Mariana is wildly different from Otis, just like Professor Aaron prefaced. However, that did not prepare me to watch her showcase the projects she worked on to us today.
I found her ideas really interesting to hear about, but I can’t say I would categorize her music as the same type of music I listen to regularly to vibe to. It’s more of an abstract art piece in the form of audio. As Mariana herself said, it’s something she makes for performances and not really for the home speaker. If a mainstream artist like Metro and Travis was to be compared to a digital artwork online I like looking at, Mariana’s music is like the art pieces behind display cases in a modern art museum. A lot less accessible but a lot more experimental and thought provoking.
I hope her masters degree goes smoothly for her and I’m glad I was able to learn about all these experimental music techniques I hadn’t envisioned before.
I usually avoid reading due to my attention-related problems but I was willing to give this book my undivided attention since I found the material discussed in class very thought provoking.
I think Professor Aaron did a great job of piquing my interest by showing what this book has to offer and then letting us explore it ourselves. In particular, the exercise of creating an L shape with just two cuts on a square paper made me understand the idea of Lateral thinking much better.
The assigned section of reading also answered a big question of mine I had during class. Was this like a growth mindset vs fixed mindset scenario where a growth mindset was objectively better? It felt like it wouldn’t be right to dismiss vertical thinking altogether, would it?
Thankfully, the book answered the question in just the first few paragraph, explaining “Lateral thinking enhances the effectiveness of vertical thinking. Vertical thinking develops the ideas generated by lateral thinking.” This makes much more sense because I was thinking surely lateral thinking doesn’t replace the logical pattern recognition we are naturally good at.
I also really like this quote “The exclusive emphasis on vertical thinking in the past makes it all the more necessary to teach lateral thinking.” I don’t completely understand how to integrate lateral thinking into my thought process yet but I look forward to what this book has to offer.
So for this assignment, we have to take the assignment we did previously on Thursday and interpret 5 alternative meanings for it. Here is the thing I designed for yesterday:
I also thought it would look pretty good on a T-Shirt, so I made a quick mockup!
I found it a little hard to look from an outsider’s perspective since I design the whole piece, but I these are the few ways I tried interpreting from a different perspective.
a piece of abstract art
a promotional image for a new board game related thing
a display of an artist’s personal perspective and passions
a showcase of a designer’s color palette
a demonstration of how restriction to using a specific shape can actually spark a lot of creativity
Next I had to choose 5 things I could possibly make based on one interpretation. For that I chose to interpret it as a promotional image for a new board game related thing. Here are some of the things I came up with
>The first of which was a competitive Connect 4 browser game called Connect4.com, to mimic the feel of chess.com using the UI. The loading screens would be a looping animation of Connect 4 pieces satisfyingly being placed down.
> The second idea I had was like a hipster clothing brand. I’ve been really into this Japanese clothing brand called NONSENSE recently so I felt it was only natural that it was subconsciously part of my design.
>The third idea was a board game cafe back in Abu Dhabi. I think a board game cafe would be a great place to hang out on Saadiyat or maybe even on campus. I’ve been staying up with my friends playing the card game and board game I made recently so that’s where that idea came from.
>The fourth idea was the idea of a board game called Muffin time that somehow utilizes an alarm clock that screams muffin time randomly. Maybe the point of the game would be a competition of reaction speed. The inspiration of this was that one episode of spongebob where Patrick sets an alarm clock to eat his Krabby Patty at midnight, but now there’s several patricks all wanting to eat that Krabby Patty.
>The last idea was to make a whole currency using the Connect 4 design scheme. The coins already exist so why not extrapolate it to paper bills, or even a connect 4 credit card?
I ended up really liking the idea of the Connect 4 browser game site, so I ended up making a mockup UI to demonstrate my idea. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out.
Everything here except for the icons on the left were personally designed by me yesterday. I really like how it came out and I’d love to flesh it out more and maybe actually make a real game. I hope the chat log comes off both authentic and immersive, like this is a real site that real people are chatting on.
I also made a mockup for the loading screen! Like I mentioned in my initial ideas, there would be a satisfying animated loading screen.
I didn’t really have the time to actually animate the pieces moving down but I hope it’s clear that it’s meant to be a satisfying loop of the five red pieces falling down from left to right (maybe it’ll be right to left for players who have their language set to a right-to-left-reading language like Arabic).
Thank you for reading my blog! I hope you liked the designs I created!
While I can’t recall the last time I heard a saxophone by itself, I was not expecting the saxophone to sound the way it did when Otis played it. There were so many different types of sounds .
Everything kinda made more sense when he mentioned he was trying to integrate aspects of electronic music in his sax playing. I was also wondering if the occasional air blowing sounds were occasional or if he just messed up because he was trying to play it quietly.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about the track he showed from his new album Y-OTIS TRE though. I can’t honestly say I liked it but I was interested in why it felt like there was a lot of secondary noise, like the recording wasn’t very crisp. I assume that’s intentional but personally I don’t enjoy that vibe.
I was definitely not expecting our first reading assignment to be a TED talk from Kermit, but I really enjoyed the bizarre nature of this talk. Kermit made a lot of great points I think some friends of mine need to hear.
I have a good friend who frequently praises me for my ideation process. She says she can’t fathom how I just come up with such impressive ideas, at the speed I do it as well. To that I can only ever humbly tell her that creativity is a skill I honed, but it’s a skill anyone can pick up.
I’ve been drawing, designing, and creating things since I was a kid. Unlike other uni students my age, I just never stopped. Because I’e always been in this healthy mindset towards creative works, I design fast and come up with ideas fast. Unfortunately my friend doesn’t believe she has it in her to do what I do, she thinks it’s just a magical talent of mine.
One of my favorite lines from Mr. Kermit here is “We think (creativity) is for artists. Imagination and inspiration? Well those are just words we use around kids, but for grown-ups? Well those are just nice words in some corporate mission statement. Our real job is to make a living. Well folks I say that is wrong!”
I think Kermit has given me a great video for me to pass around. I would love to see more amphibian muppet representation in TED talks.
