Successful Practise task: Why Design?

This is a picture of one of my favourite designed items, the Nintendo DS Lite.

Why is it that we want our belongings to do more for us than to function well?
With the constant evolution of technology, people are able to make previous tasks easier to do or perform new ones that may have been possible to do without the technology. As technology tends to offer hundreds of new possiblities for people, their expectations of what they want technology to enable them to do and their ambitions increase as well. Therefore as a consequence, the more technology evolves, the bigger our expectations become. Because technology can do so many different tasks for people, I believe people are beginning to accept the idea that technology is potenially capable of almost anything at least and therefore, with what it is able to do now is no longer enough, they want it to be able to do what they want, on top of what is already capable of.

With peoples' increasing demands of what technology must be able to do now, it surely must be fuelling the designers/inventors into designing new technology or upgrades for existing technology to meet these ever rising demands. Technology plays such an important role in peoples' lives these days, it is only natural people will start to expect more from it as they grow accustomed to it.

Why are we willing, as soon as we can afford it, to pay extra for things with appealing forms?

In response to the question, I believe it is down to the presence of three personality traits in people ,which are greed, pride and envy. As technology continues to evolve and newer, better versions of existing technology appear, I believe people will feel intimidated by the version of the product they own becoming outdated or even themselves looking inferior. This is because as other people upgrade to the newest product in the range, that person may appear to others as stuck in the past due to that they still own an older form of the product.

There are many examples out there of constant evolution of technology causing people to be left behind as it charges onwards. For example, if you look at the Microsoft Windows operating systems, there are still a lot of people who own the XP operating system or even an older version, but there is a new version of Windows on the market at the moment called Vista. As technology gets more advanced, it is inevitable that it is going to cost more upon retail, which is evident with the Windows series. Vista is not exactly the cheapest of products out there, and with people trying to save up money to afford it, it will become a problem for them when they upgrade to it finally only to find out Windows is already working on a new operating system.

Another solid example I can provide is related to the enclosed picture. The Nintendo DS Lite is the latest product in the handheld series of consoles by Nintendo. Nintendo originally started with a Gameboy, and over the years, newer versions of it appeared like the Gameboy Pocket and Gameboy Colour. Eventually, Nintendo produced a new handheld console to succeed the Gameboy series which was called Gameboy Advance. The Gameboy Advance was a fairly large step up from the original series, but as the years passed on, Nintendo brought out the Gameboy Advance SP which was a smaller, redesigned version of the original model and then eventually, they brought out the Gameboy Advance Micro which was a significantly smaller version of the original Gameboy Advance. There were no ground breaking updates from each generation of Gameboy Advance to the othe particularly the SP to the Micro, but people still bought them like they were in limited supply. The next big leap, would be the launch of a new handheld called the Nintendo DS. The Nintendo DS boasted much improved graphics, dual screens with one being a touch screen, a microphone and stylus as well as Wi-Fi capabilities amongst other features. The DS was a roaring success, and some time after it's released, Nintendo brought out the DS Lite which is pictured above. The DS Lite contains slighty bigger screens but a more compact design regardless, a new power switch and improved battery life and brightness settings. It was not a huge leap from it's predecessor, unlike the Gameboy Advance series to the original DS, but people are still buying it in the millions to this very day all over the world. But Nintendo hasn't stopped there, they are now developed a new DS model called the DSi, which contains new features such as o.3 Megapixel camera, several power lights instead of one, a new power switch, slighty larger screens and more advanced in-built software such an animation application. Yet again, it is not a revolutionising leap, but as shown through the past, people are more than happy to pay for a basic upgrade of an existing product that may only have been given a few extra bells and whistles and a new look. The fact whether the new features it offers are revolutionary and do justify paying the price for the upgrade, are basically just ignored by the millions of customers out there as apparently you only have to make a few small changes to the existing product and it will still sell phenomenally. This is also strongly evident in other forms of technology such as MP3 players and Ipods, games consoles and mobile phones.

I admittedly do not understand why people must continually shell out their hard earned money everytime a new version of their beloved products are released, as most of the time the upgrades made to the latest version definitely do not justify the increase in price from what the previous product's price was. It probably does come down to peoples' obessessions with being as ahead of others as much as possible, thus creating an ever growing hunger to get the latest and best technology available as soon as possible without caring how much they will need to spend. The greed, envy and pride personality traits definitely do have their roles here and I think due to them being present in everyone, it causes this arrogant, self centered need to be amongst the most modern people out there.

Our Pixilation Project So Far

With our Narratives module so far, we have studied pixilation and stop motion animation. As well as looking at different pieces of stop motion work by various artists, we also had to create our own pixilation video in small groups as part of our assignment work. We had a 2 hour session to come up with an idea for the film, find an ideal location and also take the necessary pictures to produce the film. We needed to take at least 360 photos but the more the merrier. The video had to be at least 30 seconds long, which at a rate of 12 frames per second, equals 360 photos.
The people I had in my group by the way were Tebby, Dan Everitt and Umar.

Basically, we went into the cemetery near building and I decided for us to create our own spoof of the famous 'Thriller' video by Michael Jackson, but add some very crazy and unexpected twists into it like I do with my existing work on Youtube. With the video itself, I came up with the majority of the ideas for it at least, but I do owe the guys a lot of gratitude for helping me to make the video especially with the awesome poses they pulled off! :P

I'm one of those people who is better at coming up with lots of smaller, more random ideas than one long, consistent idea that runs through out the video. I think it's mainly because with both the projects I have worked on in the past (the anime spoofs and the project I am still doing now which is a parody series of a game), the videos I make for them are made up of short, random sketches. And thus, I believe from being so used to that sort of style, I automatically ended up applying it to this pixilation work.

