Location Recon 3

The end goal of this project is to display the work out in the environment, to an unsuspecting audience. So a location which has no audience would be not ideal to say the least. Therefore another factor in the location and the project has to be this possible audience. With that in mind a basic people count at set points, was a simple first steps in helping better understand the audience, and to a greater affect, what shape the project should take. These are the results of this first step.

1. People at bus shelter/opposite restaurants = 12 people/1 bus



2. People walking by on foot = 55



3. People walking by side of building on foot = 8



4. Cars entering and exiting car park = 38 cars



5. Traffic passing on main road = 422 vehicles

Location Recon 2

Below is the second possible site (B), again at the New Palace Theatre, but this time on a side window. The display area is a more uniform shape, making the final project more visible, but I feel it would be less interesting. Need to test theory. Again just off main road, so large passing audience, and opposite is a large car park for some shops used mainly in the evening (video rental, super market etc). Another good location, with a lot of practical qualities.

This is a scale drawing of the projection area showing all measurements and represented in a 20:1 scale when on A4 size material.

Location Recon

As a group I feel we have a good, basic idea from which to build upon and experiment, using noise to represent the ‘life’ of an area, then taking that input and using it to change the exterior of the New Palace Theatre through projection of imagery that reflects that ‘life’ as we see it.

However this clearly needs exploring and developing, so to that end, the location itself seemed the most logical place which to start to explore, both in the physical space and practicality, and in observation to see what we can bring to the area.

Below is the first site (A) which is a doorway on the front of the building leading to the main road. Located near by is a bus shelter on the same side of the road, restaurants opposite, and with it being a main road there are many passing pedestrians and much traffic. This is a good location to get maximum exposure to a non-captive audience. Also the doorway is covered blocking out street light, making the projection more effective.

This is a scale drawing of the projection area showing all measurements and represented in a 20:1 scale when on A4 size material.

PDP

Self development and improvement is key in every aspect of your life, whether it be educational, personal, or for your career. The plan below is designed to make you think about the key aspects which are needed to have a clear focus, and therefore achieve your end goal. Personally I view myself as a very organised person who manages their time well, and tries to succeed in every task they take on. However, I strongly believe that what one person views as a strength, another can view as a weakness. For example, I think it is a strength to keep my surroundings tidy, as ‘tidy person, tidy mind’, but my wife views this as a weakness as she views it as obsessive. My point is, I have done many of these forms throughout my life, and also I have had to administer them as well, and my findings and beliefs are that if a person wishes to succeed in any given task which is within their realm of capability, they will, if they are not bothered, they won’t. No form like this is going to change somebody dramatically if they don’t already have the internal drive, it would, and does, take a much greater agent of change.

After all that though I have completed the form for the purpose of the exercise, focusing mainly on technical skills, which I would have already strived to gain, and lack of confidence in front of unknown groups of individuals, which I may become better at masking but will never change.

Spacial strategies

Below are three links I was sent that deal with strategies for a non-captive audience. I just wanted to include them as reference points before we start developing our own strategies and plans as a group.
http://chaohanarch.blogspot.com/
http://kimberlycwalker.tumblr.com/
http://sirigoyen.wordpress.com/

Final Website 2

Having thought that I had completely finished the website, I had to revisit it to check it for compliancy against the disability discrimination act. I thought this would only take a couple of minutes, and I already knew that I had to add some ‘alt’ tags to my images, which I had forgotten, but I was surprised once I ran the code through the compliancy software at just how many small errors there were. With these errors I was shocked that the code even ran, as I believed it had to be character perfect, and also just how long it took to solve these small problems.

