11.02-
15.02.

week 2

reflections and thoughts about art and design and what the difference is

distinguishing between art and design

discovering at the moment: I am definitely a designer not an artist

learnd about plotpartys as critical pieces and conversation starters

whats new?

what i have
done

teamed up with moritz

came up with a concept for a plotparty asking "People I work with need to be..." and giving ranges of two extremes to choose from.

Later discovered, the question how people see themselves is also an interesting addition to the question of demand.

expanded the plotparty, now asking "...and I am:" two with the same template

note of the week

This week started really unlucky for me as I lost the keys to my appartment. This struggle in the beginning of the week was very troubling.

Still you have to deal with such events and it is time consuming for no purpose.
I liked this weeks project very much, because data visualisation is an interesting topic in general. I enjoyed thinking about these forms of displaying data and what comes with it (not anonymous, how valuable - o rhow honest - is the collected data then?)

First participants, figuring out how to bind the thread

People getting started

this weeks zine

Final draft for the Lasercutter -->
radius = 60 cm

the idea

At first we planned to only make one plot asking how people should be so the students would want to work with them. Shortly after deciding for this way, I realized it would also be great to ask for a self-assessment at the same time using the same values. So next to deciding for preferable opponing values for choosing. We thought about a concept how to put the two plots together.

The first plotpart shall show which kind of values a people search in people they work with. In the second step they should show how they would describe themselves concerning the same values.

first attempt: failes because of the laser settings: Needed interval: 0.05 otherwise typo not good (too filigrane typo)

testing different laser cutter settings for the desired effect //
Settings Scan > small lettering 0.05 interval & 45 power
big lettering 1 interval & 35 power

testing with different sizes of holes for the screws // 2.75 was perfect for 3 mm screws

iterations

plotting* & mapping

The initial concept was to combine the two plots to also visualize the overlappings between demand and offer. For doing that we had the idea of creating a two layered construct consisting from two plates. The lower one should be from MDF. The upper one should be out of seethrough acrylic. The acrylic one would be placed on top through 1-4 skrews when both would have been "filled out".

After going to the hardware store and finding out that acrilic material in the size we needed would cost ~25 Euro we did not go with that approach anymore and decided to make two seperate pieces.

testing & learning

plotparty in motion

assignment

In pairs, design and create a “plot party*” to research your peers’ preferences when it comes to working in collaborative environments. Come up with an evocative statement or question that you can invite your classmates to respond to, based on this week’s readings. The plot party should give us insight into the collaborative patterns and preferences within the group. We will all respond to each other’s plot party’s before the next show and tell. Suggested tools: laser cutter and vinyl cutter (can also be used as drawing machine).

*This format has many names and often remains unnamed. At the Visual Methodologies Collective, we call this format of eliciting responses a “plot party”. It is an engaging manner of gathering information and personal views from various people and also acts as collaborative visual intervention that can be used to elicit responses about certain issues, to formulate (better) research questions, gather opinions and start a discussion, or identify priorities around a specific topic. Plot parties hold a playful and informal middle ground between a questionnaire, an infographic and a discussion starter. As such it can be an attractive exploration and research tool for events and gatherings. Check out the references below.

collaborative learning & reflexion

Because I worked with Moritz before (a lot) I didn't expect any surprises when teaming up with him. It was pleasant and also a little bit weird, we came up with the same approaches, though not having talked about it. He was not in uni the day we started the project due to illness, but we managed to talk via chat about the upcoming assignment and decided on the topic and what we would want to do with it very fast. The collaboration went very smooth and efficient.

I like that we were almost always on the same page and still give impulses to the other person he or she wouldn't come up without the other one. We also had one discussion point.
I found it interesting to think about questions and what they would tell us in the end. We had a conflict of weather or not it is "useful" to ask if one would prefer to work with a male or female person. I found it interesting to find out how people react to this, while Moritz found it in some sense useless to ask for a value between male and female. I am excited how this question turns out, because after all Moritz let me leave the "Male/Female" in the plot while still not agreeing with the usefulness. I document this before we made the plotparty. So there is more to come when I know if it actually worked.

EDIT AFTER TESTING

The Plotparty worked out quite well.
What I would do differently >>

1. Different yarns for different people, graph was not readable because it was all the same and not obvious which thread parts come together.

2. the conversation starter "male or female": It was interesting to see some people actually prefer a certain gender to work with. As there was one person choosing male over female. When we talked about this, we quickly came in a "stereotypy" direction and unfortunately didn't continue with the conversation. However most of the people chose the exact middle between the genders not preferring any. We discussed this in class, probably people are not as honest as in private because of the public display of the survey there is no anonymity. My intent was to see what people choose and discuss in the next step the values they assume to a gender and especially why they assume them in a professional working environment.

Unfortunately we were advised to set the interval to 0.2 instead of 0.05, which we already tested and turned out just as we liked it.
One of the lab technicians told us the interval with 0.2 should also be fine with our filigrane lettering and be 4 times as fast.

But he was mistaken and so were we...as you can see above, the lettering wasn't engraved in a readable way. There was no purpose in trying to match the exact same engraving lines and we had no material left to cut it again. Also it would have been very wasteful, which I really did not want to be. So we had to come up with a solution.

a mistake :O

the solution

We cut the final design into paper hoping the screws would hold it on the plate in a nice way.

And it worked just fine, so no harm done and everybody was happy again. The only thing which was not so good on the paper solution:
--> engraving on the grey paper isn't visible the way we wished. The letters we engraved "...and I am." were barely visible. We should have also cut them.

Most people already participated

plotparty results

I found it very interesting to see the various preferences of people together with their demand on attributes in others. If I spend some more time in interpreting the data I could probably read more out of it. By the first evaluation it became clear that demand and offer was very contrary to each other which makes kind of sense.