Packing again..

And again I'm packing my stuff. Not suprising heh?

This was the presentation we gave today

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It was great! The website about the project including all products we made, the documentation we wrote, the usability video, the animation, etc will be there.

Thanks all for the great weeks, the homemade lemonade and the mikado! See you on visits to us and from us to you :)

DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
waiting for the official ceremony and the inofficial party ...

Impress

That is the OpenOffice.org version of PowerPoint. And ours is finished right now! See you all tomorrow, and be impressed ;)

Poster needs to be done at 5

.. he said at 5:25.. No, poster is not finished yet. Well, almost, right Andreas? The CD is already waiting in the burner.. Soon they will save to USB-stick and it will get to this laptop and be burned. Right Andreas?

I needed to create another version of the logo, wíth the background color :) Saved to USB-stick and it is now being inserted in the Photoshop poster.
"Yo good, it is done". Ok, it seems to be done. It justs needs to get a bit smaller..

Perfect. Oh, wait, I can do this.. a little bit more. Now they really align. No sorry, oh! Yeah, this one. Ok, delete this. This one? Yeah its good! Save it! It should actually.. No, we don't have time now. Save it? Yeah, right to the stick. *Click* Ok, it is saving.

Stick is coming here, plug it in.. Burning time!

I've adapted ...

Jan took those pictures in the Topkapi park and I really like them ...

:)

bacteria on wall

translating into esperanto, translitterating into georgean, writing on a huge wall was fun!

Swedish research center and Yakup 2

The visit to the Swedish research center was really nice yesterday,I learned a lot about some Swedish people that I have never heared of .... but it was really interesting though. The wine and crackers were excllent.
As far as I know there is no such Austrian Institute in Istanbul ... the Austrian Institut Istanbul is just for Turks who want to study German .... but I found out that the Austrians have a really nice Konsulate here in Istanbul - have a look.
The dinner at the restaurant Yakup 2 we went to was quite an experience, first we had Mese, the turkish way to start ... delicious and then there was a power failure so we were sitting in the candle light, eventually we got our food too, an excellent fish on my plate... when it came to the bill, there was a difference of 100 YTL between the actual amount and wha they wanted, but it was just a mistake ...
:)
Thomas said that there was a film shot there at the restaurant - but I cannot remember the name of it!

Two tea tabs

In the breakfast restaurant they have this tea machine. Every morning you could see peoples faces when drinking their tea, they didn't like it.. The tea is too black, you can't even tell the difference between the tea and the coffee. Except when you put milk in your coffee :)

Then a few days ago someone told that you should put water with your tea because otherwise is way too strong. Then people understood were the second tab on the machine was for, you could mix water with your tea.

The funny thing is, people didn't used the second tab before.. The tea machine had two tabs without describing which is which. At first hand you would think it is bad to not put text/icon above the tabs because people wouldn't know which one is tea and which one is water. But it is creating another problem too, people don't even know the two tabs have different function, they probably guess that tea will come out from both tabs.

Btw, we got some nice feedback on our concept today.

Feels like working!

Today we really started researching and prototyping! Which is good, it feels like finally getting some work done. The jottit-wiki is filling with information about information about the bacteria, the primer, language and an alphabet.

Birgit is now searching for some flowchart program for the Mac.. I think I'm starting some kind of website to put the information in, maybe using Google Pages? Armağon and Andreas are working on some prototype for the interface at the students arm :)

University of Babel

Our concept is about the University of Babel. We started using a wiki to collect our research and as a cooperation tool for creating the concept document. See the process at University of Babel @ jottit. Below is our current idea of the concept, the goal of the University of Babel (UoB) is to learn about other cultures.

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One university in Turkey and one university in Sweden. The Turkish university has a Arabic speaker tower to send information to other universities and can also receive messages with the tower too. The Swedish university has the same, but instead of a speaker tower they have a Christian church bell which acts in the same way. When a message is received by a speaker tower or church bell it is send to bacteria inside the university. These bacteria sit in the walls inside the university and aline in a certain pattern to display the message received by the tower on the walls. This message is in a general standard language which we will come up with. This language is a mixture of images and text, with latin letters creating the image. And thus multiple layers of the alphabet get visible (like in calligraphy with the background story and everything). For new users (that don't understand the language) there is a Primer. The Primer is a digital book explaining how to read and write the language. The book adapts to the learning curve of the user by dynamicly changing according to the questions the user has about the language. (See the book The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson for more information about the Primer.)

