City activism and creativity

Urban prankster is a site for people that get together and arrange fun happenings in urban environments, sometimes disguised as "agents" to increase the impact and keep some moment of surprise for people passing by.

http://urbanprankster.com/

Another site like this is

http://improveverywhere.ning.com/

So maybe you want to act also, a good start is to create your own social network at Ning.com, like any public blog site but for social networks.

PostSecret

This is blog/site where people send confessions on artful postcards. The founder of the site Frank Warren selects a few every week that are published on the site. "Since a 4-by-6 inch card is not big enough to to hold a complete story, writers must use just handful of words and images to share a take they might have concealed for decades" (Warren, Wired, March 2007)
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

Desing research task Unversity of Art and Design Helsinki

From University of Art and Design Helsinik

Preparation

Homework

Before coming to the workshop, participants must do a homework exercise that consists of a literature package and a movie watching exercise.

Keep in mind that the reason for this exercise is not to make you movie scholars. The point is that movie makers in Hollywood have more experience than anyone else in the world in packing experiences into a form that communicates with global audiences. There must be something we can learn from them in designing experiences in space!

Home Work: Steps

The Home Work proceeds in four phases.

• Step 1: Readings. Go through the readings listed on the next page.
• Step 2: The movie/cartoon exercise. Get the movie data and go through the exercise described below
• Step 3: An Applied Essay. Apply what you learned in previous steps to a design target in an essay.
• Step 4: Presentation. Create a short presentation from your essay.

Please, go through the exercise in this order! It is designed to sensitize your eyes to how narratives could be applied in design!

Step 1: Readings

Readings are in two categories.

When participants read these texts, they ought to make sure that they understand the difference between telling and showing (Booth), can analyze how narrative positions are constructed (Booth), and understand how time can be used as design material (Genette).

Narrative positions:
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction Harmondsworth: Penguin. Read Chapters "Telling and Showing" (pp. 3-20) and "Types of Narration" (pp. 149-165).

Time in narration:
Genette, Gerald. Narrative Discourse. An Essay on Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Read Jonathan Culler's Foreword, and pp. 25-160. Aim at a cursory reading: aim at undersatnding what Gennette is after, not at understanding every detail!!!

Keep in mind that the aim is not to understand Gennette's theory, but to understand how narrative order may differ from the order of events in rel life, how duration in narrative is a design matter, and how frequency is built into narrative.

Step 2: The Movie/Cartoon Exercise

In Step 2, you have to apply understanding gained from readings into analyzing movies. Here, you have to see four movies and study narration and the time in them. The workshop uses Casablanca as the anchor movie; we refer to it constantly, and all comparisons are made to it.

1) Movies

• Use Casablanca as the "base" movie. (This is for practical reasons: it guarantees that we all have watched carefully at least one of the movies. This helps communication)

Classic Hollywood narration:

• Casablanca
• Singing in the Rain (or The Band Wagon)

Contemporary Movie Narration:

• Magnolia
• Dogville

2) Alternative to Movies: Cartoons

If you are not a movie person, you can do a similar exercise with cartoons.

If you opt for cartons rather than for movies, use Will Eisner's The Contract with God as the "base" for your analysis instead of Casablanca.

Classic European narrative mainstream:

• Goscinny, René and Albert Uderzo: Asterix and Cleopatra
• Hergé: Tintin: The Shooting Star

Contemporary cartoons:

• Eisner, Will: The Contract with God
• Eisner, Will: Dropsie Avenue
• Wear, Chris: Rusty Brown or Jim Corrigan

Analyze action, characters and time in these cartoons using the same sensitizing questions as in watching movies (below).

Some sensitizing questions for watching the movies

Watch the movies handed to you first without analysis. Then watch the movie analytically by stopping, rewinding, seeing again, analyzing scenes, etc. Keep the timer on so that you see how time unfolds in the movie!

Next, write a synopsis of the story. For instance, Citizen Kane can be characterized as a "story of how a young boy without a family gets rich and destroys his fortunes by getting arrogant."

The following questions help you in applying Booth and Gennette to your data.

1. Action and characters (think about W. Booth)

Pay attention to three things.

• Who are the main characters in the movie, and how they are introduced to the viewer?
• How characters change. Casablanca is a good example of a story in which key development takes place in characters. Elsa, Victor Laszlo, and the Nazis do not really develop. But Rick and Captain Renard change from a cynic and a janus-faced colorful figure into righteous adversaries to the Nazis.
• How does action happen in these movies? Action may happen in several ways. Sometimes key action in the movie takes place in talk. For example, people eat and drink in Casablanca, but these activities remain ambient. There is gambling, which gets slightly more active role in the story, but little. A good deal of Casablanca takes place in talk rather than deeds.

2. Narration (Booth)

The second thing to observe is the way in which narrative acts are distributed in the movie. Pay attention to these things:

• Who tells the story? Is there a narrator, or are things just shown (read Booth)?
• Characterize the main mode of narration using Booth's terms. Is the story driven mainly by an omnipotent narrator, and is this narrator reliable?
• How many narrators are there, and how narrative tasks are distributed between them?
• Is the narrator explicit?
• How they handle time, characters, and action?

3. Time and dramatization (Genette)

When you are watching Casablanca, pay attention to the fact that, the Paris flashback notwithstanding, the story happens in three days. We enter Rick's café in one evening, and then see how drama between Rick, Elsa, Victor Laszlo, Captain Renard, and the Nazis evolves over two nights.

