hammerhead rabbits

Archive for the ‘experiments’ Category

Ajax polling system

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

NB – Please note that I wrote most of this post about a week ago but didn’t feel like it was finished for some reason. By rights the date on this ought to be 18th of June.

I’ve found an ajax polling system that takes one closed question, adds it to a database and serves back the results for the poll immediately. Exactly what I need. I had some trouble getting it to work but the basic problems I didn’t figure out myself were solved on this useful ubuntu forum discussion.

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Pixelated backgrounds for humjam.com

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

One thing I liked in earlier experiments was the pixelated photographs I used in the background of my prototype questionnaire. I have decided to use these as background images on my humjam website. Each time someone goes to a different page or refreshes there will be a different, random pixelated image. Some of them are rather nice and I’m going to put them here as things in their own right.

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Flash Experiment and interaction thoughts

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

I’ve spent a fair bit of today trying to get this tutorial working. webdesignermag.co.uk. It’s supposed to make a poll and chart in Flash that connects to a MySQL database. I can’t get it to connect to my database though.

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Development of the questionnaire flash visual accompaniments

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

NB – I wrote this on 19/11/08 and then made lots of these ideas in flash. I’ve now reflected on them a bit so I’ll put my reflections below each idea I’ve done in italics. You’ll be getting action and reflection in one sweet sweet pill. Also, I’ve figured out a few bits of the php in that time and managed to get a version of the questionnaire online. I should add that the from isn’t yet linked anywhere. Click here to see it, though it’s likely to change every other day now. Today, it still needs design work doing on it. Maybe I should stick the flash files up here separately. Not sure about the best way of doing that. Okay, I’ll make an archive page somewhere. Soon.

I’ve just had a scribbling session thinking about how I’m going to make visual accompaniment for each question. Below is a pretty good typed version of that.

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Particle tracks

Friday, September 12th, 2008

I drew some particle tracks of bubbles in a container. I did it because wanted a miniscule contrast to the universe/solar system on the other wall. I had a vague plan to look at the way these small things are connected to create a bigger whole. This didn’t really happen though. I did all sorts of other things but no idea really leapt out at me for how to take that idea forward. In the end, I put a box with arrows pointing outwards all around it to emphasise the fact that it’s one part of something larger. I don’t think this worked though. In a way, I’d also been looking at this in the pixel zoom pictures. I think they were a bit more successful. They had a much more graspable context. They had a point of comparison. Maybe this was what was missing from the particle tracks drawing. Maybe I needed a drawing of the same thing at a different scale.

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Layered alls

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

With half of the show gone I decided I wanted to change the space quite substantially. I did this by pinning lots of sheets of newsprint to the wall and drawing ‘ealle’ on the wall in an old font that looks like handwritten calligraphy. ‘Ealle’ is one dialect of the Old English word for all. In some places it was spelt ‘eall’. It comes from the Old Frisian (pronounced Free-Zhun) language. The Old Frisians came from where Northern Germany and the Netherlands are now. Ealle was in use in England in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries or thereabouts. It is part of the earliest incarnation of English as English.

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Phone Photos

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

I also showed my phone photos. This is a web page consisting, at the moment, of about 1300 photographs taken on my phone. It’s something I’ve been doing for a couple of years but I’ve only just gotten round to getting it all online. Here’s the link:

Phone Photos page

There’s no specific theme to the pictures, but there are things that develop, as you look at all of them together, mainly because of the kind of things I usually take pictures of. I’m interested in urbanisation; the way people have changed the world and how we’ve chosen to adapt it for own ends. So there are a lot of shots of odd details in bits of cities. Hand dryers, scrawled signs or warnings, details from the textile pattern of a chair on a bus. All of these things end up getting photographed. The main reason why this is relevant to my project is that I wanted to know how effective the mode of presentation was and whether I wanted to explore it any further. There’s something overwhelming about it, after all. There’s so much there to look at. I like the fact that there’s so much to take in at one sitting.

I guess the page is also looking at the way having cameras on phones is changing the way people think about cameras generally. A photograph simultaneously has more and less value now. We cam take literally hundreds of pictures in a day and many of them will be very throwaway. And yet there seems to be more of an obsession with pictures now, if in a poorer quality format. Funny that.

Questionnaire

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Probably the most important thing I did in this show was get people to fill out a questionnaire about the word all. It starts off fairly innocently and then goes off the deep end a bit. I think my final piece is most likely to be a honed down version of this questionnaire. A few people said they really enjoyed filling it out and a couple even said they’d been thinking about it in the week after doing it. That has to be a good thing. It’s a good way of engaging people with a thought process.

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This or that

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

In the west, everything has a name and is set into groups. It’s all classified. I gather this is set into the history of western thought. Some people would probably trace this back to Aristotle. Some people think Descartes was behind the development.

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More pixels

Monday, September 1st, 2008

I wanted to develop the pixelised motorway pictures I did a few months ago. I zoomed in on three pictures by 3200% and screen grabbed small sections of them. The end result is that they look like compositions of squares. Well, that’s what they are, effectively. I think they’re quite beautiful. Some of them are anyway. I zoomed out steadily and took grabs of bits of each picture on each zoom. Over the course of a minute or two the subject of the picture becomes clear.

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