Category: Flog

I have felt like I am failing this week through figuring out what to do with my third hack project. I have two different ideas, but I am not super excited about either of them/ I need to develop them more.

The first is using a Hinge account as a way to do random public opinion polls because the way it is designed could put one’s profile on a variety of random people’s phones, so it could be an interesting way to get sample data. The problem however, as Dr. Sample pointed out is that I don’t know exactly what the public opinion poll would ask different users. I think this is a key part of the project because there needs to be some sort of commentary or the poll needs to have some utility that I can explain.

My other idea was to create an abacus in excel or google sheets. I thought this was clever because the abacus is such an outdated form of technology and excel and google sheets make the function of an abacus obsolete. Therefore I thought it would be interesting to bring the technology online. I spent a while learning how Abacuses work and it is very interesting, but definitely a little confusing. This leads to concern number one that it would maybe be hard to present because I don’t think the class knows how abacuses work. My other bigger concern is building an abacus in either program is rather challenging because of how to move the beads back and forth in a way that makes sense in the virtual setting. All of my ideas to do it are rather clunky and would be difficult to navigate.

I found the readings for Thursdays class to be helpful in thinking about the creative process and how I could combine two very different designs to make something new and unique. I think that it is very helpful to think about the softwares that are part of my everyday life and the specifics of how they were designed to find new uses and ways to use the design against itself to explore new mediums. I am excited to finish my hack and come up with something I am proud of!

This week, I mostly worked on my Hack #3. For my software invasion, I am using Logic Pro, a digital audio workstation, to display text (like typing software). I figured this would be a playful intervention as Logic Pro is solely used for creating audio and music. Within the software, there are spaces known as MIDI regions that display the notes being played. So, instead of notating chords and melodies, I used the MIDI regions to notate letters of the alphabet. I had a lot of fun creating the notes as the grid-like structure of MIDI notation almost acted as an 8 bit, pixelated style of graphics. However, I failed more than once at creating letters that were easily discernible. It became monotonous to individually develop and change each letter of the alphabet so that they were all consistent and legible in context of one another. Additionally, I particularly enjoyed the “Arousing Tools” reading from Thursday. Specifically, thinking about how tools can spark creativity and discovery reminded me a lot of past readings. I felt as this reading related a lot to the concept of “cognitive friction” and how many objects have natural, assumed social functions. Thus, innovation and creativity particularly arise when tools are used incorrectly, or in the case of Thursday’s reading, when they are used imperfectly. 

This week has been quite challenging. I have really enjoyed the readings though, and the discussions from class on Tuesday and Thursday. It is always cool to see the different ideas my classmates pull from the readings. I particularly enjoyed the Craftmanship reading because it was interesting and just the right amount of confusing. Thinking about everything as a technology that we often times ignore was fascinating.

I keep going back and forth regarding my software invasion. Not even back and forth, but all over. I keep having “good” surface-level ideas, but then when I put them into practice, they are not substantial enough. I think because my last hack provided such an important critique of the world, this one seems useless. My classmates also had such important hacks, and this project definitely renders less important results (or at least I haven’t been able to come up with any). A lot of my ideas have been to use the platforms in unconventional ways, but still, ways that the platforms could be used. I am struggling to come up with the “never thought to do that with that” idea. I am also just now realizing maybe I should have documented some of my first ideas to show the evolution of what I finally landed on.

I also would like to update my WordPress with a fun theme and make it more engaging; however, any time I sit down to accomplish just that I end up just scrolling through themes and not changing anything! It feels like a commitment and that it might make me clueless if my interface changes.

This week I was experimenting with Hack #3. I’m still working through two different ideas, one being on Desmos which is a calculator I used a lot in high school to do math calculations. The second idea is LinkedIn, which I have been using a lot in college for networking and coffee chats. I was having a hard time with figuring out functions for the Desmos idea, as it is a lot of trial and error. I was thinking of using it to draw art through writing functions, or use it to generate poems or something artistic, as Desmos is very calculated and mathematical so it would be a nice juxtaposition. I briefly moved onto the LinkedIn idea to see if that would work better, but since I do not know how to code well it was difficult to get the actual interface of LinkedIn to change. My idea is to turn the networking aspect of it into a dating formula, which is something I was even thinking about before this assignment. I feel like sending invites to connect, then asking for a coffee chat, and so forth has many parallels to online dating, and using such a professional platform for dating would also be an interesting juxtaposition. I think for changing the actual design and software Desmos would be a better fit, but thematically LinkedIn would be better, so now I am debating between these two options. I am still working through both of these ideas to see which one would work better and which one I would be able to successfully put together, but those are just some of my obstacles and thought processes.

Major failure: I went to update something to this flog and realized I hit save and never published!

