Jetha's Graduation Project

Category: Research

Categories
Design Process Prototyping Research

Week 13 – Okay I swear this is the idea now

SMART goals for this week

  • First draft Lit Review
  • Start wire framing

What I did this week

Monday

Maybe I could make a GUI creator where people can drag and drop and design their own system that suits them.

I realised while I used Manovich to help describe what GUI looks like. I didn’t look into why they look like that so I’m doing research into contributors to GUI and what theories in cognition influenced them.

As while there are other OS out there they all use the desktop windows set up. There was ZUI by Jeff raskin. But overall no ones really questioned the GUI design.

I’m then going to research what changes in cognition we have found since the 60s-70s. Then use this as the basis to evaluate GUI would look like if we based it on more recent theories.

Computing power has abused the way GUI was first designed. There was also a few things that should be questioned because of biology like how many people we are connected to. The way we connect with them. They were designing for what they knew back then before the world connected.

We should consider a system update as we have to handle more connectivity, load and processing power.

Treat like how ADHD diagnosis is treated anxiety and depression come from symptoms. Point out the symptoms of Smartphones and Desktops.

Technofeudalism Swiss-army device. Want to pacify and enslave a civilisation consider a digital device.

The bastardisation of GUI the monster it has become. Visualise and fictionalise the brain or core of a GUI. Personify it. The constant notifications the anxiety of email. the fast process. pulsating. Must unload masters cognitive load. tabs tabs tabs. More storage more things must have more things.

Humanising the features. Notifications have anxiety. Windows multiple personality. Spatial design ADHD what do I do first so many things to do. Control and Edit narcissism

The tool that outgrew humans

Xerox wanted GUI to mimic a desktop papers sprawled across the table. What if we visualised that. Find out how many documents you can fit with our current storage. Show an overflowing desk, GUI that was supposed to mimic life has now outgrown the metaphor. Or better how many desks are now in one computer. Show that the processing power is no longer equivalent to one person but to multiple people.

Maybe a peppers ghost hologram of all the papers and desks so people can turn it off so they see that by storing all this stuff in a device you don’t see the load you carry. Until you turn your phone off again. We have a spatial memory that’s why they designed things spatially because we’re better at remembering where things are so when you open your phone or laptop your memory is working to remember where everything is. So maybe within the desk or desks there’s easter eggs people can spot

Tuesday

MOSCOW

Must:

  • Explain GUI as of today
    • Spatial design
    • Time optimisation
    • Control

Should

  • It should do so in a way that shows how these things impact the cognition of oneself

Could

  • It could explain that computers aren’t inherently bad it’s that the advancements of processing power and storage have gone well beyond the capacity of a human being.

Will not

  • Explain what GUI would be better suited to today’s technological advancements and understanding of human cognition

GUI was made based on the metaphor of a desktop. While the team understood they were making the GUI with the thought of there would be improvements in hardware and there was commercial interest in their work. They could not have predicted just how much advancement would happen also they were limited to the hardware at the time. They were also basing their work on what they knew about human cognition. While there have been advancements in this field these advancements have been used under the guise of giving the user what it wants however, our cognitive biases are built for survival so giving us what we want does not necessarily respect the user. The centre of humane technology explained in the context of social media that we are more drawn to negativity and tragedy because we have survival instinct to learn about it in order to avoid it, this does not mean the user wants to look at it (explain better by watching the video again ).

I would also like to mention that the smartphone was created to encompass all of life’s tasks onto one device it did not the same start as desktop GUI so it’s harder to visualise. An argument can be made though that the power of hardware has outgrown this dream. Instead of technology trying to match us and relieve cognitive load we have created more load for ourself in order to match the power, mass and speed of our phones. Like a goldfish we are trying to grow to the size of our new environment. It is an environment as most of life is now contained on our devices. Capitalism also aims to create more cognitive load so it can sell the solution to relieve it.

So, today’s GUI is based on something that was created 52 years ago with a few tweaks that don’t respect the user. Using Lev Manovich I have understand that computer can be boiled down into 3 components spatial design, time optimisation and control. These have existed from the first GUI to present. So I will use this framework to show how the desktop GUI has been bastardised by advancements and capitalism and that the level of hardware we have now has outgrown the individual human.

How I will do this is creating 2 desks as this is where it all started. I will create a desk that is based on what the Xerox team had developed. And then another desk that is based on what their GUI has become. I will then layout tasks for people to do. By doing these tasks people should be able to see that GUI is no longer what it was intended to be.

My one concern with this method is people will walk away feeling like there’s nothing they can do. Whereas I hope to make them realise they don’t need to use everything on a device. Maybe doing small things like switching notes to paper or buying an alarm clock instead of using their phone will lessen the involvement of devices in their life which will ultimate improve things. Perhaps after the experience I can provide information that helps them understand further and more practically.

