Timestamp: 53 minutes and 20 seconds!
Thanks all for taking the time to watch + your feedback 🙂
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Feedback for Noelle and Molly have been left on their midterm posts.
My feedback for Pierre (sorry I couldn’t find the midterm post):
Hi Pierre!
Wow! It is really cool to see that a big portion of your project is already functional! Congrats 🙂 It was really satisfying watching the little ball bump into one another and eventually fall, and I agree with Quran that your project idea is really interesting and has a lot of great potential. I especially liked how you are taking a critique of NFT’s that is very abstract and representing it in a way that is very physical and visually-striking and gets your message across well.
While you were talking about your piece, I could think of two suggestions:
- Since you already have a Max patch working, you could consider adding a little bit of audio to your piece, in some way that connects to how the balls are falling so you can take advantage of the setup you already have in Max. I was envisioning perhaps a small boink or noise whenever a ball moves for the first time (is knocked into), and maybe you can have it get increasingly louder as we approach the point where every ball has been affected by one ball moving. This is just one idea, the audio could be implemented however you think best represents your message!
- If wrapping an NFT around each ball is too difficult, you could have the balls be different colors and once every ball has been shifted from its initial position, the bottom of the box could transform/melt into a giant picture of one NFT to emphasize the fact that a lot of NFT’s are essentially the same image.
Great project overall, I’m excited to see the final product!!
Zoe Superville
I think your project is super cool. The message is really straight forward and the way you’re presenting it is super creative and visually pleasing. I really think it’s a great idea! The moving graph with the sound is awesome! I like the tones a lot, but if you wanted to do something different I think you could even put voices as the sound. Maybe someone speaking in the language of that region or typical music from that region or something more specific? But I think the way it is now is also really good!
The idea of the interactive map is also fantastic! I’m wondering how you’re going to present all of the elements together. Will you have the movie graph on top of the map? Will it be on the same screen as the video that plays when you touch certain regions on the map? What kind of screen will the videos be presented on?
I think as long as you choose your presentation thoughtfully and you obtain the necessary data, this is going to be a really great project. Nice job!
Yoo Bin Shin
Isabella,
Great work so far. I think the specificity and locality of your project makes it especially effective. It also reminded me of the “Transborder Immigrant Tool” that we looked at earlier in the semester.
Regarding the project, I was wondering if you had an intention behind displaying the change in data of international students at Duke. I’m interested in hearing about it! For instance, if your purpose is to show that Duke is becoming increasingly global, perhaps having some sort of element that conveys your purpose clearly would make your project even stronger.
Going off of your idea with having an interactive installation that displays the stream of data, you could possibly have a video of a colored world map projected onto an empty world map. And like the moving bar chart in your Max Patch is doing, as the student count from a country increases, the projected video region on that particular country is colored? Over the course of time, the map that was black and white would be filled with color. If you were to use LEDs with arduinos instead, perhaps control the brightness of the LED on a specific country depending on the student count? These are just some ideas you could play around with!
I’m really excited to see your final product and learn about the changing student demographic at Duke!
Noelle
Isabella,
I love the inspiration behind your project! Sometimes I don’t feel very connected as a student to the history and context of Duke’s campus and the people who inhabit it. It’s super cool to leverage Max’s visualization potential to illustrate a story that spans across many cultures and increases awareness of the diverse origins of the people we live and work with. Playing with the colors, video, and audio to draw viewers to key aspects of these different data sets really gives life to what would otherwise be just statistics on a page. Your patch is well laid out and easy to follow which made for a great presentation.
I really hope you are able to follow through with your arduinos idea to give the project a strong physical component! You mentioned the exhibits in Perkins and the physical items of those installations lend well to the content expressed. While you might not be able to actually install everything in line with your vision, I would love to see some mock-ups, props, and artifacts that would represent a fulfillment for your ideal implementation as part of your final presentation.
I think for your video component, it would be great if you could interview some of your friends and Duke faculty to get more personalized commentary. I didn’t catch what you said the videos would be about so apologies if you were already planning something similar.
Overall, I’m really excited to see this all come together and look forward to interacting with your patch!
Pierre Nanquette
As a Data Science major, I think your project is really interesting in its direction to center your project on data visualization. Especially when considering the dynamic of the project, by which I mean it’s not just some simple chart that sits somewhere but something that is animated, accompanied by sound. I believe you have great potential in this direction to achieve something that is engaging for the audience.
Regarding what I could say more about what you have done is probably going to be first on the matter of clarity and the matter of where the visual and audio is heading towards. While the presentation of your project made it clear on what data you were going to work on, I believe there should be more indication on what is the point of the visualization. This would make it more clear for the audience to understand how to interpret what the evolution of the data would mean and allow them to reflect upon it. I cannot say much about the visual as well as the audio, but it would be nice to have something that is relevant to the data itself in some way. For instance, perhaps the audio part of the project could be a collection of voices of different languages that are spoken on campus in the format of a short sequence looping over and over, and the intensity of each language increases accordingly to the evolution of the chart with the audio manipulation feature of MAX. This may turn out to be just a very uncomfortable noise but personally it could be a cool thing to include.
That is all I have to say, I believe your project is going to be very engaging to watch in its final state. Good job!
Molly Honecker
Isabella,
I really like your project’s concept and inspiration, it is very concrete but can span in so many different directions visually depending on what you want to communicate.
To reiterate what has already been said by others, your data and visual presentations are really cool, and I think you could definitely try something more specific in terms of the audio component and the combination of the different aspects of your patch and physical layout.
One thing that could be cool to try audio-wise is to work with the pitch of the sounds in addition to volume. Maybe you could have certain tones pitch up or down based on if the populations of students from certain areas increase or decrease between years. Also, as others mentioned, I think somehow incorporating music (or any form of art for that matter) from each of these countries/regions could be an intriguing additional dimension if you wanted to explore that.
Maybe one other thing you could do with your physical map (which is super cool) is somehow emphasize the physical location of Duke in addition to/in reference to the locations around the world that the international students come from. I’m not sure how this could be achieved, maybe with some kind of video about Duke and its physical location in addition to all the things that make students want to come from so far away to attend.
Overall, I really like your concept and the patch you have so far, and I look forward to your final display. Good luck.
Molly H