Reflection: XMP in review

This is Lance Gorillastrong. He is a Gorilla who is keen on saving the environment and angry at everyone who isn't doing the same. He loves fixie bikes, has huge leg muscles, and has been seen tackling drivers of 4wd petrol guzzlers.

His audience is all of UC, but especially those that live close to the university, and yet still drive to school.

Lances main outlet is facebook. He shares his opinions and slogans about bikes and the environment on there, as well as some pictures of, as he puts it, Bike Porn.
Lance is also a physical character, portrayed by me in a gorilla suit. Lance may or may not have been spotted at Groovin' the Moo, the music festival held at UC on the weekend.
I also intended for lance to have a youtube page, but i did not have time to film content for the channel.

Some examples of Lance on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/lance.gorillastrong/posts/171450739676805

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=112379575621373&set=a.112379658954698.1073741828.100005479933248&type=1

My sticker and poster were a shocking failure. I made 2 big mistakes i think, maybe 3.

1. Lance Gorillastrong is a Facebook profile as opposed to a Facebook page. I think that this was a mistake, as i think people are scared to add someone, where most people will 'like' any page.

2. I should have used bit.ly. My poster and stickers use a QR code to take people to Lance's facebook profile, but the link goes directly there. If i had of used bit.ly i would have some form of tracking how many people actually went through my rabbit hole.

and maybe 3. my photoshop skills. Maybe Lance is just too ugly for people to actually be interested in. I could have gotten some help with making him. but then it wouldn't have been all my own work and I am not sure how I would feel about that. So I don't know.

In terms of further development, Lance will stop with this class. There is a solid idea behind him in my opinion, but if I were to approach this task again I think I would approach it completely differently. I would spend much longer in the character phase and perhaps create 2 opposing characters. It's hard to make any real storyline happen with only one character.


"Can we use Transmedia to Inspire a Culture of Sustainability 

at UC ?"

Yes. We can. I think a lot of the class did very well. Even just getting the word sustainability out there helps. 160 people saying the word and putting up posters and stickers and everything puts it in the front of peoples minds while at university. 

Next time - start the actual creation of characters earlier. there are more people around UC earlier in the term. 

Posters

This week our task was too make a poster as a rabbit hole for our characters and to tag its location on panoramio. I stuck with my sticker design from last week but with and added slogan:

Ride to UC, or else...

So my poster looked like this:

My photoshop skills leave a lot to be desired. But as I said last week I think that its weird enough that people will be like "WTF, ill scan that qr code and see what is going on".

I also made a stencil for spray painting a logo around UC:



But decided i shouldn't be doing graffiti. Good slogan though. Lance might repeat that one.

The hardest part is finding content for lance to share. He has an active facebook profile but I have realized that i should have made a page not a profile, ads it seems people are reluctant to add Lance where they probably would have like a Lance page without any concern. As it stands I am lances only friend.

poor dude:(

Hackathon continued: Rabbit holes

This weeks exercise continued the Hackathon: We were to create "rabbitholes", a physical link to our chartacters online virtual story world. I chose to try out my photoshop skills and see if i could stick some mad muscle builder legs on a gorilla, as though he had been riding a bike a bit too much.

As you can see my photoshop skills arent great, but i think it ius weird enough to make people wanna find out what the hell its for:

Lance Gorillastrong: the huge legged scary gorilla who will hurt you if he catches you drive a petrol gussler. Ride to UC! This will be made into a sticker and mass printed. The more coverage, the more likely people are to see Lance and want to find out more about him.

Workshop Hackathon!

So my phone died. So until I get a new one (my plan runs out 30th april), i am stuck with a nokia 3315. Awesome phone, it has a black and white screen and snake (needless to say i have spent a few hours playing snake this week), but sadly it lacks a camera. So i now have no photos from the workshop.

Anyway, this weeks workshop was a hackathon. We were shown some really cool stuff about AR (Augmented Reality), like this vid:

The 4 types of AR:

1. Personal: In this mode, only the person’s head, or other extremities (hands and feet) are captured in the camera’s field of view. This mode usually caters to 1-2 participants. It has a wide distribution, and can be used in a range of locations. (Example)
2. Public: The person’s whole body can be captured in the camera’s field of view. There are more spectators, as the image is often projected onto a larger screening space. There is however, limited distribution. (Example)
3. Private: Only the person’s extremities are captured by the camera, as the camera, and display, are attached in the user’s headspace. There is almost zero distribution of this method. (Google Glass Example)
4. Intimate: The user’s whole or upper body is captured in the camera’s FOV. There are few spectators, but a wide distribution. (Example)

The major activity for the day was our Aurasma character creation. We were asked to draw a character on a brown sticker and stick it to a coffee lid. We then had to take a photo of the drawing and upload it to Aurasma where it became part of the database and became associated with an image, either one of their template ones or we could create our own.