After a bit of time and effort I managed to iron out all these things, and ran each page separately through both

1. http://www.contentquality.com/
2. http://validator.w3.org/

and managed to get all to pass WCAG-priority 1.
Also the css sheet passed compliancy when ran through
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Mini-Projection Ideas

As a group we have decided to revert back to our original idea of projection onto a structure to improve the general area’s perception and emotional connection. For this task, the initial idea is to make a projection onto a small area of the old theatre as it is not only central to the location, but also has a massive amount of history attached to it. The projection is also going to reflect a constant variable to the area in some way, from an input source. A basic idea of this would be to have a small projection of silhouettes dancing in one of the theatres windows, and this would be attached to a wind speed measuring device, then the winder the area was the more distorted, through a ‘TV static’ effect, the image becomes. This is one example of visually displaying the general wind speed in the area, whilst also improving the areas aesthetic quality. The same idea could also be used to show the communities feelings towards certain issues by having a simple form on a website, which has a series of questions with both a positive and negative perspective, which is then calculated and fed through as the input, causing a change to the image to represent these feelings. At the moment these are obviously just thoughts on the problem. The idea needs to be fully explored to create a solid foundation from which to build as we neither have the money or the scope to be able to achieve this as successfully as a project like ‘D Tower’

Final Website

The final website should be online now at www.jmmoore.co.uk

After finishing my first website I was pleased with what I had achieved, if you had asked me to do it 2 months ago, I wouldn’t have known where to start. However, there are a number of technical and aesthetical changes I would like to make when my skill set improves.

First, I feel the general layout and content is quite plain and shallow. I do like clear black and white layouts, but still think it could be a bit more ‘funkier’, and hopefully I can improve this in the future, whilst adding to the content.

The photo slideshow could also be technically simpler on reflection, and still achieve the same result. Instead of using modular division, simply adding 1 to the variable each cycle, then adding a statement to say once the variable reaches a certain value, return to 0. However if I had a greater skill set I would use different code to create a control system to manually view the photographs, I did try but couldn’t get the code to work, nor did I fully understand it, so I reverted back to the one I did, even though it may not be the most efficient. Linked to this point, when I create my next website it would be better to have one separate page to handle all my JavaScript, like I have 1 page to handle all the CSS on this site, and 1 page to handle the validation JavaScript for the contact form. It does not affect the functionality of the site, but it would make the navigation of the code easier and tidier.

The contact form on the site is centralised in style but the check boxes do not line up perfectly as I would like, so next time I would probably use a table to achieve this. Also with the contact form, it sends the information entered an echo form, where I would like it to be sent to me. The validation is also pretty basic, as discussed before, and I would like to improve on that. Finally before I had validation on the form, I had a line of code that enabled the pre-rendered message in the text boxes to disappear when the user clicked in the area, so they didn’t have to manually delete it, but I couldn’t get this to work alongside the basic validation so had to leave the text areas blank. I would like to include this feature again, which I think is standard on forms nowadays, and allows another area for the designer to communicate with the user.

Overall I am very pleased though, I think it is a good, solid start which I can build on, and have learned a lot from.

My manifesto

A manifesto is a declaration of principles and intensions, usually very persuasive in nature, and political in content. This is the ten key points which I believe everyone should try to live their life by. I feel that if everyone was to adhere to these points the world would be a better place.

1. Everyone has the right to seek comfort and guidance from whatever source they feel fits the purpose, whether it be spiritual or material, as long as this has no negative influence upon others.


2. Everyone has the right to free health care, if they live a relatively clean, healthy lifestyle, and the cause is not self inflicted.


3. No one should go hungry in the modern world.


4. No one should be denied love and companionship, as long as this has no negative influence upon others.


5. Every child has the right to innocence.


6. When the above points are achieved, those who commit crime and cause hurt to others should incur the fullest penalty of the law, and be treated as they have treated others.


7. Every man and woman should strive to be the best they can.


8. People should live each day. Life is a gift which is taken away to freely from many others who don’t have that choice.


9. Don’t worship greed, take what you need, share what you don’t.


10. Enjoy your life, you only get one.

Street Furniture Example

Below is a quick example of the ‘street furniture’ I found at the entrance to Union Street. This picture demonstrates just how much physical space these items take up, and if we could turn these into positive factors in our life (like those mentioned in the previous post), the sheer amount of sub-conscious positive data our brain would receive and have to process. Surely this increase of ‘happy’ data would, theoretically, have a proportionate effect on our mood, therefore the overall mood and quality of the area.

