Blog 8: Expo Module 1
05-11-2019
This tuesday, the fifth of november, we had the final expo for module 1. During this expo, everybody could show the work they had made during the module, and the final project of all the project groups
were also showed here. You can read more about this final project in my portfolio, here. It was very fun to see what all the other project groups had made of the final project and what others
had made for the individual assignments like the programs written for Programming. The only downside of this expo was the fact that you couldn't really hear the sound of the movies made for the final project. Of course you could still see
the movies, you just couldn't hear what it was about. Some groups explained what was happening while the movie was playing, so that was helpful, but still not ideal. Also, after about an hour I had just about seen everything, so I had to wait
quite a long time before the best videos were announced. I know that this is not something that could have been prevented since everybody needs enough time to look at everyting, but it made me personally a little tired. Enough with the negativity
though, overall it was a great closure of the module, and I enjoyed looking at everyting.
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For an assignment, we had to review a website made by one of our fellow students. I was assigned to review .png)
When I started out with coding for my website, I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I wanted it to look like. Therefore it was quite a good exercise for me to just come up with an idea of your design and to sketch it on paper. Although it has really helped me to get further with my website, my current website does not look at all like my first sketches. In my first sketches I purposefully made the design really simplistic because I thought that I could never master the harder parts of designing a website. Now I’ve got to admit that my website still isn’t the most advanced website ever, but looking back at what I first came up with, I’m rather proud of what I made of it in the end. I did not use a default template for my site. My entire site is made up of self written css and of course html. To become better at html and css, I also followed a few courses on the website of codecademy. That helped me a lot, and after that I could really think about what I could make my website look like, because after that I actually knew what was possible.
For my study we have to make an interactive video in small groups. We are completely free in this besides the fact that it has to be interactive.
What this means is that te viewer can decide what happens in the video. Sometimes the viewer can make a choice for one of the characters and that choice impacts the story.
When making the choice you have no idea whether it's the right one or not so you have to think logically. It is our job to make this video as interesting as possible.
For an assignment, we had to go to the Gogbot festival in Enschede. I was actually very excited about this because I saw the website and it seemed very interesting. Unfortunately though, I couldn’t really make it to the main event due to some planning issues. I did however went to an early exhibition in the Tetem building in Enschede where there were already some artworks on display. This was just a small portion of what I would have been able to see if I could have gone to the main event, but the artworks that I did see were interesting nonetheless. The exhibition in Tetem was divided over two rooms. The first one we entered was immediately interesting. There was some sort of wall with drills mounted to it and those drills were connected to plants which somehow told them when to start working. I didn’t really hear the explanation on this one since there was constant drilling in the background so my explanation here might not be entirely the right explanation, but it certainly comes close. There was also a small dome with all kinds of molds and bacteria underneath which created some small microbiome. This was really interesting to see. There was also some artwork dedicated to measuring genitals in this room but I didn’t really pay much attention to that one.
The other room was also really interesting but also somehow very different from the other room. In here there were two bike-like constructions of which one was meant to show how hard it was to melt plastic by having to cycle for two minutes which felt like you were cycling uphill. The other one was made so that you could cycle upside down. Especially the bike with the plastic was really interesting to me because there was a real environmental message attached to that one. The last artwork in this room was an entire wall dedicated to pictures of stuff from random people. This stuff was not just any stuff, it was stuff that they had gotten or bought with the intention of using it, but which they never actually had used. This was also very interesting, mainly because I realised that I owned some of the same stuff people had put on the pictures and I never used them either.
That was unfortunately all I have gotten to see from Gogbot this year, but I hope that I will be able to visit Gogbot in the coming years.
As of right now, my portfolio website unfortunately still looks like shit, but I’m going to change that. The day after the first lecture I wanted to work on the site some more but I realised that I couldn’t really come any further because I still didn’t really understand the basics. To battle this problem I decided to do some studying on my own so I went to Codecademy.com to sharpen my skills. Right now I’m about halfway through the beginners course and I think that after finishing this course, I will be able to really make some major changes to my website. Until then, it will probably look like shit for just a little while longer.
The fact that I can’t really change anything big to my website yet, does not mean that I can’t already come up with some basic ideas for how I want it to look in the end, so I did that.
As you can see, it’s a quite basic design but I’m really satisfied with these ideas. It’s simple but I like that. There will always be some sort of navigation block on the left side and the rest of the screen will either be dedicated to an introduction, the blog, the portfolio, or something else depending on where on the website you are.