Boardsm System

Uploading

Unfortunately the drag and drop feature that is used in the Microsoft Silverlight cant be made. With JavaScript I had to make an extra page for uploading. Visitors would be able to upload images from their hard drive or from the internet, or they could write notes on the boards. Visitors would also be able to chose which notice board they post to.

The Notice Board

The online notice board is interactive and playful. Visitors would be able to move the post around just like the original board.

New Board System

There are difficulties with the current board system using Microsoft Silverlight. I am only able to create one working board. I tried to create one board for each webpage but when I post an image to one board it will appear on the other boards as well.

With no solution I am trying to remake the notice board system with JavaScript.

In Auckland Art Gallery

In the Auckland Art Gallery I found this interesting wall. It features 3 square box and there are notes on each of what the visitors saw, thought and loved in the gallery. It has a similar concept to Derek Eland's Diary Room.

Interactive Board

I was testing using Microsoft Silverlight to create the board system. Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications, with features and purposes similar to those of Adobe Flash. 

I have a working prototype of a board with an interactive drag and drop feature. Users would be able to drag pictures from a local hard drive and position them anywhere on the board. This feature is really great since it mimics the action of putting a note/picture on an actual notice board.

New Design Concept

This design will mainly focus on the board. There are links for for a region of Auckland and each of the region will have an independent interactive board.

The original idea was to be able to search and discover communities of people that share the same interest or something you are passionate about; culture, interest, social to sport – in your local area.

I am dropping the idea to collect the database of communities in Auckland to focus on the idea of the notice board more.

The simple design is to make the site like a blank canvas and the posts for the public will colour the whole site.

Human Centred Design - Liz Sanders

A human-centered design revolution is taking place. Consumerism is no longer enough. The everyday people we serve through design are becoming proactive in their demand for creative ways of living. New design spaces are emerging in response to people’s needs for creativity. The role of designers will change significantly in the near future.

http://www.maketools.com/articles-papers/ScaffoldsforBuildingEverydayCreativity_Sanders_06.pdf

Relational Aesthetics

The standard cliché summary of modern (and contemporary) art is that now, anything is art. Jackson Pollock threw paint around. Duchamp strung up a shovel, upended a bike wheel into a stool, put a urinal on a pedestal, and called the resulting three “sculptures” art of the highest order. After so long, we’ve started to run out of things to suddenly deem “art.” But relational aesthetics, or the posing of an artist-constructed social experiences as art making, is the latest step in this process of turning everything into art.

Art critic, curator, and historian Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term “relational aesthetics” in his 1998 book of the same name. He’s pretty much inseparable from the concept itself, so chances are you’ll see his name attached (or quoted) wherever you see relational aesthetics pop up. In the book, he defines the term as:

"A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."

That is to say that relational aesthetics projects tend to break with the traditional physical and social space of the art gallery and the sequestered artist studio or atelier. Relational aesthetics takes as its subject the entirety of life as it is lived, or the dynamic social environment, rather than attempting mimetic representation of object removed from daily life, as would be the case in a Dutch Baroque still life, for example.

In even simpler terms, the goal of most relational aesthetics art is to create a social circumstance; the viewer experience of the constructed social environment becomes the art. The task of the artist is to become a conduit for this social experience. To that end, artists often create a physical space to be used for a particular (often ephemeral) social event. What is this “social event,” Well, almost anything could constitute a relational aesthetics event: a communal meal, a discussion, even sitting around.

http://place.unm.edu/service_relational_art.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_art

Fridge magnets

A refrigerator magnet or fridge magnet is an ornament, attached to a small magnet, which is used to post items such as shopping lists, childrens art or reminders on a fridge door, or which simply serves as decoration. Refrigerator magnets come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, including thin die cut forms the thickness of heavy card stock, and may have promotional messages placed on them. Refrigerator magnets are a relatively popular collectable object.

An interesting thing I found was a giant fridge magnet billboard for Bond + Bond. The fridge magnet billboard is located in Newmarket near Bond + Bond store. Huge colourful magnetic letters and numbers were made and stuck onto a white metal billboard. And each week they are rearranged to spell out the next offer. This campaign was very successful with people walking into Bond & Bond asking for the special on the billboard.

http://www.draftfcb.co.nz/ourwork/bondandbond/

Derek Eland

The British artist Derek Eland made an installation called the Diary Room. It was at a public space in the UK and the residents of the area to write down what the want to change and loved about the city they lived in, using coloured post-it notes. Over the time of 6 weeks there were more than 4000 post-it notes in the end. The resulting work was titled 'This could be Carlisle or anywhere' and was re-created as a 54 foot long installation in Carlisle's Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery.

http://derekeland.com/diary-room/

Post -it Art

I like office supplies. Products that organise my life and make it more visual. In fact, I developed a habit of putting post-its up in college that outline the tasks I had to accomplish ahead. I even have the post-it notes app on the phone.

A Post-it note is a piece of stationery with a reusable strip of adhesive on the back, designed for temporarily attaching notes to documents and other surfaces. A low-tack adhesive allows the notes to be easily attached and removed without leaving marks or residue. Post-it notes are most commonly a square, yellow in colour.

There a number of artists who uses post-it notes as their medium. Rebecca Murtaugh is a known artist who uses post-it notes. She did an art piece by covering a whole bedroom by the notes.
I found myself naturally drawn to Rebecca Murtaugh'swork. As it is related to my work in a sense of posting things up. But she takes everyday pieces of our environment and turns them into Pop art.

