Yesterday Connexion 1 group made its presentation and I would like to flash three phrases that more or less resume the idea we wanted to show to the audience:
Based on Maslow's and Meyer's work about human needs, we look at the model and thought about self actualization, we described it as satisfaction, well being, we started focusing on happiness as our need.
Whilst media influence is relatively consistent across our different cultures, the idea of happiness has less focus on individuation, and prioritizes community and family.
The goal is to find harmony between non materialistic pursuits and material needs, to have enough variety to keep us alive. Is our desire to consume which underpins the consumer culture, industry plays on these desires by offering to each individual the promise of happiness with vast choices, suggesting that the fulfillment we pursue can be bought.
For the presentation I am going to be reading the conclusions part, I think I selected this part in order to have more time to fix a few things from the processing program I prepared. These are the conclusions we made:
Happiness is not fixed, it changes from day to day and external influences play a part.
It is different for each individual
happiness is not an entity, but a by product of relationships, experiences and pursuits
Happiness requires effort and some understanding of self
Internal or subjective mood, emotions and feelings affect happiness as well as external influences
Media communications influence our understanding, and affect our perceived connections between money and happiness
Happiness is subject to constant influence from media, culture, politics, enviroment (personal and physical) and history.
The meaning of this project wasn't clear at the beginning, not for me and for some of the members in my group. A group project when we should be thinking about our project proposal and our thesis seemed to be fitted hardly in this 6 weeks project but once its over I can say that it would have been worse to fit it later on when we are pointing to a defined direction as group projects, as I discovered with this one, can change your view on certain things at the time to approach new projects.
It is interesting in the way we approached this project as a group that at the beginning we were making research on our own, this turned in a lot of resources to have a look at and it seemed to work because the following weeks we were looking in others research and finding what personally suited us in relation to the theme. At the time we were preparing the presentation is when all the ideas and conclusions came up together this way we made a presentation full of content, research and useful links. From the rest of the group presentations and ours I take the area each group were looking at, we had various keywords like colors and happiness seemed like we all started in the same position but we all took a different way.
At the time of facing a group project, what I have learned from this is that it is not necessary to take personal risks as long as each group knows its strengths and weakness at the time of selecting a task to do inside the group. This will help on future group projects as I think for this one I took to much responsibility in order to improve my skills but it turned into time consuming at the end.
[Ovo]: Mgmt - Kids
As part of the research of the project I have been reading about happiness and the pursuit of happiness, the most incredible thing is that I selected the texts randomly between all of the different documents I have and all of them have lots of points in common, for example, the money. The following texts come from three documets I found revealing:
Daniel Nettle - The pursuit of happiness
Mike W. Martin - Paradoxes of happiness
The paradox of money is that money does not bring or buy happiness, contrary to the widespread illusion that it does. money is pursued in the belief it will make us happy, in challenging our tendency to regard money as the solution to all our problems. hedonic treadmill’’: the more we buy and have, the more we want In macroeconomic terms, the paradox of money has been called the paradox of (economic) progress. The paradox of money expresses a partial truth. Money does contribute to happiness. It increases happiness dramatically by moving individuals out of poverty, but thereafter it contributes little and haphazardly to happiness. Part of the explanation is that we tend to misuse money once we have it, becoming caught up in endless routines of getting and spending, Also, we are made unhappy by envy and by feeling we are not making what we deserve compared to others.
The paradox of choice, as Barry Schwartz calls it, is that multiplying the number of options sometimes lessens happiness, too many choices can be burdensome because they place responsibility on us, but also because evaluating options takes time and adds complexity and confusion. Again, having the options to return purchased goods would seemingly increase our happiness in making choices. Yet, Schwartz marshals evidence that we are more satisfied when our decisions are not so easily reversible, probably because reversible decisions keep us anxiously alert to better options we have missed. Of greater consequence, the paradox of submission overlaps with the paradox of choice: When we commit ourselves in a spirit of permanence, as in getting married, we tend to be happier than if we feel free to walk away at any time. The goal is to find the proverbial joys of a simple life while grappling with sufficient options to avoid boredom.
