Initial visual style idea

Looking at our concept of using a future, but not so far in the future approach, we need to develop a visual style for looking at the world in a futuristic way. My looking through our camera or phone device we need a way of switching through personas etc. Below is an image from 'Black Mirror- The Entire History of You' that aired on Channel 4:

This shows a practical yet stylised way of representing flicking through different 'costumes' or identities.

Let the reading commence...

For the project to have substance, we decided that we need to look at more academic texts and to really understand the issues we are tackling. I took the social dynamics, specifically looking at online presences and theories as my topic of research. The first book I looked at was:

Identity in Britain: A cradle-to-grave atlas

Bethan Thomas and Daniel Dorling 2007

The Policy Press

Bristol

The identity chapter looked at how people are identified  in general:

People are normally identified by (in order):

gender

age

role (in families- mother, sister, daughter and in work- friend, colleague, boss or mate, lover, acquaintance)

nationality (English)

racial

social class

geographical location

occupation

religion

An interesting term found was The Human Mosaic. It looks at the different levels of humans and locations in the world, from an individual to a crowd to a stadium, to the city, to the area, to the country etc.

(“Each place is a story of thousands of stories, a composite, collage, collection, a human mosaic”)

This could be used for the name or just use this theory to help structure our project.

Week 2 research

Thinking on the technology angle, I did some research and found out about augmented reality and how it is taking off. On my phone I have Layar, an app that was pre-installed on my phone that allows you to see the world in a whole different way through your camera. You turn the feature on and hold it up to an environment, then digital displays such as restaurant reviews and star ratings will appear on your screen. The company website is here and there is an interesting blog about what other things that augmented reality can be attached too, such as the work they did for Rolling Stone magazine where people pointed their phones at random covers of the front page of the magazine spread around New York, and they got to watch videos with the stars on their phone.

Something to be thinking about, especially since this technology is starting to become part of consumer products like phones.