The tool that outgrew humans

Essentially I am pointing that we are still using a system from 50 years ago that no longer fits our current world. If people can learn this. It shows people that system that carry in the pockets in their bags does not work for them and that they should be demanding something better something more humane. But they also walk away knowing that they can still have agency over this inhumane design by knowing the specifics and take control over a technology and turn it back into the tool it started as while we wait for the next evolution

Here are the specifics of this desktop design, Here’s how it’s been abused, By being able to walk away from the installation one could also walk away from the technology being forced upon us or we could use a part of the system(do a few tasks) and then opt out when we want to.

2 versions need to be created one without ending it ends with just showing the current design of computers and one with an ending and see which one people prefer

Maybe ending could be another set of tasks but instead it teaches people how to return the computer back to a tool. Or just a link to resources about using the technology we have to today in a better way. But also anticipate and look for change. I want people to be able to survive in the technofeudalism world while the tech world battles it out for better tech for people. I believe this can be done through knowledge.

People who are organising for change are those who have worked in the tech industry at the highest levels. Those who are developing new systems are those who understand tech on a technical level. This is all great but we are leaving ordinary people behind we are not preparing them for change we are not helping them out of the system even though we need their support the most and we’re doing this for them. We know what we know because of our knowledge this needs to be shared with them.

Desk 1 Macintosh

Your data was carried on a disk that you held onto. So you could take to other computers

Desk 2 Today

  • Read 10 letters dump any that are spam
  • Listen to 3 songs
  • Make a drawing (pay a £5 subscription to complete this task)
  • Find this document titled thisfileislostforever

Desk 3 Tomorrow

Hardware has mutated GUI so it’s outgrown our daily tasks

Desktop metaphor GUI was misdesigned in the first place add to this the extreme power of hardware today. You get a tool that negatively stimulates our cognitive biases. In order to survive against this we must limit ourselves.

Wednesday

So I realised that I’ve been focusing too much on the why and not the what. I started out with looking into physically representing the digital world which is exactly what the desk idea does. So, now that I’ve remembered what I’m actually doing and that my thesis was never about the why.

In short I’m going to make 2 desks physical representations of the first GUI personal computer System 1 Macintosh and MacOS Sequoia. As GUI is a metaphorical representation of a desk. There will be a list of tasks to do at these desks. But the audience should get the idea visually that the hardware capabilities of computers have turned this metaphor into a hellscape.

I’ve been doing research into System 1 Macintosh and MacOS Sequoia and listing out all of it’s features. I’m then going to try and match to the real life action.

I’ve had a lot of personal stuff going on so I got really muddled up in my own thoughts and curiosity about the topic. But talking with family has made me get back on track on what I’m trying to do.

Thursday-Sunday

I carried on making the list of features for MacOS Sequoia.

I also had a thought while recording that the tasks list can be visually impacting. If the old desk is a really short list and the new desk has a really long list like really long comically long.

MacOS Sequoia Default Features

Categories
Research Supervisor Meetings

Week 11 – Last Week Before Easter Break

SMART goals for this week

  • Finish writing Lit review and Intro
  • Presentation for Formative

What I did this week

Supervisor Meeting Notes

Project considerations

  • The interface
    • Hard to make interesting
    • Make the the external and screen
    • Make it shout out
    • A controller that does a lot of things but it takes a lot of time to control
    • Eye tracker whether you look at pop ups with things that it thinks you want
  • Example Ken
    • 8 bit keyboard
    • To make the most useless e.g. both raspberry pi and arduino
  • Concentrate the quantity

Thesis Questions

  • Audience
    • Technologically extensive to non tech savvy people
    • SMART Goals how to measure improve that
      • I do like this to reach that goal
    • Prove that what I’ve done targets these people
    • Evaluation more systematic
    • Can ask people to informally test it does need to be included in the thesis
  • Extra context with stuff that’s older to support the newer stuff
  • Beneficiaries who might have an overlap with the audience

I started writing my introduction and planned out my literature review. As now that I have the idea to iterate I need to finish the writing before I start working on the project because I will not prioritise the writing as I struggle with it the most.

I thought I found a good structure for my writing and then realised it wasn’t very clear. To be honest I have spent this week mainly feeling very confused and mixed up my thoughts so not much got done this week. I was also very busy with other commitments.

I talked with Agnes who gave me some references to look at and also helped me pick out some physical computing stuff to play with over the break. I also attended her soldering workshop so, I should be well prepared when I come back.

