Closing Statement

Hi everyone, I hope that you are all doing well and realising your plans for the future. I’m currently looking for a job or freelance work, so get in touch if you know anyone who needs a website!

It’s been a great year. Some of the highlights for me included Transmediale Festival and Berlin, and the amazing array of practicing professionals which we have had in to speak to us. I’d like to thank them all for their time and let them know that they have all inspired me in some way. Thanks to Micheál for getting them all in and organising the course so well.

I feel like I have learnt so much in such a short space of time and really refined my research and design skills. The projects we have done have all been very challenging, but each one has also been incredibly rewarding.

As a person who came from a working environment back into education I would definitely encourage anyone in a similar position to go for it. However, do not expect an easy ride! I have been working pretty much non-stop throughout the year and have been constantly thinking about the briefs which we have been set. If you enjoy a challenge, and have the time to dedicate to it, then this course is for you.

Some of the books which I’ve found incredibly useful throughout the course include (in no particular order):

The Design of Everyday Things
By Donald A. Norman

The invisible computer : why good products can fail, the personal computer is so complex, and information appliances are the solution
By Donald A. Norman

Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing
By R. L. Gregory

The language of new media
By Lev Manovich

Clicking in: Hot Links to a Digital Culture
By Lynn Hershman-Leeson

Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand
By Gerry McGovern

I think that the show went really well and it was great to see everyone’s work displayed. I wish everyone the best of luck for the future and I hope that you all keep in touch. I think Colin has made a Facebook group for the course, which might be a nice way to keep in contact. I’ll leave you with the cartoon I drew for Micheál:

The End is Nigh

Hi everyone, I hope you all got everything in on time yesterday. This year has been very intense and it’s very odd to be almost at the end of it. If you would like to take a look at my final project you can do so at www.dreamodyssey.co.uk.

I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a comment on the site about it. Hopefully see you all on Monday to plan the show.

Dissertation Overview

I handed in the dissertation yesterday. I really enjoyed researching and writing about the subject, although I found structuring it quite difficult. When I say structuring, I mean I found it difficult to take out parts which I had worked really hard on but that needed to come out because they disrupted the flow and were not totally relevant. I remember PJ Harvey saying something like “When something isn’t working, you need to take out the part which you like best.”

I think I did quite a good job and handed in a good piece of writing which I am pleased with. It’s hard to judge it properly when you get so close to it and end up being able to recite parts of it from memory!

I tried to think about how someone would read it and to make it as interesting and clear as possible. I didn’t use sub headings, instead I used questions to break up the text and help me to discuss my main points. I felt that this system worked well and provided a better flow throughout. I found it quite stressful towards the end, especially when trying to judge when I should stop going over and over it, and I think I will probably be constantly thinking about it for a while longer as it is hard to switch off.

I’m just going to briefly lay out the main points:

My title was: “Considering the constantly evolving technological landscape and the new “prosumer” attitudes towards creating web content, will all web content and related technologies ever be truly accessible to all?”

As this topic had the potential to be very broad, I decided not to look into security or privacy issues which would obviously inhibit access. I also focussed my investigation on access issues of people with disabilities and specifically those who were visually impaired.

I began by looking into the histories of technology and the Internet to discover how it had become so inaccessible. I discussed how quickly the technology is changing and how people may not be able to keep up.

I went on to explore and define Web 2.0, “prosumerism” and social media, and discussed how they might be affecting accessibility.

I defined disability and examined how disabled people are generally viewed, and how the term disability can be misconceived. I then provided statistical evidence confirming that disabled users do not have easy access to all websites and information on the Internet. I discussed how these statistics may be due to the fact that web designers, and now “prosumers” who create web content, may not be paying attention to user-centred design and accessibility guidelines.

I discussed my experiences with some of the “text to speech” software I had tested, and looked at developing technologies such as the vOICe software and how they may help create a better web experience for visually impaired users in the future.

I explored and explained some of the terms and ideas detailed by Donald Norman in his book The Design of Everyday Things, including: affordances, conceptual models, mapping, standardisation, constraints, errors, feedback and visibility.

Finally, I presented possible options for the future of technology and how it could be improved and made more accessible and user-centred for all.

I ended with a quote from Norman form The Invisible Computer:

“Today, it is the individual who must conform to the needs of the technology. It is time to make the technology conform to the needs of people.”

The Stages of Sleep

On average people experience 5 stages of sleep each night. This means that they slip in and out of R.E.M. mode around 5 times and can potentially have 5 different dreams each night. Therefore, based on this information, I propose to create 5 different scenes within the piece, which correspond to the 5 stages of sleep.

Each scene will have different options for the user to explore. By selecting an option in each scene the user will have the ability to change certain areas of the narrative and eventually, will either be returned to the current scene, or passed to the next. I would like the piece to be simple and straightforward to use with no instruction needed. I will use subtle animation to move between scenes and within the options so as not to bombard the user with too much movement.

There are a few films which I have really enjoyed which deal with the subject of dreams and sleep and these might be good to refer back to, as they could potentially give me inspiration for the content of the scenes I will create within the piece.

The first is Waking Life:



And the next is The Science of Sleep which is directed by Michel Gondry, one of my favourite directors:

Exam Project

For the exam project I’ve decided to look into something which I’ve been interested in for a while – interactive narrative. For the Design for Interaction project – www.interactwithme.co.uk, I created an Adobe Flash interface which attempted to explore the roles of control within interaction and tried to reverse these roles, making the interface difficult to interact with. In contrast, for this project I would like to explore the way in which narrative can be changed and randomised through interaction to create a piece which is potentially interesting and engaging.

I have been interested and researched many aspects of how the brain functions over the course of the year. For the Design Futures project (www.sensorysubstitution.co.uk) I looked into Sensory Substitution and the way in which our senses relay information to the brain and how the plasticity of the brain can allow the substitution of one sensory input for another. For the Design for Interaction (www.interactwithme.co.uk) project I investigated perception and the way we see and interpret information as well as optical illusions and how these are interpreted by the brain. Also, for the previous project, the D&AD Student Awards (www.dandad.lucyirving.com), I researched Dementia and brain injuries and a condition called Agnosia, a term coined by Freud in his book Aphasia to describe recognition and perception disorders. I would like to continue to research into brain functions, and this time I have chosen to research into the way in which the brain constructs dreams, using this as a basis for my narrative exploration and construction within my final piece.

I am considering creating a questionnaire to allow me to do some primary research into what people remember about how their dreams are constructed and the way in which a narrative is constructed within their dreams. I am however having difficulty thinking of the questions I could ask to obtain this information, so I really need to sit down and work out whether it would be possible and/or useful to create a questionnaire. Anyway, here’s a nice illustration of a brain I did a while ago to keep you amused:

First Day Back...

Good discussion this morning, nice to see the book by Lawrence Zeegen brought in by Chris. I really like his style and actually accidentally came across one of the people he talks about in his book – Secrets of Digital Illustration: Simon Oxley. He presents his work in a really interesting way and his website is definitely worth a look -www.idokungfoo.com. Nice to hear something from everyone. I’ll look forward to the presentations this afternoon.

Social Media Bits

Hi everyone, I hope you are all having a good break. I’ve found out about a few interesting websites recently which I thought I might share with you. The first is twitter, take a look:



The second is muxtape.com – a simple way to create and share mixtapes.

It’s hard to keep up with all these new developments in social media websites etc. so if anyone knows of any more please let me know!

Fun fun. Also, has anyone found anywhere interesting to go on Secondlife at all?