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How computation applies to my INTERESTS
Before the surge in engineering's popularity that occurred after I entered college, I believed coding had little relevance to art and design, which made me uninterested in incorporating it into my work. However, coding was a mandatory part of my architecture design program, and unfortunately, I found myself frustrated with tools like Grasshopper and Python, struggling to see their value compared to building projects step by step.
My perspective only started to shift as I transitioned to studying and working as a UI/UX designer after graduation. Last year, I had the privilege of collaborating with Tencent Games on the localization of a mobile game in their Tokyo department. There, I discovered that coding at work is not as daunting as I had once believed from my college experience. My interest in computation also grew as I became more accustomed to and proficient in applying it, without the stress of being graded upon using it at every step of the design process.
During this period, I also learned to play the bass guitar and became involved in band music and performances. Given my limited experience in music-making, I found myself relying heavily on music AI tools. These tools allowed me to explore and create music without needing extensive professional knowledge.
To answer this question, understanding computation has become essential to my interests in both design and music. As I engaged more with these fields, I realized that many of my creative ideas now require some form of computational support to materialize. Whether in designing interactive user experiences or creating music, computation has transitioned from being a supplementary skill to a fundamental tool that drives my creative process and helps bring my concepts to reality.
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What projects do you imagine making this term? What projects do you love?
I have an ongoing project that is a variation of this project called Mikutap, which is an interactive website where users create and manipulate music in real time by simply tapping and swiping their keyboard. As users manipulate the music, the screen displays corresponding visual feedback. I found the project really stress-relieving and wanted to apply similar logic to make a project that will be based more on band instrumental music.
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Self-portrait Documentation
What pitfalls did you run into? What could you not figure out how to do? How was the experience of using the web editor? Did you post any issues to github?
From the moment we were assigned the task of creating a self-portrait, I knew I wanted to draw a cat. The sketching process went smoothly initially since we had learned how to draw ellipses (for the head), triangles (for the ears), and rectangles (for the body) in class and through worksheet exercises.
The hard part was the arc().
Getting the curve I wanted was difficult to begin with, yet I encountered more problems trying to mirror the curve of one eye to the other. In previous steps, I could mirror shapes simply by changing the x-axis value manually or by setting the new x to width - original x.
However, this method wouldn’t work for the curve. Despite seeking help during Monday’s session and consulting my engineer friend, I could never get the angles to mirror properly with the commends we have learned. Therefore, I abandoned drawing the complicated arc(x, y, w, h, -3/5*PI-HALF_PI, HALF_PI-2/3*PI) in favor of the simpler arc(x, y, w, h, -1/5*PI-HALF_PI, HALF_PI-2/3*PI) that I knew how to calculate manually when mirrored.
So far I haven’t encountered any difficulties using the web editor.
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