VIPP symposium 2008: Feeling Blue

October 2nd, 2008 by Antti Raike

The Feeling Blue symposium will be held on 10th December 2008 at TaiK.  Researchers, doctoral students and MA students working on thesis: welcome! 

Programme 

Session 1, Sampo Hall, LUME, TaiK (open for all)

9:15 Fade in by Antti Raike.

9:20 Mobile Phone as SprayCan by Jürgen Scheible.

9:30  Anatomy and physiology of colour vision. Keynote by Simo Vanni. 

10:00 Discussion

10:30  What is colour? How we see it? How we measure it? Keynote by Timo Jääskeläinen.

11:00 Discussion

11:30 Lunch

12:30 Parallel demos: 1) Accidental Lovers show at Sampo Hall and 2) The Finnish Pavilion 1900 (max 5 person for a show) at alalämpiö

Session 2, Eisenstein, LUME, TaiK (for researchers and DA/PhD candidates)

13:00 Colour as Subconscious Guide in Interactive Drama – Case Study: Accidental Lovers, Interactive Dark Musical Comedy for Television by Mika Tuomola.

13:30 Colour and Memory by Lily Díaz.

14:00 PhD project: Business power of colours. Narratives on colour culture in China and in Finland by Kirsi Kommonen.

14.15 Discussion

14:30 Coffee

14:45 Panel: Colour related research in Aalto University. Moderator: Kirsti Lehtimäki

Panelists: Timo Jääskeläinen, Simo Vanni, Harald Arnkill, Kanerva Cederström, Mika Tuomola and Lily Díaz

16:30 Concluding remarks

17:00 Fade out

Venue

Taideteollinen korkeakoulu – University of Art and Design, Hämeentie 135 C, 00560 Helsinki

How to get in TaiK (map)

TaiK floor plan for Media Center Lume: Sampo Hall (morning) & Eisenstein (afternoon)

Reittiopas – Journey planner

Lunch

Antell-ravintola Arabiakeskus, Hämeentie 135 A

Meccala, 5th floor, TaiK

Kipsari, Hämeentie 135 E

Keynote speakers

Timo Jaaskelainen (University of Joensuu) received his PhD in Physics in 1982 from University of Joensuu in Finland. He has been a Professor and head of the Department of Physics and Mathematics at University of Joensuu since 1992. He teaches advanced courses of physics, optics, and color science. He has more than 30 years teaching experience in physics, computer science, and photonics at three universities. His research interests are focused nowadays on color science and applied optics including lighting and display technology, color vision models, color measurement etc.  Publication list contains about 150 refereed journal articles, and he has supervised or co-supervised 18 PhDs. 

Simo Vanni (TKK) is docent in neurophysiology, and works as senior researcher in the Brain Research Unit of Low Temperature Laboratory at Helsinki University of Technology. His group studies visual information processing at systems level, using functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetoencephalography. The presentation includes introduction to anatomy and physiology of color vision, from photoreceptor at retina to higher visual cortices. Current models have reasonable view of processing at the retina and primary visual cortex, but the emergence of color perception and color constancy at high-level visual cortex is still under debate.

Shows

Accidental Lovers

The Finnish Pavilion 1900 is a virtual reconstruction of the Finnish pavilion – an important historical milestone in the path of becoming an independent nation – that was constructed for the Paris World Expo of year 1900. The installation enables the visitors to experience the building in real scale and real-time using 3D glasses and immersive display technology. The work was done by the Systems of Representation group as part of the Tekes-funded HandsOn project dealing with spatial interaction.

About the symposium

Visualisation of data and types of knowledge is a major component of ICT across the sciences and the humanities. Global access to information challenges the transfer of knowledge increasingly towards compressing knowledge into models, schemata and graphs, animations, films, pictures, and augmented reality. Hence it is important to pay attention to technological issues such as data-capture, encoding and multimedia software standards. However, it is similarly important to understand accessing and searching datasets of visual imagery on the one hand, and human issues such as the connection between perception and cognition, the visual mode and language, and useful typologies of linguistic and symbolic semiosis. All these provide challenges for the transfer of technology mediated types of knowledge through visual processes of learning. 

Human brain is not a fixed system but rather has the ability to adjust its functions according to the demands set and statistical properties of the surrounding environment. These general principles hold also when it comes to visualisations of any kind. Many of the obtained results of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) indicate an action-perception connection within each individual and both motor and sensory mirroring between individuals. Perception and action form an ongoing loop of interaction and the mind emerges in the context of this loop. While some information can be read by brain imaging, sensory experiences are not explained by the results of brain research. Understanding the biological mechanisms and psychology of perception may help to define the limits and variance of perception in situational context of behaviour (like film making, painting, design). 

Participants of the ‘Feeling Blue’ symposium will contribute to same goal while seeking the potential of different disciplines to understand the meaning and use of colours and how knowledge building happens with interactive visualisations and tools in diverse communities. The ‘Feeling Blue’ symposium will focus on recent trends in cognitive, cartographic and design principles in mashups and other complicated layering used in computer displays and visualisations. The term mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data e.g. from Google Maps to add location information to e.g. film scheduling and budgeting data, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.

The VIPP symposium on December 4th 2007 at Media Lab, TaiK

February 4th, 2008 by Antti Raike

The first VIPP symposium was quite an informal meeting by colleagues who are interested in colours or who have to deal with colours in art or design. All the talks were given from a special vantage point, as well as the comments were more contemplative than critical.
The programme:
VIPP symposium 2007: Colours – Do they make sense in project visualisations?

Let’s roll!

January 25th, 2008 by Antti Raike

Designers are artists? Painters? Hackers? Researchers? Do they design “for all”, i.e. users, or for themselves? Surely designers vary a lot, as the users do. But would it be reasonable to think that designers awareness of the principles of human cognition and biological constraints and collaboration with users will improve the accessibility of project visualisation? Or that designer’s tacit and cultural knowledge of the users supports more accurate project visualisations?

The aim of VIPP is to a) Explain how colours could be used in visualisations to augment accessibility; b) Find interdisciplinary tools and methods for project visualisation practises, which can be understood equally by all technical and artistic project members; c) Clarify how design for all principles could be rationalised in project visualisations; d) Describe what are the constraints and limits of the design for all principles in complex technologically driven media projects, and e) Generate cross-disciplinary dialogue between art, design and technology projects.

The methodology is based on participatory action research and advanced codesign (collaborative design having a focus on human and social factors in design) due to complexity of the phenomena involved. Triangulation for the data collection will be used, thus the research questions will be studied from versatile data and points of view. Data will consist of researcher’s observations in the research log, recorded e-mail comments by participants and designers, results of the eye-tracking tests, concept maps made by participants and project visualisations of the design experiments.

Expected results will — hopefully — contribute to design of accessible and universal interfaces for information and communication technology (ICT) in rich media project management. I like to think that results will improve and propagate the project visualisation methodology in media and design productions to augment better financial and content conduction of the projects.

– Antti