I realised that I missed some stuff out that I need to add to my intro and lit review like

  • Explaining how the current GUI design is based around a capitalist framework
  • Looking at esoteric and artworks that question the design of Operating Systems
Categories
Research

Week 4/5 – Starting Point

I found a book through my mum called “Technofeudalism” by Yanis Varoufakis. He talks about how capitalism as we know it is dead and has been mutated into a feudalist system based on cloud space instead of land. I’m reading through it and making notes this will be a good for my main source of research. As it talks about the tech dominance USA and China have over the world.

Chapter 1-2: Capitalisms Inception and Evolution

Some thoughts I’m already having in regards to my project:

  • Modern Victorian Era
    • “The Victorians believed that firms should be small and powerless, so that competition could perform its magic of keeping entrepreneurs honest”
      • What businesses do we have in the UK if we relinquished power from Big Business?
      • What technology do we have if we isolated from the world
        • Estonia Intranet
  • Quaker era of business
    • Excess profit given back to its workers and the community
      • Monetary value for experiential labour?
  • Capitalism is nursed by people’s passion
    • Capitalism pays you for your commodity labour but your value lies in your experiential labour. That’s what they use to sell their commodity
      • Example: We have the best school because our teachers care the most. Every school sells the same thing education services but what differs them is the people working there (not just teachers all those involved).
    • We have the power in capitalism but are people aware of this power they can exercise? Is this a power we can still exercise in the mutated version of capitalism?

Chapter 3: Physical to Digital & Cloud Capital

Some thoughts I’m already having in regards to my project:

  • Alexa is Don Draper
    • Technology’s role in advertising
  • Nothing is neutral
    • A lot of people have the belief tech is neutral which makes it better than human judgement. However a machine with no sentience is actually more dangerous. It has to be taught what is right or wrong. It can’t make its own judgement on what is right or wrong. As seen with biased systems AI will discriminate and it won’t know it’s discrimination or that discrimination is wrong. Many argue that humans are no different to AI when it comes to generation. Humans just rehash the same stuff over and over. But a human does not need to be told to generate an idea or a thought.
  • Little data Big Data
    • We exchange what feels like small anonymised data to companies. But when you put all that data together it becomes very specific and identifiable. Features like recommendations, personalised ads, social media feeds, news feeds can then be made super catered to you. Then because your feed of content feels like you and it knows you it can then be manipulated to make you think that what you’re seeing is what you agree with and like.
    • ooooo feels very black mirror
    • How damaging is it not to see opposing content or things you don’t like
    • I also recently switched to web results only for on my google searches, I tried ecosia and duckduckgo but I couldn’t get use to them. It was a huge change I wasn’t expecting. Googling something feels way less overstimulating. I’m looking at multiple sources to find the answer I’m looking for, I’m paying attention to which sources I’m looking at. It’s more akin to a library I feel more relaxed. I did the same with youtube a while back I turned off recommendations so when I go onto youtube I just see a search bar and tabs I’m not slapped in the face with thumbnails.
All results
Web results

Chapter 4: Technofeudalism history

  • Scooby doo unmasking terms
    • I’ve noticed a lot that terms have been dressed up to sound less nefarious lulling us into a false sense of security.
      • Subscriptions sound nice, beneficial, equal exchange but what it really is is rent
        • Instead of buying your favourite album with a one time purchase you pay over and over again for your favourite album. Suddenly the idea of subscriptions sounds crazy and a poor financial decision. But you could argue that it’s not just the music you pay for. You pay for the being able to discover new music, to hold all the music in one place, to listen to other people’s playlists. But these things aren’t new, you could pay for songs and hold them locally on your phone. Listen to the radio, go to music festivals, talk to other people to hear new music.
        • So in summary when you rent music you pay for the same product over and over and you pay for isolating yourself from other people. Then on top of all of that the musicians who paid for the music aren’t even paid as much as they would be if you paid for the song or album once.
        • Popular songs go fro £0.99 on iTunes (Once purchased the files are only accessible through an apple computer) and I have liked 1,956 songs on Spotify that would be a £1,936.44 one time purchase I have those files forever on every device I would like them on. I have a premium individual Spotify account that’s £11.99 a month since August 2019 64 months £779.35 that sounds better right? Let’s do the maths in the long term. Bear in mind that this is buying songs individually and not as albums which discounts songs by over 50%. Assuming I live to 70-80 one time purchase would be £15,876 – £19,116, Spotify £7,050.12 – £8,488.92. While on paper it looks like Spotify is cheaper. There’s a lot more value that owning music has vs renting music. Owning music means: more money is given to the artist that made it, music can be passed on to next gens (I have my grandads old vinyls which are worth more now), to discover new music you have to talk to people go to gigs and festivals, reduces overconsumption as we have to consider whether we like the music enough to purchase it we tell children they can’t have everything they want because that’s life but we don’t live by these same rules, censorship because you can’t censor what you own but renting makes censorship. Is there a change in mindset that people don’t consider the social impact their purchases have?

