How to Fix a Ballot: What voting-booth materials look like is almost as important as who’s running

Newsweek took a look at “Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design” in this article. Nice to see, however, that our projects are still working on topics that where this book stops short, namely web design and electronic voting. Apparently only 4 pages devoted to these topics.

“There are two significant areas that are glossed over, however: Web design and electronic voting…Fair enough, but it’s shortsighted not to explore the unique complexities of information flow and hierarchy on Web sites and touchscreens with the same care and attention spent here on printed material. In successful online or electronic projects graphic design is inseparable from interactive design—”human factors” (industryspeak for how a user pokes around an electronic interface) are, at the very least, as important as what font an art director picks.”

Working with the blob detection library, I am step by step partitioning up the screen.  Each of these different quadrants need to recognize if they have a blob in them and reveal a white circle if so.

Prototype 2, PDF Format
Prototype 2, HTML version

Animations for Major Studio Final Project : Stage II prototyping

from www.vimeo.com posted with vodpod

from www.vimeo.com posted with vodpod

from www.vimeo.com posted with vodpod

from www.vimeo.com posted with vodpod

Technology

Computer Vision

Processing with Blob Detection Library

Webcam

“Secrets” portion

After Effects

Prototype II

Draft A

Draft B

Final Project List of Precedents

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Please Be Seated: A Video Installation by Nicole Cohen

Ongoing Installation at the Getty Center

video (need RealPlayer)

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Please Be Seated is a video installation by contemporary artist Nicole Cohen that allows you to interact with the Getty Museum’s 18th-century French chairs.

The installation blends footage from decorative arts galleries in the Getty Museum and three French museums with live video captured by a surveillance camera. As you sit in reproductions of the original chairs, you become part of the installation, virtually entering historic recreations of 18th-century French spaces. With this installation Cohen compresses time and space to create a metaphorical game of musical chairs.

Interactive Museum Exhibit Using Pointing Gesture Recognition (PDF)

“The combination of intuitive interaction techniques and the presentation of multimedia content like digitised paintings on a projection screen is used to generate a novel experience during an exhibition visit. Interacting with virtual exhibits directly increases the level of interest of the user and thus the impact of quality of education through hands-on experiences.

Museum of Pure Form

This project used virtual reality and 3D models of sculptures to provide a new experience of sculpture for the viewer. The user is able to feel the sculptures and move through this newly defined museum space. I enjoy the fact that the user is given back the feeling of touch in this piece, and although it is not a part of my project as planned, the physicality of the project is similar to my proposed.

Human Movement and Clear Affordances Promote Human Interaction

Running Sculpture + Aarhus by Light

Running Sculpture + Aarhus by Light is a dance performance that revolves around professional dancers interacting with Aarhus by Light, the interactive media facade currently on display at Concert Hall Aarhus, Denmark.

Time Experiment (2007)

by media artist HANNA HAASLAHTI

video

“Time experiment creates an temporal augmentation in the space. The installation could be defined as a mirror with memory.”

Scramble Suit

by media artist HANNA HAASLAHTI

“In the installation user encounters his own image in a real-time projection. His reflection is being attacked by a computer generated character. The digital character is a kinetic monster, which tries to overlap users reflections in the projection and take it under it´s own control. When user moves and tries to avoid the visual invasion, he is engaged in a struggle to keep his own appearance in the projection.”

White Square

by media artist HANNA HAASLAHTI

“Nothing exists in White Square if nobody is present. When somebody steps in the square of light, shadows appear circling around him. People find themselves in the middle of a living shadowland, where interactive shadows projected around their feet make contact with other shadows in the square. People can play together with collaborative visual structures created by shadows reaching and grabbing onto each other. The shadow world creates a reflecting surface of positions and movements done by people in the square.”

The Museum Wearable

by Flavia Sparacino at MIT Media Lab (1999)

“The museum wearable is a real time storytelling device: it is a museum guide which in real time evaluates the visitor’s preferences by observing his/her path and length of stops along the museum’s exhibit space, and selects content from a large database of available movie clips, audio, and animations. The museum wearable targets individual visitors with special learning needs or curiosity, and offers a new type of entertaining and informative museum experience, more similar to immersive cinema than to the traditional museum experience.”

Exploration of some of Gauguin’s artworks by the Museum Wearable adapted from the digital artistic reproductions (DAR) conceived by the artist Etienne Trouvers

A continuation of the work as seen above by Flavia Sparacino

A later implementation of the Museum Wearable idea which gives the viewer a multimedia look into the history of the art.

“Original collaboration in between the Museum Wearable represented by Flavia Sparacino, chief technologist and creative director of the Sensing Places company, and MIT researcher, and the work of original reproduction of Paul Gauguin’s paintings, according to the principle of digital impression or digital artistic reproductions (DAR) developed by the artist Etienne Trouvers.

The Museum Wearable is a portable audio-visual augmented reality device that delivers to the visitor a dynamic and reconfigurable audio-visual documentary of an exhibition based on his progress in the museum space. As the wearer observes a work of art he will also see, through the “private-eye” display, a virtual projection on the wall of the museum of an audiovisual résumé that explains and illustrates what he’s looking at. The Museum Wearable relies on custom designed “location bulbs” to determinate the visitor’s location in the exhibition space. Thus, he doesn’t have to press any button to start the animation, nor deal with any other similar interface. To sum up, the Museum Wearable is the most advanced version of the traditional audio guide as it provides a combination of both video and audio information automatically triggered by the location bulbs. By personalizing the visit of the museum and making it more attractive and intelligible thanks to the object-centered mini-documentaries, this device offers both an educational and entertaining alternative to the traditional museum experience.”

