In class we learned about something called critical design. The idea was completely foreign to me at first but after discussing the practice with Marina I now have a better understanding. In a way it kind of reminds me of science fiction. A good science fiction story will change something about the world and then build a story around it, examining the consequences of the altered world. The story itself can help us see our current world or potential future from a new, critical perspective. Similarly, critical design can help us gain a new critical perspective of the world through the design of new objects that are not necessarily useful beyond their ability to make us pause and think. This is closely related to design fiction.

I'd like to do a critical design project for my light pollution topic because doing something like critical design is outside of my comfort zone and I know I learn more when I do things like that.

Let's do this.

First I need to brainstorm some critical design ideas. I thought about it for a while and come up with these ideas:

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This week we learned about Asemic Writing. This is something that has the appearance of writing but isn't composed of real, meaningful words or text.

I wanted to do more than a bunch of letters; I wanted the letters to be grouped together in words and the words grouped together in paragraphs. To do this I had to think about spacing between letters and words and line heights. Rather than pick arbitrary values for this I learned about Gold Ratio Typography. In theory it makes the text more pleasing to the eye. In the case of the below sketch, the line height, font heights, and font widths are all functions of the P5 canvas sketch width.

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I am continuing to do research on Light Pollution and am learning a lot more about this field.

For our first assignment we experimented with a JavaScript-based terminal emulator. In the early years of computing, terminals were the main interface for computer users. They provided a text-based interface for entering commands and receiving the results.

I wasn't around back then but as a kid when I started learning about computing one of the computers I used was a Commodore 64. During Allison's lecture I was reminded of the kinds of programs I wrote with that computer. It was a limited machine but with some effort I could program it to create simple games. One kind of game I made many times challenged the user to navigate through a maze. For whatever reason I was fascinated with mazes and created many versions of this theme over the years. For this assignment I had the opportunity to make yet another one, and I jumped at the chance.

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This week I did 7 days of a constraint-based daily practice and I interviewed my first expert, Gregory Dobler.

Research on my second topic, light pollution, is well underway.

For our last assignment I experimented with HDR photography. I used my CHDK-hacked Canon camera to take the photos and Luminance HDR to create the HDR photos and perform the tone mapping from HDR to regular LDR photos.

I did quite a bit of experimenting with my camera and the software to understand how all of this works. I also read all of the Luminance HDR documentation. The documentation clarified a lot of details about HDR photography and helped me understand all of the steps to making photos like this.

All of the below HDR photos were created with 8 photos with exposure settings ranging from -3 to +4. The HDR photos were created using the Debevec model with a Gaussian weighting function and a Gamma response curve. I used Mantiuk '08 to tonemap the HDR images to the LDR JPG image format. There were other possible choices for these settings and although I did experiment with them I don't claim to have a full understanding of what they are or what they do. I used these settings because I was happiest with the results. I will have to look for other online resources provided by professional photographers to get better guidance and intuition about how to use these tools.

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The final-final version of my Field Guide is finally(!) available. I made some improvements to it based on my thoughts from my previous Field Guide Reflection post. Most importantly, I made it more clear who the intended audience is. In the introduction on the inside page, I added this:

Jumpstarting home ownership in low to middle income communities is an important component of community development that you as a community leader need to recognize. As you read this guide, consider how government policy can encourage home ownership and make it accessible to people who don’t have the resources to pursue it on their own. Critically, people need access to fairly priced mortgages and financial literacy information. Additionally, think about how government policy can confer the same benefits to renters and other people who don’t or can’t buy homes.

I think this improves it quite a bit because I make it more clear who I am addressing and that the content is intended for the development of low to middle income communities. Improving high income communities isn't something the people living there need help with beyond what they can accomplish on their own.

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