The messages are displayed on different walls. Every wall can represent a subject or another university, country or culture.

Inside the university the students read the messages on the walls. In this way they learn about other cultures. The environment of the message is lacking because the message in transmitted to the other university with another culture. There the teacher comes in sight. The teachers -or supervisor- will help the students by explaining the environment or the background stories behind the messages.

What this all points to is love, peace and happiness. As the students from the different universities, different countries and different cultures talk to eachother and get to know each other they can solve world problems. The UoB helps the students in reaching this goal by transmitting messages to the other university and starting a conversation between the cultures.

The love, peace and happiness (LPH) is not our goal, it might be the goal of the students. We try to create a system which supports the students in their goals, be that LPH or something else. This way we release the stress between the different countries and cultures and build bridges between the universities.

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We've got some extra ideas for combining personal messages on your own arm, retrieving and publishing messages from and to media companies, and receiving and sending messages to gods via Me.

Furthermore, we just got our first critique round from our supervisors. They thought we should be focus on one part of it (for example leave the communication between universities which we already thought of) and focusing on the interaction parts of the concept. Also they pointed us at washing hands, using OLED-displays, Peter Hoffman and the Game of Life.

Relaxing after our presentation

We've been talking about movies:
* Quatsi triology
* De zee die denkt (The sea that thinks)
* Go around twice if you're happy (link doesn't work in Turkey without some proxy..)
* And a new movie we saw about calligraphy, I'm still processing this one :)

Friday morning we went to a calligraphy artist and got our names in calligraphy too. Mine reads eco when turned upside down. And they had these living rooms there. Without chairs, you could only sit on the ground. We thought this might only be used for sitting and drinking tea. You couldn't do much else.. So the whole family would be out all day? Interesting, these 'small' things change the culture.. or are changed bu that culture?

In the afternoon we've had our first presentation. We had to present our concept until now and show where we were heading. The day before we had three main idea's but not really worked out yet. Then Friday morning I talked to Jan about our ideas and went more into the encryption and communication. This caused an old idea to be retrieved which we've thrown away before; the satellite dish on the university building. In the one hour before the presentations we've created a concept called the University of Babel. Our storyboard and the inclusion of bacteria in our concept got the biggest applause and the questions had to be stopped at some point to continue!
Some people might not have understood it, but we'll help them in the final presentation. Info about the concept will follow tomorrow.

Saturday was a relaxing day, we went to the Princess Islands. They don't allow motorized transportation there, so everyone get around by horse and carriage or by bike (nice to see some bikes again, missed them..). Together with Thomas Porathe we walked through the village and around the hill on the island and eat at a restaurant where they'd charge for service costs. All very nice and quiet.

Sunday we went to visit the Topkapı palace and to four mosques. Topkapı had some nice kitchen factories for all the people living there. The mosques were nice too, but differed a lot. Some were huge and thus a bit too much impressive, others had a nicer atmosphere. When we visited the last one they were just starting prayer. People got from everywhere, in their working clothes, ran into the mosque and started their prayer. Very nice to see.

Now the real work starts..

Låda

calligraphy today

I really enjoyed watching that calligraphy teacher today, it is quite some art I guess ....
I like my name and want to try and copy it at home ... we'll see what that will look like ...
the cistern was nice too, a little touristy perhaps, but a cool place!

calligraphy ....

and so on ...
;)

Impressions of the beauty of the city

it's great!

selection and list of pros and cons

Mindmap

The virus is spreading...

Mikado!

A lot a small things happened, but sometimes they have a large effect on me and my thoughts.
.. When talking about the "walking on the snow without leaving traces"-t-shirt Mary said that it may be about not leaving traces in other peoples lives.
.. I can write "I love you" in four more languages now; Jag älskar dej, Ka te Ljubem, Ti amo & Qishterv :)
.. I'm not the only one who played with Kapla in my youth, Tove did too.
.. Saying spädbarnsmassage really fast in Swedish is pretty near impossible.
.. Someone thought up the idea to combine Chinese calligraphy and the English language, an Chinese image for the word horse, made up of the latin letters h o r s and e. Nice :)

I finally understood the meaning of "the environment creates the meaning"! We thought of creating a mobile for baby's with calligraphic sura's as parts of the mobile. But it would be of no use when the parents wouldn't tell the background stories of the sura's. So the tarket group should be Islamic parents. There the environment creates the meaning for the calligraphy, without that it is meaningless.

