9. Crit & Projection

Today was our crit where were had to show our final design to our class as well as receive questions and feedback from our peers and tutor, John about our ideas and how we got our final design. I thought the crit went well as we were able to explore the process of design and information to our class and we were able to backup and link information we found to the design. We were given various feedback about the layout, text and positioning and how we could improve parts of it.

I enjoyed the process of looking at other projects other groups created as it gave me ideas of things that I could possibly look at or create in the future.

Once the crit was over, we decided to act upon the improvements and suggestions in order to improve our work. We did not have too much to do but the suggestions given, helped us refine our work further. 

To finish off the day, we projected our work on to the glass in order to see how our final design would look. We were given a large sheet of tracing paper to tape onto the glass so that the projection could be see easily. However this did not work due to the way it was laying of the glass and it looked uneven. To revolve this problem we used individual sheets of tracing paper and taped it onto the glass which looked much better.

Before

After

Education

Ethnicity

I was quite happy with the final outcome however, the colour of each section did not show up and well as I wanted it to be. To resolve this, next time I would have liked to increase the vibrancy of each section more.

8. Final Design

Today we spent the day creating and finishing our final design on After Affects for our crit that was coming up. I enjoyed this process as I was able to learn how to use After Affects. Due to having three sections of information, we thought the design process was quite easy as we were able to use one section as a template for the other two, we had to change the colours and information to create the next section.

Our final design/ visualisation:

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7. Designing (4)

Due to the problems of the location of our projection, we chose to move our projection inside the café, this meant we had to change the whole design which I thought was a lot better as it made it easier to display our data and not so chaotic. We chose to use three panels of glass to display our data on and each pane showed different information.

Initial Design

Development and Final Sketch

From our sketches, we where able to create a section of our design using Adobe After Affects:

Digital Version/ Final Design

I really liked the look and the layout of the data as it makes it easy to read and understandable about what section it is talking about. We made each section different from one another in order to show a different form of data.

6. Designing (3)

Development of design idea:

Development

We received some feedback from our tutor and which allowed us to develop our previous design. We were told to remove the map as it was irrelevant. We were also told to think about the placement of the data and have the most important information large on the screen. This helped us think about what was relevant on the glass and how things should be laid to make it visually pleasing and presentable to the audience.

Additionally, we were asked to test out our projections to see how our designs would look and to see whether it would work. From our testing, we found out our design would not work as well as we wanted it to due to the placement, projector and objects which were in the way of the projection. Also, due to it being a very large area it would be harder to create each section and it was quite hard for the projector to fill up the whole glass. This helped us think about where our projection should be located to and re-analyse how we wanted to show our data.

 

5. Designing (2)

Initial Design 2:

From our first initial design, we used this in to design what each section of glass would look like. We made use of various circles and bar charts which would show our data. We also wanted to include a map to inform people about the area.

Sketch

The first row of glass will have a map of Elephant and Castle, on the second row of glass information on each subject will be shown and the row will show percentages which link to the bar chart. Along with the data, an animated bar will move across the whole glass and new data will be shown.

Development of Sketch

When we were designing it on photoshop, we changed the design slightly by making the first row a whole map. However I feel the title of each section needs to be more visible to the audience.

4. Testing – Projection Mapping

In todays workshop lesson, our tutor Oliver showed use how to use MadMapper

Projection mapping is is a way to project light onto any surface or object and it allows you to turn common objects into any 3D shape. I think this is a very important tool as it will help me in my current project as I will have to project the data I have found onto the front of the building.

To start the lesson, we were introduced into the concept of projection mapping and how a projector should be set up. Additionally, we learnt about the term, ‘keystoning.’ This tool helps you setup and change the angle of the projector in order to keep the data/ video centred correctly onto the screen. As a class we watched our tutor how to do this by using MadMapper, this will allow our data to projected onto the wall. Our tutor used a video to project onto a manneqin as well as mask and remove certain areas that we did not need.  I really liked this technique as it thought it was very unique and interesting.

Later on we were asked to use the projectors ourselves, in groups we set up the projector, connected it to the computer, and found a video which we could project. Our tutor began to give us post stick notes which we had to project onto.