Presentation Table

An Interactive Narrative Space by Flavia Sparacino at MIT Media Lab (1999)

” The presentation table is an interactive display table which narrates a story guided by the position of the objects on it. The featured example is Unbuilt Ruins, an exhibit space which shows a variety of architectural designs by the influential XXth century american architect Louis Kahn. This exhibition interactively features radiosity-based, hyper-realistic computer graphics renderings of 8 unbuilt masterworks by Louis Kahn (side screens). It is housed in a large room, and contains in the center a square table above which are mounted a camera and a projector pointing downwards. By placing the foor-plan selector-object in the center table, and moving a cursor-object around the displayed floor plan the public can explore hundreds of images which otherwise would have been impossible to house in the limited space of a single museum.”

Tourbot

(2000-2002)

“The goal of this project was the development of an interactive TOUr-guide RoBOT (TOURBOT) able to provide individual access to museums’ exhibits and cultural heritage over the Internet. TOURBOT operates as the user’s avatar in a museum by accepting commands over the Web that direct it to move in its workspace and visit specific exhibits. The communication network is, thus, effectively extended by the introduction of interactive, mobile robotic platforms as terminal nodes. The imaged scene of the museum and the exhibits is communicated over the Internet to a remote visitor. As a result the user enjoys a personalised tele-presence in the museum, being able to choose the exhibits to visit, as well as the preferred viewing conditions (point of view, distance from the exhibit, resolution, etc.). At the same time, TOURBOT is able to guide on-site museum visitors providing either group or personalised tours.

To make the TOURBOT system possible, a multimedia Web interface allows people to interact with the tour-guide system over the Internet [5]. Furthermore, an on-board interface facilitates interaction with on-site visitors of the museum. Using the Web interface, people all over the world are able to tele-control the robot and to specify target positions for the TOURBOT system. The robotic tour-guide possesses a multimedia information base providing a wide range of information about the exhibition at various levels of detail. Thus, the TOURBOT system serves as an interactive and remotely controllable tour-guide, which provides personalised access to exhibits with a large amount of additional information.”

Art History/Museum Website Content Inspirations

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Exploratorium: Extremophiles in Kamchatka

Visible Proofs

The Phillips Collection’s Timeline of American Art

• Immediately faced with a great deal of information and multiple navigation locations
  • Top Left Vertical Nav (Home, Site Index, etc)
  • Top Center Horizontal Nav with Pictures (About the Office, Elections & Voter Info, State Rules, etc)
  • Left Lower Vertical Nav (related links under Top Center option “Elections & Voter Information”
• Still not a fluid arrangement of information
• Voter Information leads me to this list of links:
• 

Requirements:

• Universal Editing Capabilities by all users
• Embed Links
• Embed Video/Audio
• Voting

Some Options:

• WackoWiki
• Media Wiki
• DocuWiki

Ok. This rocks. Look what Idaho has posted on their site since they are “Determined to Vote”:

http://www.idahovotes.gov/Media/Determined_to_Vote_animation.wmv

Idaho’s site is pretty straight forward. Not exactly elegant, but it doesn’t crowd like some of the other sites. Still using the default “link” blue/underline color/format arrangement.

Here is Idaho’s Left-Navigation which stays up throughout the whole site:

• Voter Information, Registration and Access
• Where do I vote?
• What’s New
• Become a Poll Worker
• Audio and Video
• Logos and Posters
• Links

Idaho Logo option. I’m not certain what the bottlecap stands for… maybe I’m missing a major Idaho historical moment. The site

Here are images of the 3 different methods of voting used by Idaho voters depending on county:

County Listing

Optical Scan

Paper

Punch Card

• CONTENT | What questions need answering on Board of Elections websites?  I am brainstorming to gather as many questions as might be relevant to a voter.  As the project is focused on the voter as user, it creates a stricter guideline for questions to ask.

  • STATUS : Currently brainstorming.  Still perusing through websites that are well-done to collect questions.  Also, I want to keep in mind that it’s not just about answering the questions, but perhaps the WAY the questions are answered.  For instance, New Hampshire has available “How To Vote” videos available for download.  Currently, they are not in their most accessible presentation as one is required to fully download to their hard disk, but definitely the idea and resources are there.

• TECHNOLOGY | I have begun my introduction into setting up my own wiki for this project.  I agree that utilizing the web community to populate the project with content is a good idea.

  • STATUS : I have downloaded WackoWiki software to begin setting up the project.  This is my first experience with setting up a wiki, so there is a learning curve, but luckily I am taking Intro to DB, so at least it’s not quite as foreign as it could be.  Worst case is that I simply begin collecting the information on my own and posting it in table form.  I think that more interesting results will stem from this being a group project, though.  We shall see… we shall see…

• OUTREACH | Once running, by what method should I do outreach to ask for help?  Should I target organizations like the League of Women Voters?  Or perhaps there are forums where I am able to post the project?

  • STATUS : Keeping this in the back of my mind, but not quite ready to ask for help just yet.