All the paradoxes suggest that happiness is pursued indirectly as the by-product of meaningful activities and relationships. Paradoxes of aim tell us that we should not focus narrowly on our pleasures (hedonism) and our personal good (self-interest); nor should we assume that we can have a pellucid picture of what will make us happy (guidance); nor should we conceive of happiness as separable from meaningful activities and relationships (constituents). Paradoxes of success remind us that getting what we want does not always lead to wanting what we get (getting), and that happiness is easily lost amidst illusions about material goods (money) and comparisons with others (status). Paradoxes of freedom emphasize that submitting to causes, loyalties, and standards can bring happiness-promoting liberation (submission), that too many choices can threaten happiness (choice), and that we can undermine our happiness when we fail to reasonably resolve or accept our conflicting desires for belonging and breaking free (conflict). Paradoxes of attitude tell us that pursuing happiness in things we lack can be futile unless we learn to cherish what we already have (affirmation)and derive peace from hope and faith (hope).
Ruut Benhoven - The art of enjoying life
we can experience deeper satisfactions, in particular when ‘actualizing’ ourself in mastering new challenges and when finding meaning in what we do. Broad hedonism assumes that much of these satisfactions are found in productive activities and in social involvement. pains are balanced by deeper and more lasting satisfaction. In this view, the quality of life is not in the number of passing delights reaped, but in enduring satisfaction with life-as-whole, in other words, in ‘happiness’. This view of the good life is figured in classic utilitarianism. what ways of life are most conductive to happiness and it is therefore less easy to see what capabilities are required. Since there may be multiple ways to a happy life there may also be multiple arts for this purpose. general capabilities to cope with the problems of life, such as common sense, energy and some frustration tolerance. Since happiness depends heavily on the realities of life. This capability will be required for almost any way of life. Social competence needs for social contact, keeping up of love-relationships, position in social networks. in particular for sound self-knowledge. we must know what we want and what we can. All this requires an insight in who we are and an ability to learn from experience. The happy do clearly better in social relationships, The happy get also better along with family and friends On personality tests happy persons rate as more kind, sociable and cooperative, while they score lower on measures of aggression and egoism Happy people are also found to be more popular There is also some empirical support for the contention that happiness requires considerable self-knowledge in the conditions of modern multiple-choice society.
These are the bits I highlighted from the documents I read for my research on happiness, I didn't include all the texts because most of them match on lots of aspects so I selected the most relevant ones for me and the group which curiously are also the ones I enjoyed more while reading. Most of the text I read for this project came to me from the rest of my group, it seems like I have been focusing more on classic interpretors of happiness like Plato. As I said before these are just the highlights, I strictly recommend to read them as they give you something to think about while reading them. I read them as part of my research for the speech that me and my group are preparing for our Connexion 1 presentation.
Previously the only contact I had with texts about happiness was a book called “Happiness” by … and in it I found the terms long term happiness and short term happiness for the first time. Later on I noticed that they appeared on all the texts but with different appreciations, in the book by … both are shown as complementary of each other and in the text by Daniel Nettle , for example, long term happiness takes more importance on the individual. This is probably because they are connected somehow to the idea of differentiating material of non material happiness. Normally you find this connection every time the money topic is discussed in relation to happiness. Short term happiness is always just farther than what you can reach and it exists the chance for you to get habituated to it and then by the time that feeling of happiness will disappear. It is interesting that these points are common to all the texts, probably because they seem to be the the first parts of the happiness diagram. The fact that all of the texts mentioned before have similarities might be caused because they have been written in similar contexts, probably speak about happiness during war period is far more difficult to be explained, even if it keeps the first communal parts mentioned. Other example of this is how Plato connects happiness to beauty.
I find a lot of similarities between what my personal idea of happiness and the ideas I read about, and I also try to find it on a long term but I personally never forget the short term one as it seems to be for me the spice of life, what gives taste to the long term happiness. In connection to my every day work I can also say that it is possible to make a difference between long term and short term learning and also confirm that long term learning gives more short term happiness moments than short term itself. So long term happiness and long term learning seems to be a good way of thinking/working as it is the one that are more pleasant at the time of recapitulation
[Ovo]: Bob Dylan - Hurricane
Wow! (well I'm not really surprised) our individual work is a 40% more important than the group presentation (that's 70%) for the final submission. We have been told to keep a reflective journal and the best definition I found is this one: A reflective journal is a way of thinking in a critical and analytical way about your work in progress. It shows how different aspects of your work interconnect. (from here) I decided to make a group of posts about the group project in order to keep it separated from the rest of my research which is gonna be mainly about my final project.