This week was not met with any true failures, but I did struggle to get my game of Life to “perform” and show the exact message I wanted it to. The hardest thing for me to work around was the investment squares. I struggled to find a way to make various “reality” check cards that were applicable because users could be at different stages in their lives. I also realized after I heard my classmate’s hacks, I thought of changes or additions I could make to my game that would improve it. I feel like I needed to finish my Hack early and really sit with it to make sure it was “everything” I wanted. For the last two hacks, I felt like even a week after the project, I discovered an amazing additional stipulation.

I do not have many ideas for Hack #3. Well I do, but none of them with importance or impact. I need to find an idea so I can have extra time marinating on the best way to execute. This week has been a bit of a failure in general as I broke my thumb in practice on Friday and have had a lot going on personally making me fall a bit behind. I am hoping this project will help me get back on track in an enjoyable manner.

I think chatting with classmates about ideas could be helpful for me or anyone before Hacks are due. We all have various ideas but hearing other people’s struggles can help inform each other.

Balancing Hack and writing isn’t easy. It feels natural to focus on finishing the Hack before starting the Artist Statement. If the project isn’t finalized, writing about it might feel vague or incomplete. But the problem is, by the time the Hack is done, there might not be enough time left for writing, leading to a rushed and shallow Artist Statement that doesn’t fully reflect the thought process behind the project. Another issue is that sometimes while writing new ideas emerge that could improve the Hack, but if the project is already “locked in,” making changes becomes difficult.

The best approach is to work on both simultaneously rather than treating them as separate, linear tasks. A good way to start is by outlining the key points early on, even before the Hack is fully developed. I started by thinking questions like: What are the rule changes? Why were these changes made? (What effect or message are they meant to convey?) How do these changes impact the gameplay? At first, the answers don’t need to be detailed—just having a rough framework helps. Then, throughout the Hack process, keeping track of important decisions, like “Will adding this rule make the game too complex?” or “If I remove this element, will the social meaning still come across?” can be incredibly useful. Taking notes along the way ensures that by the time the Artist Statement needs to be written, there’s already a solid foundation instead of having to recall everything from memory. As the Hack reaches its final stage, the Artist Statement can also be refined, turning those earlier notes into a more structured and polished explanation. One of the biggest advantages of this approach is that Hack and writing can influence each other. This way, instead of treating them as two separate tasks, they work together, making both the project and the writing stronger.

This week the biggest struggle for me was creating my hack. Mariana and I knew we wanted to attempt to tackle a large scale problem in the world, but we also did not want to focus on one that we felt like a lot of other people in class would center their hacks on. Because of this, we decided to focus our redesign of a game on the healthcare system. More specifically, how broken and unfair the healthcare system is. We wanted to highlight how the healthcare system heavily favors those who are rich and insured versus how it is works against those who are less fortunate and uninsured. Health care is something everyone should have readily available, and this clearly is not the case in this world. That is why we wanted to challenge this system.

The biggest challenge we faced is what game we were going to manipulate to get our message across. Mariana had a couple decks of cards with her, so we thought it could work good to use those. We did not know too many card games though as we did not play too many of those types of games growing up. One game that we both were familiar with the rules with was “Go Fish!” The ruleset of this game is fairly simple, so it felt like it would be easy to manipulate it how we wanted to. Although the ruleset was simple, we ran into many problems trying to add new elements to the game. We would add new aspects thinking they would work and run smooth, but then realized they would not work once we finally did trial runs of the game. There were more elements that we wanted to add than we had in our final product, but just could not figure out how to add them and have the game run smoothly.

We also really wanted to reskin a game, but we were not sure how to reskin a deck of cards and have it actually change how the game is played or the meaning behind the game. Instead, we settled on rewriting the game and just changing a few rules and adding a few new elements to the game. We ended up naming this game “Go Fix!” The general rules and function of the game is very similar to that of the original “Go Fish!” Each different type of card represented something different. One set was a health issue, one was different forms of treatment, one was bad luck cards, and one was good luck cards. The goal of the game is to match your health illness cards that you draw with its desired treatment. We added a money system to the game using poker chips. This was incorporated so that some players could be at an advantage and a disadvantage at the start of the game. To play this game, there is one player who is the role of an “insured” person and one who is the role of an “uninsured” player. When an insured player matched a treatment card to an illness card, they had to pay 1 poker chip. If an uninsured player matched these cards, they had to pay 3 poker chips. If player drew a bad luck card, they had to pay 1 poker chip. If they drew a good luck card, they were add 1 poker chip to their pile. To win this game, a player must match 3 treatment and illness cards and still have poker chips left over. A player can also lose this game by running out of poker chips and being in “debt.” This ruleset made it to where the insured player was at a heavy advantage to win this game. Every time we player, the insured player one.

This game shows how the healthcare system favors different groups of people, but also how it unfair to everyone still.

For this week’s FLOG, most of it will be focused on my process for Hack #2. As I had previously mentioned, my previous idea for this project was to redesign the game of Operation. However, I had made a change, good thing I did because another group used this game and they did a really good job at redesigning the game into a critique about exploitation of material/people in Africa. Anyways, I continued with the idea of redesigning Mouse Trap instead, which was interesting because I hadn’t realized that the game itself had been redesigned in recent years. Because of this, it was harder to find a physical version of the actual board, so I decided to do a virtual version of the game so that I could use the older version of the game as the aspect of creating the mouse trap was kind of important to my vision. However, now I’m starting to think that I could have created a version with the newer version of the game. I might look into that for the future.

