The Vector’s project I chose was the Memory issue.  This issue focuses on the idea of both memory and history recalling events and peaches from past United States Presidents like Ronald Reagan or George Bush.  These vectors highlight political, social, and political stakes with a dose of daily life mixed in. Vectors encourages a form of old media and new media i order to highlight the particular topic at hand.  The project I chose was Gidgets On the Couch.  In this project, Peter Lunenfeld, coincidentally a professor at UCLA, explores the interior and exterior of the digital world.

The idea of southern California and Surfing, is bound by this wanting for geographical location the vectors within this project rely on background how we can come to a conclusion based on our memories and that of history.  We start with evaluating Gidget who played a character by Susan Kohner.  Gidget was a surfer in Malibu and an all American-Southern California girl.  Kohler’s father was a screenwriter and wrote the story about his daughter.  It was a world in which men predominantly ruled the sport, and were aggressive athletes.  The presence of Gidget brought a new found sexuality to the sport.  It is a story of real feminist power.  It follows the idea of the photo-feminist woman.

Navigating the site was quite simple, however it took me a while to realize that this project was in fact a video not a map layout project. Additionally, i was unaware that readers could comment their own input on the particular project so that it could be shared with others.  This site is very simple, but accomplishes the goal of examining the project thoroughly.  However, since this project was a fun loving approach to the idea of Gidget I do not believe the theme and background for the site correlate with the original idea.  If I were designing the site, I would have included an interactive map of surf locations Gidget used. Additionally, I would have liked to see more images of Kohner.

I do believe that this project was successful, because while the site lacks the substance of moving image, the video illustrating the project by Lunenfeld perfectly demonstrates to Vector was the project is and  how it accomplishes the idea of history accompanied by memory.

http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/7/totality/#annotation=0;page=1

This project is called ‘Totality for Kids’ by Mckenzie Wark. This project wanted to use the Kevin Pyle to tell the historical story of the Communists party in Paris. People in Paris seem to be bored of their city, and life as well. Everyone is sad and fed up with the rules and laws. This leads to protests and some city destruction. This project contains all free, non-copyrighted material.

Navigating this site was quite easy. The controls and layout was very straightforward. The application had a side panel with a few controls that were self explainable. Changing through the slides to reveal the comic-like story was no trouble at all because of the simple layout. Added functionality came with the preview window for each slides once they have been read. This was clear  indication which page you were on, and allowed me to go back and click through previous slides. The site also had good animations and effects on how the content enters the frame when the slide first loads.

The designer originally wanted to present the art of Kevin Pyle and present it in a comic like style. This is definitely reflective in the visual choice of presenting information. The name of the project ‘Totality for Kids’ also reiterates the comic book style of story telling. I believe the slide like interface was the best choice for these designers. Putting all the pages up at once like a real comic strip would have been overwhelming. I believe using only material that is freely available to the public further emphasizes the feel for the story. That it is about a group of people in a city, who come together and share similar ideas. It keep the process and the narrative in agreement with one another.

I believe this project is very successful. It had a goal in presenting a historical story, in a visually appealing way. Not only in a visually appealing way, but also something easily comprehended. I believe the comic strip like aesthetic aspect provided this. The visual style allowed for a more flowing reading, and the short length of the dialogue did not cause a reader to spend too much time on each slide. This project is also successful in just being an art piece, as the art is very impressive and original. Even the background song was recorded just for this project. I find this project unique and original.

I explored issue #2 of Vectors: The Mobility Issue. As expressed in the project’s editorial statement, I found the interface to be engaging and dynamic. The presentation was clean easy to navigate. On the right side of the page, there are rectangular shaped images that link you to each of the stories in the issue. When you get to the story, you have the option of linking to the Editor’s Introduction, Author’s Statement, Playtester’s Statement, Peer responses + Discuss … in other words, there are several layers to each story; several perspectives from which to enter each blog. This is in line with the editorial goal of keeping the site dynamic. And, even though the work is layered, it never feels unmanageable. I also noticed that every time one returns to the Archive page, there is a different quote from each of the different stories in each issue. This detail adds to the dynamic feel of the site. It never feels like static items have been cut and pasted to the web page, but, instead, the way the site is designed takes advantage of the specific and non-linear story-telling opportunities particular to this medium.

