Mixed Feelings

A dear college at TRIAD, Claudia Baumgartner, made the concept for Gemischte Gefühle. That was shortly before she packed some stuff on a bicycle and left to cycle around the world. How cool is that? In her absence I got to make the storyboard and do-ability research. I liked the concept a lot and tried to defend her ideas as good as possible against all attempts of simplifying the exhibit.

One important part was not be too clear about what each slider will do while still maintaining reproducibility. That way the user would be forced to use intuition instead of his conscious mind. While Claudia was somewhere on her bike in Middle East, I had to write some storyboard actually naming these abstract sliders and explaining what mumbo-jumbo they were meant to do on the screen although I was not totally sure yet, what would be possible, or how. I made some shader experiments.  My main conclusion was: Give the software developers freedom and trust and powerful hardware. And finally I merely crossed my fingers writing it down. 

Part of the concept was to compare the resulting impressions anonymously to other’s visualized feelings. The comparison gallery was given up at some point while I was difficult to reach – riding on a 100$ scooter through South East Asia for some weeks. (You may get the influence here.)

Additionally, one slider, Variance, had been changed to Transparency. “Benjamin, nobody understood it.” I would be told later but it simply looked like only a few people in the chain of approving between the designers, chefs, and the customer’s employees simply hadn’t understood that slider at first glance which made some ripples in the chain of communication back that lead into the designers being asked to change it. At that time I was busy collecting fallen off motorcycle parts somewhere in Myanmar. So I wasn’t there to explain that not understanding the sliders immediately was the whole point.

A few months later – I was freelancing by then – I took over the software development of this project for Hüttinger and got back my own storyboard. Thanks to a tip by Johanna Noltmann, the currently responsible designer back at TRIAD, I tried out a technique called ray-marching. I used a framework to build complex shader codes to morph  shapes dynamically and made these codes more efficient by hand afterwards. (Let’s not talk about the hardware decisions) Finally I got it working  much faster than I had anticipated. But it was only after I had finished that I got told about the new Transparency slider. It  already had been CNC made at that point. (carved into stone you could say)

I did not like it – the concept was abstraction and Transparency simply was not. Not looking at the extra work this was in my eyes swapping out something good and clever against something totally trivial. So there was an intense and fruitful conversation on how to map what I deemed necessary onto what had been approved, a workaround but a good one I hope.

By now what I understand of the usage of the exhibit, it did not work out as well as others. Many kids again are said not to understand it.  I know kids to be smart and fast with computer stuff but maybe this is a bit too abstract to get the idea fast enough. On the other hand there have been many bargains during the process of production and the project was stripped down quite a bit and maybe lost too much. I still love Claudia’s idea and I am fond of the shaderwork.