Week 11

Shooting, Video Editing and Open Studios Set Up

This week was mainly focused on completing the basic rooms of Garden web, shooting the video, and setting up for Open Studios. I also had to work on my zine and reprint.

Incorporating Room 3: Reflection Space

A huge part of the philosophy of slow technology is designing for users to reflect. Reflect on their day, reflect on prompts, reflect on their digital ecosystem. For this room, I conceptualised this room where people could reflect on any given prompts.

  • Draft 1 Allowing the prompts to be saved to user's local storage

  • Draft 2 Minor adjustments



I felt like the user interface for this room still has a lot to improve on. In terms of clarity in communication of the purpose of this room. But I'll leave it as it is for now, since I have to move on to work to record a video, edit the video, and work on my zine and reprint. The previous semester, I spent too much time getting frustrated over solving technical challenges that I didn't have much time for other things. So this time I'll focus on managing my time properly for the other aspects.

Updating Room 1: Text Garden

    • Incorporating 'Read More' Option Doesn't look nice...

  • Changing text to 'Let it Grow~'

When I implemented text garden I asked some of my peers to try it out and plant some seeds into the garden. The API was done in grids, so it was quite difficult for longer texts to be seen. I thought to include a read more button to allow users to read the full text, however it wasn't really working out. Without much prompts too, my peers were questioning what should be written into each seed. I felt that they didn't really know what to put in, but they started writing and providing texts about gardening and plants. Some even started reflecting on their personal greenery images and experiences. I thought that was quite interesting, but yet at the same time, I had to make the clarification and connection clearer for sure.

Video Making

Back to Shooting

I wanted to create a video explaining my design research, and subsequently Garden Web, which is a manifestation of Poetic Web. This is also so that people would understand what i'm doing even when I'm not present during Open Studios to allow users to user test.

    • Starting off with a brief overview of the internet

    • Viewing Text Garden

  • Viewing Breathing Space

In hindsight, I think I should have incorporated in screen recordings of each rooms for more clarity.

Re-editing zine

    • Content Page

    • Poetic Web Spread Laurel Schwulst's Essay on Websites

  • Selected curation of websites spread Heavily focused on communal third spaces

I printed this zine in Print De Creation, with 100gsm maple bright paper. When I showed it to Andreas, he mentioned that the previous essay I did in Week 4 felt like there was "better energy". More fluid, and less rigid. Whereas, for this zine, it felt more 'edited' and 'designed'. I sort of agree with that, but yet at the same time, I felt like the writing of the previous essay was not so refined, and was very lose and messy, and I thought we had to make things more designed! I'm confused.

Open Studios Set Up

    • Work-In-Progress Table Set-up Messy Wires and non-elevated Macbook



Laying out the wooden blocks, texts, and poster of curated websites to see how roughly it would look like. I like how clean and simple it is. I know Andreas values highly curated works, no distractions! and I would like to believe that that is really important in terms of curation of works. Jun Liang, who is so detail-oriented, kindly told me to manage the wires for the iMac, keyboard and mouse. And so that's what I did. It really looks a lot cleaner. Thanks Merlin! I knew it was the magic that helped me out.

    • A more confirmed Table Set-up Cable Management, Wooden elevation for iPad or Macbook on the Left

There are a couple more things that I would like to do. Firstly, to bluetack the poster onto the wall. But my friends suggested that I mount it on the wall using nails to make it elevated. This was something we did while working on Singapore Design Week Exhibition with Andreas. Compared to sticking images flat onto the wall, using nails to elevate the images made it look more cleaner and nicer to look at.

Informal User-testing with Jun!

    • Viewing Text Garden

He brought up a really good point that I didn't notice. In Garden Web, when the page is refreshed, the position of the 3 rooms will be randomised. Users may forget which room they clicked on. He mentioned that maybe the rooms could be in a fixed position, or either that the rooms could change colours after being clicked. It might also be quite frustrating to keep going back to the main page after each room.

Web Seminar: The Internet's Root System
by Matthew Prebeg

    • Audience reflecting on their digital ecosystem

  • A map of digital ecosystem

I signed up for Matthew Prebeg's web seminar on the internet's root system. And I completely missed out on the seminar because of the timezone. It happened at 1am-3am, while I was asleep, thinking that I was gonna be on time. So disappointed! Anyways, Matthew Prebeg is a digital field researcher, artist, designer and technologist, currently researching about the internet and techno-ecology.

Luckily, I still had access to the slides, coupled with some resources, so I could still have some insights into how Matt educates and shares his learnings about about the internet and ecology, and what kind of activities is he creating for his audience to reflect on the internet!

Matt Prebeg talked about how supporting independent platforms is one way to make our digital ecosystems more biodiverse, because it encourages a wider range of tools, voices, and ideas instead of everything being controlled by just a few big companies. I see Garden Web as similar platform and a website that serves that purpose too.