Monthly Archives: April 2021

NEW MEDIA DOCTORAL SEMINAR – Thursday, 29 April 2021, 16:30 – 19:30

Welcome to the fourth New Media Doctoral Seminar of 2021, last one for this Spring semester!

The seminar will be held virtually on Zoom on Thursday 29 April from 16:30 to 19:30 (GMT + 02.00, Helsinki, EEST). Mediated by Professor Lily Díaz-Kommonen, there are again two extremely interesting presentations with a Q&A discussion taking place afterwards.

Click here to join the Zoom event!

Presentations are open for everyone. Welcome!

PRESENTATIONS

Picture of Tania Chumaira's work 'Understanding Spatial Affordances in VR environment through Mapping'.

Understanding Spatial Affordances in VR environment through Mapping by Tania Chumaira. Illustration © Harishazka Fauzan.

Understanding Spatial Affordances in VR environment through Mapping

by Tania Chumaira

ABSTRACT

The emergence of technologies has led to creation of novel spaces that aim to mediate and migrate our everyday activities. One of the most engaging novel spaces is the VR environment in which interaction and actions occur in one shared virtual environment in real-time. This new way of constructing space enables the creation of different spatial affordances. This research explores mapping in the VR environment as mapping is one of the most common techniques in architecture to read spaces and understand spatial affordances. This research hypothesises that through using mapping techniques borrowed from architecture discourse, we can be more informed about the VR experience’s spatial affordances.

BIO

Picture of Tania Chumaira.

New Media DA candidate, Tania Chumaira.

Tania Chumaira is an Indonesian-based architect. After few years of practice in architecture and interior design, she started to develop an interest in combining new media and spatial design to experiment with different spatial experiences without making massive and disruptive physical intervention. Being motivated by that idea, she later pursued her masters majoring in Interactive Architecture at The Bartlett, London. Currently, Tania is working on her doctoral research supervised by Lily Díaz-Kommonen and supported by Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation.

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Exploring an Illustrated Manuscript through an Interface based on Interactive Data Visualization

by Ferhat Sen

ABSTRACT

With the advance in digital technology, cultural heritage artifacts are digitized to provide access to wider audiences. These digitization efforts resulted in a vast number of digital collections while introducing a problem of how to explore or present these collections. Going over a gallery of images does not convey much information and keyword-based search does not seem to be useful in scenarios where the user is either does not have prior knowledge about the collection or does not precisely know have what s/he is searching for.

The objective of this research is to investigate alternative ways to display/present image collections using data visualization with a use case of an illustrated historical manuscript. Interactive data visualization can offer users the possibility to explore a collection along with the inherent relationships between the items in the collection with references to the specific qualities of the artifact.

By using a user-centered design approach along with interactive data visualization techniques, we created a prototype web application called Exploring Suleymanname.

In this presentation, we share the design, implementation, and evaluation of a responsive web application that enables users to explore the image collection of the Suleymanname manuscript through interactive data visualization.

BIO

Picture of Ferhat Sen.

New Media DA candidate, Ferhat Sen.

Ferhat Sen is a creative designer and engineer. He brings together design and technology to create innovative online/onsite digital experiences. He has produced and collaborated several projects using various media ranging from interactive installations to web applications. Ferhat is currently working at Stereoscape as Chief Technology Officer delivering solutions involving web, mobile, VR and AR technologies and pursuing a doctoral degree in New Media at Aalto Media Lab. His research interests are interaction design and digital cultural heritage.

Defence of dissertation in the field of Visual Communication Design, MA Laura Valojärvi

Zoom Quick Guide

The audience is asked to join at no later than 12:00. The defence will be recorded.

Event language: English  

Event page: In English In Finnish 

Title of dissertation:

The Cycle of Creative Resources: The creative process and creative well-being from the perspective of picture book illustrators

Opponent: PhD, Docent Maria Lassén-Seger, Åbo Akademi.

Custos: Professor Masood Masoodian, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Department of Media.

ABSTRACT

“Research studies acknowledge the complex nature of creative personalities and show empirical evidence for an association between creativity and mood disorders. Yet, there has been surprisingly little discussion of creative professionals who have lost their work motivation and creative spark. A critical discussion of this phenomenon is often reduced instead to conversations focusing on some variation of the idea that the unifying characteristic of creative people is that they all love what they do. This perspective does not reflect the reality of the working lives of creative professionals and ignores those creative individuals who have lost their passion for their creative work. In the studies presented in this thesis, I focus on addressing this gap and attempt to provide a more in-depth understanding of the creative process.

This thesis examines creative well-being and the complexity of the creative process from the perspective of picturebook illustrators. The methodological basis of the thesis is a qualitative approach called grounded theory. The term “grounded” refers to the idea that the theory emerging from the research is grounded in data, instead of having its basis in a particular theoretical framework. I collected the research data by documenting my own picturebook illustration process and by conducting narrative interviews with eight Finnish picturebook illustrators. Initially, my aim with the thesis was to gain a better understanding of the creative process of illustrating a picturebook. I started by trying to answer the question: what is the creative process of illustrating a picturebook? However, the more I examined my data, the clearer it became that it suggested a new kind of theory about the work-related well-being of creative professionals in general. Consequently, I ended up posing and answering two further questions: what are the main elements of creative resources, and what are the main factors contributing to creative well-being?

