Animations for Maths and Art Project

Here are some animations I made for our maths and art project using Groboto.

Overview

Overall, I didn't feel as though i learnt much from this paper. It seemed as though every lesson was an overview of basic mathematics with a hint of design to it. I felt as though the classes could have been a lot more informative. I attended every class and none of them really surprised me. It seemed as though the tasks being set were not thought through enough. A lot of the exercises I did through the class I didn't feel even needed documenting because they were so mundane and simple. I didn't try my very best to keep track of blogging and documentation however I found that at times there was quite simply nothing to write about.

In the end, after completing both my literature review and applied project I felt as though it had no influence from anything that we were taught in class, and this was a disappointing to me. I think that many of us in the class already had a firm idea of how mathematics and art are linked together.

Designing THINGS

Today in class we focused mainly on how to design and develop brief for particular projects. The very first concept that we had to explore was a backpack for everyday university use. Before we started to  draw anything we jotted down ideas of what the backpack should hold inside it. These objects included our lunch, laptop, cords, drink, raincoat, books and a few others. We grouped these into categories that defined where they would sit in the back, for example, you would not want to have the drink bottle and laptop close together as the laptop might get wet. By doing this, it really helped us establish how our bag would look like. I liked this exercise because for me it is always hard to find a starting point for a design. By writing down these details it gave me an idea about how I should go about drawing the bag. Andy went on to say that when designing things, we should use knowledge of what we already know. It is always to weigh up the pros and cons of new ideas to test their suitability.

We were also asked to design some kind of emergency housing. This was an extremely relevant topic to discus as all around the world we have been experiencing disasters such as in Japan where thousands of people are without an homes. Houses have to be transportable and have appropriate conditions for an entire family. Once again, we summed up what we thing should be in a house. Eg, lighting, power, bed, toilet, shower etc etc. However I thought a major problem was that some families are extremely large. Thus making a larger facility harder to transport. To avoid this problem, I thought it would be a good idea to develop a house that could break apart. Talking about this subject reminded me of a topic that we discussed in our Intro to Creative tech paper. It made me think about 'container houses' that use shipping containers to shelter people. These in fact work extremely well and are cheap and affordable. There is already infrastructure around these containers as they are frequently loaded on and off vessels to transport overseas.

Lastly we talked about changing the English alphabet into something that is more understandable. Im sure many of us would agree that some of the English language is questionable. Andy talked about the use of C and K. Do we really need both?  Do they simply just complicate the language? We noted down each letter of the alphabet and made decisions as to which letters and combinations actually needed to exist. It made me think about the i before e except after c rule. For so long I have been confused about this rule. Because half the words in the dictionary don't follow this rule at all. I think that it is of no importance at all. All it does is create unnecessary grammatical errors.

Today in class we first started to talk about flow charts. After a brief discussion with Andy I soon remembered that I too had used this kind of format when I was doing programming in engineering, we would always start off with seudu code which would help is structure our programs. I also remembered these from when I was in school. After a few more examples I realized that flowcharts can be used for almost any task that  needs executing. Its just a method of organisation. We then moved on to graphs. We talked about how they can be used to represent data. However, we also talked about how they can be used to intentionally mislead people. For example, a bar graph in a 3D view can be rather deceiving. A smaller bar can be made to look 'fatter' and on first glace it looks more prominent than the other taller bar. After this we talked about sequences and relations, which was translated to mean a set of ordered pairs. All throughout my history of mathematics I have always struggled to find patterns in maths. I may be fairly good at maths but when it comes to these kinds of problems I am horrible. Probably because I am a very visual learner. And numbers just don't supply any visual value for me. Andy told us to try and draw the patterns in different ways. I thought this would help but to no avail. Even still I gave me new perspective as to how I can view problems rather than just stopping when I hit a dead end.

We also were given isometric paper for us to draw on. I've done 4 years of graphics so this was nothing new to me as i don't really have issues visualizing 3D objects. The last exercise that we did was to try and fit 11 squares within a single square. I don't know why but I really had trouble with this, (although I only made 2 attempts). After Andy revealed the solutions I really felt stupid. It was really easy I just didnt think about my approach. I should have thought of the solution as 5+5+1 = 11. Make 1 big square and the rest smaller. Overall, once again I did not feel as though I benefited much from this lecture. I want to be doing more exciting things that have more relevance to me.

Today with Andy we talked more on the subject of paper and the golden ratio, although the ratio was not exactly golden, it was however still convenient for its packaging. The Sizing is dictated by the squareroot of 2. You can fold forever and it will still be the same ratio of paper. Andy used an example of this by displaying a news paper and how that is folded over and over to represent the same ratio. It made me much more aware of the importance of packaging. I never really stopped to think about why paper is shaped the way it is.


We then began to design labels for a specific drink. I chose to lighten my mood by having a bit of a play. We talked about the necessities of what we expect to see on a bottle. But more importantly what does it need to have. For example, ingredients, label, alcohol content, brand, bar codes etc etc. It made me realize that there are many fine aspects to many designs that we never take into account.

We also dabbled with a few ideas for business cards. Andy told a story about a business card he was given by someone in japan that made him realize that appearance isn't always the main thing to focus on. He realized that the material itself is also an aspect of the design. People often write on business cards, so it would be wise to consider making the card out of cardboard and not plastic for example. Other aspects to conciser are font. We always must consider what we want to convey to the viewer.

Another interesting fact we discussed was how books were produced. Instead of having the traditional double page layout. We folded paper and record the page numbers as we folded them. By doing this we could easily mass produce books much more efficiently. It was a very interesting design strategy that I have never thought of before. Not only did we talk about folding, but we also talked about other aspects of books that need to be taken into consideration, eg, how using columns and spacing make books easier to read. This made me realize that packaging is not just an exterior concept, it also effects the interior of our designs.