We had a little a bit of trouble getting started today. Half of the class was asleep and the other half, including myself, looked just plain burnt out. It's hard to believe we are already half way done with the semester. Next thing you know, finals... Anyway after a brief lesson on the word "iterative" which Jimmy said is "the process of repetition for the purpose of getting better" we saw a couple of TED talks. Just a refresher, TED is Technology Entertainment Design. It's an organization that sponsors annual conferences and brings professionals from the field of: Technology, Entertainment, and Design to speak about spreading ideas. The TED "talks" we saw today featured John Maeda and Scott McCloud.
John Maeda is a world renowned graphic designer and computer engineer. He wrote a book called The Laws of Simplicity and he spoke about it in this presentation. I found what he said to be incredibly interesting. He spoke alot about the relationship between simplicity and complexity and how we as humans love complexity. For example we love relationships which are very complex. I was in awe of how he demonstrated this in his work. He showed how he took french frys and put them together in a way that they looked like butterflies. Such a simple thing as food and he was able to turn it into a beautifully complex piece of art. He also did the opposite with computers which are incredibly complex and used them in a simple way that had nothing to do with all the advanced hardware inside. It all demonstrated what a push and pull relationship simplicity and complexity has.
Scott McCloud is a comic-book artist who is revolutionizing web-based comics. He spoke a lot about vision and how he believes there are three types of vision: Vision that we cannot see, vision that is proven, ascertained, and vision is based on knowledge but yet is still unproven. His presentation was in fact very visual, in both words and imagery. It was a bit difficult to follow because he spoke very quickly and he threw out a lot of ideas. It reminded me very much of a comic book because in comic-books the plot plays through quickly and a lot is said and seen in those 9-10 boxes per page. What really stuck with me though, was when he said that computer monitors are very much like pages in that it has the same basic limitations, but what if we looked at monitors as windows instead. This blew my mind. We've advanced so much in merging computer technology and art yet, I think we've barely scratched the surface. To think that we could use computers as infinite canvases is just incredible. I have to take another look at his presentation, there is a lot more to revisit, it was, again, very interesting. The TED talks can be found here.
Really good stuff.
I was wondering what iterative means so thanks for typing that out! And thank you for letting me what's up yesterday!!! :)
ReplyDelete