Aden, David, and Courtney's Spec for Final

Aden, David, Courtney

Specs for Final: Communication and Connection

The Application:

To have a dating communication application that obscures the visual image of the user and the person the user is communicating with. The application’s chat format will allow users to communicate in real-time with their webcam images blurred and the longer they chat, the less blurry their images will become.

• Create a two-way communication chat that has users talk but with blurry faces.

• With every hour that passes, the users faces will become less blurry.

• After 15 hours of logged communication, the face will appear clear.

• There will be a timer logging how many hours the users are communicating.

• When users exit the screen, the timer stops.

• If users are uninterested in the candidate, they can cancel all communication at any time.

• There will also be 4 different design specs including but not limited to: timer starting over, user controlling blurriness duration, application knowing you are interacting with another person (webcam senses it), both users have to do a certain amount of “likes” throughout the conversation for the image to clear up.

The Written Document:

The major sections of the document:

• Resources

• Goals

• User “How to” guide

• Rationale

The length of these sections:

Resources -

• Minimum of 2 links, including Lauren McCarthy’s facial recognition coding demo

• Minimum of 4 articles discussed in class

Goals - Minimum of 200 words each

User “How to” guide - a list of extensive instructions detailing everything needed for the communication application as well as how to implement it

Rationale - a minimum of 1500 words

The purpose or effect of each section of this document:

The “Resources” section will be used to inspire, educate, and instruct users on how to use obscured communication. It will also show the theory behind our prototype.

The “Goals” section will answer the following questions:

• What do we want the user do?

• What do we want the user feel?

• What do we want the user think?

The “User ‘How to’ Guide” section will outline exactly what we want the user to do, as well as what we want our prototype to do.

The “Rationale” section will address the following topics and questions:

• Who are we designing this for?

• What inspired us to create this “chat”.

• What the design choices represent.

• What this is a reaction to.

• Visibility vs. temporality

• Concept of self representation

• Answer the question: what if we were able to create this to be a common form of communication?

• Why are we asking people to engage in this stable subjectivity? Why does it matter?

• Use the theory discussed in class to explain the reason behind the obscured face in the design.

• It will cast our goals in terms of larger themes (mostly neoliberalism).

• Look at Hodge’s “Impersonal pleasures of social connection”. “While social affiliation is often taken to be an expression of the subject’s individuality, the generally impersonal pleasures of digital connection invite us to consider the ambient and diffuse promises of being otherwise governing the pleasures of connection” (4).

• Explains Haraway’s concept of our inability to distinguish ourselves and the machine and “Fractured Identities”.

• Simondon – technology transforms us.

• Contrast social media communication, where you are in a world of “selfies” and the exterior, with the interior of blurred face. Allow yourself some ambiguity.

• Manovich - ““In a postindustrial society, every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and ‘select’ her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices. Rather than pushing the same objects / information to a mass audience, marketing now tries to target each individual separately. The logic of new media technology reflects this new social logic” (42) and “In a postindustrial society, every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and ‘select’ her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices. Rather than pushing the same objects / information to a mass audience, marketing now tries to target each individual separately. The logic of new media technology reflects this new social logic” (42). And “Cultural interface”. A dating app or website is also a database.

• Cohen - “Personhood is at stake as well in any space of mediated encounter where what happens in that space is built upon a very partial knowledge of someone that might never become part of a whole: queries, likes, pokes, flame wars, emoticons, spam, lurking, a vast and growing diacritics of encounter” (33)

• Jagoda - networks “are not absolutely determinate either of dystopia or utopia, corporate networking or human contact, technological disconnection or relational connection” (114)

• Kittler- “Artificial mouths and ears… as technological implementations of the central nervous system” (28). Kittler/McLuhan- Technology as an extension of ourselves

• Sterne- Distortion of visual image as a form of compression.

• Richmond- “we use mobile computing technology to relieve ourselves of ourselves, just a little bit” (12), Protocols “specify the rules for, and possibilities within, that connection, including initiation and termination” (15), “the network releases us from a particular here, slackens the bonds of geographical presence, it continues to insist on this particular now, a now in which I find myself, to be sure, but in which I also find others” (23).

The responsibilities of each team member:

• Pull themes and passages from readings

• Equally input writing of the design document

• Create an individual cover letter describing the experiences of the project

• Create wireframe / mockups of the application.

• Help create a prototype. The application will be light HTML, CSS styling, with JavaScript utilizing the WebRTC open project and APIs

• Equally participate in the crit