Record of MFA DT MAJOR STUDIO 1
A What is critical making? Defination: Critical making’s stress on critique and expression rather than technical refinement and utility. is much more focused on the constructive process of making as opposed to building an artifact, which critical design is focused more on. Role：Giving people the opportunities to make things with human-oriented values, reconsidering a broader spectrum of human experience and highlighting people, which is always overlooked by standard methods of technological design.
B The Art of Critical Making It is about How John Maeda put the fields of technology and art and design together and how he took a leadership role in the movement of turning STEM to STEAM. It gave me a deeper understanding of critical making and made me realize how critical thinking and critical making leads to innovation in other fields.
C Changing perspective “Being a creative is often like being a blind person. We are dealing with a problem that we cannot see. We talk about it, we look at it, and then we try to solve it understanding only the parts that we can see. The problem is that we can get in a rut and start seeing the same problem and offering the same solution. “
The article gave some tricks about how to look at things from a new perspective and come up with innovational ideas. The suggestions are mainly for visual and UX designers, but there are still some points I found inspiring for my MS1 project. For example, the process of looking for inspiration from competitors as a way to help envision patterns that you would normally have to prototype yourself is very similar to the process of looking inspiring inventions while thinking of my unique position when I do my final project research.
We may have lots of ideas in our project but we could not implement most of it at the same time in one project. 7 in 7 gives us chance to prototype our ideas. Also, taking the upcoming 7 in 7 as a chance to think of my research questions from different perspectives would be helpful to find our own position and create something unique.
The feedback gave me quite a shock and made me realize that my thoughts were quite shallow. What I wanted to explore was explored by many people before. I wanted to find a pattern showing the relationship between color and music. But after research, experiments, and feedback, I don’t think there is a pattern. The pattern, in other words, how color reflects different dimensions of music, is so subjective. However, I don’t think it is a bad thing.
I looked over the reference in the feedback and found some other inspiring precedents. First one is ‘Unravelling Boléro’ by Anne Adams, which is a bar-by-bar representation of the popular classical piece Boléro by Maurice Ravel. Adams and Ravel are thought to have suffered from the same neurodegenerative condition which might lead to synaesthesia. What I found interesting is that when I did the little experiments with Boléro, I chosed totally different color from Adam, which proves that the pattern between color and music is totally a subjective thing. But it also means that I can create a rule of how visual elements represent different dimensions of music by myself in a very subjective way.
Another is the Choral Color Experiment conducted by Radiolab which uses a choir to translate the color into harmonies. It’s base on the ideas that shrimps can see thousands color human could not see so the author thought that we could not see the brilliance of shrimpy rainbow but what if we can hear it. The same action of translating color into music, but the medium of the choir and the implementation method is super interesting to me. Rather than focusing on the establishing ruleset of translating, it’s more experimental, which also expand the limitations of the medium I’d like to use in the prototype.
Although Sven suggested I continue exploring in 7 in 7 and be more experimental instead of trying to prove the relationship, I still want to try to establish a subjective rule of the relationship between music and color in 1-2 prototypes. I’d be more experimental in other 7 in 7 prototypes, not just rule based, and try to expand “color” to other visual elements. I’d think of the medium of paper, video, audio, or even VR. I want to make this project more “art“ rather than creating a tool as I thought before.