S.o.S

Last year we had problem during our brainstorming for our final. So we listed everything we like and spotted our common likes. We didn’t use that concept at the end but it was a good icebreaker and a starting point for brainstorming.

Later I realized that I worked on something similar at the beginning of the semester, which lead me to a realization that I love new things; something being created or discovered.
Especially kids are very fun to watch when they are playing with something new. I worked with kids who were likely to be diagnosed with autism, but recovered later on. The aim it was to get the child to know different personalities and get socialized easily. It wasn’t that long but still I really find it very interesting how different they interpret with toys and systems. Once a 3 year old kid was playing with a lego and all of a sudden he stopped and asked
“Why is this called a Lego?” Usually kids tend to have those “why? Why? But why?” moments a lot but this one led to something else.
“Because the brand named that toy Lego”
“But why? Why is it not called "Gofa" but Lego? Why L E G O is related with this thing?”
It blew my mind how this kid related to a very basic topic of Semiotics.


So I started researching about child psychology and learning:
As a starters point I picked up Sophie’s World: there it suggests that the purest form of a philosopher is a child because she / he is not exposed to the whole world of learning and can look at everything with a objective point of view.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/children/
http://www.otizm.org
http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/
http://www.crafttoys.com/toys.html

“A variety of colors creates excitement, however, certain colors
stimulate the brain to associate colors with certain objects at an early stage in development. Most parents pretend that it is okay as "artistic or self expression" for children to color grass pink or cows purple. Deep down inside, the parent usually feels uneasy or uncertain that their child is "learning" or understanding reality properly.” Karen D. Hill

As for my concepts, I would like to stick to my interests I listed earlier and add some more on to them:

Here are my interests: Sociology, Semiotics, Psychology, Technology, Interactivity, Physical Computing. Interestingly, these topics are based on more than one person. Well most of them are.

Perception, “Learning”, lack of verbal language (inspired by Carolina). As a kid who grew up bilingual, I find myself lucky and unlucky at the same time. Lucky in the sense that I can understand both languages (as much as I can), unlucky because I can not translate one language to the other.

Design elements: Color, size, shape, texture.

Target Audience: Children. (with disorders: autism + dyslexia ?)

Well, when all of these come together, they lead me into a specific direction: toys/games… Interesting..

Keepon!

das ist meine Venn Diagram

Probably I spelled that wrong but yeah, here is the holly Venn diagram.
Generally the website I'm planning to work on is aiming to get people to taste the before they go and try out a restaurant. There are two ways to do it: Either everybody needs a printer that can print the flavor or different senses will be triggered to get the taste.
One of the greatest reasons why I'm doing this is: I'm always having people over, my family, friends, ex-boss, uncle's boss and so on. As everybody has a different personality, they seek for different tastes or ambiances. I'm a citysearch.com user and love it because there so different views from a lot of people that can help me to judge the place easily but doesn't help me taste-wise. So I'm looking for a website that can give me an idea of what the food tastes like.
I always find other people's opinions no matter what I'm doing. Because no matter how hard someone can work on a topic, they can not see every single detail in that project. A new eye always beings a new perspective. In this case, again I find it very valuable.

an article on art and design

Art vs Design, nice article
http://bokardo.com/archives/five-principles-to-design-by/

bunch of videos

umm.. any ideas?

Well, here is one I've been thinking about. It seems a little impossible but still it's an idea, nope?
I wish the net had a site that had every kind of food with pictures and tastes. Let's say, you're going to go out to some fancy cafe with people you want to impress; wouldn't that be great to be able to nibble a little of that food and be sure how it tastes like?
Or let's say you're traveling somewhere, and you need some good advice on food: what to eat, what to avoid, what NOT to be scared of.
As a solution: well I'm not sure what I can offer but here's something I've heard a while ago. Every taste refers to somewhere on our body. When the nerves referring to that body are triggered, we feel the taste in our tongue.
This just sounds creepy..

A map of everything.. Wouldn't that be great? I know that's way too general but let's say it's a map for a city you have never been to but planing to move to. It can give an idea about the best restaurants, the rent rates, the crime percentage, the live expenses and etc.
Obviously everybody is moving somewhere new and most of the time they come across with problems which has a lot different answers. Moving in New York is a good example actually; let's take someone who has no idea about New York but just got accepted from school. Getting to know the city for living but not for touristic purposes can have hard consequences. What if we had a website that could list the security, rent rates, deli's, living expenses of five boroughs? Wouldn't it be easier to find a good spot to live? Not only for New YOrk of course, it's for all over the world.
It's not that hard to build up a database for this, anybody who has access to the internet can write down a couple of lines just like in urbandictionary.com or answers.yahoo.com and voila, there's your database.

I heard this project was coming to life but I couldn't find it online yet. It's not online or it's my poor search skill..
I wish the net had a site that can let me sing in and find which song I've been singing for a week. There's always a song stuck in your mind and sometimes this song can be foreign or just the instrumental part of a song. When the lyrics are stuck in your mind, it's not a huge deal to look it up on the net, but when it's the instrumental part, it's just messed up. I've heard that they are building up a database of songs for a website where you can sing right away with your mic and the website will be able to pull up that annoying song you've been singing since you got up.
In a way it's like myheritage.com's celebrity finder, just a little bit different than that.
http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/tryFaceRecognition.php

It's on!!

Rather than agreeing and disagreeing on the article, I've found it informative. So it's hard to point out ideas which work for me or not.

The idea of having every document to be linked to each other reminds me of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and the book that knew everything about everything. It feels very powerful even thinking about having a guide like that and wondering in foreign spaces (not places, spaces!) However, I'm not sure how this can save the world from stupidity. As information gets accessible to people, they'll be willing to give less effort looking for it, because it's already there, "I can get it whenever I need it!" Knowing that information is already present in a very easily accessible network may work good on stupidity but it will also make it a lot harder to be (or look) smarter. Is it only me or isn't it scary to think about everybody know about everything? - ok, I'm getting confused, let's jump to something else.

But I can not agree more with Kevin Kelly in not being able to
see what the web has become. "Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago." got me thinking of what we might be doing right now. Thinking about ten years later is not as hard as thining what we are doing wrong right now. I have a guess though: People will get so sick and tired of dating site or self-representative sites (like myspace, facebook, xuqa and etc.), they will look for something maybe less entertaining but more interesting/smart: an interaction that is not based on interpersonal relationship, but more on “informational” relationship. About ten years ago, when I was a younger loser, I was subscribed on almost every chatting website. I was so all over the place, I became a tester for a couple of Turkish dating websites. Right now, I spend most of my time either on Wikipedia, Yahoo or Eksisozluk.org , kind of a Turkish urban dictionary but the entries are done by users.

This shift has already begun; by blogging. I do agree a lot with Kelly on everything he says on blogging and it is amazing to see how valuable it is to share certain experiences. Usually I read a couple of blogs before I go out and try a new restaurant, I never read magazines or rely on their websites. True experience can only be present in a true user’s blog, who is not seeking an economic outcome of what s/he is writing.

“The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is.” What if we compare how complex they get every year? The Machine is created by people, it’s easy to predict where it is going, but the brain is still carrying so much mystery, it’s hard to guess the upcoming 5 minutes of it.



Oh, by the way, it was hilarious to see where baloney Cliff Still was!
Thinking about everything being linked to each other, here is a sweet site on data visualization:
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/