Hi！This is a website for works completed in IML300 Introduction to Creative Web Design. I am majoring in Media Arts + Practice and Architecture at the University of Southern California.
This project explores expressing love and gratitude using memes through animated photos, focusing on my dad's favorite foods in 2023: milk tea, steamed buns, fried dough sticks, and spicy fish fillets. By clicking on the displayed photos, viewers can engage with and discover the surprises within. The aim is to creatively celebrate personal connections and cherished moments, encapsulating the essence of these experiences in an innovative, interactive format.
This project explores the journey of a water drop through the Yangtze River, focusing on the Three Gorges Dam's impact from environmental and human perspectives. Set in the 1990s, it explores potential outcomes: reaching the ocean, getting trapped in the dam, or being utilized by local villagers. The aim is to understand the Yangtze River's "endings" under these varied scenarios, reflecting on the dam's controversial effects.
When people grow kelp in a controlled lab environment, too much plastic PVC pipe is used. So, we came up with a more sustainable solution: using oyster shells as the bio-material to replace the existing tubes and modeling a more efficient unit for kelp growth. The main goals of this website include: introducing knowledge about kelp, listing the procedure for creating materials, comparing the differences between plastic and oyster shells, and sharing the effects of our designed units in both tanks and the ocean.
[240117]I really enjoyed the reading “Cataloging Change: Women, Art and Technology” as it made me realize how “gender” is intertwined with the development of art and technology. I am particularly interested in the section of “Gender, Technology, and Art” as it showed me the hidden gender politics, as computing is something that’s historically rooted in the military and engineering.That is, during the post-1960s, programming became more masculinized due to professional associations, educational requirements, and targeted advertising. This shift reinforced gender stereotypes, leading some women artists, like Truckenbrod, to feel marginalized in the masculine computer culture. It is really important to have the artwork created by women to have equal opportunities to be seen compared to men.
[240125]I think before the reading I had never really realized that it was so complicated to "program something" and I had never understood the necessity of interactivity or UI/UX design, or, the importance of a GUI. I think the "democratization of technology" is a really important concept, as it not only makes the technology accessible to a broader audience but also lays the function for more innovative interaction in the modern world. All those kinds of interfaces are mapping abstract entities which is related to something that has always existed but is somehow beyond the user’s vision. I found this part very fascinating.
[240203]“The web is what we make it.” All the reading materials for this week are about the one question “What is the Internet/web?” While knowing the key terms such as the host/server/client/DNS are important, I found the description of the internet from Laurel Schwulst to be particularly interesting. She describes it as a room, a shelf, a plant, a garden, a puddle, a thrown rock that’s now falling deep into the ocean… I found these phrases really inspiring and poetic: they mentioned how websites are something being built by human beings from the very beginning of history; something being created by us, it could reflect our identities, ideas, and dreams. While the individuals are not connected in real life, our works are connected through websites and clouds, expanding the possibilities of websites on a larger scale.
[week5]“Eyeo 2019” is one of the most inspiring videos that I’ve watched because it reveals some of the reasons of why people pursue online presence on web these days. I used to believe that only the person without enough real-life connections would enjoy the online ones; however, I really appreciate a quote from the video: “Somebody should know about me - I want to share with people but I don’t know that I want to talk. It takes time to touch the base of the people.” I think in that sense web is allowing people to “be seen” and “be known” in a convenient (but also one-sided) way. This is quite important because “being seen” and “being recognized” is actually one of the basic needs of human beings, and the web is about telling a story with no words.
[Week 6]My favorite quote from “In Defense of the Poor Image” is “Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images—their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria.” A poor image is more than one with a bad quality, while the very original one is being duplicated, compressed, reproduced, ripped, and remixed for different purposes, some new meanings and effects are being added on top of it. I suddenly thought of memes that everyone is using today. Despite their often ambiguous and imperfect nature, memes gain significance within specific contexts, evolving into a novel form of cultural expression and communication.
[Week 7]The TED talk by Joy Buolamwini is really inspiring because it really asks me to think about the social impact of the technology that we are developing. Her study initiates a broader mission to address bias in machine learning, which she terms the "coded gaze." The bias being coded into the program is leading to the algorithmic bias and the discriminatory practices. The undetected faces, the misidentifying suspected criminals, the unequal civil liberties are all being highlighted. However, I think we should make the human vision not restrict the computer one; instead, we should make it beyond the human vision.
[week 8]I appreciate the theme of “Data Heal & Digital Decolonization” especially from the TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the danger of a single story. It reveals to me how the digital form of media – with wider accessiblity to different audience – could affect the perception of a topic. However, things are always having different aspects and we should never listen to a single side of the story. Web could be an important media in that sense to visualize a more diverse and equal social environment.
[Week 11]Cyberfeminism index is an inspiring website to browse through because it’s a way of showing the resistance, both in terms of the content as well as the web design. The main website page is mostly constructed with text with little hierarchy, giving me an overwhelming sense of feeling. It looks really like a list of data instead of a carefully curated story, however, these data can be seen as an innovative way for people to reconstruct themselves by technology. I also found the use of green color is a deliberate choice because it is often associated with experiential nature and it brings a sense of technology-based “mutation” to me.
[Week 12] Brandon Gregory’s “Designing for Cognitive Differences” hits directly into the theme of critical access. I realize that “inclusive design” is not only for people with physical disabilities; some issues like inattention, anxiety, and depression can all be considered as disabilities: “Disability takes many forms, as should inclusive solutions.” I also found out how the web elements like gifs, images, and texts could intrigue the different reactions of people. Some easy steps could be removing unnecessary distractions, reassuring users that they’re doing the right thing, and keeping things easy for users who are struggling.