Public service announcement

There are many different definitions for a public service announcement (PSA) or public service ad, but the simplified version is PSAs are messages in the public interest disseminated by the media without charge, with the objective of raising awareness, changing public attitudes and behavior towards a social issue.


"In the United States a public service announcement is defined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in a formal and detailed manner. A PSA is "any announcement for which no charge is made and which promotes programs, activities, or services of federal, state, or local governments (e.g., recruiting, sale of bonds, etc.) or the programs, activities or services of non-profit organizations, for example, United Way, Red Cross blood donations, etc. and other announcements regarded as serving community interests, excluding time signals, routine weather announcements and promotional announcements."


http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=publicservic

Pinterest

Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies, and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, 're-pin' images to their own collections and/or 'like' photos. It is one of the fastest growing social services in the world.

I think that this website has a close tie to my concept. Firstly because it uses the style of a pinboard or bulletin board style, which my website also uses.

Notice board

A public area online where you can post a message for everyone to read. It could be used as a place to advertise item for sale, announce events or provide other information. The traditional community board is made of cork so it could be easily used to place and remove information using pins.

Bulletin boards are seen a lot at local community centers. They are used by universities,many sports groups and extracurricular groups and anything from local shops to official notices. Apartment corridors, well-trafficked hallways, lobbies, and freestanding kiosks often have cork boards attached to facilitate the posting of notices. At lampposts, bollards, trees, and walls often become important posting sites in areas where official boards are often seen.


Internet forums are becoming a global replacement for traditional bulletin boards.

Website Design Concept

Home Page

Community Page

Browse Communities Page

New Research

• Communities on how expose themselves
• Journal articles on social networking
• Website mass communication
• Literature research on mass communication, community involvement in public events,
• Survey on public opinions, local council, and the communities on community notice board thus far, their likes and dislikes, their advice on improvement, their point of interests

Website base for Communities

• Search and discover real communities of people that share the same interest or something you are passionate about; culture, interest, social to sport – in your local area       
• Promote the community through web based board - where you can post videos, articles and other useful widgets
• Complement the community's social media effort through the integrated board

Hypothesis

Web-based community notice board will:

• Create more public awareness about what are on display on the web-based community
• notice board compare to non-web-based notice board
• Create more networks between various public organisations
• Create more public interest to be involved in public events

For Communities

After talking to my tutor Clinton I decided to focus on Communities. Communities are made of people that share the same culture, interest or hobby. I would like to provide the space for people to discover communities that share something they are passionate about. Also provide a channel for communities to communicate with the public and redirect them to their preferred communication channel (be it their website, social media or even phone number). Remember the good old local community board? Maybe I could recreate that in another way or form.

Similar Projects

University of Toronto have a similar concept of dining with 12 strangers which is a program that brings students, alumni and staff to create to new networks and make the university a friendlier place.

link to website:
http://my.alumni.utoronto.ca/s/731/index_clean.aspx?pgid=1797&gid=1

Website with similar concept

I found a site based in America that has the same concept of my Dining with Strangers. It is a social dining website, social dining is when a group of people meet either at someone's place or at restaurant to enjoy a meal together. It is a philosophy of using meals specifically as a means to connect with others: eat to socialize.

Grubwithus arranges family style meals at restaurants and signs up participants to book and pay in advance at a discounted price. Grubwithus builds friendships over great meals. Similar to Meetup and OpenTable but instead of booking your own table, you're booking an individual seat at a table with other social diners.

I now need to redefine my concept but still sit within social network.

Possible Research topics

• Journal articles on social networking
• Journal articles on human relation especially between strangers (e.g. psychology, media)
• Survey on ideas about meeting strangers
• Survey on restaurants to see what they think about the idea

The Project

My project is about dining with strangers, meeting people with common interest online and through a dining experience.

My hypothesis is because of the facts on the previous post my assumption is that by combining the elements of the success social networking on the internet and meeting strangers face to face Meeting strangers with common interest online and then face to face will create a long lasting network

The method

• To create a website which enables people to dine with strangers.
• It is a cross between Grab a seat, Treatme and social networking websites. 
• The website will feature dinner plans for set at a date, then people would be able to buy/book a seat on a table at the restaurant. And other buyers who book will sit at the same table as them.
• People would need to have a login to book a seat and enter have a small profile of themselves so that other people would know some information, such as interests in travel, music, art, business etc.

Social Networking and more

We all know how important networking is, there is a saying "its not that you know but who you know"

So a background on how social networking has evolved. Some times is hard to imagine the days where you can just take a picture and share it with all your friends or type in somebody's name and be able to find the online, but things have change dramatically.

Some of the ideas of social network theory are found in writings going back to ancient Greeks.

In late 1800s both Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tonnies foreshadow the idea of social networks in their research of social groups.

Social groups has been defined as two or more humans who interact with one another, share similar characteristics and collectively have a sense of unity.

As we know social network on the internet is already the norm, for example people are on Facebook, Twitter and more. Web-based social networking services make it possible to connect to people who share interests and activities across borders.

Facebook it self and other social networking tools have become so large that they have become objects of scholar research.

The other fact that I would like to mention here is that there are reality shows in which people meet face to face through the show. For example 'Come dine with me' which is a program brocasted in the UK for a number or years. In this show a number of strangers  meet for dinner everyday of the week to each other houses.