This Tuesday we presented our second hack. I mainly struggled with two things when it came to developing this hack. First, I had a really hard time figuring out which board game was best to convey the idea because I actually never played chutes and ladders as a child. I thought of all the board games I knew, and none of them had the correct set up for the upward mobility I was trying to convey. I was in Target in the board game section, and I noticed chutes and ladders, and that it was the only board game that wasn’t like $25. It literally had the perfect set up, so I bought it and didn’t need to make physical changes to the game board. Designing the cards was very simple to do, and I did it using Canva. However, printing the cards in color was almost an epic fail. I tried on two different computers and neither of them had the software that T&I made their tutorial with. After playing around with a lot of settings and pressing a lot of buttons, I sent it to print in color. And then the printer told me I didn’t have enough declining balance, so I had to stop again and reload it. Luckily, the printer I chose also had a backlog and hadn’t printed anything since the night before at 10 PM. So it printed hundreds of pages before finally printing my puny four pages in color. 

My last artist statement finally uploaded to Dr. Sample’s site, but my flogs still won’t appear as of Feb. 21st. 

Writing my artist statement for hack #2 was definitely a challenge this week, especially since WordPress is now giving me issues with the images. I ended up linking the image as well as uploading it because it wasn’t showing up at first (it appears to be there now). I also couldn’t get my post to go to the main DIG401 site with the other artist statements, I used the same tag as artist statement #1 and then I tried adding another one to match everyone else’s but for some reason it won’t send (here’s the link if you need it https://dig401.limilano.dcreate.domains/artist-statement/put-the-bullet-through-the-ceo/). The image issue started after I updated something in WordPress so maybe I need to update it again because there was a problem with the last update, it seems like others have had problems with uploading images as well. 

I don’t have many ideas for hack #3 yet but I was thinking about doing something with either creating an animation in something like Google Slides or using a video game like Terraria for something unexpected. 

The reading for Thursday made me realize that I might have been able to make my Oregon Trail idea work if I’d found another editor for BASIC instead of trying to use FreeBasic. I didn’t try to find another one since the download of the game I found said to use FreeBasic in its ReadMe, but since it’s written in BASIC I may have been able to use any BASIC editor I could find. I wish I’d thought to try that sooner, but I guess I might be able to do something with it for hack #5. 

Actually as I was going to post this my WordPress said it needs to update, so we’ll see how that goes…

This was an eventful week for Hack #2. I am extremely proud of the outcome, but it did not come easily. We encountered issues over the weekend when DACE was closed, and we didn’t have access to any of the needed materials. We decided to check out the small art center in the union, but they were missing essential items: a box cutter and tape. Fortunately, Davis Cafe saved us – I asked a worker for a box cutter, and the union front desk had some painter’s tape.

Our next challenge arose when we needed tin foil. Davis Cafe didn’t have any, and we couldn’t find any in the union. We headed to Nummit in search of it, but they didn’t have any either! We then went to Ksig and raided the kitchen, emerging successful with foil in hand.

Writing the artist statement for the second hack gave me some trouble. I had many thoughts about Elon Musk but didn’t want to detract from the actual meaning of the hack. Finding a proper balance and flow for my argument took quite some time, and I worried I wouldn’t finish in time. There were moments when I’d fall into rabbit holes researching Musk and his family. Sometimes I’d end up in obscure Twitter (X) threads that led to nothing but speculative discussions about Musk’s origins.

I found the reading this week quite interesting, although I had trouble getting through it. It was dense, with many abbreviations whose meanings I kept forgetting. I took many breaks while reading but still didn’t fully grasp it. Only after some class discussion did things start to make more sense. It was interesting to see the evolution of the computer from places outside the grandiose settings of MIT or Silicon Valley.

When I first approached my “Battleship” project, I envisioned digital versions of my modified “Battleship” game. The digital prototype seemed like the perfect medium to implement my ideas about war’s human cost. However, this turned out to be my first major setback.

The digital interface felt too far removed from the nostalgic aspect of the physical Battleship set. Beyond that, the digital version lacked the element of surprise and competition between two physical players. Furthermore. the interface wasn’t intuitive, the visual impact was lacking, and most importantly, it failed to create the emotional resonance I was aiming for.

Another challenge I faced was balancing the game’s playability with its critical message. I wanted to maintain the game’s core mechanics while adding layers of moral complexity. While I succeeded in keeping the game functional, I sometimes wonder if I could have pushed the ethical implications further without compromising the game structure. Overall, the simple addition of “baby” game pieces and subsequent modifications demonstrated how such divisive messages about war remain present in our daily consciousness. However, I would like to explore more physically involved ways to subvert the game and make it more unique from its original version.

LF