Teddy Lee

We repeatedly altered a simple movement algorithm in order to produce interesting patterns of generative movement that were indeterminate and emergent in the movement they produced. One of our main point was our use of looking down at cell phones as well as walking backwards to reflect the entropy and chaos seen when people look down at their phones while they're walking.

My problem in daily life was that I have to manage much of my own funds for food, entertainment, and other expenses, but the interfaces the banks and other financial institutions had was unintuitive and unrepresentative and hid the larger picture behind many numbers. My idea is to create a graph similar to the google+ waves map that showed your accounts, your income, your spending, and other financial information in the macro, through circles proportionally big as the account, the micro, through information appearing when you hover over or click on a circle, and have a temporal aspect through a timeline which would position the expenses of the week selected as circles coming off of whatever account they came from. This would allow you, at a glance, to figure out how much money you have, where its going, how your spending changed from week to week, and where you could stand to save a little more. This data could come from sources like mint.com which track all your accounts at once. This is particularly important for college students as they are just now entering a period of new found financial independence and it would encourage accessibility to their financial information in order to have them make more informed decisions.

Our intended goal is to keep people from jaywalking, and as a result, promote safety in congested intersections. The crosswalk on Forbes Avenue is a perfect example of a place to watch pedestrian behavior. When people intend to cross the street, they’re checking for three factors to allow them to do so - a red traffic light, the crosswalk sound, and the stop hand on the crosswalk sign. Currently, there is a prevalent gap in time between the sound cutoff, when the stop hand on the traffic light turns solid, and when the traffic light turns green.If we were to make the stop hand and crosswalk sound cohesive, this would allow people a better understanding of when to cross the street, and when to not do so. Our plan is to not only change how the crosswalk signal sounds, but to also change how the stop hand reacts to the crosswalk signal. We believe that if we were to replace the beep-boop sound with notes that speed up to let the pedestrians know when the crossing time is running out, their behavior would change. People generally conform to the beat of music, so if the notes on the crosswalk speed up to indicate that they’re running out of time, a pedestrian would understand whether they should cross quickly or wait until the next light. One major example of this is the classic tune on Jeopardy which signals the elapsing of a contestant's time. Similarly, if we were to replace the stop hand with-- or add to it-- a countdown clock that is synced with the notes, this would prevent several people from jaywalking, thus increasing their chances of crossing the street safely.

Using both physical drawing and 3D modeling and digital fabrication, we took a simple object, the C and C# keys as they are the most recognizable silhouette on the piano, and transformed it into a small representation of using the familiar tools that both of us were used to in order to make an object that represented something wholly unfamiliar to the both of us. Representing ourselves using our favoured techniques traditionally associated with still images, we represent the motion that is our life through an object associated with sound and the associated vibration and movement. We Decided on our Methods of representation of the piano key in order to have the traditional, the digital, and the physical which encompasses both the art and technology that is a part of us. By exploring an unfamiliar object, we were forced to research its structure and layout. Technical skill was required of us to be able to draw out the exact C and C# key. This began the first of this three step process. The first, a sketch serves as a rough draft or blueprint of the keys. Next, it fuses into a 3D rendering on the computer as a model for what the object will actually look like. The final step, the keys have been created; a 3D printing of both the piano keys joined together to form the finished product. By laying out the process with which this piano key was developed, we wanted to display the true level of complication behind this seemingly simple object. The Piano key was chosen as the specific object we wanted to use because of it's simplicity, iconic representation of sound, and by presenting it in still images, separate from all the other keys on the piano, we created a stillness in something that is associated with motion and sound to contrast the fact that what we do is only a part of who we are. The piano key, silent in the face of these images, is an incomplete representation without the sound and dynamic styles usually associated with it.