This interdisciplinary investigation draws not only on studies of the picturebook illustration process, but also on research on creativity and creative processes in general. It concludes by providing two visual models that have emerged from the studies presented in this thesis. The first – the Picturebook Illustration Model – presents the four-stage process followed when illustrating picturebooks. The second – the Cycle of Creative Resources – proposes that creative well-being could be observed as a cycle of six states of creative resources that have been identified in this thesis. Where on the Cycle of Creative Resources a creative professional finds herself has a direct impact on how fulfilling or draining she experiences the creative process. This thesis suggests a new way to approach, achieve, and sustain creative well-being. It concludes by proposing that creativity in itself does not increase or diminish in a person – it is always there, ready to be used and explored. What increases or decreases are the creative resources. This, I propose, is at the core of creative well-being.”

Image related to the dissertation. The Cycle of Creative Resources by Laura Valojärvi.

The Cycle of Creative Resources by Laura Valojärvi.

The dissertation is publicly displayed online 10 days before the defence here.

THE DOCTORAND

Image of the doctorand, MA Laura Valojärvi. Image © Teemu Valojärvi.

The doctorand, MA Laura Valojärvi. Image © Teemu Valojärvi.

Laura Valojärvi is a Helsinki based designer and researcher. In her doctoral dissertation “The Cycle of Creative Resources: The creative process and creative well-being from the perspective of picturebook illustrators” Valojärvi provides a more in-depth understanding of the creative process and creative well-being of creative professionals. Valojärvi has previously graduated with MA from University of Art and Design Helsinki (Taik). She has also studied illustration at Cambridge School of Art. Along with her doctoral studies and her work as an illustrator, Valojärvi has worked as a teacher and lecturer at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture since 2011.

For more information, please contact Laura Valojärvi.

 

Defence of dissertation in the field of Photography – MA Pauliina Pasanen

Zoom Quick Guide

The audience is asked to join at no later than 12:00. The defence will be recorded.

Event language: Finnish

Event Page: In Finnish | In English

Title of dissertation:

Kohtaamisissa koetellut.

Oppiminen dokumentaarisissa valokuvaustyöpajoissa

English title: Tested through encounters. Learning in documentary photography workshops

Opponent: PhD, Reijo Kupiainen, University of Tampere.

Custos: Professor Harri Laakso, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Department of Media.

ABSTRACT

Tested through encounters. Learning in documentary photography workshops research is academical study in the field of arts pedagogy. It examines learning in photography ́s major studies in a University of applied sciences, more precisely in two specific documentary workshops in which the photography of the students is at the core. The teachers of the study (Stefan Bremer, Encountering photography workshop as well as Japo Knuutila and Jan Kaila, The methodological workshop of photography) have carried out workshops using self-developed concepts for decades in Finnish photography study programs.

The methodology of this study is at-home ethnography with the context of the study being the researcher-teachers workplace. The researcher makes use of essential research material alongside her own knowledge and experience about the subject. The material consists of pictures and sound recordings of the teaching situations and is supplemented by interviews of the teachers and students. In the study learning is observed through the actor-network theory. In this case the learning is considered to be happening in transformations of the different human and non-human actors. Instead of seeing learning only as an individual’s progression, this research looks at learning as a socio-material process. To learn to be a photographer is to experience the trials of the unified functioning of human and camera in different encounters in photography environments as well as teaching situations in the dialogue between the teacher, the student and the student group.

The research accounts for the changes that digitalization and the internet have made to photography and its learning processes. The Documentarist now acts in a networked world, where the information concerning the study of art is easily available, international contacts are created through social media and the sharing of images changes the human attitude towards photography.

Alongside non-human actors the study also examines, for example the dialogue and authority relation between the teacher and the student. The teacher teaches in many ways, for example by setting up as opposition to the student and challenging them to overcome themselves as photographers. In Documentary workshops the idea is to be present in the world which is not entirely possible through distant learning using the internet. Being trained in being intensely present matters. Instead of examining the photographers identity the study suggests using Rosi Braidotti ́s concept of Nomadic subjectivity to look at the agency of the documentarist in different relations as a continually evolving process.”

The dissertation is publicly displayed online 10 days before the defence here.

THE DOCTORAND

Image of the doctorand, MA Pauliina Pasanen. Image by Kari Pyykönen.

The doctorand, MA Pauliina Pasanen. Image © Kari Pyykönen.

Pauliina Pasanen is a senior lecturer at the Department of Photography at Lahti Design Institute (LAB University of Applied Sciences). The methodology of her doctoral dissertation ‘Kohtaamisissa koetellut. Oppiminen dokumentaarisissa valokuvaustyöpajoissa’ (Tested through encounters. Learning in documentary photography workshops) is at-home ethnography with the context of the study being the researcher-teacher ́s workplace. Alongside the actual research material, the researcher makes use of her own knowledge and experience about the subject. The dissertation is published by Aalto Arts Books. The research is the first study about the pedagogy of photography in higher education in Finland. Pasanen has previously graduated MA from the University of Art and Design (Taik).

For more information, please contact Pauliina Pasanen.