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
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...
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?
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 :)
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.
