tutorial 29/09

first thing: don't start with the introduction. oh well :p


just had a very useful and eye-opening chat with my tutor Seel, which has given me lots of subjects to think about and people to talk to. expect charts.

an intro of sorts

i am currently in a position where i have to have written 1000 words for my GARP by this time next week, and thought an introduction would be a good place to start. since the knowledge and techniques i'll be researching are quite specialist, a good clear introduction will be vital. also, i'm sick of stumbling over myself whenever somebody asks me what my GARP's about. so here goes:

“Any designer that uses a computer is a digital designer; the only question is whether or not one recognises the limitations imposed by by technology and, in so doing, takes an important step in evolving beyond them.” - David Womack, Eye Magazine 2001

The budding designer.

When I was very young, six or seven years old, my friend showed me Micro Machines '96 on his Sega Megadrive. Despite a general dislike of racing games, and the fact that I was really, really bad at it, I loved that game. This was because it was my first encounter with a level editor. You could make, save and play your own tracks. More recently, a lot of games have tended towards the user-generated content approach. "Sandbox" games like Grand Theft Auto, while consisting of a defined environment, allow the user simply to explore and play on their own terms, effectively creating their own game as they go (My favourite goal is to find a motorbike, provoke a police chase, and try to evade capture by jumping the bike off a bridge onto a moving train). Then there are games that take this further. Little Big Planet is centred around the level editor, encouraging players to create their own levels with an array of tools and pre-made obstacles, then share them with the online community. The library of online content now dwarfs the included story-mode levels. My latest favourite, Minecraft, combines sandbox and level editor. The entire game is the level editor, where players are expected (but not required) to conceive and create their own structures, by taking and combining materials from the randomly-generated level - editing it as they go.

I find this kind of user-generated gameplay the most fun, and more importantly, the most satisfying. I think that there is a clear parallel between the urge to create, edit and share, rather than just play the levels you're given with the game, and the current state of digital design software. Similar trends have emerged in many aspects of our lives; almost everyone has a wallpaper on their phone or computer that means something personal to them, social media sites and blogging sites allow and encourage users to customise the appearance of the page, even naff custom-made greetings cards can be ordered from various websites named after unorthodox animals.

This website documents my findings on the subject of user-created and customised software used in the design process. I will be looking at digital design outside of a WYSIWYG environment, and asking how or if the tools we use now will change - not just in terms of adding or editing the tools themselves, but in giving the user freedom to create or edit their own tools, be that within existing programs or by creating entirely new environments in which to do their work.

This is important to me because, in my opinion, it is lazy and ignorant to settle for the processes we have already established in the way we develop our working environment.

I want to explore the extent to which the tools we are given for digital design restrict the work we can produce, and how manufacturers of creative software may decide to tackle this.

Processing - baby steps

just had a bit of a read on http://processing.org/learning/. I found a sample code that draws a circle around wherever the cursor is, and after some playing around with the code came up with this:

the idea was to create a vague face, with the circles always centred around the same 3 points, and their size depending on the position of the cursor (rather than the size being fixed and the position depending on the position of the cursor). Looks like a skinned monkey ... i mean, er.. probably looks like a skinned monkey :)