A reflective journal records where your inspiration comes from and how you make use of the ideas generated in order to develop your work, including also, some evidence of the understanding of the cultural context in which the project is gonna take place. It is made of your own research notes, images, visits extracts, lectures, tutorials , books, journals, photos, sketches... Basically it is made of everything that you looked at or used while doing your project.
It is important to be critic with what you are doing and to keep analysing it every time you make a change on any aspect that your project includes. In order to explain or justify what you are doing you should compare different points of view and identify conclusions made by other persons and how they arrive at them. Decide what you think based on the evidence available. It is like recording all the steps taken during the execution of your work but reflecting on it, creating this way a circular way of study. This is more or less what Andy Warhol did during the last days of his life when he started recording all the process involved in his work in order to leave the legacy of his process.
Having read what a reflective journal is makes feel more secure about the execution of my project as now I know that I am going to have a reason for doing what I am doing and that it will develop my writing and communication skills, this can be really helpful for presentations and for the time of writing my thesis. It seems to be a powerful tool to make my ideas deeper and more precise too but it will slow down the evolution of this blog though.
more links:
Multimedia reflective journals examples
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[Ovo]: Scsi-9 - The line of nine
After defining our personal needs, the group decided to put them all together and then try to find some similarities between them. After locating the similarities between all of our needs we noticed that there were some needs more common in all of us. We decided to keep focusing on the similarities and make some questions with them. Matching other people's answers with ours could give us some sort of interactivity between users and the group in order to make a conclusion about the most common needs and how to cover them. We agreed that the best way to do so could be by the creation of a questionaire in which the questions should be answered in a growing scale from zero to ten. Here there are some examples of the questions so you can have a general idea of what we are going to be asking:
I have the ability to assess my circumstances and prioritise my time
Are you able to express yourself clearly and confidently?
I engage in cultural activity enough for personal and professional gain
The questions will be fitted into different categories, just as Maslow does in his pyramid of needs, the different categories and the answers will be theb representated graphically so the user will be able to compare the results with the overall average and the group averages.
My main task for this project is to do the graphic representation, for this pourpose I am using processing and the research I made so far (with the help from the rest of the group of course) on data visualization gave me some ideas already about how the interface and the interactivity should look like.
We Feel Fine Some Examples together Synoptic
The following are some examples of the investigation made during the execution of my task and some examples from the code I am using for the interface:
- Processing Radians:
public float xpos, ypos; // The center of the rotation
public float rot; //the amount of rotation
public float rad; //the distance from the center
void setup (){
size(400,400);
xpos=width/2; //this just locates the center of the
ypos=height/2; //rotation at the center of the window
rad = 100; //moves the ellipse 100px far from the center
}
void draw (){
background (240);
noFill();
stroke(1);
ellipse( xpos+(cos(rot)*rad), ypos+(sin(rot)*rad), 20, 20);
// we add the cosine to the x position and the sin to the y
// The Pythagorean theorem basically
rot = rot + 0.1; //adds one radian every frame so it moves
}
Just copy and paste this code into processing, I made it as much simple as I could, feel free to modify, play and observe. Thanks to: Spencer Roberts.
-Different graphic Interfaces for Processing:
They are basically two, or the most used ones are these two: Control P5 and Interfascia
I am more used to work with Control P5 but this time i found a problem (maybe I didn´t managed to solve it) at the time of using radio buttons for the user to select from zero to ten in the scale for the questions I discovered that Control P5 only allows you to place them vertically and for the project I needed them horizontally. What did I do? I used Interfascia which is a little bit less beautifull but more practical when creating new interfaces.
Have a go on both of them and maybe you can find a solution for my problem (Im happy with intersfacia). Just one thing i have to say: don't try to rotate the controlP5 radio buttons or you will have a very nice glitch.
C'est fini!
[Ovo]: Manu Chao - Me gustas tú. I like you
I recognise that the first time I had contact with "Basilica" I didn't realise what I saw. That first time what I thought was that something went wrong during the rendering process of a 3D image. I couldn't be more mistaken, it was generative architecture what I was seeing, at that moment I was really interested in generative art and I am now, it seems to be a part of generative art I never really studied deeply. Now that I had another chance to get closer to it I noticed how big it is, it actually seems to be impossible to me to do a post about it in just one day, so I'm gonna start by adding here some links to Soddu's website and speeches.
