After Midterm

I found that there are problems in my current proposal.
So I tried to reply to Loretta's critics which make them pretty clear as fallowing.

• Concept of distance? You are not grappling with this concept. (CR)

Yes, I realized right after the presentation.
I have a strong-motivated concept of interpersonal distance which has not addressed clearly in my prototypes. And I believe that it is a deep topic that hard to describe through an simple interaction. At the same time, I developed a format of making an interactive door to create a surprise moment and temporary illusion, which has not had solid enough concept yet. But it is effective and with a lot of possibilities. I am interested in both of them. But they are going totally two separate ideas now. I am wondering if it is too forceful to combine them, which direction should I choose for thesis?

• Disconnect: not an experience that brings people together

Yes, I agree. So I attempted other formats to achieve what I wanna explore about cutting down mental distance. I started to compare how much time I spend on people around me to find a proper distance among my relationship. Also ask friends about what close means to them, ask them to think and draw a close one with eyes close, and ask who are close to them and who they stay with the most daily. A few tests gave them some thinking process of what the relationship between physical distance and mental distance is. Should it be direct ratio? Both physically too close and far might cause mental distance. Then what is the most balanced distance? Some of my friend suggests me to do it in narrative, using my own story and expression to build the mental interaction. I already had a plan of making a experimental video about this concept for a while but still have no time to push it forward because I am not confident with the format and content.

• Door itself – simplicity of – powerful – has potential as study (ST)

I studied door in my first semester, which was interesting. But I am not sure about if there is enough motivation for me to keep discovering about this. Why is door important to me? The only thing connecting to myself is that I use it everyday and I always want to have an anywhere door. A door that can take me to anywhere I want. Let me meet with someone immediately regardless the cost and time of transportation. A magic door that can give me surprise all the time. I miss traveling a lot. Travel is the thing always brings surprise to me because scenes, people, and moods change from place to place. So maybe I can create an unexpected journey through a door. A journey of others' life? A journey in New York? A journey around the world? A journey through all doors in movies?

• Make doors – many, many doors as experimental exploration: ‘what doors do; how people respond; meaning inherent in “doorness.”

What I am interested in door is that it has a lot of collective memory and it is everywhere, a universal language. it is about space and place, security and privacy, and curiosity and imagination.

Tree Map

I questioned myself a lot during every step, so I could not finish anything practically. Today in writing class, I tried to map out my project and find out where I am in this diagram. As a result, it looks like a huge domain in the content, which is good as well as bad. The good thing is that I have abundant materials to address my concept. But the bad thing is obviously that I am engaged in many issues. Since I have to drill down for three-week-long process, I need to make a choice from them.
So, I picked physical interface on the form side. And for the first experiment- a door letting remote people communicate in real time, I think I was trying to make "On-line meeting" into physical world. It means that I attempted to make real-time meeting happens regardless space distance in physical world as easily as it does in virtual one.
For the second experiment- a door letting remote people communicate by passing a note to each other, I am going to recreate a usual communication way happens regardless space distance in physical world as easily as it does in the Internet.
The difference between the first and the second is that users can communicate with each other through touchable interface-paper weather the partner is in front of the door or not in the later . But in the first, although users have to be both on site to communicate, they don't have any time difference in this case.

Back to Anywhere Door

For the difficulties of defining a way to measure interpersonal mental distance by physical objects, I decided to make my experiment go for the simple idea of Anywhere Door for now. I found that Internet has already done what I kind of want to do- change the sense of distance. Within on-line world, people can feel close with remote partners, see far away through great distance and time, and expend their power of effects easily. The most easy way to maintain long-distance relationship has become online meeting. In some degree, Internet has changed every computer or smart device with access to the web into an anywhere door. People use it to go through many places virtually, and to connect with others everyday in big cities. (My roommate is playing guitar with her boyfriend who is in Taiwan through Skype now. How miracle it is that two people can interact with each other regardless time and space)
So, to make a good use of the magic of Internet, I added some possibility into my experiment.

1. People can see random places around the world in real-time through a hole and they also can rotate the door nob/knock to switch scene behind the door connecting with world wide surveillance cameras.
2. Using Skype activated on two different locations, two remote doors make people living far apart communicate with each other as neighbors.
3. By drawing a rectangle on a wall, people can open a virtual door leading to a place on the earth.