Last (and most profound) Blog of the Year

As I leave this blog at the closing of my senior year of high school, uncertain about whether it will remain alive or drift like a tumbleweed through the Interwebs, I would like to get a wee bit philosophical and figuratively sign my name goodbye through this post. At the beginning of writing this blog, I chose my perspective "lens" to be structure and design, simply because I found looking at symbolism, design, and visual art to be fascinating. I did not suspect in the slightest that I would find some deeper meaning in the observations I was making of the links I was embedding. But as I conclude both my senior year of high school and this blog, I am shocked and pleasantly surprised to conclude that if my blog has enlightened readers to any degree, it has enlightened me significantly more.

You see, at the beginning of the year in English, we were talking extensively about the stories that we tell about ourselves, their complexity, and their value. I believed then that I stood for several things: environmentalism, moderation of luxuries, empathy. One thing that did not appear at all in that list of words with which I construct the mirror through which I see myself was beauty.

When I say "beauty", I mean the beauty of all things, animate and inanimate, but more specifically, the beauty of all things constructed. The concept of design inherently suggests that there is a maker behind every product discussed. This really struck me as I look back on all my posts, which consistently analyzed man-made nouns like literature, natural parks, video games, social networking sites, household objects, etc. The sheer amount of insight I was able to wring out of each of these seemingly ordinary things astonished me, and slowly inscribed a new conviction in my story I tell about myself.

Don't look at anything just once. There is more there than you suspect.

Actively searching for and appreciating the beauty of intentional construction and design around us is vitally important in order to have truly lived and absorbed life completely. I will pass this nugget of wisdom down to my children and include it in my list of beliefs henceforth. I am glad I didn't look back at this blog just once. There was far more value than I expected.

2048 and the Mind

In the past couple weeks, there's been an influx of coverage on the new addicting game 2048, comparing it to other gaming sensations like Flappy Bird and Candy Crush. Thanks to my Facebook newsfeed, I had already become mildly addicted to 2048, and in doing so, realized a key ability in the game to implicitly affect how players think about real-life hierarchies.

If you haven't played the game, the goal is to combine lower numbers which double each time, to reach the number 2048 or even higher. So having a grid full of 2's and 4's can be extremely frustrating. As I played the fraternity version, something began bothering me about its structure. I found myself coveting the "higher-ranked" fraternities and irritated seeing "lower-ranked" ones on my board. Although I don't care much for Greek rankings, the more I played, the more I subconsciously valued the higher-status Greek letters. It occurred to me that this subtle effect could lead to implicit attitudes, attitudes I didn't even realize having, about Greek organizations. I immediately switched over to the standard 2048.

2048's open source nature reveals hidden biases

This wouldn't be the first time that video games have laid the foundation for implicit biases in players. Others have tried to use games as a way to reduce implicit bias. But cues for implicit attitudes come from all around us. In everyday situations, people react to implicit biases involving race, gender and appearance. These biases have been proven through Implicit Association Tests (IATs), as well as referenced frequently in behavioral books including Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.

2048 is still new enough that there isn't any sort of public research on the addictive game, so this is not exactly a data-driven observation. But 2048 itself is a game built on copies. 2048 stemmed from a game 1024, which copied the original game of Threes. Now, there are tons of similar games flooding in. In fact, there are already several sites dedicated to aggregating all the 2048 variants. So it may not be long before someone creates a variation that promotes or creates ingrained biases. Especially as the format of 2048 is perfectly suited to translate into hierarchical structures.

I don't know if any of these creators used the game purposefully, knowing how it could affect players. But it is worth noting by those who design games like 2048 and its variants as well as those who obsessively play it that even the most simple games that reel us in are also capable of affecting us in much deeper ways. 

Please comment with your experiences with 2048 or other similar games!

The Beauty of Unpracticality

Scrolling through my usual visual design and art blogs, I stumbled upon a series of work that really lived up to its name. A set of-- I guess "sculptures" is the closest term to what these objects are-- dubbed the "Uncomfortable" series by Athens-based architect Katerina Kamprani really did make me feel more uneasy than I had felt in a long while.

This series included simple, everyday objects that had been manipulated or changed in one serious way that completely obliterated its practicality. For example, one of the pieces in the series was a watering can which emptied into itself, therefore never capable of hydrating anyone's flowers. Other pieces included a furry plate that would just be the definition of unpleasant to eat anything off of, and a bowl with a small hole intentionally drilled into its bottom, thus obliterating its primary responsibility of containing liquids.

