Journey design

Experiences are gaining importance among new generations, with traveling being one of the most practiced activities. There are plenty of processes and stakeholders that influence the travel experience, many of them often frustrate passengers and affect their perception of the journey. The research process starts by understanding the business of travel and identifying the most significant needs. Inspired by historical research and following slow movement principles, this thesis looks for areas of opportunity to enhance the overall journey, providing passengers with a more enjoyable experience. Focusing the design process and product development on luggage, this study presents products with new functionality for leisure travelers, providing a more efficient user - product interaction

Print and Screen, Muriel Cooper at MIT

Muriel Cooper (1925–94) worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for more than four decades as a graphic designer, an educator, and a researcher. Beginning in the early 1950s, she was the first designer in MIT’s Office of Publications, where she visualized the latest scientific research in print. In the late 1960s, she became the first Design and Media Director for the MIT Press, rationalizing its publishing protocols and giving form to some of the period’s most significant texts in the histories of art, design, and architecture, among other fields. In the mid-1970s, Cooper co-founded the Visible Language Workshop in MIT’s Department of Architecture. There she taught experimental printing and explored new imaging technologies in photography and video. And from the 1980s until her death, Cooper was a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab, where she turned her attention to the human-computer interface. Cooper helped cultivate a design culture at MIT. And before her premature death, she established some of the metaphors and mentored some of the designers that have shaped our contemporary digital landscape. Few 20th century designers have made significant contributions in both print and digital media, or helped to navigate the epochal transition between the two. Yet Cooper, in designing and redesigning roles for herself within new fields at MIT, did just that. Over her career and across multiple media, Cooper’s concerns remained quite consistent: She focused on developing both design tools and user experiences that would provide greater control and quicker feedback, eventually to be aided by machine intelligence. She sought to create experiences that were dynamic rather than static and simultaneous rather than linear, ones that engaged multiple media and a range of human senses. Cooper applied her knowledge of print design to software, and considered print and the process of its production as a prototype for the experiences that she would seek on screen. She also borrowed freely from media such as photography and film to inspire some of the effects she would later explore in new media. Cooper’s career traced an arc, in her practice and her pedagogy, from a focus on objects to one on systems. And her relationship to the digital evolved from a set of effects to be emulated in other media to seeing the computer at first as a tool, then as an assistant, and finally, as the medium itself. At the same time, she participated in a broader shift during this period from the paradigm of the humanist subject to the digitally augmented, “posthuman” condition of the present. In her interests and her achievements, Cooper exceeded any traditional definition of a graphic designer. At the same time, her work has defined the present state of the field. This dissertation, the first dedicated to Cooper, charts her pathbreaking career at MIT while also shedding new light on vital moments in the history of art, design, architecture, and media in postwar America

Encoding chance: a technocultural analysis of digital gambling

This thesis explores how gambling and gambling-like practices are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. Digital gambling brings gambling closer to the practices and features of videogames, as audiovisual simulations structure users’ experiences. New forms of digital gambling have clear political implications and institute new economic dynamics, as operators increasingly rely on the exploitation of constant interaction, as well as fostering compulsive play. By studying digital gambling from media studies, videogame and cultural studies approaches, this thesis offers a new critical perspective on the issues raised by computer-mediated gambling, while expanding our perspective on what media and gambling are. Current research on gambling practices and markets in disciplines such as psychology, sociology and law has positioned wagering as an exceptional activity because of its association with problem gambling, taxation and financial loss. The increasingly malleable nature of digital gambling media complicates these understandings. Digital gambling and play take a number of shapes: state-of-the-art slot machines, desktop platforms and mobile apps for smartphones and tablets. These cultural forms involve both gambling companies such as Aristocrat and IGT, and videogame companies such as Atari and Zynga. Digital gambling products are consumed by millions of users, primarily in Australia, Europe and North America. In contemporary forms of digital gambling, many users have a gambling or gambling-like experience with or without real money involved. Consumers pay with money and/or labour and/or time and/or access to their digital social networks and contacts. These dynamics represent a significant departure from previous gambling studies, which only consider gambling as those games that involve real money and are demarcated from everyday life. The development of digital gambling sees new cultural forms, including gamble-play media (gambling and gambling-like platforms constructed as videogames), the procedure-image (images that articulate interactive rhetoric), mobile social gambling (the practice carried out through social casino apps) and gambling-machines (an iteration of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines). Digital gambling operates through assemblages that are materially heterogeneous and increasingly deterritorialised. Through a selection of case studies – including the 3D online casino PKR, the mobile apps Slotomania and Slots Journey, the Electronic Gaming Machine market in New South Wales, Australia, and the online casinos PokerStars and 888 – this thesis analyses the interplay between various digital gambling assemblages and their relations to other media such as videogames and social networking sites

Snakes and Funerals: Aesthetics and American Widescreen Films

The study of widescreen cinema historically has been under analyzed with regard to aesthetics. This project examines the visual poetics of the wide frame from the silent films of Griffith and Gance to the CinemaScope grandeur of Preminger and Tashlin. Additionally, the roles of auteur and genre are explored as well as the new media possibilities such as letterboxing online content. If cinema’s history can be compared to painting, then prior to 1953, cinema existed as a portrait-only operation with a premium placed on vertical compositions. This is not to say that landscape shots were not possible or that lateral mise-en-scene did not exist. Cinematic texts, with very few exceptions, were composed in only one shape: the almost square Academy Ratio. Before 1953, cinema’s shape is that of portraiture; after 1953 cinema’s shape is landscape. Widescreen filmmaking is not simply an alternative to previous visual representation in cinema because no equivalent exists. Widescreen is quite simply a break from previous stylistic norms because the shape of the frame itself has been drastically reconfigured. With the proliferation of HDTV and widescreen computer monitors, certain aspect ratios that were once regarded as specifically “cinematic” are now commonplace both in the home and in the workplace. This project outlines a project that traces the innovations and aesthetic developments of widescreen aspect ratios from the silent era of D.W Griffith, Buster Keaton and Abel Gance all the way through to current widescreen digital manifestations of web-based media and digital “blanks” such as those created by Pixar. Other chapters include close textual analyses of “experimental” widescreen films of 1930, the development of “norms” for widescreen filmmaking in the early CinemaScope era of the 1950s and examinations of the experimental multi-screen mosaics of 1968 and beyond