Things to hand-in:
1. Dissertation, for the University of Wales Exam Board... Download a draft version here!
2. 1 main project image, 18x12 cm, 300 dpi, TIFF format, no text
3. 4 project images, 18x12 cm, 300 dpi, TIFF format
4. 1 process report
5. 1 Flash presentation, 760x420 pixels

I agree with Hector's posting where he criticised the Flash format of the presentation. From what I've heard, it's a Domus requirement, not a UofW one. I just hate the format of 760x420, superwidescreen which requires re-layouts of my system diagrams and other drawings I used for my Dissertation paper (portrait format).

Things I need to finish for the presentation on November 29th:
1. Flash pres
2. Video scenario
3. Experience prototype

Things I need to finish for the Exhibition on December 15th:
1. Interactive Flash UI prototype
2. Interactive prototype

I'm not sweating yet.

The Dissertation abstract is due tomorrow.

Humans are social by nature. The relationships and interactions of humans nowadays are often facilitated by information and communication technologies, whereby amplifying existing group behaviors within social networks, such as swarming, mass hysteria, gathering, collecting and spying.

Vexed outlines the process of investigating into phenomenon of scopophilia in online social networking and how surveillance techniques can enhance and support this activity. This concludes with solutions for revealing, concealing and camouflaging identity to preserve anonymity during voyeuristic and exhibitionist acts.

The proposed Vexed concept captures mobile experiences of scopophilia, through a series of designed objects that create spaces and opportunities for exhibitionism and voyeurism.

You can download the Vexed Abstract .pdf over here.

You can download the latest presentation over here. You can also view the presentation as a slideshow on my Flickr set, however you must be logged in and be on my Flickr Friends list.

In the presentation itself, I didn't declare a clear decision between going the direction of exhibitionism or voyeurism. After some thinking, although exhibitionism seems like the submissive action rather than the dominating behavior, I will use exhibitionism as the main driver and voyeurism as a secondary model. :-)

I was thinking about Claudio's feedback on personal curation of what information one puts public on sites like Flickr, MySpace, Friendster. After asking some people over the curation of their own content, the answers didn't reveal much beyond the obvious: "I just pick the best-looking picture", "Just want to publish generic images that are not too private", "This layout is simple and clean, and I like simple and clean", "I don't want to put too much about myself, because it all comes out in the pictures/entries/tags anyway"...

So, it's time to go to the other end, and see if the audience of voyeurists influences how we behave as exhibitionists.

The Johari Window model could be an exercise that looks into the behavior of Exhibitionism and how one wants to be perceived by others, as well as Voyeurism and how people actually perceive one. So yeah, now I'm trying to figure that out without going too psychological over it.

Kathya and David are actually here, and since she is one of my User Personas, I was bouncing off thoughts and ideas on her. She agrees that I might fall too far into the psychology end. Patricia is also here for a couple days and we've been discussing my final project as well.

Having friends over in Milan during this time is good. Most of my friends are (interaction) designers either by profession or education and can provide many insights on a range of topics relevant to my projects. Plus, they also get me out of the house and provide downtime from project work. I love my visiting friends :-)

Here's a collage of yesterday's presentation. You can download my presentation from yesterday over here. The presentation might make more sense if you download the first presentation beforehand. Any feedback is welcome.

The feedback was to make a clearer connection of the values of Mobility in daily activities and social networks.

I broke down last week's presentation into smaller pieces and went through a series of mapping sessions to derive experience targets in Mobility. I've put the smaller pieces of the presentation into two documents: a bibliography, and an inspiration projects pdf.

In the meantime, you can download the revised, condensed presentation over here and the inspiration projects over here.

Today we had to write and send our project descriptions to Motorola. I am not completely comfortable with writing a project description now, especially so early in the concepting stage, but here goes...

Reveal | Conceal | Camouflage

Investigations into the uses of surveillance technologies and techniques on the online social networking phenomenon of scopophilia leads to the value of mobility solutions for revealing, concealing and camouflaging identity.

Bluescan was done on Mobile Processing and you can view the source code here. Mobile Processing is an ongoing project and on their site you can find references and documentation for learning it.

I use PhoneAgent for uploading stuff onto my mobile phone.

I read a lot of material while I was flat on my back in bed, though, and I'm a lot better now, thankfully :)

Structure for contextualizing the research:
1. Introduction:
personal stance on the idea of espionage, related personal projects that are relevant.

2. Social Networking:
clustering my findings, definition of social networking, natural and mediated human networks, issues of privacy, identity, mobility of information, emerging behaviors, and what does it all mean.

3. Espionage:
drivers, enablers, the spying window, the security and human acts of espionage, concepts of revelation and concealment, and my own interpretation of everything and what aspect of espionage I want to push further during the project.

4. Related art/design/tech projects
on Social Networking and Mobility, Espionage, Identity and Information.

5. User research:
have started into user profiles and their behaviors in using social networking sites, as well as their relationships with their mobile devices :)

6. Explorations into Mobile Processing:
I've sort of started playing around a bit. The scripts all work on Robert's Nokia, but not on my SonyEricsson. Poo! It's very odd; I don't yet know if it's a phone problem or a script problem (although it really runs OK on Robert's phone). Maybe I can E-Bay for a cheap SonyEricsson or Nokia to play around with during this project.

