Drawing machine

Project 1

I am very interested in this drawing visualization machine project. Through the process I have learned a lot from my team members. The first idea of our machine was something like a drawing arm. It was able to draw pictures through the colour change. But after we had tried around five times, it still did not work well. So we change the idea. We made the machine only work at night or darkness. When the light came on it stopped working immediately and walked away just like it had not done anyhing. I think this idea is very interesting, and it is also different to other team. However, after we had finished building our machine, we found that if we drew on paper it would be quite boring, so we started to think about drawing around the city just like a graffiti person. One problem which I think we need to solve is. that we have not done enough research for this project. Our machine looked so basic and the images of the three drawings are quite similar. To overcome the shortcoming we can try to add sound system to our machine, that is, when the light comes on, our machine will give off sound and walk away at the same time. I think this will work and give our machine more sense of humour. 

Orientation week

During this week my classmates and I have done some very interesting things. We were told to write our names and many question answers on a piece of page and stick it up on the white wall. Then we used thread to connect the pages which share same answers. For example I wrote tea for the answer to the question what I like to drink. If someone gave the same answer we would connect his page and mine with thread. In my thinking this is a very good way to let us know each other and it is better than making introduction by ourselves. Also I think maybe this activity contains creative technology.

 

This is the first week I have become a student of AUT creative technology. In general I think I had already known what the course is about before this week, but after I have listened to what James said the first thought in my head is that I have made an extremely good decision and the course is great for me. From his talk I absorbed a lot of new things into my head, which is very good for me to understand more about how the course influences future and what the purpose of this course is.

The next day after this we put all information into a program called 'Gephi' which helps us to link our answers together. Even though it does not clearly show the relationship between those answers at that moment, I can still feel it will be useful for future study. Before I have used this program, I always used Photoshop to draw this kind of graph. Now I can see which one is better on it.

The final activity was working by group. Each group needed four people, and we got some cards and followed the information on the cards to walk around the city. Each one of us got a task to do and at the end we combined photos and videos collected us during the activity, and made a short presentation with a mini film. I very much enjoyed that because the film making process gave me by many surprises.

The orientation week is over but more and more surprises will come next.

Orientation

Today four of us did a fun activity. The roles of all members of our group were actuator, controller, tracker and sensor. I was the tracker and my role was charting the progress of the actuator. In the progress I followed my group to walk around the downtown Auckland and recorded the walking route on my map. It is very new for me to do this and through that I was able to think about the production process of film and video. In the process, each step needed searching and planing first. When problem happened we also needed to solve it. Being a tacker on my group I had to think something first. When I drew the walking route on the map I found that the map was not big enough and this caused the line was not very clear, and the unclear line affected the next task. In general, this activity was cool and it allowed me to think creatively.