TRACE OF SOUND
The world around us is populated by invisible phenomenon. Most of modern technology that we use is sometimes invisible. As interaction designers, we constantly talk about them and use them to shape experiences. However, sometimes we also wonder how might they look and behave like? That is exactly what this project set out to explore – to make the invisible visible.
We wanted to capture the invisible nature of sound and reveal how sound looks when it reacts to different varieties of music, pitch, volume and bass. We used a portable radio and sprinkled on it some glitter dust so that we could materialize the immaterial nature of sound. The output was visually very interesting because it reflected how the glitter reacted to various experiments like tuning the radio, playing different tracks or even just changing the volume. The final video was purely a series of stop-motion animation frames which lend itself to reveal this phenomenon.
CONNECT FOR GOOD
I have noticed that my Facebook newsfeed is always filled with various social concerns that are of great importance in my home country (India). Thinking about my FB network, I made the following hypothesis:
The use of Facebook as a platform to promote social causes on FB mainstream is unique for different age groups.
To test hypothesis (at least within my own network) I used the Facebook API to find out which social causes my Facebook friends shared the most. A simple Processing script looked up the WolframAlpha for every cause shared, giving a good indication of its popularity.
All this data I put into a spreadsheet, grouping it by age. Even though there was a broad pattern in the causes that were supported it varied greatly with the age groups of the people who supported it which in turn influenced the way they shared it.
For this data visualization, everything from visual hierarchy to information layering to line stroke and color weight was given prime importance so as to foster efficient & effective communication of the data.
NABA CHRONICLES
(Excerpts from my article published in The Journal Of Design)
Spending the summer studying in the design capital Italy was not just an extremely thrilling experience but also an eye opener for me to understand the changing paradigms of design globally. It was incredibly inspiring to study in an atmosphere where even though there were students from all parts of the world, the interaction was fluid and the cultural amalgamation so intense. The classroom here was not an apparatus in which we were getting ready for the real world; it was the real world.
Here I saw virtual becoming the new real and the influx of new media shaping our day-to-day life in a very interesting and unique way. This experience changed my perspective towards art that received a global dimension and I became fascinated with new media, with experimentation & the world of play in the mind.
The impulse to make unexpected connections - to see interrelationships where they are not obvious, to explore possibilities through the making of new work was in a nutshell my entire academic experience at NABA. By disregarding traditional boundaries, I learnt that artistic experience is more often a pursuit of the unknown than a mere recitation of the obvious.