Today (Thursday) I (together with Birgit and Angelika) also went to the Istanbul Modern, a museum with modern art from Turkey. They had some nice things in there. The coolest thing was a ceiling of books. They hang the books up on the ceiling with wires and created a second ceiling. Very cool.

After the museum I walked back to hotel and went out to have some diner -I was starving- with Roy and most of the Swedish students; Andreas (roommate and teammate), Kristina (aka Koko), Maria, Sofia and Tove. We ate some very nice noodles, spaghetti and pizza and afterwards went for a experience with dondurma (Turkish icecream) and had a drink with live Turkish music while playing Mikado using chopsticks from the Wagamama.

Sleeping time now...

Alarm clock fiasco

Yesterday morning we got up earlier than planned because of the "alarm clock fiasco".. Yes, I should explain.

My alarm clock isn't working that well. When you press the snooze button after setting the alarm, it won't go off anymore. But I'm used to that now and found my workarounds for it.

A second problem is when it does go off and you want to wake up at the same time the following morning -thus not changing the time- it won't go off either. Nice isn't it? It won't go off if you don't change the time.

The workaround I have is to change the set time with like one minute. But I already did that one night, so I couldn't go on because it would get later and later. Still following me? Wow.
So I thought of setting the alarm one minute back. As you know with most alarm clocks you can only go forward to get back in time, the same with mine. Well, in my situation the alarm was set at 7.31 and I would like to have it one minute back. Notice the difference between "one minute back" and "7.30", the first was my mental model at that time in the night :). So I held the minute-key to until it was 7.55 and then released it on 7.59, which was "one minute back". There was the error, but it wasn't the final error yet.
At that moment I thought that I would have to do the same with the hour-key to get it back at 6 (I was awake enough for that thought :)). But I didn't want to do the same with the hour-key so I thought; "Well, I changed the time already so the alarm will work. Let's just add one minute so I won't need to change the hours." And that is where it went wrong and we got up at seven :).

The good thing was I could take it easy.

I feel like calligraphy

I feel like calligraphy.
I'm misunderstood by many people. People understand only parts of me, I'm not able to say everything I wanted to say at once.
I'm speaking in another language because the language I would like to speak in, is a language which isn't allowed. I can't express my true feelings to everyone.

On the bright side of life, people who know me more think I can be beautiful. I can be art.
If I only would know how these other people were looking at me ..

More and more questions arise. If only a few would get answered. Start prototyping is the answer?

Mindmap of Me?

Corné made a photograph of our mindmap:

Yes.. the questions and other parts are upside-down. A work in progress.

I personally like the Me part of this. The similarities between Me and calligraphy are interesting. They both have found a solution for getting the word to the people. Calligraphy can't use any images and uses a kind of letters to tell the word to the people. In the period before language Me tried the same via other media like music and maybe thought? For me with my Western background in writing it is as hard to grasp calligraphy as it is to grasp Me.

Istanbul, here we are ...

all excited about what the upcoming days will bring, what the outcome of our projects will be.
So we've learned about calligraphy here in Turkey, ottoman calligraphy ... as time goes by we're more and more into it. We are starting to understand what calligraphy might be and what we could be doing with it as an interactive output ... but I guess vision is still a little blury ... :)
Calligraphy is all about rhythm, emotion, medidation ... for the artist at least, for the obsrver on the other hand it is all about letting calligraphy impress you, reading it more as an image or icon.
I especially like quadratkufi ... it looks so strange but nice in a way ... so I put some pictures I found as well as some others in other styles:

Finally in Istanbul!!