• How many days the story takes: try to count them.
• Count scenes (do your own analysis, do not pick them up from DVD!). How many scenes are there?
• How are scenes distributed in space: how many places appear in the movie? What are the key arenas for action?
• How is time distributed between the scenes? How long is the longest scene? What about the shortest?
• How is time packaged into scenes? For instance, most action in Casablanca takes place on the second night within three episodes that describe events that each last only a few minutes.
• Tricks in storytelling: how is time stretched through flashbacks, dream episodes, and so forth? How are these tied to the story? What functions these episodes have in the movie?

4. Finally, compare Casablanca to Magnolia or Dogville. (This is optional!)

• Create a matrix in which you compare Casablanca to the movie you selected. How these movies differ along different dimensions?

Step 3: Essay

Please, write the essay only after you have done the homework! The point is to learn to see things narratively for design!

The essay should have less than five pages of text (spacing 2), but illustrations and pictures may add significantly to it!

In the essay, you must describe a design object you have been working with and think about how you could dramatize it. The object can be:

• a product, a Web site, or an environment
• a space you visit often (for example, a café or museum)
• a place (say, a square), neighborhood or a whole city.

Use the standard structure of a scientific paper (intro - theoretical perspective - data & methods - results - conclusions). For example, you can use the Nordes 2005 template, available at www.nordes.org and www2.uiah.fi/~ikoskine/nordes. This format is boring, but communicates the essentials. It is dense, so stick to the 5-page limit.

The task is to understand experience with the product, experience in spaces you describe, or experience in places you describe, and then turn that experience into something more dramatic using narrative techniques you have learned.

"Salve" as Narrated

For instance, you can think about a café you frequent. What kind of action takes place there? How you could construct your experience with the place using narrative techniques described by Booth, and by designing how people navigate their way through these narrative ad experience-related signposts.

To give an example, Salve is an old restaurant in the Western part of Helsinki's city center on a street called Hietalahdenranta (mapquest "Sandvikskajen" in Helsinki). When you get to this restaurant, you easily find brochures that tell colorful stories from times gone by. In essence, Salve was formerly catering for sailors, but nowadays more for advertising people (you can easily guess what kinds of stories these are: for instance, one of the characters was the French tough-guy character Eddie Constantine, who loved the place). This is a story you find from a brochure, but its function is obvious: it is designed to make you imagine a colorful and harsh era, and that way to create thrill to people like us, who have access to these rough-times-gone-by only through stories, not through the place as such.

When you get to Suomenlinna,/Sveaborg you will find that the whole island is full of stories like these, some "musealized," some commercialized, some turned into amusement for children, some just stories told among the local population.

And of course, you find similar narratives practically everywhere, ranging from Lapland to Christiania.

This is the raw material we will be working with in the workshop. If we learn to see the world through narratives and to dramatize it using the same means, we have achieved our purpose.

Step 4: Presentation

Finally, you have to communicate you design thoughts in a Powerpoint (or similar) slide show that lasts no more than 5 minutes.

Plan for three slides, presented at the first day of the Summer School, August 22th.

• Explain first the object so that others understand what you are talking about
• Then explain "its" narratives
• Finally, think about dramatizing it: for example, how could you take the narratives of a place like Salve and turn them into something more interesting than a brochure..?

Use any presentation technique you have learned over the years. However, if you use anything that is hugely more sophisticated than Powerpoint or Flash, take your own laptop and software with you!

And since it is industrial design that arranges the Summer School, the same goes with Mac users. Please: take your own machine with you!

Random thoughts

Action!
Its time for me to start with my masters thesis in interaction design after postponing school work for 21 months to find passion, interests and myself. Things that aren't taught at the University, but only in real life, things that you didn't know you wanted to learn.
Choosing a subject that is interesting from both a design perspective and some kind of scientific value isn't entirely trivial I think.

Ministry of Love
Personally I think surveillance is pretty interesting... What is captured in the cities? Who can watch? Who is watching you? Right now? Usually there is a sign that tells you that you are being watched, at least in Sweden, based on pretty strong integrity laws, that are slowly being weakened as a result of economical interests clashing with moral decay and changing public opinion. However I think there is a lack of understanding what is really happening... How can one be attached, understand, what does it really mean to be under such surveillance. What are my benefits vs. losses as private person? 1984 seems more real everyday, taking into account political changes in the world. I don't think that many understand the implications and the magnitude of our actions in this matter. Perhaps it wont matter...

Some other thoughts then... Can I do something more humane, create understanding between humans and their situation. Create a meeting between people. There are a number of approaches already taken in this direction. It seems like the norm is to experience something together, to create a common ground on which a discussion can talk place. A primer for people and interaction. Is this the only way to do this, is there maybe something more primitive that can bring people together e.g. body language?

Handshake machine
I read a book about a body language and in particular one thing caught my eye. A section described how people shake hands and how the handshake is experienced. There seemed to be a particular formula for the perfect handshake. So I thought, can a handshake machine be built to practice this action. It could give you score based on how close to the perfect handshake you come. Now is this a good thing? Are we adapting the person to a norm. Isn't this a bit like getting plastic surgery? You are changing something to fit the standard and transform yourself to something else...