Anyway, out of sheer excitement, I decided to make my own version of the video for this project at home, before we make a video during our session at uni. It was mainly as a basic demo to see how the video would turn out with the all the pictures put together and such. I am really pleased with the results, it has turned out pretty hilarious and I have uploaded the video to Youtube now. The video has been embedded into the blog below.


I will also provide a link later on in this post of the final video that I will have make with my next session and have it uploaded it to Youtube.

Whiteboard Animations

This is the overall video of the whiteboard animations everyone had to make during our stop motion workshop in the welcome week. My group's part starts from 2:48 as it the last one anyways. We had to take about 120 photos but I'm not entirely sure if we achieved that to be honest. The whole picture taking and white board drawing work itself took 2 hours to do, but our tutor put the video together.
I will also post a link to the pixilation project I am working on with new group as soon as it is ready.

Successful Practise: The State of Multimedia Technology

In my research of the current state of multimedia technology, I found an article by the BBC, where they are investigating three new possible methods of interaction with technology, particularly computers. The three new methods of interaction include: touch screens, movement and mind control. The article I have used is located at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7676552.stm .

The type of interaction that I will investigate is the use of touch screens. Touch screens already feature in existing forms of technology such as PDAs, the IPhone, Nintendo DS and so on, but now they are trying to integrate the technology into computers so people do not have to use the mouse to command a computer. In the article, they describe technology that aims to offer a new way to interact with computers, which is "Surface" by Microsoft. Surface is a table mounted touch screen and on the inside, it has been designed to operate like a computer running Windows Vista. The use of a projector inside of the table and a reflective screen as the table top enables the users to see and "interact" with the table. I found an article detailing the various features of Microsoft Surface and it is located at: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/29/microsoft-announces-surface-computer/. According to the article, Surface is able to recognise physical objects placed upon it including a paintbrush and a mobile phone and it will enable hands-on control of various media such as pictures, maps and music. Surface was designed directly for establishments such as hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues, with people actually being able to perform tasks such as, ordering a drink via a tap of the finger or even sorting through a list of music and organising it into playlists like with a computer. The difference here being, that they would not need to worry about having all the components necessary to run a computer, such as the monitor, hard drive and mouse, as Surface acts as all of them in one and can be used just with normal hand gestures.

Upon reflection, it does seem that Surface has got a lot of potential on causing an impact on the current state of technology. Combining the fact that it operates like a normal computer but without the need for the mouse and keyboard and that it also can recognise physical objects placed upon it, whether it's a person's hands or a still object like a bottle of wine means it can open up a whole new world of possibilities. As said before, it has been designed in mind to be easily usable by people who are not confident with a mouse, and thus it means it can offer people a less daunting and more familiar way of interacting with a computer, as it all requires us to do, is what we already know how to do by instinct. It can offer people a new way to do traditional tasks as well as technological ones in a completely new way so there definitely is potential for it having an impact.

My Phoenix Wrong work

Here are the links to my Phoenix Wrong work on Youtube. These Phoenix Wrong videos are my tribute to an already existing craze on the internet where people parody a popular anime style game called Phoenix Wright. The sprites are taken from the game and either put through Macromedia Flash or a video editor like Sony Vegas and thus these videos are formed from lots of dedicated editing.

I decided to join into the craze as I'm a big fan of the original game and the existing parody series that was started by a user called Ashfordpride on the website Newgrounds. From making these Phoenxi Wrongs and seeing people's reactions to them as well as seeing all the pixilation videos, I was heavily inspired into becoming an animation artist as my future career. The original creator of these parodies only managed to create 3 or 4 videos to the series, but I already am working on the 10th one now after I started making them back in June!

Here are the links to the first video in my tribute to the parody series and also to my homepage on Youtube so you can access the other ones too:



My Homepage : http://uk.youtube.com/user/krazykakashi234

The first video is still quite rough though even though I have made a revised version, but the quality of my editing does get more creative and polished with each new video to the series, I promise :).

My First NTU Blog

With this course, I would love to be able to further my skills with multimedia and also prepare myself for a future as a games designer. I'm very keen on learning as much as I can with games design and animation as I have recently developed a huge interest in animation. This was due to starting a series of video based projects which are parodies of a fairly well known video game series. I upload the videos to Youtube and they have gathered some attention and have received very positive feedback from the viewers. I am currently working on the 10th video in the series and I am considering the possibility of doing even more of them in the future.

I originally was into becoming a character designer as about 18 months ago, I actually started to try japanese manga style drawings as a hobby in my spare time. I didn't feel I was polished enough as an artist though to become a character designer and I actually found I really enjoyed animation and was fairly good at it after I started my new project. Therefore, that is the reason why I switched from wanting to be a character designer to an animation artist instead.

As well as doing this course, I'm also going to be studying the language Japanese as a supplementary course at NTU. I'm a gigantic fan of all things Japanese and Chinese hence being able to do this course would be extremely helpful for me in the future.

During this week, I haven't been up to much aside from all the official welcomes from NTU including the Dean of the School of Art and Design and a NTU graduate who went on to win a gold medal at the Olympics. I also got introduced to all the staff involved my course and received a very helpful and interesting insight about the Multimedia course. With the actual Welcome Week events I haven't really been to any so far as my friends decided to back out of the Game On! event and also the Chinese buffet, but I will be going to all the upcoming buffets, the Japanese taster session, the samba and instrumental workshops, bowling, a hypnosis show and a comedy gig, so I do have plenty to keep me busy.