New Media 1: Perspectives
Futures Project
The Concept
This is a team-based project and will involve collaboration in terms of input, development, and technical problem solving. You are now a small start-up or development team. You share a common understanding of new media principles but have your own strengths in terms of a discipline. You share a common concern for professionalism. Maybe one of you in a marketer, yet another, an artist; still another, a writer. You’ve been hired by The Head, a new media group who’s in a rut. It’s your job to pull The Head out that rut with a dazzling idea. You will present your ideas and findings to The Head’s stakeholders.
The Project
Based on what you and your team members have learned in the course, prepare and present a 10 to 15 minute oral presentation to the class on your vision of some future system where new media will play a significant role (and pull The Head out of its rut). The subject area will be up to your team but may involve entertainment, communications, politics, appliances, education, health, architecture or the arts. (Example: What will Madden Football look, play, and feel like in 10 years? How will cell phones have progressed in 5 years?)
Here are some issues that you need to think about. The oral performance must present a realizable, fact-based system, based on what you’ve seen, experienced, or envisioned. We have real, operative principles to work with. As you work with your team, you should track how ideas develop, how problems of concept and presentation are solved, and how decisions were made about presentation and concept issues. A weblog is a great way to do this tracking, but it can also be done on a calendar
For the presentation, identify the area and/or subject you’ve considered. What is the system you envision? In your choices, thinking, and research, consider how the subject will manifest the objective inventory as seen on the New Media Analysis Worksheet. Describe this aspect of your system in detail. Secondly, present an in depth description and evaluation of the formal system (see NMAW). You should then conclude the presentation by relating your futures project to other systems in existence now or that will come as a consequence of your projection into the future. What theme’s are shared? What problems will your system solve? Will it involve passive or active interactions?
Necessities
Visuals, feelies, prototypes.
PowerPoint presentation?
Your talk should be organized and should be accompanied by a typed text or an organized set of PowerPoint printouts. The presentations will be filmed.
New Media Work Sheet
The following provides a four-step process to begin critically analyzing and developing works of new media based upon Edmund Burke Feldman’s “The Critical Performance.” Use this as a guideline in your analysis and development.
1. Description
This should be an objective inventory of what elements are immediately apparent in the work. That is, a description of content as well as its qualities of interactivity. These elements would include text, images, sound, motion (animation), video, hyperlinks, and existing or proposed user interactions (how the reader manipulates the work).
2. Formal Analysis
Here you will be describing your perceptions of the work’s structure and organization.
a. Does this system most closely meet the definition of a transactional communication model or a linear communication model? Explain your reasons why.
b. Does this system show evidence of the principles of new media at work?
i. Numerical representation
ii. Variability
iii. Modularity
iv. Transcoding
v. Automation
vi. Interactivity
c. Would you call this an adaptive (smart), embedded, or a pervasive system? Explain your reasons why or why not.
d. Would you describe the system as an open (writerly) system or a closed (readerly) system? Explain your reasons why or why not.
3. Interpretation
This is an important area. Here you must wrestle with meaning, theme(s), and solutions to theoretical problems (successful or unsuccessful), if any, based upon your previous description, formal analysis, and background research to form a hypothesis (“a tentative assumption made in order to draw out and test its logical or empirical consequences”). At this point, you should be relating your selected work to other works that may have been discussed in class and found in your research.
4. Judgment
This is where you will provide your final evaluation of the work.
• What have you discovered?
• What have you learned about systems in this analysis or development?
• What is being conveyed and has the work succeeded?