Stories in Digital Media

This is unfortunately just an announcement for the German / German-speaking students amongst us.

There will be a convention for the staff of the DM-program and some of its students in order to discuss (and maybe improve) some of the processes within the program Digital Media.

Therefore, there will be a two-days “convention” (the German word “Klausurtagung” does not sound that fancy at all – more like sitting and talking far away from the actual world) from Friday, June 27 (early afternoon) till Saturday, June 28, 2008 somewhere close to Bremen. In German, unfortunately.

If you want to go there, please send an Email to our coordinator Claudia Kessler (ckessler@hs-bremerhaven.de). Details will be announced soon. I will definitively join. It would be great if some other interested students would also come. This is a good opportunity to actually talk about hot topics and to look for solutions. And to meet a lot of the staff and some other students.

2 things come up in our studies very often, which I want to emphasize here today: presentations and learning.

PRESENTATIONS:

There are two people, I want to introduce you to and whom you should look at and take into consideration whenever you do presentations and visualizations.

Their names are Edward Tufte and Garr Reynolds.

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I just found the GNU manifesto in the internet (With the open-source browser Firefox, btw).

And now I am writing a blog entry about that manifesto with WordPress, also published under the GPL (GNU General Public License). Open Source Software is everywhere, and it’s still growing! Seems like this manifesto written in 1985 really changed the world a bit..

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html

PS: There is also a Mozilla Manifesto.

Have you ever asked yourself “why can’t I just send this ringtone through bluetooth” or “why can’t i synchronize my phone with [whatever addressbook]“? You are not alone! When buying a cellular you are facing two problems: first, in most cases you cannot try before you buy. You may have the chance to take a glance at the device you wish to buy, but thats it. Often you will rely on the oppinion of your friends and colleagues and just buy it in the hope that it will fit your needs.

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I think that I now saw everyone of our age group at the Master Presentations on Friday. Finally! I somehow feel much more connected to the other groups since I know now, what all fellow students are doing.

Here are the four projects in overview:

• Intelligent Room gesture/sensor based interactive room (Uni)
• T³H – The Tell Tale Heart personal experiencable installation (HfK)
• NoISE Sample Browser and Editor (HSB)
• Game-based learning system for the Schifffahrtsmuseum Bremerhaven (HSBhv)

I liked the presentation of the HSB the best. Because they actually demoed and it was a quite impressive one, regarding the early time of the project.

But what’s your opinion? Which one did you like the best and why? Tell us in the comments.

a friend of mine created a cool sound installation, called “quite quiet”. here is the explaining text:

Quite quiet mouth opens,
streams through the machine and let
perceive yourself else

The mouth operates as sound generator apart the remaining voice apparatus. Eyes shut and mouth wide open. An alien sound spectrum is generated, self-perception might be questioned. The mouth serves as a graphical score to conduct any soundsamples by granulating and eventually chewing them.

Watch a video here (.mov, 33mb)

…for the German and political interested readers a short announcement:

Well, those guys basically had the same idea…. but they actually implemented it. Alliance (Win, Mac, Linux) allows you and your friends and colleagues to build up an own private Peer 2 Peer Network. Guess what: I have something 2 share with you. If you are interested: my nick is effzehn.
EDIT: Well it seems that at least the OS X version is very unstable, so we have to postpone our sharing session! But nevertheless, I like this idea.

Digital Media Bremen and Interface Design Potsdam graduate Christian Behrens recently finished his Master thesis at the University of applied sciences in Potsdam. He designed a compendium of dozens of information design patterns, such as treemaps, pie charts, thread arcs, etc. There is an online version available as well as a printed book (which is not yet for sale).