Once you enter a story, the design of the page changes and the links to the additional stories now appears at the top right of the page as one thin, long rectangle and without images. Instead of being confusing, this change in design kept me engaged with the page. It felt like I had to keep paying attention, which kept me interested. And, because the design of the site is clean and minimal, I never felt frustrated or lost in a sea of overwhelming information or extraneous text. Unlike other projects we have studied, the design of Vectors felt like every link had a specific purpose and I was not going to go down a rabbit hole. The design feels circular, as if taking different paths; experiencing the site in different ways, is part of the designed experience.

I think the project is successful in that it takes the overarching theme of technologically-mediated mobility and reflects it in its non-linear design aesthetic. By maximizing the mobility, or navigation, opportunities that are specific to this medium, the designers have created a unique experience for the viewer.

I chose to analyze the project Blood Sugar. The project uses mainly audio and an interactive interface to tell the stories of several drug addicts who use needles. Overall I really thought this project was interesting and benefited from the audio interviews. However initially navigating the site was difficult. I do not think that this site it easily understandable if you do not know what you are about to look at and why. After initially launching the site, I had to go back to the about page on the vectors website to figure out what I was looking at. Basically at the heart of the site is a visual presentation of the audio interviews of addicts. The site tells the stories of 13 users. The visuals relate to what I assume to be hear rates.

The main problem with the site is that while the audio plays there are moving animations that can be interacted with, but I’m not sure what all of them do and at times they distract from the interviews of the addicts. The interviews themselves are very captivating, and I think necessary to achieving the project’s goal of moving away from more subjective accounts of addiction and needle use. I think the creators chose to make the site interactive, to emphasize certain economic, gender, geographic points that should be considered for context in addiction. I also think they chose the animations because an artistic perspective was mentioned multiple times in the Vector about page. One of my favorite parts of this site was the terms section that could prove useful for an audience looking to educate themselves in this subject matter. I also noticed that the website has a section of what can be done about this issue, which definitely distances itself from stricter more journalistic uses of interviews. I also liked the inclusion of transcripts for the interviews just in case I did not catch everything.

This project was a very interesting example of an overall successful use of multimedia in storytelling. I do think that the animations can be streamlined and the navigation could be more user friendly, without the need of a “help” section of the website.

Virtual Tourisms is a project by Megan Kendrick and David Lopez for the “Memories” issue of the Vectors Journal.  As written in the Editor’s Introduction, this project uses the lens of a hotel to “examine the cultural imaginary of Los Angeles as seen from a variety of social class positions”. Kendrick utilized the concept of hotels as “manifestations of abstract cultural ideals; a symptom of the collective unconscious of a particular age and geographic region.” In other words, she used Los Angeles hotels as a vehicle to examine the socio-cultural features of the city due to their unique position as a social space with particular interactions and transactions that acts as an intermediary between cultural myth and city representation.

The interface of this website interweaves as a kind of game-like storyline told through a travel album.  You open the travel album to begin and are directed to a type of “About” page that introduces the project’s purpose and method of digitization. You then click “Continue” and are allowed to choose a historical character from the 1880s and 1890s to go through the rest of the project as. These individuals are of varying class, gender, and ethnic backgrounds to simulate the complex network of land, labor, and nature in the complex LA tourist infrastructure of the time. You are allowed to read a mini-biography of each given character before you make your selection.

You are then directed to a selection of brochures such as “Why Visit Los Angeles,” “Where to Stay in Los Angeles,” “What to do in Los Angeles,” and one of the “Hotel Raymond” (where the character stays). You are then free to explore these brochures and  their different sub-categories.

Those subcategories usually include a representative picture through which you can then choose between three different lenses for a unexpected, behind-the-scenes view: Advertising and Promotion, Built Environment, and Socio-Spatial Practices. Using these lenses, you uncover different layers beneath the representative picture.

Your adventures and explorations are logged onto a feature called “Your Souvenir” which  keeps track of what you’ve personally taken interest in and is presented into something of a postcard, which were popular at the time. The postcard symbolizes the process of creating your characters personalized “image of the city” through his/her’s particular journey.

