2009 March « James Butler’s Blog

Monthly Archives: March 2009

So I took two songs from my itunes, of two completely different genres to create this counter-intuitive juxtaposition.

Gondry camera trick

Exploring photographic illusions reminded me of the inventive techniques of Michel Gondry. This particular scene was taken from ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, a specially designed set creates an effective illusion on camera.

Photographic illusions

http://damncoolpics.blogspot.com/2007/02/photo-illusions.html

Another example I found, like a photographic Escher piece.

Jumbled letters

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Testing our perception

The famous artwork of Julian Beever. Renowned for its interesting originality. Anamorphic illusions drawn in a special distortion in order to create an impression of 3 dimensions when seen from one particular viewpoint.

Counter-intuition

According to wikipedia…

A counterintuitive proposition is one that does not seem likely to be true when assessed using intuition or gut feelings.

Scientifically discovered, objective truths are often called counterintuitive when intuition, emotions, and other cognitive processes outside of deductive rationality interpret them to be wrong. However, the subjective nature of intuition limits the objectivity of what to call counterintuitive because what is counter-intuitive for one may be intuitive for another.

Flawed understanding of a problem may lead to counter-productive behavior with undesirable outcomes. In some such cases, counterintuitive policies may then produce a more desirable outcome. For example, a policy of catching large fish and throwing back small ones may be counter-productive. In response to that policy, evolutionary pressure may select for small fish. A counterintuitive improvement may be to catch only medium sized fish, leaving the biggest free to breed, creating evolutionary pressure for fish to grow quickly through the medium size.

Counterintuitive ideas in science

Many scientific ideas that are generally accepted by people today were formerly considered to be contrary to intuition and common sense.

For example, most everyday experience suggests that the Earth is flat; actually, this view turns out to be a remarkably good approximation to the true state of affairs, which is that the Earth is a very big spheroid. Furthermore, prior to the Copernican revolution, heliocentrism, the belief that the Earth goes around the Sun, rather than vice versa, was considered to be contrary to common sense.

Another counterintuitive scientific idea concerns space travel: it was initially believed that highly streamlined shapes would be best for re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. In fact, experiments showed that blunt-shaped re-entry bodies make the most efficient heat shields when returning to earth from space. Blunt-shaped re-entry vehicles have been used for all manned-spaceflights, including the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle missions.

The Michelson-Morley experiment sought to measure the velocity of the Earth through the aether as it revolved around the Sun. The result was that it has no ether velocity at all. Relativity theory later explained the results, replacing the conventional notions of ether and separate space, time, mass, and energy with a counterintuitive four-dimensional non-Euclidean universe.

Examples…

The Monty Hall problem is a probability puzzle based on the American television game show Let’s Make a Deal. The name comes from the show’s host, Monty Hall. The problem is also called the Monty Hall paradox, as it is a veridical paradox in that the solution is counterintuitive.

A well-known statement of the problem was published in Parade magazine:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? (Whitaker 1990)

It is assumed that the player prefers winning a car rather than a goat. Because there is no way for the player to know which of the two unopened doors is the winning door, most people assume that each door has an equal probability and conclude that switching does not matter. In fact, in the usual interpretation of the problem the player should switch — doing so doubles the probability of winning the car from 1/3 to 2/3.

Simple probability indicates that the player has a 2/3 chance of initially choosing a goat. Players who unconditionally stick to that choice therefore have only a 1/3 chance of winning the car. Players who unconditionally switch get the opposite of their original choice, so they have a 2/3 chance of winning a car.

When the problem and the solution appeared in Parade, approximately 10,000 readers, including nearly 1,000 with Ph.D.s, wrote to the magazine claiming the published solution was wrong. Some of the controversy was because the Parade version of the problem is technically ambiguous since it leaves certain aspects of the host’s behavior unstated, for example whether the host must open a door and must make the offer to switch. Variants of the problem involving these and other assumptions have been published in mathematical literature.

The standard Monty Hall problem is mathematically equivalent to the earlier Three Prisoners problem and both are related to the much older Bertrand’s box paradox. These and other problems involving unequal distributions of probability are notoriously difficult for people to solve correctly, and have led to numerous psychological studies. Even when given a completely unambiguous statement of the Monty Hall problem, explanations, simulations, and formal mathematical proofs, many people still meet the correct answer with disbelief.

…Granted this is all totally behind me.

O2 Idea

The idea behind my final idea, is, in short, 100% recycled envelopes. There is currently only one company on the market producing 100% recycled envelopes on a mass scale. These are however recycled papers broken down into a pulp to create plain envelopes. The idea behind my envelopes is alot more raw, I wanted to create 100% recycled envelopes and for them to be exactly that and to scream the word recycled. The idea is to use old newspapers, magazines, card etc to create the envelopes directly out of the old materials. The final product is both novel and eye catching, but also modern and environmentally friendly. I did some research and found out that currently 99.9% of envelopes readily available on the market are 80% or less recycled materials but also go through whitening processes that are harmful to the environment, so where they call them recycled they are still bad for the environment. I think my idea is original, but yet modern and in keeping with times. We currently live in a world worried about climate change, recycling is bigger than ever, what better way to advertise how much o2 cares, and through the medium of communication.

I set up a mini studio in my living room and photographed a couple of envelopes I made. For my final boards.

Sketchbook and ideas + Task 20

I felt compelled to scan some pages from my sketchbook in order to explain my thinking. Rather than concerntrate at all on the aesthetics of the actual sketchbook I tried to be more reckless and attempt to actually use it in order to generate ideas. For that reason it is scrappy and graphically rubbish. Following on from some research I did on the ideologies behind communication I began sketching the O2 logo hoping ideas would come to me, I played about a bit and one idea I came up with was an o2 man, made up entirely of sections of the logo!

Bring the logo itself to life gave me the idea of separating the ‘o’ and the ’2′ and making individual characters out of them, I came up with the idea of having them communicate but when trying to illustrate my ideas swayed away from the point and ended up drawing them as working together, I had further ideas to develop on this but didnt want to go too far away from the original point of communication. I felt that after all communication shouldn’t necessarily be expressed as teamwork.

My next idea was an illustration also, in this I would draw a network of houses very closely together, connected by roads which would write out a phrase for example ‘we are closer than you think’, this was to express the idea that the world is shrinking in terms of communication but not physically obviously, so even though houses are separated by long roads, they are actually situated in the image as close together. I got the idea but trying to tell other people was a bit of a nightmare and I decided it was a bad idea to create something that required so much reading into.