No downloads for this blog entry but maybe when I manage to put the research into a presentable format... :)

La Marchesina: "WarpGates"
The first, for La Marchesina, with project leader Domenico Pisaturo, is about enhancing and adding meaning to public transitional areas, within a new real-estate development in Milan. La Marchesina is a real-estate company and currently developing a former Osram factory into residential and commercial areas. Domenico's company moves in the design area of interactive exhibits and installations, so together we are to explore the potentials of this transitory spaces.

You can download the brief here.

Samsung: "Sell and Display"
This tackles the subject of brand and retail experience. The project leader is a guy called Alessandro forgot-his-last-name, who runs a company called Quinine, specialising in retail and exhibition design. He showed his previous work for Orange UK stores and I liked what I saw.

The thing is, my personal interest really doesn't lie in retail. Branding yes, but not retail. They emphasized a lot on aesthetically-pleasing elements and I thought that shouldn't be a way to approach a project that deals with brand experience. I mean, if you went to a Samsung store that was really "wow" and then you go home after buying a product and it doesn't work well, you'd be disappointed, right?

I think their stance is to assume that all interaction, behavior and services within the Samsung products are all perfect, therefore let's just concentrate on the aspect of brand experience in retail spaces. Which is fair enough, but that's not what I plan to do after graduation.

Vodafone Japan
Announced at the last minute, for a Monday morning briefing, is the last project brief. The project leader is Setsu Ito, a Japanese Milan-based product designer. For a previous Samsung project last semester, he also had the role of project leader, for a design brief with the MA in Design students. I don't know what the brief is, but my mind has been made up, so...

I signed up for...
1st choice: Motorola's "On the Move": Mobility in Social Networking
2nd choice: Fujitsu's "Where is My Simple Life": Simplicity in Convergent Products

OK, I'm now going to send out that email for everyone, calling for participation in user research.

Here's a quick recap of the presentations today and why I finished the day with mixed feelings. ...

A thesis is not a thesis...
The framework of the thesis, as far as I understood it today, are as follows: we are given four briefs from industry-partners and we have to pick one as a basis for our individual thesis work. At the moment, the thesis industry partners are Motorola, Fujitsu, Samsung and Marchesina; each with their own themes such as 'Mobility in Social Networking', and 'Simplicity: Where is My Simple Life?"

Now, I thought a thesis was where you, as the author/undertaker of the project, pick your own area of interest to study, research and generate concepts and ideas on. Correct me if I'm wrong here....

I think from now on, I will stop saying the word "thesis" in this context, and use the words "final project" instead.

Framework of the Final Project
Each brief has a project leader and project assistants. Today they mentioned that they would like a good balance of people within each group. So, in my mind, that computes roughly to: 17 people on the course, and 4 project briefs, which equals to more or less, 4 people per brief. What I am concerned about is when there is a large interest in one or two of the briefs, and therefore, would they start forcing people to do the other less popular briefs?

They've done this in the past in a previous project. Which amounts to pushing people to do topics that they may not be interested in.

And that sucks big-time.

Materials to be handed in:
1. Digital presentation (Flash)
- include .fla and .swf source files, 720x460pixels
2. Dissertation
- format between an article and scientific paper, between 10-20 pages
3. Abstract
- in English and Italian (!)
4. Images plus Keywords
- TIFF hi-res images
5. Project Image
- TIFF hi-res
6. Process Report
- organise and print a sketchbook about your project research and process
- I'm going to keep my final project stuff here and move my personal blog to vox.com
- I'll just print out this blog and my Flickr final project images as my process report
7. Any other optional materials in a communicative layout
- i.e brochures, flyers, micro websites, prototypes, etc

The Flash presentation bugs me. The idea is that we present our projects to the exam board. But to dictate us to use Flash? And for what? I know that not many people in my class are adept at using Flash, and it will take them a lot more time to make a presentation in Flash since they tend to animate and use frame actions.

It's been like this all year, and so far, I've managed to cheat the system by making everything in Keynote, then exporting all the slides as JPGs and making a ten-line script in Flash that clicks and jumps through the slides and sections of my presentation using keyboard navigation. I think I sent out the script to everyone in class, though, so I hope they will use that.

Timing and Deliverables
I really wonder about the kind of depth and quality of work that they expect us to reach by the end of the year, with this kind of timing... Bear in mind that the launch is today and tomorrow, and I think by Friday we're already supposed to decide which briefs/group we want to continue with.

Research Phase - September 18 to October 6th
Concept Generation - October 9th to October 23rd
Concept Refinement - October 21st to October 27th
Concept Development - October 30th to November 10th

Abstract
- due Monday November 6th at 13.00
- middle of Concept Development Phase

Dissertation
- due Monday November 13th at 13.00
- the Monday after the Concept Development Phase

Digital Presentation and Project Image
- due Monday November 20th at 13.00
- does this mean we have an entire week to make the Digital Presentation? I'd rather spend an extra week writing the Dissertation paper!

Images plus Keywords, Process Report
- due Friday November 24th at 13.00

I'm a bit confused as to what we're supposed to be doing after November 24th because the final project presentation isn't until December 1st. I guess maybe it's a week of catching up on sleep ;-)

Downloadable stuff
- Brief_Motorola
- Brief_Fujitsu
- Deliverables/Hand-Ins
- View Project Planning