Tanagram attended an interesting AIGA Student Chapter meeting called SPARK at the Illinois Institute of Art in Schaumburg. The event was held at the Prairie Center for the Arts and about 75 people attended the meeting.
It was a mixture of alumni, students and faculty who came to listen to Rubbish Films and Tanagram Partners. The event was a mixture of a social, a bazaar and a presentation. There was a DJ with a G4 laptop “spinning” an auditory web of music to set the tone while everyone was hobnobbing.
Rubbish Film is a collective of five students from Columbia College, University of Iowa and Illinois Institute of Art who have a passion for film making and more important, story telling. They are a clique bound together by a clear sense of purpose using black and white 8mm film, guerilla-like filming tactics and a compelling series of techniques.
You could not escape their sense of enthusiasm and idealism that comes with being 20ish, but they also exhibited a sense of drive and saavy that one does not associate with this generation. Their film “Eyelids” is an engaging story about a boy who projects himself into the mind of a girl and sees the world through her eyes over time. They have marketed the film themselves and wound up at Cannes Film Festival in the short independent film category. They are now a distributed collective and collaborate on other films as well as doing music videos.
The theme for the meeting was “motivate” and Rubbish Films definitely motivated everyone in the room of what can be accomplished with little resources and alot of drive. I felt like an old college professor as Tanagram is essentially Rubbish Films 25 years later – more polished and tempered, but just as committed in doing good work.
After a raffle and a few words, it was Tanagram’s turn. Within a fairly large auditorium, I asked everyone to move to the front so I did not need to use a microphone. Most complied, but as human nature would have it, several only moved one row.
Tanagram is a hybrid company working on fairly wicked problems. I eased into the issue with a traditional design audience by discussing what objects can and can’t do, recognizing human behavior, and then defining design excellence. This tactic seemed to work and by the time we showed three examples, the audience was ready. Overall, the questions were thoughtful and most students were amazed at the diversity of thinking and skills that go into our work.
Going to student events is a hit-or-miss proposition. This time it was a hit.
Significant real-time data immersion is not available for the consuming public yet. More data is available than ever before, but the traditional web browser experience has to grow up quite a bit before it begins to tax the cognitive capabilities of the average human with regards to information flow and memory. Sure, bad design is overloading us already, and yes you can watch real-time posts to DIGG, but imagine 7 to 12 real-time feeds simultaneously informing the user of the state of a given system. According to Micah Endsley [1] we can handle it, now we need to design it. One of the core principles of real-time information design is the establishing and maintaining of situational awareness.
Wickens defines situational awareness as “the continuous extraction of information about a dynamic system or environment, the integration of this information with previously acquired knowledge to form a coherent mental picture, and the use of that picture in directing further perception of, anticipation of, and attention to current events” [2][3]. The Air Force Research Laboratory similarly, and perhaps more simply, defines situational awareness as “how accurately a person perceives his current environment relative to the reality of that environment” [4].
Applying situational awareness to the goal of improving user interface, Davenport identifies three key areas of awareness encountered by the human participant: systems awareness, task awareness, and spatial awareness [5].
Systems Awareness
This is the human participant’s ability understand the state of his or her equipment. In the cockpit, for example, systems awareness is often abstract and usually requires aggregation of various gauge indications. Knowing that the engine is running hot means nothing by itself, but combined with other systems indicators, may indicate a potential problem.
Task Awareness
This is the human participant’s ability to accurately obtain information relating to tasks relevant to his or her goals. Understanding the current state of all tasks that are underway is critical as poor task awareness increases cognitive load, diminishing overall situational awareness. Good task awareness also enables the human participant to make informed decisions when making changes to the planned task.
Spatial Awareness
Spatial awareness can be broken into two sub-categories; Global and Local. Global spatial awareness is an understanding of the position of the human participant and his or her equipment in the world at that moment. It is the ability to accurately determine relative relationship and trajectory of objects within a global 360-degree sphere of influence and often pertains to the human participant’s relation to a target destination, anticipation of upcoming objects, and other spatial directional judgments. Local spatial awareness pertains to the attitude (vector and velocity) of the human participant’s equipment. This is particularly important when dealing with moving platforms such as aircraft. During observations of pilots using simulator software, it was repeatedly noted that during increased times of cognitive load the first errors made were related to spatial awareness. As the local spatial orientation of aircraft changes rapidly and frequently, the related local spatial SA tended to be the first awareness lost.
Interestingly, because situational awareness is the process of aggregating understanding it becomes evident that a failure at any time during aggregation can cause a series of failures much like a highway pile-up. The aviation community calls this cumulative effect of related incorrectly executed action loops a “Chain of Errors.” The National Transportation Safety Board has documented that a catastrophic failure, like a plane crash, is seldom caused by a single incorrectly executed action but instead by the cumulative effects of multiple incorrectly executed actions.
Situational awareness becomes even more critical in dimensional immersive experiences but we’ll save that discussion for another day.
References:
Micah R Endsley et all, International Center for Air Transportation, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT, September 1998 Situation Awareness Information Requirements for Commercial Airline Pilots.
Amy L Alexander and Christopher D Wickens, University of Illinois, Aviation Human Factors Division, Savoy, Illinois 2003 The Effects of Spatial Awareness Biases on Maneuver Choice in a Cockpit Display of Traffic Information
Amy L Alexander and Christopher D Wickens, University of Illinois, Aviation Human Factors Division, Savoy, Illinois 2004 Measuring Traffic Awareness in an Integrated Hazard Display
Michael T. Brewer, Major, USAF, April 2000 An Investigation of the Non-Distributed Flight Reference (NDFR) Ownship Status Symbology
Clark E. Davenport, Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB OH, May 30, 1997 Displays for Spatial Situation Awareness: The Use of Spatial Enhancements to Improve Global and Local Awareness
Three months of still photographing dice resulted in this amazing video (thanks Rudy). It’s gorgeous. There is something to be said for the love of the craft and attention to detail.
In the virtual world everything must be intentional. This video makes an excellent example (thanks Travis) of this as the story and the conflict between cultures evolves. Watch the metaphors stack up on each side and then explode into reality as they drink their tasty beverages. A LOT of work went into this.
We’re huge fans of the post-hyper-real (or whatever the historians will call it) abstract impressionistic CGI animation phenomenon. This video is a wonderful example of expression and playfulness. It illustrates the value of abstraction for creating mood, feeling, and aesthetic appeal. It would be cool to play in a virtual world that looks like this.
We are now stalking Robert Hodgin. This guy is our hero. This 163MB processing video features music by Tosca. The only thing that could possibly make it more beautiful is a stereoscopic display (ya 3D!) Rock on man…Rock on!
Brooklyn Foundry (thanks Rudy) used digital superimposition to make an amazing proposal for one of their clients (an architecture firm). This is a flash site with no bookmarking so we can’t direct link (BOO!) but if you click on “WORK” and then click on “Museum Plaza” you won’t be disappointed.
Take a look at these guys! First Avenue Machine (thanks Rudy) makes CGI video content that is so hyper-real it’s impossible to separate from the reality it’s superimposed onto. We can’t link to it (Bad flash developer! BAD!) but scroll down their projects window and take a look at “Sixes Last.” With Moore’s law still intact we are soon coming to the point where this type of rendering will be possible in real-time.
Thanks Erik for this great article in Slate about social implications derived from stock photo purchasing. I hadn’t heard of Everywhere Girl (yes she has a blog), but I think the story is great. To become a cult celebrity because you were a model on a shoot that happened to capture the look that advertisers and book publishers all over the world wanted for their project is a perfect testament to the randomness of life. Beautiful!
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