Street Furniture

Although it would be a nice idea to replace all the buildings and project 3D images onto the exteriors, it is not very practical, and would be very much a long term game plan. Another idea which could be used in the present to achieve the main goal of rejuvenating the areas life and soul would be by turning the everyday things we don’t notice, but hate, on the street into educational and joyful objects. If I look at the basic aerial map on Union Street and roughly block out the street furniture we all dislike but need, you can see how much space these items (street lamps, bins, pavement, bus stops etc) take up physically and in our subconscious.



To that end, if we were to take these necessary and transform them into objects of joy, this would in turn improve the area, and its aura.


A historical time line could be literally embedded into he pavement, and even the material of the street could change along the line, from cobbles to modern slabs, to help represent this history. Also a thing like the ‘Chalk bot’ could go up the street every morning and print peoples messages on the pavement, or 3D art could be used to represent/change peoples moods.




Street lamps could change the colour and intensity of lighting, linked to improving people’s happiness. The inputs could be weather sensors, sensors in bins which have compartments for both trash and recyclables, when people recycle more the light changes to a warmer, friendlier colour. When it’s cold out the lights could become an intense red to compensate.


The bins themselves could give out a positive message or feedback when people use them to help encourage people to use them, and the bus shelters could display images which people would laugh and smile at.

All these little ideas could and would add up to improve peoples moods, and bring back a history to the area.

Networks

Just a quick post on network models. I have already made my feelings clear on ‘social networking’ in a previous post, but I didn’t talk about networks as a whole. There are three main types of networks, demonstrated by the diagram below.

Centralised networks work by many users having access to one main resource, i.e. most mass media. There are millions of people watching one TV program, from one source, for example, but the problem with this is that if you take that source away, everyone is affected, and the network stops.

On the other end of the spectrum there are distributed networks, where everything is linked independently from each other, the Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.

This is really the ideal, with free passage of knowledge and resources, with no risk of the network collapsing when a few of these connections are broken. However, even though I feel that if we achieved this model in most areas of life things would be better for everyone, it would also destabilize both power and wealth, the two things people strive to achieve, and therefore our very human nature stops this from becoming a reality.

If we go back to the TV example Sky would never let the BBC show a brand new series of 24 at the same time as them, even though this would allow more people to view it, as this draw of the ‘latest and greatest’ is the USP (unique selling point) of that channel, and how they make money from their subscribers.

My Website design (part 2)

Bibliography

• “Dreamweaver CS3” by Nick Vandome, Computer Step


• “Brilliant JavaScript” by Ken Bluttman, Pearson-books


• “Brilliant HTML & CSS” by James A. Brannan, Pearson-books


• “HTML & XHTML Pocket Reference” by Jennifer Niederst Robbins, O’REILLY


• “JavaScript Pocket Reference” by David Flanagan, O’REILLY

Websites

• www.marvel.com


• www.playstation.com


• www.lego.co.uk


• www.NewZealand.com


• www.google.co.uk


• www.simpleflashblog.com

Acknowledgements

• Leanne Moore


• Luke Mears


• Chris Saunders


• Mark Dixion

My Website design

As previously discussed I wanted my site to fit a template like my mock-up. I changed it slightly so it just consisted of a main banner, side bar, and content. I created my own banner using simple shapes on Illustrator, before adding my digital signature, I created for IDAT 107, using Photoshop.


I wanted to use my digital signature as I put a lot of work, time, and research into making it something that truly represented myself, see the IDAT 107 labels for a full breakdown. It was also from that research that I decided that I wanted to use the font type Arial throughout my site as personally I find it a friendly, warm font which is slightly rounded, all of which could be said about me. Also I used the same colour scheme, black and white, for most of the site as I feel it gives the design a more ordered, mature look ( blue text is used to highlight certain things, but still compliments the black and white), and two, it signifies how I often see the world in things being black or white. To achieve this uniformed look and feel across the site I used one CSS sheet to style all the main pages.

In terms of content, I viewed the website as an ongoing project which I would like to add to and change in the future, so with that in mind I just added four additional pages which are about different aspects of me. I have a brief intro about myself on my home page, and then I have a separate page to do with my travels, one to do with my hobbies, a cool stuff and links guide, and also a contact form. Although some of these pages may seem a bit bare at the moment, my thinking was by laying them out in such a way it would make them easy to add to, or to add a separate page for another topic in the future.