Based on the project’s editorial statement and my own observations, I believe that the designers put in careful and thoughtful consideration into creating this interactive interface in the way that they did. I think they made the design decisions they did because they really wanted to emphasize the construction of alternative spaces (hotels) to suggest the transformations  of experience due to differences in geography, time and personal background. By allowing the user to experience this world through a different historical character of their choosing, so many different stories are offered and can be told through this one interface. Their decision of including different lenses to view information through also contributed to the purpose of revealing the different layers of LA society at that time. Through this interface, you see through both literal and metaphorical viewpoints which is what the designer intended for the user to see. The project designers really wanted the user to experience what it was like to be a tourist of Los Angeles during this time period while also giving them an exclusive behind-the-scenes look to add more context and extend the user’s knowledge so as to blur the lines between image and reality.

I believe that this project’s design was quite successful in communicating its purpose. Through this interface, the user is allowed to learn from the past to construct our own histories while acknowledging the certain limitations of our historical documentation and tools. Unfortunately, some of the information and clarity was lost, as there was no way where you could combine the different stories told into one place that could be compared an contrast. Other than that, this project’s interface definitely brings a whole new meaning to the concept of “virtual tour” and I enjoyed it because of the interactivity and the it possibilities offered.

I chose to examine the Vectors project: Virtual Tourism. The goal of the project is to be able to navigate with as much information as possible while still being efficient. While navigating this site, it was easy to click from one link to another, receiving information that matched the visual it was presented on. The visuals were clear and the information on them was helpful and different depending on the person chosen at the beginning and the individual steps after that. Seeing all the information through a different lens, a historical one, was the aim of the project and I think it was achieved.

The project designers used an interface where the viewer needs to click through each person and catalog to reach the information in order to place them in the position of those in the past and look through their eyes at the options. It adds a historical context that wouldn’t be present if it were placed on another interface. The layers of each person through the tourism were created so the viewer can experience a sense of depth that they would if they were in that historical setting. The step-by-step clicking through in the info is effective in conveying this idea.

Overall, I would say this project is very successful. The old-timey colors, the homepage not finding any information other than what is on the website overall gives the feeling of being in the historical time period ready to experience a tour of Los Angeles back in the day. The hotel options, without colored pictures, only detailed drawings and descriptions match the editorials descriptions. The creators did a great job in matching what they envisioned to what the viewer experiences, which I believe is one of the most important parts in making a project successful. It also gives each viewer the opportunity to create their own history: by choosing what they would want to do they can view their own version of the tours. Since there is not direct path to navigate the page, each viewer creates their own idea of what had happened, while still receiving interesting and intriguing information.

My Vectors project is called “Blood Sugar,” by Sharon Daniel & Erik Loyer, chronicling the stories of intravenous drug users through a visual-audio experience. There are sound-clips of interviews conducted with participants in an HIV-prevention and needle-exchange program, touching on heavy subjects like abuse, isolation, and incarceration.

The piece is often very symbolic. Its title is a reference to the street name of heroin, “sugar.” Its audio clips, shown as “waveform bodies” are visualized in a way to resemble syringes. The words that float around them are quotes or notes from the project lead Sharon Daniel, and touch on more general and societal commentary on the stories. It’s “outside” of the body, like a needle or drug before injection. However, as you zoom in, you enter the “cell” or “inside” of the body (and mind). Now, the floating words deal more with chemistry and drugs,  internal thoughts, and physiological responses.

The project consists of different zoom layers. At its most wide, the “audio bodies” are lined up representing all of the subjects’ stories. Upon clicking on one of them, the screen fills with the shape, and can be interacted with (spun, stretched) the mouse. By zooming in further, words float around a sphere, representing the cell. The next level is inside the sphere, with phrasing floating around a pulsing, amorphous shape. At all layers except the most macro one, the quotes (“you just can’t stop until your ready”), motifs (“repetition”), and science (“[Methadone]”) constantly float around the screen.