Chapter 5-6: Technofeudalism history, global impact

  • Europe is behind
    • With no big tech companies Europe doesn’t have the cloud control US and China do. We will forever be begging for their mercy unless this changes. Vassals and serfs in their fiefdoms
    • UK is in an even worse position as we are no longer part of the EU so we will have to do this ourselves too.
    • Europe needs to admit they’re no longer a developed country. We now fit the definition of a developing country.
  • Oligarch investors
    • Varoufakis talks about ways out of the dollar debacle we’re in is to default on the dollar debts which results in not having money for essentials or getting another loan from IMF which results pretending to repay by giving over our essentials to US oligarchs posing as investors and fuel and food prices being so high people starve.
      • UK has already chosen the second one. Blackrock and Palantir already have NHS contracts, Google and other American companies were given our AI budget, many British companies have been sold to American ones. While both options were bad the first one we would have been able to get back on our feet still. We saw during lockdown people came together to help one another out. We might have had to go back to rationing and maybe even blackouts but we would have been able to eventually sustain ourselves.

Chapter 7: The Solution

  • On sale 24/7
    • Accounting for experiential labour people now work 24/7. We have no time for ourselves, outside of work we must also maintain our online identity.
    • We aren’t weak willed our focus and attention is being taken from us.
    • We no longer self possess our identity
  • Terms & Conditions
    • What is in them? We can’t really deny them we must accept them if we want to continue to use or access a thing. This isn’t a choice.
  • Why do algorithms reinforce the worst of us?
    • bots released on social media are very quickly turned into machines that spew hate
    • bots social media experiment with positive inputs?
  • How to kill a God: Technofeudalism
    • You can’t price regulate something free or cheap
    • How do you break up something digital and global? Amazon Tesla Google
  • Actual solutions
    • Varoufakis illustrates a fictional global utopia. The solution he does say feel unfinished and outlandish. With political exhaustion it would be near impossible to organise a large scale boycott. Even then if it was done what would happen next?

Whole book

  • Pixels to Matter
    • An experience that brings the digital ecosystem into the physical world. We’re okay with accepting cookies here and skipping ads there. What would that look like in the real world? If every time you went somewhere you had to choose whether to give your data to third parties
  • Accept Cookies
    • We are now given the option to decline cookies so why would we ever accept them in first place? What benefit does the user get giving a part of themselves away for free? Especially e-commerce we are already there to purchase something why do they then need to sell our data to third parties? What is the monetary value of our data?
Notes-on-TF
Categories
Research Supervisor Meetings

Week 3 – Supervisor Meeting

What I did this week

With everything that’s happening in the world recently I want to make a contribution. So moving slightly away from social relationship with technology. I want to look at the political role US technology plays in the UK.

However, when I was talking about this with my supervisor I was concerned I would get swept up in the idea and lose sight of my dissertation. It could be better to pick something a little more controlled and just pick a piece of technology and take it to the extreme. But my supervisor pointed out that there was overlaps. That I could look at current US tech dominance and push it to the extreme (ironically in hindsight I think we are already at the extreme end of the scale).

Notes I need to remember:

Technical part of the project

  • Have interaction in the final piece whether it be sensors or something else that involves coding
  • Blend current skills with new skills (I would really like to do something with Blender and Projection mapping)

Goals for next week

  • Collect research
    • Find a central piece of research
      • Supporting research
    • Look at existing artwork
  • Refine Context and Problem Statement
  • Figure out whether I want to do a:
    • Statement Piece
    • Solution oriented
    • Satire
Categories
Research Supervisor Meetings

Week 2 – Supervisor Meeting

What I did this week

Second meeting with supervisor we talked a bit more about the approach to the idea. Thinking of Black Mirror, taking technology to the extreme in both ways little technology or lot’s of technology.

Little technology -> Performance based art -> technology as magic

-> Hide technology for people to find

I asked a question about the literature review for art thesis

  • normal style of research if based on the world
  • existing artworks

Goals for next week

Clea idea on the starting point

Categories
Research Supervisor Meetings

Week 1 – Supervisor Meeting

What I did this week

Had my first tutorial with my supervisor. We discussed my broad topic interest which is the social relationship we have with technology and how I want to explore this artistically ideally using 3D softwares. My supervisor told me not to lock myself in with how I’m going to do it and start finding some books and papers about my topic. I said I wanted the idea to come from the research rather than me having a preconceived idea and finding research that supports that. They also agreed that this was a good approach.

Goals for next week

I want to find at least one book and a couple of papers.