Useless watering can

The reasons these objects make a viewer feel uncomfortable are obvious on a surface level, but when examined deeper, they reveal quite a bit about how most humans view not only art but all objects in the world around them. When asked about her project, Kamprani called "Uncomfortable" "a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects," adding that it "started as a twisted sadistic design project. It messed up its creator's head (and the heads of people she knows). It exists in sketches and 3-D visualizations and has no meaningful purpose. It's a parasite in the world of materialism and design."

Humans look to objects in order to utilize them, and if they can't use them, they should at least be able to find some semblance of meaning in them. By purposefully removing any utilitarian capabilities from the everyday objects Kamprani chose, she forced people to resort to finding meaning in them to accept their value in the world. This is why Kamprani's "scuptures" become art. Not only do they make an aspect of the human psyche clearer to the human population, but they also convey meanings in similar ways as an abstract dot upon a canvas does at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

National Parks

One series of "structures" that a great deal of planning and design has gone into to create are our country's National Parks. Built to give the American people access to the preserved natural wonders on their soil, they were put together all those years ago to do multiple, quite contradictory, things: show and conserve nature.

"Conservation" in this context means management rather than protection, and the "highest purpose of these resources is necessarily defined as their availability for "use and enjoyment". In addition, the National Park Service has acquired a symbolic role in the public mind that goes beyond its stated objectives. As natural areas in the United States have diminished, the public has come to perceive the National Park Service as its primary provider of the wilderness experience. And yet, as the number of park visitors have grown, the parks have moved farther and farther away from a state that could be described as "wild". When many of the national parks, like Yellowstone, were first established, they were not intend to be wilderness preserves at all, but rather "public parks or pleasuring grounds."

It was only with the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 that the clause about leaving the parks "unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness" was added to the necessity for public enjoyment. How could national parks be designed so that the public could, in essence, constantly be visiting places that have never been visited? It's a tough and tenuous balancing act.

National parks approximate the wilderness experience for a larger audience by presenting a landscape that reproduces a scenic facsimile of wilderness, a mythologized image of what we would like the wilderness to be. Evidence of human activity is carefully erased, but humans themselves are not excluded. On the contrary, their spectral presence is essential to the idea of wilderness. The framing of the wilderness area by contrast to the civilization that surrounds it is a process analogous to the picturesque framing of a landscape. Much like "outdoor museums", national parks are designed so that huge amounts of human traffic are shuffled in and out each day but told to pick up after themselves so that the same amount of people will be able to see what they have seen for years into the future.

Facebook's Design Trap

With about 134,000 Facebook users only in the United States, and the average American user spending over three hours per day on the social networking site (Facebook statistics here), it has permeated through all facets of the American, not to mention global, population. Therefore, there is not only a lot to be said about the goal behind it, connecting friends with friends and allowing them to share updates about their lives at any time, but also the structure and design of the site which allows this goal.

Although Facebook has frequently changed up the format of their site, causing much unease and frustration amongst its users, its most basic functions have remained the same. Users setup two-dimensional profiles for themselves, complete (yet perpetually incomplete) with a profile picture, birthday, career description, relationship status, and different interests. To this profile, users can then add statuses, upload pictures or videos, and share the posts of other groups or people. The next step is connecting with other users by “friending” them, which then allows every user to see the activity of their “friends” on their “News Feed” and either “like” or comment it.

Though many of these aspects of Facebook could be picked apart structurally, it is one of the most enticing and attractive features of Facebook, the ability for each user to create his or her own personal profile page, that I want to take a closer look at.

The Facebook Profile Page

Selectively choosing pictures and descriptors that paint the picture of themselves that they wish others to see. Structurally, Facebook has made this very easy, with simple drop-down menus for things like relationship status (which may be much more complicated that it would seem on the site) or upload options for profile picture (which could be of the actual person or of a leek, depending on the user’s whims and fancies). This structural choice to make users’ profiles boil down to their age, what they look like, who they are with, the things they like, and the things they say online is very intentional and has far-reaching effects. Because users are selective about what they publish about themselves, they are not only broadcasting a warped and incomplete image of themselves to the world, which people like the author of this Economist article would argue breeds nothing but unhealthy envy, but they are looking into a warped mirror of themselves, breeding narcissism and body image issues.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Facebook. I shamefully spend hours on it everyday, sucked in by the never-ending updates on my News Feed and the exchange of comments with friends. I also see benefit greatly from it, as I can keep in touch with long-distance friends and stay in the loop with the different extracurricular groups or classes I am in. However, I have also made a concerted effort to recognize the slippery and intentional design tactics Facebook has used to keep me hooked. And while the profile page allows us to connect with and learn about others, we have to realize that it occupies a space somewhere between the second dimension and unbounded imagination.

