Week 9 – Coding for Creative Practice

I was away this week so I kind of did my own thing. In class they focused on entourage and context.

Context is the environment or setting something is in and often helps describe function or use. A typical way of describing a context visually is through adding entourage; animals, plants and people all help give a sense of scale. Placing your creation into a scene can achieve this too.
The main thing is to communicate what your creation does, what’s it for? where? when?
You can get imagery of people, places, objects, etc to use as entourage by taking your own photos, or by finding them online.
Tim, taken from Stream

With this information I started by creating a list of contexts where you could see my output.

Entourage & Context Ideas:

Posters and print
Book
Bus ads
Phone cases
Stickers
Website
Flyers

The next thing I wanted to look at was what my creation does, what and who is it for, where, when.

I want my creation to be a positive reminder in what can be a busy, dull day. I want it to be something that grabs someone attention, possibly through colour, something that grabs their attention to hopefully pull the viewer out of their funk that they may be in or just a nice, friendly reminder. It isn’t for anyone in particular. I want it in places where it is easily visible and with things such as posters it can be up for a period of time which can be a daily reminder. I am unsure as to where some of my other context ideas would be available but somewhere accessible, possibly universities, a website where people can add their own words of affirmations as well as view what others have said and hopefully be able to order their own books or flyers etc.

My idea

Back in week 1 when we got to see examples of past work, there was one that I really liked. It was made by Calvin Lai (http://calvinlaicreativecoding.blogspot.com/). He had taken fairy tales and turned each letter into a colour ellipse. The colours, simplicity of the white space, the creativity that grabbed my attention. It is a beautiful design.

I want to be able to take this idea and using my own data and make sure that I understand the code that I am using and turn into my own.

I know that I want to take something to do with mental health and turn peoples pain into something more bright. I originally looked at suicide rates but what I didn’t want to do was take something that is serious and not glorify it by making something beautiful and creative so I decided against this. This then got me to my next idea which was what would help someone going through a hard time. I wanted to get this data from people who battle with mental health. Using Facebook, I asked a group that I am apart of some questions.

Description:

I am currently a design student at Massey. This semester I decided to take a coding for creative practice paper and for my project I want to look into words of affirmation. The aim of the project is to explore the use of computer programming as a creative tool in relation to art and design creative practice.

I am hoping to take your answers and turn them into something beautiful. Dealing with anxiety, I understand how much kind words can add a bit of colour into your life.

If you choose to take part, your answers will be anonymous unless you would like to be named.

Questions:

What are some word of affirmations that you would you say to someone going through a hard time?
What are some word of affirmations that you would want someone to say to you when going through a hard time?
What would you want to tell your younger self? Any advice?
What would you want to tell your future self?
What is a quote that you always replay when things get tough?
What is your name? This question can be left unanswered if you wish
Comments or anything else you want to share?

I did manage to get a couple of results which was great and exciting. The first thing I did was play with text in processing.

What is good about the video is you can see that I managed to get a typing effect going in println. As great as this is, it’s not quite where I want to type or where I want to type to show. I don’t mind if it typed on the run screen and the println but with it just being on the print line it currently can’t be saved as a PDF for me to then be able to take it to the next step. However, I am glad that I did manage to get some sort of type going.

X, Y location I find difficult to use as I can’t actually see the X, Y points to be able to work out so I kind of have to imagine it and then hope for the best. However, because of this half the time it doesn’t do what I want it to do and it does the almost opposite. Other times it works how I want it to. I added the notes to help me work out what each function does so the surprises are less common.

The string holds the set of text using the parameter ‘s’
Text size controls the size of the text
Text align controls how the text sits when the words go over two lines
Text controls what text is shown (in this case ‘s) and the it controls the box of text size and the placement on the screen

I next moved to wanting to be able to type on the screen.

Above I tried to type which worked but once it hit the edge of the page the typing stopped. I do like that I have it going even if it is not exactly how I want it to be and I also like how it is easy to read.

Another variation where I got the typing to work and I was able to continue typing however this time it moves to off the screen and only types in the one bottom corner. Just have to add it all together to do what I want it to do. At the moment my purpose of being able to write is if I am unable to add and load the table with my data into processing that I can at least type it in.

Above was my first go at importing my table into Processing but when I pressed run it didn’t show anything because I hadn’t set anything up so I decided to confirm that it was working through println which showed all of the answers that people had filled out. I found this exciting as I had just accomplished my first step. The next step is to have the text show on the screen when I press run.

I managed to get the text to show even if it was just one word at a time and really quick. This tells me that I am visually able to show the text. I would like to be able to slow the text. and then I want to work on placement and adding the colour ellipses.

Still shows one word at a time but at a slower pace

I decided that I wanted to be able to work out how to show more than one word at a time. I also want to start adding in the ellipses.

Managed to show more than one word but it shows the headers

I decided not to worry too much about the text right now as I want to be sure that I can also do the colour ellipses for the different letters. I am happy with my progress so far but I feel that there is a lot to do for it to work.

So my next steps and my main goal for my project are the colour ellipses which at this stage I am unsure as to how to do it so I decided the best place to start is to just do it. I got carried away and didn’t screenshot my process to get to where I did below.

Above you can see where I found what I had learnt about typing had come into play. I managed to get each letter to be a different colour and when it comes to capital letters, a different shape. I like that the colours are bright, they grab you attention and provide a positivity vibe which I am hoping for. This can be altered with HSBA (Hue, Saturation, Brightness, Alpha) if I need to. The capital letters are still the wrong shape as they are oval and overlap the letters that are on the line above which makes it hard to read.

I played with finding the right line height, letter heights and shapes to produce and outcome that I liked. I did like how the capitals are clear that they are capital letters but because they are so much bigger than the lower case letters it kind of grabs your attention and I find it hard to read and look at the different variations of size. This may change when I change the sizing but at the moment it hurts my eyes.

Above I started playing with sizing and accidentally made them just a tad to small… I then decided to just move onto adding my data into processing. I knew at this stage what controls the sizes and that I can type it in so if I can’t insert my data/table at least I can now type it in manually.

Here you can see that I managed to get my data table working in Processing! To confirm that it was creating the ellipses using the data I provided and not just creating ellipses I ran println which is spitting out everything in the spreadsheet. At the moment I haven’t set colours for each of the different letters but I can use the data in Processing (woohoo!)

The next step is to add colour and have a set colour for each letter.

I started playing with the x and y locations and it created a chaotic mess

At the moment, there is a lot of colours and as much as it creates a bright, positive idea it is a little hard to lock at for long and is a little overwhelming. To help break some of this up I decided that it could help if each question has their own page. I thought that it might make it easier to change questions but using the mouse pressed function to move to the question and show those answers.

After I had separated the questions I started thinking about what I want to do with this code and what output I might want.

My first thought was a book that has the questions (which I decided didn’t need to be shown in the code so the headers/questions were ignored) and the answers in a book. The book being something that people can read and see a range of questions and see the positive answers. Having these answers being words of affirmations the book will be good for people who need affirmations during a hard time. With different questions it can help with different situations and reassure people of different things. I want these to be available in stores (bookstores) or even doctors and therapy offices for easier access to those who may need it. At the moment it is almost impossible to read unless you know what each letters colours are. For this reason I wanted to add some text on top of the ellipses with the letter so that people can read the affirmations.

Above is my first layout. Each page has all the answers to one question. You can see that I added text over the ellipses but quickly came to the conclusion that having to manually do this was going to take a lot of time to position each letter so that it is the same throughout as well having to go through and add a letter for every ellipse. I either need to find anyway to add text or find away to get the message of ‘words of affirmations’ to be clear.