While visually interesting, I can’t say that this project has intuitive interactive design. There are parts constantly in motion, and it’s easy to feel lost in the clumps of words and odd shapes that fill the screen. The words often clash in the foreground and background, making it difficult to read. Furthermore, without the index on the bottom bar, it would be nearly impossible to intuitively seek out a specific quote or theme. There is no clear organization in the visual interface, and it’s easy to miss out on details because they move around so quickly.

However, I understand the justifications behind the design choices. As stated in Daniel’s author statement, most of the visual aspects are representative of the stories they tell. She argues the project is “structured in terms of the social and biological construction of addiction at the boundary of the skin.” This idea is supported by her designer Loyer’s explanations that convey how the annotations are the “interviewee’s oscillations between topics located primarily outside of the skin (social) or inside the skin (biological).”

Therefore, the leaders of this project likely prioritized the symbolic experience of the stories, rather than focusing on each word. It works as a whole, rather than emphasize its parts–it’s united by its visual motif of the skin barrier, and complemented by the emotional audio clips. The project doesn’t aim to transcribe the subjects’ interviews for the sake of recording, finding, and referencing specific words, but rather to encourage exploration of the wealth of themes it touches upon in a holistic manner.

I chose to examine the Vectors project, The Roaring Twenties, created by Emily Thompson and Scott Mahoy. It is an “interactive exploration of the historical soundscape of New York City” during the 1920s. The creators of the project wanted to historicize the sounds of the urban landscape using almost 600 noise complaints, Fox Movietone newsreels, forms, photographs, and letters. Rather than creating an immersive 3-D model of New York City in the late 1920s where users can virtually explore the streets, they have decided to allow the users to create for themselves a virtual reality in the mind by listening to sounds captured in the motion pictures and reading and imagining the sounds documented in complaint forms and letters to help contextualize the soundscape of a thriving environment bustling with all kinds of city noise.

There are three different interfaces the users can explore: Sound, Space, and Time. In the Sound interface, the user is shown a vintage illustrated layout with the title “City Noise Sources”. There are 8 categories: traffic, transportation, building operation, homes, streets, harbor & river, collection deliveries, and miscellaneous. And each category is broken down into subcategories, which the user can hover over to see documented noise complaints and/or videos. For example, under Transportation, if you hover over Trolley Cars, a list of noise complaints and videos pops up. If the user clicks on one of the noise complaints, an information box opens detailing the type of noise, the complainant, and the location of the noise. If there is a pen next to the noise complaint, the user also has the choice to see the actual document. The user can also watch and listen to noises under each category.

In the Space interface, there is a vintage map of New York City with four different types of data points: noise complaint, noise complaint with documents, complainant location, newsreels. These data points are all the same as from the Sound interface, but now the user can actually see the locations of the sounds and noise complaints. The type of noise pops up for each data point by hovering over it, and if you click on it, depending on the type of data point, an information box pops up just as in the Sound interface. The user can zoom in and zoom out.

In the Time interface, a very elaborate interactive timeline is presented with 7 different types of data points. Not only can the user explore different years by moving around the small box, there is a more detailed timeline underneath with the data points. The information is the same as the other two interfaces. The difference is that the user can see the data points in chronological order. It is interesting to see that there were more magazine and newspaper articles that documented noise and sounds before 1928. However, starting from around 1926, there is an increasing number of newsreels that documented the sounds, noise complaints, and noise abatement commissions.

The site was very easy and fun to navigate. It is user-friendly, and I particularly liked the idea of three different interfaces for different kinds of exploration. The creators of the project purposefully did not simulate a virtual reality of New York City in 1920s because the idea was to immerse the user into the act of listening and try to engage the user into using their own imagination to think about what it must have been like in a city during this decade. In this digital era, we are constantly consumed and distracted by “digital noise”, such as Facebook and Twitter updates, and we tend to block out noises from our physical surroundings. The creators hoped that the user would be able to understand the importance of being present in the physical space by contextualizing the sounds created from it. If they have created a virtual 1920s New York City, the user would have been distracted by the visuals by trying to navigate the virtual streets of the city, which would have defeated the purpose of the project. Overall, I think the site was put together very well, and it was also a great way of exploring the soundscape of New York City in the Roaring Twenties.