 1920′s, continuing through his student Aleksey Leontiev, and then through students of Leontiev. This work has been influential in education, organizational design, and interaction design. Activity theory works well with design because activity theorists have always tested their theories in practical ways and believe that application is an outcome of theory, not a separate activity. In some of my writings I have discussed how, as a psychological theory, activity theory can be scaled to collaborative settings without losing sight of individual participants in an activity.” (Bonnie Nardi, http://darrouzet-nardi.net/bonnie/, 11/6/2010)

Nardi. Activity Theory in a Nutshell. Word Journal Of The International Linguistic Association.

Creativity in amateur multimedia: popular culture, critical theory, and hci

• Three views on creativity
  • HCI, Rationalist, instrumentalist
  • Post-Structuralist (death of the author)
  • Technological Determinist
• All see creativity as a discourse contributing to knowledge
• The useable is the message
• Found art drives meaning
• Creativity as primitive art management

Bardzell, Jeffrey. 2007. Creativity in amateur multimedia: popular culture, critical theory, and hci. Creativity 3, no. February: 12-33.

Do Clothes Speak? What Makes them Fashion?

• Formal qualities evoke style
• Style equals fashion
• Fashion helps create social identities
• Clothing has a code, which equals a style

Davis, F. Do Clothes Speak? In Fashion, Culture, and Identity.

What is Video Prototyping?

Video Prototyping is a tool Interaction Designers can use to tell a story about a design. It allows for the showing of an entire experience through a narrative. Video prototypes can be used to help better show a design in use in a way that many people connect with emotionally and aesthetically.

My Goals

Video Prototyping can be a very powerful tool to communicate a design. However, it can also be expensive and time consuming in order to produce. While some industry players are starting to use video prototyping more, many do not because of the costs involved. With this in mind, I decided to create a video prototype with very little cost in as little time as possible while still providing quality when narrating the experience of my design.

My Process

My overall process for creating a video prototype was to choose/create a design, ideate on how to tell the story of that design, create a storyboard, shoot the video, and then edit and upload that video.

I decided to use a design that I had worked on in the previous (spring 2010) semester entitled GroupView (research overview, design document). This design allowed multiple photographs to come together and learn from and teach each other. It connects their various cameras to an iPad application and allows for on-the-fly editing. As this design never previously made it to a full prototyping stage before, I had to iterate briefly on the design itself before bringing it into a video prototype.

Storyboard

After iterating on the design, I came up with some basic ideas on how to tell a story about the design. I quickly sketched out a basic narrative using 6 post-it notes and asked my colleagues for feedback. With this feedback I created a storyboard of my video prototype, using post-it notes on a sheet of foamcore so that I could rearrange and iterate quickly as needed.

Shooting and Editing

With the storyboard in tow, I gathered a couple of students and starting shooting the video. I had quickly scouted out a place to shoot and informed my ‘actors’ of their roles as we walked to the location. From there I directed my actors and shoot several takes of most of the scenes. I quickly learned here that having my shoot broken up into scenes greatly speed up the process of shooting. I was able to shoot the entire video in about 25 minutes.

In keeping with my goals I decided that the quickest way to edit this video was to use iMovie. iMovie provides a good quick interface for putting together a decently polished video. Spending just 4 hours total, including make a couple of graphics in Photoshop, I was able to create my video prototype from raw video footage.

Reflection

I’ve found through this project that video prototyping can be a very compelling way in which to show a design. It allows stakeholders, users, developers and others to quickly understand the experience of a design. Some major drawbacks are that it costs (time and resources) a bit more than other forms of prototyping. However, by being mindful of these costs I think a video prototype can be created fairly easily. In the future I would be more mindful of my lighting sources, as there are several annoying reflections within my video. Scouting multiple locations could also help to provide backup plans for when a primary location doesn’t work out (as in it’s too sunny outside to see a screen, etc). Furthermore, storyboarding should absolutely be done prior to shooting as it cuts down video production (shooting and editing) time by a large factor. Without having properly storyboarded my design I would have spent much more time shoot and editing the video. Overall, I am happy with my process and have proved to myself that compelling video prototypes can be made with little resources and time.

Final Video

Below is the video prototype for GroupView. I would love any comments and critique on the video itself, as well as my process.

Over the last two days I’ve been iterating a lot on my design for the critique portion of my capstone project Give A Crit. I’ve locked myself in a whiteboard room and sketched and sketched, and sketched some more.

Here is an example of a whiteboard sketch.

I took this particular sketch and decided to quickly mock it up using Keynote (taking only 30-40 minutes). This was done to help me begin to better understand the design and interactions. This particular concept uses the idea of ‘purposeful progression’ (Dewey) through a three step process for contributing a critique.

However, I wasn’t really happy with these sketches. So, I talked to some colleagues and showed them my work. They gave me some great feedback. So much so that I felt compelled to come back into the studio at 9pm and sketch some more in the whiteboard room (love that room). Here are some sketches I came up with then.

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I wanted to explore my capstone design problem a bit today. So, I decided to head into our whiteboard room (3 walls of whiteboards, 1 wall of glass) and start sketching. Here are some of things I came up with.

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As always, I welcome feedback, comments, and critique. These are just some initial ideas. It was helpful for me to get these out of my brain and into the world. If these provoke you in some way, or if you have some awesome insight, let me know!

I’ve been sketching and thinking deeply about my capstone project lately. I’ve done close readings of web based critique systems like Flickr, Deviant Art, Dribbble, etc. I’ve also been talking recently about the value of quickly prototyping a design. So tonight, I took a recent sketch of my capstone project, Give A Crit, and created a quick (non-interactive) prototype. This took me about 40 minutes using Keynote templates by Keynotopia, just one of many providers of keynote templates for prototyping. So, I present here, for your critique, a quick prototype sketch of Give a Crit, specifically of the critique functionality.

One main thought behind this sketch is to provide some ambiguity of the design so that photographers giving critique can provide meaning as they see fit. Furthermore, this sketch is totally lacking in the photograph’s technical details, which I believe will add value when giving a critique. These technical details could live below the photograph’s description, but I haven’t put much thought into that feature yet. Click on the image below for a full size version.

This project is ongoing and will change by leaps and bounds. I’ve conducted very little primary research at this point. Most of my thoughts have centered around a formal analysis of flickr, facebook, deviant art, smug mug, dribbble, and others. Formalist theories (Bell, Wolfman), Structuralist theories (Hebdish, Polhemus), and Use Quality theories (Lowgren) have also provided some grounding to my work, but will be further expanded upon in the future.

Recently, I had the joy of photographing my good friend Brittany. We were hanging out in Indianapolis talking design and life while enjoying some wine in a local bar. The light was brilliant so I grabbed my camera and made some photographs. Brittany isn’t a trained model and was a little shy in front of the camera, but I was able to get some great emotions out of her with a little directing and a watchful eye (and I’m sure the wine helped a little). Here are what I think are the best shots from that session.

Brittany is a kick ass designer, see her work, and a good model (who has never got the modeling ball rolling) as well. We had a blast creating some fantastic photographs. If you have any thoughts about the above photographs, leave a comment below.