Monday the 30th of June:
The weather is nice, here I am in Istanbul sweating a lot, which for most of us doesn't seem quite as nice :) Our hotel, Grand Halic is a good hotel. The rooms are nice and I live with two friendly dutch guys. We walk to the University which takes like half an hour. Our first day started with an introduction of all the participants and teachers. We got a little tour in the University as well.....time passes..... Now we,ve listened to the first lecture and introduction to Calligraphy! It was interesting even though I was a bit tired after a quite stressy lunch. Before we were out eating with two of our turkish friends. We waited for the food to come and realized we couldn't make it until 14.00 when we were suppose to start in the afternoon. Anyway, some of the technical guys didn't show up on time so the all hurry was quite useless. (Well, enough of that! :)
In the evening we all went out to drink in Taksim. It was fun and I had a couple of beers and we all had Raki! (Don't know the spelling) Skal!!! (but with a dot over the a). I was back at the hotel at 2 I think.
Next day we started with a short summary of the schedule and after that we started with some brainstorming and mind mapping. Suddenly we had to leave for the boattrip, stressy again.... But we waited for like half an our anyway.....surprise:)! The boattrip was really nice!! I wanted to jump into the water.....almost. After the boat arrived at the Museum we had a quick lunch before entering. In the Museum of Calligraphy we were divided into two groups and we had a guided tour. I was in the last one so we began with waiting in the cafe....The Calligraphy collection was inspired even tough it looked quite the same to me. I recognized the signature of the sultan, which we were shown during the lesson. We took the boat back home and it arrived at the same side as our hotel. Yippii!!! In the evening I was out and had a Kebab and a coffe at Starbuck's and now I lying here... lol

A boat is better than a bus

The day started with some introduction about brainstorming (very very short) and mindmapping (less short). The teachers got 10 minutes from us. :) We also started on our mindmap today, need to finish it tomorrow morning as we needed to catch a boat very quickly. We will post some pictures tomorrow.

As "Cornie vèn Delft" (English pronunciation) wrote it is good to have more questions than you had before.. but it still feels strange. Today we went to a museum about calligraphy (with the cool -as in cold- boat). The museum had very nice .. paintings? of calligraphy. Well yeah, a little side-step here, but how would you call this? Calligraphy is text, it is not an image. But how do you call it when they put text, which looks like an image, behind glass in a museum? I think I'll just use "calligraphy" then.
So, the museum had some nice calligraphy. And immediately you start to analyse it. Why does these calligraphics have flowers which the others have not? (They seem to be from a later period in which the sultans needed to impress the people and say that everything went ok when it didn't). Why do the lines go up when they reach the end of a line? Is one sura with flowers really a different one then the one without? (You can write a whole post about sura's, which would be very interesting, so maybe I will some day). Do the stripes below the letters really have meaning or are these for decoration? (You should be carefull saying that parts of calligraphy are just decoration :)).

On the boat back I was talking with some students from Austria (Graz) about the study Interaction Design. I had the strange fealing of being with other people and for the first time not having to explain what Interaction Design is. As normaly when I'm with others I can spend hours talking about what I do. But I was wrong. The different Interaction Design studies don't have the same subjects. For example we have more tech subjects and they have choices like exhibition design which sound very nice.

By the way, the language here in Turkey is funny as they have a lot of words written phoneticly. Like taksi (taxi) and oto (car which is auto in Dutch).

Below me and Georg, another student from Graz :)

Calligraphy is like logos

In the questions after the first lecture today (as an introduction into calligraphy) I discovered that different calligraphy is not like different fonts in our culture and even not comparable to different handwritings. A more accurate comparison came from a Turkish student which gave the example of the IBM logo. In the (IBM) logo the typeface is set, but doesn't really represent the meaning. What really gives meaning and recognition is the way the letters are placed, how letters connect to each other as the lecturer -Çetin Sarıkartal- said.

Something with an even more open ending was the 'clash' of calligraphy and interaction design. Calligraphy is understood -even now- by a limited amount of people, not even all writer understand it. And it was kind of meant that way. It is not made with the idea to be easily understandable, unlike interaction design were you help the user to understand where she is working with. The idea behind it is that it is more pleasing to understand it after the considerably amount of work you spend on it and also the status you receive when reaching that point. Well, if I got this right. :)

It will be interesting to work out that difference between interaction design and calligraphy in the coming weeks. On the other hand, today I learned to not look at the concepts/ideas behind something but rather on the experience it gives you. With that in mind calligraphy and interaction design aren't each others counterparts anymore, both are about the interaction between the environment (the text) is in and the user on the other hand.

Packing..

I've just started packing all the stuff, well, actualy only made a list of things to pack :) Things that might be of any interest:

• a digital photo frame, to disassemble
• a solar-powered flashlight (with empty batteries, how suprising), also to disassemble
• I try to get a webcam so we can do something with multitouch if we want
• no camera, as it broke a few days ago :(

What do you all take with you?