After this as a whole class, Oliver wanted us to use Mad Mapper but on a larger scale. We gathered a series of objects, such as tables, a large pillar and a mannequin and added post stick notes and paper to the objects. In our groups, we were asked to pick a section that we were going to project on to, my group chose the mannequin and the post stick notes on the pillar; we projected a video by Joanie Lemercier.

Group Projection

As our class we were able to project a variety of still images and videos onto different objects and here was our final outcome:

Final Outcome

3. Design (1)

Our next stage of the project was to think about where we wanted to project our design. A member of my group, Horia created an initial design which would help in the creation of our projection and gave us a starting point of what font, colours and layout we wanted to use. We were given feedback from our tutor and was told to think about the size and shape of the projection, meaning it did not have to be a generic rectangle, it could be any shape.

First Initial Design

 

We went outside of the university to see where we could possibly project the data. We chose to project our data onto the large panel of glass in the entrance of the building. This helped us think about the layout as well as design. The next step to was to develop our idea and think about the design of our projection and the size of each frame. This led us to measure and find out the dimension of one glass pane and find the dimension of the whole area. Furthermore, this would help us find out the resolution of each section too.

Entrance to London College of Communication

From here, we were able to create another design using the correct measurements:

First Initial Design

I think knowing where you are going to project is very important as it gives a guide and a layout of how your designs and projection will look and what you can do with the space that you have. We wanted to keep our designs quite simple; showing important information but making it visually appealing by using bright and bold colours to make it stand out.

2. Research – Aligning Sides

In groups we continued with our projects with the briefs we were assigned from Tuesday. In my group we first refreshed ourselves in order to fully understand what we were being asked to do. This helped me hugely as it gave me a greater understanding. Furthermore, we looked back on the information what we had found from the previous lesson in order to see where we were at with our work. We did not think we had enough data and it did not link to what we wanted to visualise so we split the research into different sections in order to make it easier to find data about the specific subjects.

We divided the work between the three of us and started looking for more data. In the group, I started looking at education where I used various websites such as The National Statistics, Land Registry Data and Census to collect the data. I found these websites very useful and they told me information specifically about each postcode in the Southwark area. Due to the large amounts of postcodes, I chose to look at three specific ones which were: SE1, SE16 and SE11. I chose these postcodes as one of them was where London College of Communication is situated, and the other two are surrounding postcodes. Using this information would have allowed to get a large amount of statistics, however if I had more time, I would have liked to go through all the postcodes to get a better percentage.

I also tried to find other information too in order to see how the data varied between websites.

I wanted to use other sources of information such as books, however I was unable to find any relevant information from the last 10 years. From the feedback, we got given in our class we were told to try and gather as much information as possible, this led me to email Census to see if I could find further information and to see if the data I had already collected was correct.

Research

From the research conducted, I had found enough to start designing our projection.

1. Brief

Today we recieved our first assignment brief. We were asked to design and produce a data visualisation which will be projected onto the side of London College of Communication. In order to understand this further, as a class we analysed and broke it down into various sections, such as; research, design and final projection. This made it the brief much easier to understand.

Additionally, we were able to visit and look at a current exhibition in London College of Communication to give us more inspiration and ideas. I enjoyed viewing the three designs as they where visually pleasing to look at due to the various colours, layout, sound and equipment used. Also, they were all very informative as you were able to learn information straight away.

After visiting the exhibition, we were divided into groups of three. In my group, we brainstormed a came up with a variety of ideas such as:

• Property Prices
• Development of Elephant and Castle
• History of London College of Communication
• History of Elephant and Castle
• Cultural exploration of Elephant and Castle

I liked most the ideas we came up as they all linked to the brief however, I did not think we would be able to find a large amount of information for specific ideas such as property prices or development of Elephant and Castle due to them being quite broad. We decided to merge ideas together and focus on ethnicity, education and health in order to look at diversity of Elephant and Castle.

We chose these three sections to look at as we thought they were key points which should be included and a good way to introduce International and British students who may have not visited or known about the area.

Later on, we received feedback from our tutor which helped hugely as we it gave us a grounding in order to begin researching into the diversity of Elephant and Castle.