We then had to spread out the characters on 2 axis - the good to the bad, and the simple to the complex. Mine was at the very bottom of good and the very top of simple, since Lance isnt the most simple sustainability mascot, but his values are quite simple. And he isnt really the nicest charater around. He Takles people getting out of big petrol wasting vehicles.

Week 7

OUr goal for this week was to prototype a chracter and a story for them to act in involving sustainability at UC. Stephen told us to spread ourselves around the university and try to think of a story involving a character, so i went up near the bike station behind building 9 and waited for a bike to pull up. In 40 minutes i saw 15 cars enter that car park but not 1 bike go past so i came up with the idea to have a character to encourage people to ride to school.

Stuck to the side of building 9 is a sticker that has been there for more than 4 years, of a big muscly scary gorilla, but it is torn so you cannot see the whole image. I wanted to play off this by having a gorilla with super big scary muscley legs that rides a bike to UC.

Thinking of perhaps the only famous cyclist i could think of, I came up with Lance Gorillastrong. picture these legs:

on a big gorilla like:

How badass is that. Next Up: a facebook page for Lance.

XMP Workshop 2

As ever for this workshop we split into groups, and we were assigned a student or staff group to focus on for the workshop. Our group of 6 included 2 American Exchange students, so we got "International Students" as our group to focus on.

The Workshop was split into 5 main parts, Talk from Emma, activity, talk from Emma, activity, talk as wrap up with Steven and Emma.

Emma Beddows was the guest workshop host. He focus was on fandom and transmedia story, especially fan fiction.

Activity one had the objective of making us aware of our target audience. We were tasked to use postit notes to label all of the media platforms our group might engage with. Of course first off everyones tongue was Facebook, and all the online social media platforms, then we started to think specifically about international students, we came up with a number of platforms. We initially forgot about sticky notes and did it straight on the paper, then re-did them on the post-its.

Next all of the groups had to put their page of post-its out and members from each group sorted them into 5 categories; events on campus, posters/ads, magazines, online social media, and traditional communication. The sorting process was a bit chaotic:

In exercise 2 our job was to create a character who could tell our story, an to "create organic links" between these 5 categories. Our group came up with this:

Meet Danny the Drop Bear. We decided on a drop bear since that is something all international students have in common, they have been told at one time or another about drop bears. He would be a campaign for a very timed event, such as stonefest. 2 weeks before the festival Danny would appear around the university, not saying much, just being there, doing things that may seem a little odd. There would also be sightings of Danny on Stonefest posters and in the UC magazine, CUrio. The trigger is the other people working on the campaign  asking students if they have seen Danny  making up some stories about him to add to the myth, and leading people to Danny the Drop Bear's Facebook page. From Facebook Danny could tell us why he is at UC, with a message about recycling at Stonefest. All of this would act as advertising for Stonefest and raise awareness of recycling. 

As a joke we also said Danny's footprint should be a QR code, but that was just the group be facetious.

Mars and Sustainability

This was our interpretation week. This week in class our job was too follow the IDEO process to come up with some ideas about sustainability based on our interviews. Our group Of four focused on one of the groups interviews because it was the most interesting. Tor interviewed the president of the Australian Mars Society. She said that she was really sure where the interview would go but it turned out to be very interesting and useful. We looked at how they plan to manage sustainability on a new planet with very limited resources.

Our basic conclusion was that because they have a fresh slate on mars, sustainability can be built into the systems from the start. Of course this doesnt help UC, but it could help all new planning from now on.

Our poster/flowchart (get it, its a river, flowchart lol) with goals and means separated by obstacles and requirements.