The site contains links to other sites, and also to navigate around the content, this was achieved using anchor tags, and specifying the destination using href, reference point attributes. There are three other parts to the site which use specialised coding, the story, the contact form, and the photo slideshow.

The story was achieved by using alert popup boxes to gain information, then by using variables and if statements, to place the relevant information back into the text at set point to make it appear like I personal story.

The contact form also uses different data collectors, and that data is sent to a specified destination linked to the “submit” button. In this case the destination is just an echo form which displays back the information you sent, but demonstrates that, in theory, the information could be sent to myself. The form also has if statements built in to check the three main elements required when submitting. These are run client side using JavaScript to check that a name, message, and a valid e-mail address have been entered. If not an alert is activated to ensure the user knows why the form will not submit. I chose to check for these items because if it were to be submitted for a real person to reply, these are the only three items they would need, a name, a place, and a question, whilst the other fields are just additional data. The name and message are checked by simply having a value, whilst the e-mail address is checked, crudely, by seeing if there is an ‘@’ symbol after the first character.

The photo slideshow of New Zealand uses variables and if statements to place a picture into a specified source, along with another variable to control the amount of time that image is displayed, before the code is run again to pick up the new picture variable value, and therefore change the image displayed. The continuous cycle of these images is achieved by using modular division (represented by percentage symbol [%]), so the number used in the statement is the remainder of the sum, not the answer. For example if there were 5 pictures, and the variable in the equation was 1, then 5 goes into 1, 0 times, but has a remainder of 1, therefore the image displayed is linked to that number. The cycle is achieved by the fact that when the variable then becomes higher, say 6, then 5 goes into 6 once, but the remainder is 1 again, so the first picture will be displayed again. Similar to how a clock works I believe. The getElementById function is used to enable the line of code to work in any browser.

There are a number of improvements I would like to make in the future which I will discuss once the site is active.

My personal biography in hyperlinks

This is a represntative example of how all aspects of life are linked and 'net-worked'. Each word in the following paragragh is hyper-linked to a webpage which has some personal relationship to the word it is embedded in, some deep, some very shallow. However, here is a brief selection of moments from my life to this point.

I was born in Birmingham on the 9th November 1983, where my parents named me Jon Michael Moore. However my parents, sister and I moved down to Torbay when I was very young, and this is where I grew up and lived until very recently when I moved to Plymouth to attend university.
I met and fell in love with my beautiful wife, whilst attending Churston Grammar school, at the age of 15, before finally marrying her in June 2008 at Churston church, followed by an unusual honeymoon in Disneyland Florida.
After finishing school I worked in WHSmith. It was not for me, so my wife
and I packed up and left for six months in New Zealand. Upon returning my wife trained to be a secondary school teacher whilst I returned to brain dead work making aeroplane engine parts in a factory.
Today as I have previously mentioned, I attend Plymouth uni, and enjoy my hobbies of computer games and comics, yes I do know I’m 25, whilst living happily in the city with my wife.

Rhetoric

The effective presentation of ideas, or simply the art of argument. First a brief history. Rhetoric is one of three original liberal arts in western cultures, along with grammar (the correct use of language), and logic (testing and inventing knowledge, mainly through questioning things). It was taught by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and is just making a come back now after 2500 years. Classic philosophers believed it was essential in the discovery of truths.
There are many rhetoric techniques and devices which can and are used to construct an effective argument. I could list them but we would be here for a long time, however the main ideas are contrasts, three part lists, and language devices.
I was intending to put forward an intellectual piece on the use of rhetoric, but whilst trying to construct an argument of my own to show its’ effectiveness, I learnt and realised that most if not all people use these devices whether they are doing so consciously or not. Therefore there is no thing to prove, it works, and must do to have been an art form for so long.
I never set out to write a piece with these techniques in mind, I try to connect with my audience on a more personal level, rather than writing something which feels clinical and cold, but by doing so I inadvertently use these devices to make my case. I also think that this is an art form which has stood the test of time, and many great men and women have debated it for a lot longer than I am going to do, so I shouldn’t have too stronger personal opinion on the topic other than to acknowledge it exists and works, and everyone seems to have an understanding of its uses to one degree or another.