reculture

With love, from Portugal!

With love, from China.

Christmas and New Year (and birthday) are over and done with and semester two starts next week. It’s time for an update.

The last you’d heard, I’d managed to get my hands on a souped-up machine which unfortunately didn’t work with the software I needed. I was quietly despairing at this point. The one morning, Ali, my studio manager came in and offered me an Intel Core 2 Quad with a dedicated graphics card and eight (or six) gigabytes of RAM! This was incredible. Once he delivered it to me, I connected it up, installed the software, and lo and behold, we had a winner! It worked perfectly. And then I had to go home for Christmas… So not many advancements on that front.

I still need to send out many more stickmen packs, and as time is now ticking, I’m looking more locally for participants. This shouldn’t be a major issue, but I would have still preferred to get a stickman to them as opposed to them having to come to the stickman (don’t be pedantic here!).

I’m also looking at performing some experience prototyping, but keep watching this space for more information about that.

Anyway, happy 2012!

With love, from Japan.

With love, from Britain.

With love, from Holland!

With love, from Britain!

After much labour and toil, I finally got the first pack sent out and I got someone, who was not acquainted with the project at all, to test out the pack! I’m quite excited now!

Right, here’s what’s happened since the last time:

I created the instructions and the message cards (see above).

I created the ‘branding’…  I have the word ‘branding’ in quotation marks there because it’s very basic. It is literally just a logo of type. For now, it will suffice. I also chose to go with a monotone colour scheme to mimic the instructions of the Otamatone. It’s not particularly well designed, but it’s functional.

I also chose not to use any graphics because the nature of the project is all about how different cultures interpret things differently and I feel that using images would have different meanings to different people.

I refined the box to include a window and some printed text as well as my ‘branding’. I then attached the acetate to create the actual window and folded it all together:

I then put stickman in, along with the instructions and the message cards. This resulted in the completed pack!

What do you think? Please leave your thoughts below.

After making Stick Man Mark I, I learnt a few things, and I made Stick Man Mark II. This time, I thought he should have been a little more human based so that it would be a more accurate representation of how people are and, therefore, easier for the users to manipulate into the poses they want.

I bought some pipe cleaners today! And I started making my pipe cleaner man:

 It turns out that he’s much hard to make than I first though, at least out of the non-craft pipe cleaners. He struggles to stand up, and yet he’s quite the character.

Some things I’ve noticed are:

• Because I’ve been handling him quite a lot, he’s started to go dull!
• The wire at the heart of them ends up taking its toll on your fingers.
• He needs weight at his base to stay stood up.

Time for stick man Mark II.