Distilled to a VENN Diagram:

Observation and interpretation

In groups of three we were asked to look at 5 questions and attempt to answer them, with sustainability at UC in mind. As a group of three pretty clear thinking guys we decided to be very practical in this task

1. What do people need and/or want?

We decided as a group that sustainability is not necessarily a want or need from a students perspective. Sustainability is something we should aim for and work to achieve long term. The easiest way to achieve sustainability is to copy others. ANU is renowned for its sustainability exploits, why doesn't UC just steal their ideas.

2. What technologies can help?

Technologies as simple as timed light switches and motion sensors save lighting costs and power consumption, all the way to deep level technologies like high tech water mesuring systems and recycling solutions need to be considered.

3. What solutions or ideas are being tried in other areas?

UC has next to no sustainability technologies in use. ANU, on the other hand, has lots. It is worth having a read of ANUGreens webpage, where they outline a number of sustainablity initiatives and strategies. 

http://sustainability.anu.edu.au/themes/energy-and-climate/energy-and-climate-change-strategies

4. What ideas or solutions can be applied at UC?

Obviously ANU has a bigger budget than UC, so not all of their solutions will be applicable or practical for UC, but they have a number of simple things like paper recycling which UC does none of. 

5. What are your strengths? ie. implementation / technology / understanding peoples needs

As a group we are all technologically minded and media biased, so our strategy as a group is to lobby the Student Body and Executives of UC to initiate some of these strategies and to spend some money on Sustainability at UC.

XMP: Workshop 1

So this week we had the 1st workshop, with the idea of working on the proposed sustainability garden. Our goal was, in groups, to come up with a way to make sure students interact with the garden to help promote sustainability, especially with reference to cross media.

Most groups focused on way to make the garden technologically interactive, with varying degrees of success. The main of focus, I think almost every group alluded to or used in some way, was QR codes.

QR codes are a are an awesome technology that are well and truly overused for bullshit uses. Most people do not know what they do or know why to use them, let alone actually scanning them.

Our group fell into this trap, while also coming up with some cool ideas. We targeted two potential user groups, the junior school at UC and the rezzies. Within our group we split into smaller groups to focus on these two use cases. The juniors team came up with logo and mascot for the garden, Carol the Carrot. A first draft of carol was drawn up, looking very animated and fun:

As the rezzies focused group, we decided the garden should interact with Zierholtz. Our idea was around the idea that the garden could be used to grow the essentials for a sustainability beer, grown and brewed at UC. As an initiative to get the rezzies involved in the garden and in the beer we could hold events called working beers. The idea behind a working beer is that the rezzies take a day to work on the garden, planting, weeding water and the like, in return for cheep or free beers from Zierholtz.  We thought we could come up with a cool logo, something looking like a bee, with wings and legs, but its body as a beer bottle:

As a result of all of our brainstorming, our group, Carol the Carrot, tied for second place in the best ideas of the day vote thing at the end of the session. Our prize: a bag of lollies.

Natural Confectionary Company: Yum.

Niantic Project: An example of transmedia story telling

The Niantic Project started in november 2012. The "investigation" started as an empty message board on www.nianticproject.com and was filled daily with additional clues and snippets of information. As details emerged it became clear that the story was being told by Google, as all of the clues lead to Google web pages.

The story involved a comic book artist called Tycho, a character who had become infamous for his appearances at the 2012 Comicon, handing out posters like this one:

http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/pac/IB/00/item/1ty1.jpg

At the same time there were posts about a guy who bought a phone on eBay to find that did very weird things in public places. These videos were posted on youtube and held clues to further websites with addresses similar to to that of the tycho poster above.

A wikia page was made to create a community working to solve these puzzles:

http://niantic-project.wikia.com/wiki/Day_12_-_11/12/12

Puzzles included sound files, youtube videos, hidden coded in documents, images which needed to be photoshopped to reveal more information, QR codes, Facebook and Google+ profiles, as well as physical clues at locations.

One of the puzzles that stumped the hole communities was "3vh1v". goo.gl/3vh1v, a shortened URL seemed to be a solution the puzzle but turned out to be a red hearing. The puzzle was eventually solved 555h5, using the "v" as the roman numeral for 5.

By the end of november it became known that the Niantic Project was publicity for a Google Product, a game called Ingress, a geotagging and social activities game which involved seeking out physical "ingress points" and geotagging yourself there both in the game and on G+ or Facebook.

I was quite involved in the puzzles, even being the first to solve the "antonin" puzzle. However the game is Android and U.S. only, which pissed a lot of the community who had worked on puzzles off