Sam Scaife - Digital Media Design BA

I want to look at this project from a nostalgic sci-fi perspective. With that in mind I thought a good way to build up more of an opinion on my perceptions of this would be to read some old sci-fi literature. I got 3 books from my local 2nd hand book store,

1. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
2. Burning Chrome by William Gibson
3. The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks

Burning Chrome

This was the first book I got. I chose it because I have previously read Neuromancer and it had just the sort of feel I was going for. Also as Gibson invented the word cyberspace I thought he was bound to have  the sort of ideas I was thinking of.

The book is a collection of short stories covering a wide range of topics. They have strong cowboy like male characters and the worlds come across as being really rough. There are a lot of dark themes throughout the stories and you can see that I wrote in my sketch book DOUBT in big letters and this was a recurring emotion I thought was coming from the characters.

As for the Technology It was all pretty advanced. There where some interesting descriptions about the UX of the users,

"A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3-D chessboard, infinite and perfectly transparent. The Russian program seemed to lurch as we entered the grid."

The description all seem really physical and as if you could feel them using words such as 'boiled' to explain movement. He also uses the acronym ICE which brings more feelings to mind when you imagine it. By talking about the physical effects on the users, such as sweating, it really sounds like an intense experience. While it would be very hard brining in this sense of something digital being felt and having an impact on your real world experience would be a really nice quality to build into my project.

Enders Game

I got Enders Game as it was a book which I had hear good things about but never read. I didn't really know what to expect but I ended up really enjoying it. *Spoliers* It's basically an account of how a future society groom a young boy to be able to wipe out a whole race of intelligent aliens. Parts of the book talk about Enders siblings who use the anonymity of the internet to influence political ideas of peoples and nations. 

The technology was not a massive part of this book. Though I may think this because the visions of the technology are slightly more extreme versions of devices we have now.  One of the main pieces if a 'Desk' which is essentially a large iPad with an app on it which is based on the users brain signal. I quite like its method of punishing the user for failing tasks. On each progressive fail the game sets you further back within the level (its more like a continuos world). This would be really irritating to play and think it would be interesting making a very difficult game designed to frustrate the user which makes use of this.

The State of the Art

This was defiantly the most surreal of the books I read, with stories such as an astronaut landing on a planet which has intelligent plant based lifeforms who then pluck his limbs off! It is another collection of short stories. At first I didn't like them as they have odd amounts of non human lifeforms in them, and some have weird structures.

The stories point out alot of pointless self destruction. Which I think is quite an interesting thing to highlight it would be nice if my project could deliberately damage itself. Again I don't think the technology is key in these stories, its about the conscious effect of the power they bring and the relationship which build up between the user and the device. These are powerful themes when it comes to trying to explore new areas within digital design but they do no themselves suggest a device or object to be created. 

From reading these books I've learn't that whats going to make my project work is keeping it grounded in human experience and emotions. Doing so will allow people to empathise with what I create.