Celestino Soddu - Generative Art - International Conference - The evolutionary process
A first step into Needs Must project.
Hannes Meyer said:
1. sex life, 2. sleeping habits, 3. pets, 4. gardening, 5. personal hygiene, 6. weather protection, 7. hygiene in the home, 8. car maintenance, 9. cooking, 10. heating, 11. exposure to the sun, 12. services - these are the only motives when building a house. We examine the daily routine of everyone who lives in the house and this gives us the functional diagram - the functional diagram and the economic programme are the determining principles of the building project.
(Meyer, 1928)
Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs:
I say:
A possible and first pyramid could be the one shown in the picture below, it is all mixed, as I said these are my first steps on the project.
At the time i start a project or I receive an offer to do a project I find some needs or questions that I need to be answered before accepting or not. The principal ones are those that really matters to me, in case of need I could survive without the rest probably but these are the most important ones for me, that's why they are the basis of my pyramid.
Physiological:
-Budget: I think we all know this one, but I wanted to point also that feeling that you have when you know that the prize you are gonna receive is not as big as you thought. In some cases it makes you tackle a project in a very different way. A quote from a boss I had really represents this idea: "Motivation can only be achieved by money or project quality, if the project you are working in is s**t but you are earning a lot of money, you will feel recompensed at least." - Carlos Serrano
- Access to materials: This one can have two important possibilities, for example EA sports request you to make some motion capture of two chess players and it is impossible for you to find a tracking suit or the software it works with, you are not able to take the project (if EA request me for a job I'll find the way to do it Imagination) other possibility is that you might need to rent equipment or contract people for the project, here is where we can see how interconnected the base of the pyramid is.
- Time: This one might be the most important one at the time of taking a project, the I need it for yesterday phrase seems to be forgiven but not forgotten, even smallest projects seem to be decided long before the execution of it (thanks) but even sometimes people comes to you with a week deadline.
After clarifying the basic needs the following step is filled with those needs everyone should have in mind sometimes or at least know about them, this step should normally be jumped by big designing companies or names that are usually requested to do whatever they do best.
Safety:
- Impositions: Normally the things you need to have in mind about the client you are working for. In example not to use opponent's company colours at the time of making a printed advert. If there are too many sometimes you can get obsesed about them and finish doing something very average.
- Social & Cultural aspects: This one has more to do about the execution of a project but they are aspects to keep your project safe from being banned from streets. Again if there are a lot of aspects involved the project can turn into a pain more than a pleasure.
- Platform: By platform I mean the different categories a project can be included in, in example, if it is a video, a poster or a website. The confidence you have on yourself while working on a platform can change your decision about taking a project or not.
Once you get over the safety step you should feel more confident about the project, so at this time only a personal matter can make you think twice about it, this is the time for love.
Love:
-Client & Self motivation:
Design and communication does various things on my needs about projects preparation and execution, sometimes it points me into different directions and also I know it can point clients and users to
The contribution that design and communication makes on the prosecution of these needs is wide and long to enumerate but some examples could be that sometimes these needs points you into different directions no taken before, reminds you what your main tasks are, sometimes it offers you more ways of doing the same thing, it makes you invent new ways of covering them and motivates you to accomplish different the different tasks inside a project.
The Impact:
These are the general needs of my work and what really makes the difference between a well executed project or not. In my opinion (now) these needs are the main influence to my work, the rest are just ideas and techniques
Life simulation games or artificial life games are simulation games in which the player maintains and grows one or more organisms. Some games involve a population and ecosystems and the interaction between them. They often simulate animal or human intelligence and are sometimes based on theoretical research made. This games genre normally divided in three different sub-genres:social simulation that explores social interactions (Little computer People),Pet raising simulation that simulates a virtual pet (Tamagotchi) and Biological simulation that are based on the control of the evolution of a character normally aliens or animals and some other games in which you control the environment of an ecosystem. From wikipedia (See the example titles)
Other examples of life simulation games are also know as cellular automatons. Cellular automatons has on John Horton Conway’s Game of life or Life their best representative but some other games are also available to play and explore. Kai Franz for example based his games on Stephen Wolfram’s cellular automata which generates patterns using the interaction between the cells, very similar to Conway’s simulator but with a more creative purpose (link).
Spore wikipedia official web
Coded Beauty by Thomas Kräftner
Treetop by nemoorange
[Ovo]: Depeche Mode - A pain that I'm used to
