research

I've been doing a lot of research on habit. I started with a suggestion by John McVey on looking at all the various definitions of the word habit, and I've been looking at flow which is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus. It was proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and has six factors to experience it: 1. intense and focused concentration on the present moment, 2. merging of action and awareness, 3. a loss of reflective self-consciousness, 4. a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity, 5. a distortion of temporal experience, one's subjective experience of time is altered, 6. experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience. Flow interested me because in one sense it's the opposite of habit because in a habit you don't focus on what you're doing because it's routine, but it is how habits are learned in specific crafts/expertise.
I've been trying to slow down a little and really research things and not jump the gun on anything yet. I think I'm going to start a sketch book type thing using all of the definitions of habit to express what they mean and what I think they mean as I continue researching so that I'll be able to be creating things as a research piece to help myself.

Layers

I'm experimenting with new layering techniques, creating a larger more confusing space. This will be an opening part of the piece.

Take-Away Cards, Ironed, Catalogue Photos, Paint.

5x5 matte cards with rounded corners for 'take-away's, ordered from Got Print.

    

Ironed and ready to shoot on the beach for the catalogue:

Examples of the shots I took at Good Harbor last night for the catalogue.

I also purchased paint for the 8ft sectional wall as well as the nook that will be created from the second wall butting up corners with it. They are colors from my color line, I chose to do Sea Spray and Sand Dune. I went to Lowe's where I gave them the swatches of color that I made for my color line and they were able to scan it and exactly match it.

Routing, analyzing the audio signal

I spent some more time working on the program over the past week. I set up all of the Wiimote buttons that I'm using so far to be routed through a switch system that only sends the incoming signals to specific loop machines. This way, one Wiimote can control 4 different loop machines. The user will be able to switch between the 4 machines by using the D-pad on the Wiimote - up is assigned to one, down to another, etc.

I also started trying to analyze the resulting audio right before it gets sent to the speakers, but I'm not sure that I'll be able to read what the notes are - I'll probably have to work with the overall signal's amplitude/frequency.

I did a little work making the instruction manual as well - so far I've just started to turn the Wiimotes into vector art.

Mind Mapping

Recently I have been rather enamored with the idea of "mind mapping" and the potential that it holds for both mental organization, as well as brainstorming. I decided to do a very basic mind map of the dream project so far. I might do more and dive into this further, but you'll get the idea for now:

Whether or not a mind map will become more refined and actually become a piece of design work is unclear to me at the moment. I suppose it depends on what kind of response this gets.

Setting Type for Mix Tape

Catalogue Updates / Textiles! / Tags / Packaging

CATALOGUE

TAGS

TEXTILES!

PACKAGING