The Ins and Outs of the Bard's Language

The language William Shakespeare used in all his plays is like a whole new geographic world. I say ‘geographic’ because it is certainly has texture and allows for movement, constructed with topography and features. And although the structure and workings of Shakespeare’s language can sometimes make the dialogue of his plays difficult to decipher, it is in this structure that Shakespeare focused his most concerted effort, as his plot-lines were often revamped versions of old stories and myths, as with Hamlet. Therefore, this geographic world of the structure of Shakespeare’s language is undoubtedly worth exploring.

One example of the interesting structural practices the Bard utilized with this writing is inverted sentence orders, as described more fully in this article. By switching around the sequence of the subject, verb and object of his sentences, Shakespeare accomplished multiple things. He was able to match the rhyming metrics of the time better, turn certain parts of speech into different ones (verb -> noun, noun -> adjective, etc.), and also shift the overall emphasis of a line to particular parts of it which would have been otherwise glossed over.

Another especially troublesome structural tactic Shakespeare used in his plays is omitting a whole array of things, from individual letters and punctuation to whole words or lines. Similar to the inverted sentence structures, this was probably done primarily for practical reasons, allowing him to get his ideas across in the demanded number of syllables and with the vocal stresses that made performing the play easier and more powerful. However, this practice also resulted in the creation of a sort of new language altogether, anachronous in all eras. As years of human development lead to the shortening of words in everyday language to breed colloquialisms, Shakespeare did the same for the communities of characters in his plays, making the language uttered by the actors in The Globe Theatre in 1610 and the actors in The Chicago Shakespeare Theatre in 2010 equally as foreign to their audiences.

A third particularly nasty structural habit Shakespeare had with his language was the insert large swaths of text in the middle of ordinary dialogue which leads the audience in hundreds of other tributaries and rivulets they were not expecting to traverse on their journey down the river of the play. While confusing, a lot can be said for insight these additions provide into the rationale and conscience of the characters as we are not simply taken from the characters’ observations to their conclusions, but have to buckle up and take the trip through their entire path of coming to that conclusion as well. This leads to better character development and depth and complexity in the stories.

So whether for practical or rhetorical reasons, Shakespeare’s purposeful use of unusual structural techniques definitely resulted in his language remaining memorable over more than 400 years. And perhaps that is its biggest legacy. While students may be cringing in their classroom desks while reading his plays off paper, people all over the world still flock to theatres to see them performed, leaving their own world behind to explore the ins and outs of the Bard’s language.

Balloon Rooms

While scrolling through my favorite visual arts blog (which I highly recommend), I was intrigued by one particular eccentric project. Penique Productions, an artist collective based in Barcelona, came out with a series of photographs of transformative installations they had created in public places. These installations consisted of enormous plastic balloons inflated inside grand spaces within buildings or other interior areas. Below is an example of one such installation, but this link will take you to the entire series.

When I saw the brief introduction to the series which explained that these artists had chosen to When I first saw these photographs, I did a double take. The results of their efforts were like nothing I had ever laid eyes upon before. So many aspects of the rooms had disappeared, hidden behind the rubbery sheets of the balloon. There were no longer colors, except for the one solid color of the balloon, there were no people, the lighting was completely thrown off, and there was no sense of depth. However, with these things lost, other aspects of the room that would have otherwise gone unnoticed suddenly jumped to the foreground. For example, the outlines of the pillars and intricate edges of the architecture became sharp and eye-catching as they pushed on the flexible fabric. And by washing out the colors of the walls and warping the lighting through the large windows, my perception of the size and shape of the room changed dramatically, just as my house somehow seemed much smaller or larger after we moved all our furniture out before we moved.

This results of this project immediately reminded me of the neurological phenomenon that occurs when people lacking individual senses, like sight or hearing, try to gain insight from the same things as fully sighted or hearing people. Often, it is observed that those lacking certain senses have compensated with hyper-acute other senses, and perceive things using different parts of their brains than those with all their senses fully functioning. For example, as this source describes, blind people often use their advanced sense of hearing to detect the locations of objects, therefore highlighting aspects of those objects that sighted people would tend to take for granted.

Areas of brain activated by Braille tactile discrimination task indicate activity in occipital lobe (includes primary visual cortex) of early blind person, but not of sighted person

It is wonderfully curious that this seemingly simple and done-for-the-hell-of-it design project can serve as a simulation of the mental processes of the blind and deaf. The perception exercise that simply scanning these photographs evoked is one that is very valuable for all people to experience. Not only does it give us a deeper understanding of the world view of a significant population, but it also gives us a deeper appreciation for the simple things around us. Who knew a balloon in a room could do so much?