The Living War Memorial

“Se vad lite interaktiondesign kan göra!”

sara stiber — Fri, 11 May 2007 13:58:22 +0000

Den 30 Maj har vi examensutställning i Folkets Park. Kom dit mellan 14 och 21. Välkomna!

Vill ni se vår prototyp?
http://www.stiber.se/rainmaker/index1.html

______________________________________________________________________________

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony

sara stiber — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 12:22:23 +0000

An inspiring ceremony is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony. It is held in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, and one of the objectives is to console the victims of the atomic bomb. The 6th of August every year, thousands gather to pray for the realization of a lasting world peace. The ceremony is 45 minutes long and contains, amongst other things, silent prayer, bell ringing (at 8:15, the time the bomb was dropped), peace declaration, 1000 doves being released, commitment to peace (by child representatives), and the Hiroshima Peace song (sung by a choir with approximately 500 members).

Question

sara stiber — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:20:03 +0000

It is not unusual that war memorials don’t function as well as they are intended to. Often people just walk past them and ignore them. “Are war memorials to fallen heroes really ignored because people don’t want to honor the fallen? Or because they don’t want to think about the horrors of war?” Probably the last one right? So how do you inspire your audience to want to think of war? That’s the question of today.

__________________________________________________________________

Touched Echo

sara stiber — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 22:01:30 +0000

How about this interaction? Touched Echo is a installation for the balustrade on the “Bruehlsche Terrasse” in Dresden. From it you have a view of “Neustadt” which was almost completely destroyed in World War II. By placing their hands over their ears while leaning against the balustrade, vistors will hear bombers flying over their head and explosions of the bombs. The echo of the past (the sound) is transmitted via the forearm to your skull bone, where it enters the inner ear). Interesting.

______________________________________________________________

Learning from Advertising

sara stiber — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 15:18:08 +0000

Greatpockets.com is an advertising site for Nokias new phone. But I didn’t know that when I entered the site and I thought of it only as a joyful and well-crafted piece of critical design. It has some nice interactive storytelling and humour and so on. But then when I thought I was exiting the site, the real point of it flew in and landed delicately in my lap. Nice!

_________________________________________________________________

ECOTONOHA

Andreas — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:42:10 +0000

Website from NEC where people leave messages as tree leaves. A visitor can only enter one message per day in order to enable as wide participation as possible. Up to 500 entries make one tree and after that a new tree appears. The numbers of entries, leaves determine an actual tree planting activate. For every 100 signatures on Ecotonaha NEC planted another tree addition to those planted during the Kangaroo Island project. Last year 2006 they had 107.054 messages and 1.070 trees were planted.

From website:
“ECOTONOHA IS A PROJECT – TO NURTURE A VIRTUAL TREE COLLABORATIVELY, AND AT THE SAME TIME CONTRIBUTE TO THE ACTUAL ENVIRONMENT TO COPE WITH GLOBAL WARMING. AS YOU MAKE ECOTONOHA’S LEAVES, THE VIRTUAL TREE WILL GROW, AND AS ECOTONOHA GROWS, REAL TREES WILL BE PLANTED BY NEC.”

This whole concept is well thought throw and the website very beautiful. It’s a good example of how a message board can be more and look better then a traditional message board. It is also an example of how the web can be used to encourage visitors to participate in something bigger then just the actual web site.

Go to https://www.ecotonoha.com/index_en.html and leave a message.

Creator of the website seems to be http://www.yugop.com/ which also has a very interesting website.

/a.

Dagens….

sara stiber — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 14:23:02 +0000

Fem myror är fler än fyra Saddam…

__________________________________________________________________

Mashed Bagdad Potatoes

sara stiber — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:55:36 +0000

There’s just so many ways to play with maps… Three projects I found today work with mashing maps of different cities together, and through that emphazise differences between the places.

Bagdad can be toured in Brooklyn in the piece You Are Not Here. By putting the two cities maps on top of eachother, the artists could decide where to put site specific information from the streets of Bagdad on the correlating places in Brooklyn, in form of stickers with access codes and telephone numbers to “the Tourist Hotline”. The information recieved could for instance contain ‘the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein and how this might have been a stage event as most of the spectators of it were American soldiers and journalists’. The time it takes to walk all over town, in addition to the information with a different perspective then we get from TV news, can give room for discussion and contemplation.

