Mike Forsyth: Emoji Story 

https://blogs.ubc.ca/mforsyth/home/etec-540/task-6-an-emoji-story/  

 

Deliberation in Mode of Communication

 

Mike’s Emoji Story post differs from my own in a few ways, namely the amount of detail he put into the generation of his emoji story (though I feel like mine was rather short due to the fact that I chose to summarize the first issue of a comic series rather than a whole movie), but there are several instances of our interpretation of this task where we align in interesting ways. Primarily, both of us expressed our unfamiliarity with emojis as a method of communication, and our attempts to utilize emojis as a form of representational iconography that goes beyond the original purpose of the emojis in an attempt to ascribe meaning to their presentation. Additionally, my note that “If we lack the symbols to express our conceptualizations, we are unable to properly communicate our ideas, our stories, our concepts.” lines up rather closely to Mike’s reflection on how they “wonder if my students, or even some of the younger teachers at my school would find this an easier task as they are more adept at using emojis as a form of pictorial writing”. I also note how both myself and Mike ponder on our lack of foresight, and the potential for miscommunication when considering abstract ideas (in their case, the passage of time, in my own, the use of not-so-perfectly fitting one-to-one comparisons between concepts and symbols).

 

Hasan Singer: CrAIyon

https://blogs.ubc.ca/hsinger540/2023/11/19/text-to-image-craiyon/ 

 

Importance of Clarification in Prompts

 

Hasan’s post on the use of CrAIyon as an AI art generation tool really struck a chord with me. Their notes on the issues of transparency and the origins of the art that was being generated echo a similar sentiment in my own post, wherein I intentionally gave prompts that would require some amount of interpretation that I could not give. Hasan’s use of iterative prompt generation and the AI’s lackluster performance when given extremely specific prompts also align with my own disappointment over a lack of appropriately apocalyptic depictions of the AI uprising; Hasan’s point that “there seems to be a problem in conjoining different ideas but, besides the existence of the problem, it is difficult, as someone using the model, to connect that problem with a specific lack, whether in training data or in the model itself” puts a much neater and finer point on the issues I was having with my own foray; insofar that the concepts I was driving at were not aligning with the AI’s conceptualization of the same prompt.

 

Anne George: Golden Record Curation

https://blogs.ubc.ca/annegetec540/2023/10/30/task-8-golden-record/ 

 

Curation Process and Conscious Choices

 

I really resonated with Anne’s post on the Curation task for the Voyager Golden Record, because it appears that we arrived at different conclusions whilst still having extremely similar curation processes and decision rubrics. We both touch on the cultural significance of several of the original choices made for the Golden Record, but we also acknowledge the statistical impossibility of incorporating every different culture on the planet, and as such we both transitioned away from a cultural rubric and pivoted to a more musically-composition based rubric instead, opting to try and incorporate as large a breadth of different instrumentations as possible. Even our breakdown of the composition of each song is similar, though it is funny to note that our final lists do differ in several instances, highlighting the fact that even when utilizing similar rubrics, individual conscious choices will differ based on many unknown factors (something that I put a fair bit of emphasis on in the curation data task that followed this one).

 

Didy Huang: Speculative Futures

https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540ddhng/2023/11/26/task-12-speculative-futures/ 

 

Design choice and descriptive medium

 

Didy’s implementation of immersion truly inspired me when it came to task [12.2]. When i was going about my own post for this task, I felt like the inclusion of an AI-generated image for each of the three prompts that I chose to look into was a fun way to incorporate another level of integration into the post; then I looked at Didy’s post, and was immediately blown away at their ability to join together interaction, audio, and the generated prompt into a whole other level of interaction. It is funny to me that we both focused on a prompt that was decidedly apocalyptic, and that we both went for a narrative style in our expansion of the prompt. However, I must say that Didy’s really is on a whole other level compared to mine. I also enjoyed our little conversation in the comments, as their experience with the Resident Evil series really made sense when looking back at their production for the task.

 

Garth Von Buchholz: Golden Record Curation

https://blogs.ubc.ca/garthvb/2023/10/28/task-8-golden-record-curation-assignment/ 

 

Conscious Decision Making and Curation Bias

 

Similarly to Anne George’s post on the same task, Garth’s Voyager Golden Record Curation post really resonated with me, as we seemed to be on the same wave-length when it comes to our decision making process, especially when coming up with a selection rubric. I do find it interesting that Garth makes special note of the styles and types of music that are significantly lacking from the original 27 tracks, as I too was compelled to make not of this (albeit in a different way; Garth highlights the different styles that are noticeably absent, whereas I offer selections of my own choosing). I also resonated with Garth’s conscious attempt at limiting the Euro-Western bias that they acknowledge, and I applaud their ability to try and reconcile their own bias through acknowledging that there is still a large percentage of Western examples on their own curated list. In a similar vein, in my own post, I tried to reconcile my own bias through the suggestions of songs I would like to include in the list, whilst acknowledging my own inherent bias or preferences when selecting these ancillary songs.

 

Nick Robitaille: What’s In Your Bag – Redesign

https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540robitaille/2023/10/22/task-7-whats-in-your-bag-redesign/ 

 

Mode-switching and the implications of design

 

Nick’s use of personification as a driving force for the mode switching factor of this task really took me by surprise; I had not even considered utilizing this space as an opportunity to explore different methods of descriptive audio mediums, and the idea of interviewing one’s own belongings as a descriptive device really intrigued me. I found my own description of my bag and its contents to be somewhat boring, an almost pedestrian attempt at podcast or ASMR style recording of a simple description of the items themselves, whereas Nick’s creativity of having the bag and its items speak for themselves really highlights the different possibilities when exploring mode-switching. While I tried to toy with non-verbal audio effects, such as the clinking of the bag and other audio cues within my recording, Nick’s choice to play with music and the audio tropes of an interview opened up a whole new avenue of description that I had previously not thought about. Nick’s post really made me curious about how we might be able to play within different mediums to expand upon how we view those mediums themselves as a mode of communication; a transcript of a conversation for a written text would follow the same vein as an interview does in audio form; and this really opened up possibilities within the scope of the Emoji Story task as well, as we are forced to play within a visual medium in an effort to communicate.