During the first day of class I thought I had a grasp of what new media arts was, but I looked deeper and found some interesting things. When looking through various pieces of art I had realized that my perception of the subject was different and I had to look deeper to understand it. I found a piece called “Braindance”, which had caught my attention because of its use of the slow design principle “Reveal”. This piece of artwork generates a visual representation of people’s EEG responses to music and uses their brainwaves to show how a person is feeling. The reason why I like this piece so much is because it shows how the use of music can affect a persons everyday life and how much people overlook the impact that music brings to someones mood. I personally think music is essential to everyday life, and feel like this piece shows how important it can be. 

Another piece of artwork that caught my attention and helped me understand the slow design principle “Engage” was a piece about the most popular running routes for major cities across the world. The reason why this is interesting is because it shows how this sort of project relies on people sharing information on their favorite/most popular routes and how it can develop in the future. The more people share with each other, the more they can make an area relevant and in this day and age, being relevant is important. If something loses it’s relevance then it will change the way it develops in the future, and that’s how this artwork shows how engaging can create change.

After looking through some examples I have conceptualization two fantasy projects that use the slow design principles. The first is a project that uses the feature on your phone that tells you what apps have used up the most battery and how the usage of certain apps has changed over the years . The way I want to display the usage of apps would be to use shapes of all sizes that actively change depending on the how much battery is being used. The reason why I want to do this is because it would show how over the years certain apps become a staple in your life and it is overlooked until you realize that an app you used years ago is no longer being used. 

The other fantasy project that I thought of was to use inputs of a video game controller and have each button assigned to a sound, and create a small sample of music with the controller. Since the purpose of a controller isn’t to make music it would be interesting to use patterns to create a piece of music. A controller also has a limited amount of buttons so you have to work with what you have. This sort of project expands the way a controller is used from playing video games, to being used as an obscure musical tool.  Other than these two ideas, there are many other things I want to do in this class, but these ideas are ones that caught my interest when looking and applying the slow design principles.

Slow Design Principles – Ivan Martinez