Next project is called
Bagdad>. Here it’s more about what San Fransisco would look like if they got the same bombs that Bagdad recieved. Would your home be bombed?

The last project I found working with entangled city maps is called Cherry Blossoms, and was actually inspired by Bagdad<>San Fransisco. Creator Alyssa Wright brings the bombs of Bagdad back home to the US in her own way; She let’s you put on a backpack filled with confetti and sends you on walk through the streets of Boston. Your backpack can, and will, blow up at any moment. It works like this:

‘Cherry Blossoms is a backpack that uses a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative location to the center of the city are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that’s correlated to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates, releasing a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. Each piece of confetti has the name of a civilian who died in a war based on lies.’

I would just love to have a backpack like that…. Here’s another link explaining the project.

______________________________________________________________

Brainstorm 1, Five Purposes

Andreas — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:47:34 +0000

Research

Creating discussions: use abstraction to get reactions.

Mcluhan’s Coolness: Create intriguing but uncompleted information, and the visitors will try to fill in the blank spots.

Create a notice-board without telling what it is.

Connecting research: Old material with new technology, old metaphors with new research etc.

Reconciliation

With your own past: You need to mourn and understand. Try to forgive. Realize that you are not alone by talking to people that experienced the same.

My Space – pages for the dead members can be seen as good places to mourn and comforts by.

Personalize (“pimp my experiences”) to evolve the feeling.

Let the “evil” side tell their stories.

Commemoration

Tell the story of life instead of death: personalize – make it possible for visitors to tell the life story of the lost.

My Space

Make a living tombstone, create something dignified, silent but beautiful.

Contemplation

Audio creates contemplative environment, good and calm audio.

Controlling visitors without boring them. Try to get visitors to spend time during the visit, no stress. To start a contemplation process.

Abstract – play on visitors fantasies.

Combination of beautiful but tragic.

“Coolness” – make something understandable but incomplete.

Education

Create an engaging experience – by real stories and possibilities to walk in the shoes of the war victim. Learning by doing on the web.

Create an entertaining experience – use not as much text. Combine different mediums and control visitors without boring them.

Let the visitor create.

/a & s

Web Characteristics

sara stiber — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:14:43 +0000

- A fast and effective tool which makes you work faster.

- The anonymity of the web can make you feel safer than in real life.

- Internet have the power to make you become more daring and curious.

- The web is quick to involve the user, make her immersed and make her into a participant.

- A meeting place for many different media. A place for different media to collaborate.

- An experimental place. A place where people want to test the boundaries and push them further, were people actually go to be experimental. Where they search for new kinds of experiences.

- A messy place where you easily get lost. A jungle.

- A place of enormous storage possibilities.

How to benefit from these characteristics

Benefit from the visitor being able to be daring and curious

- create a “wow” – experience.

- do some mcluhan “coolness”.

Benefit from the web’s ability to involve

- Create discussions by provoking.

- Use an abstract, loose form to let the visitor steer her own imagination. Give her the oppertunity to reflect on a subject of her choice.

- Create ways for the visitor to make her voice heard. It’s good to create more than one way, to give the visitor even more freedom of choice.
- Make the visitor feel less alone. Personalize in some way.

- Tell engaging stories from the mouth of the source.

- Let the visitor create something.

- Make interconnected path of action, which fuels the imagination and gives the visitor possibility to choose.

Benefit from the web being a meeting point for different media

- Combine the different media to get new experiences, but also other kinds of combinations like old material and new technology, old metaphores with new materials and so on.

- New combinations can also give new knowledge and entertainment.

- New combinatons can also create new tools: photo + database, audio + internet-interactivity…

- Take advantage of benefits of the different media; like for example including audio to get a more contemplative atmosphere.

- You don’t need to know a lot about computers to create on the web anymore. Use shortcuts, like plug-ins and so on, when you’re a little bit short on knowledge.

Benefit from the web’s love for the experimental

- Abstract form can work since the computer user is more open to the experimental.

- Create the feeling of not being in control by letting the visitor understand that she can’t see the whole picture.

- Create storytelling in an experimental way: X: changing directions, Y: layered pictures with interrelationship, Z: getting deph a la fake way

- New combinations is also experimental