Concept – amfi's design-driven fashion label

By kwaldbillig June 26th, 2013

W h a t _ i s _ i m m e r s i v e_ a u d i o ?

To bring our concept to life, our team hired an international team of sound designers (Soundlings) to compose a piece that will be premiered at the catwalk show. These musician-sound designers have a wide range of expertise: live performance, creative coding, making new instruments, games, noisy music, dance, installations – the list does go on. That’s really the power of the Soundlings collective – the libraries of sounds, noise and music that they’ve compiled over the years can be shared and transformed in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Our team selected the Soundlings not only because we assumed they have a wealth of content already available – but specifically for their ability and willingness to experiment.

We were also looking for a way to deliver the sound, a system that was more than just a fancy set of speaker boxes to make the experience of the sound unique. (This was of course also due to the fact that asking the audience to wear headphones during the fashion show was simply not a possibility). The system that we chose makes possible a technique we discovered was essential to reviving the narrative of fashion culture: immersion.

But what is immersion?

Immersion is a concept that’s often studied in games, film and virtual reality. The idea is that coupling a visual image with audio totally consumes the seer-listener and captures every bit of her attention. The effect becomes exceptionally more powerful if the experience has interactive possibilities. A number of fields of study: acoustics, electronics, as well as data exchange play a part in making immersive audio a reality. For example, to produce a 3D soundscape for a game, the sound design must respond to a player’s actions in the game; i.e. if an enemy is approaching, the game sound should signal this to the player. The experience, although it’s only a controller and a screen, must be convincing. The idea is that if the sound is designed to “scary”, the player is mentally and physically experiencing fear.

This project represents the intersection of new media principles and the principles of sound design. Audio immersion is a means of narrative storytelling – and now it’s being brought to a Dutch fashion show for the first time. Keep checking back here as we get closer to the show – we’ll be able to share in full detail what we’ve been developing since February.

By kwaldbillig April 17th, 2013

D e s i g n _ p h a s e

Part one of the design phase

As our previous posts have mentioned, we’ve had a serious turn of events that is cause for concern. After pitching an ingenious idea, now we have to come up with the resources and the knowledge to make our dreams a reality.
Naturally, we need to be realistic and rational if we’re trying to transform ideas into innovations. This involves making an inventory and evaluating the technical possibilities and abilities within the group. But more importantly, the question for us: what possibilities are within the boundaries of our concept? With such an ill-defined question, we’re busy finding experts that can help us morph our possibilities into the creation of a physical design.

In other news, this week we also had a design presentation with all the other MediaLAB’bers. Because we structured the presentation as a brainstorming/co-creation session, we got some extremely helpful feedback from our colleagues.

By kwaldbillig March 28th, 2013

F i n a l i z a t i o n _ c o n c e p t s

Ending of the concept phase

Three bold titles with strong incentives for specific stakeholders. After more than eighty hours of sweat, tears, agreeing to disagree, and making changes – we’ve finally considered ourselves finished with the official Concept phase. Although we’re overjoyed to have come this far as a team, there’s a long road ahead of us. Naturally, however, we’d like to share our outcomes with our loyal blog following. What really made the presentation is that we reviewed the insights we gathered in the research phase that drove us to create these concepts. Each of them is indeed innovative in its own way – and in the words of Nietzsche: “the essence of all beautiful art, of all great art, is gratitude”.

“Creating a buzz on mainstream media by giving the fashion show audience a digital goodie bag with exclusive content”. This concept offers a “one-of-a-kind” social media feed overlaid on the desktop live stream, which is fed by ‘share’ function on individual pieces of static detail content being pushed to users at the live show through the AFW app. What makes this concept innovative is that instead of the social media feed be text-based, our feed would be one of multimedia where desktop users would be more enticed to click on and further interact with the images (thumbnails) bubbling up in the stream. The insight that drove this concept was that most every attendee has and is using their mobile phones during a catwalk show. Instead of having them being distracted all over the web, incentivize them to stay in sync with the brand’s exclusive content. The added benefit to this concept is that it offers traceability; the brand has the ability to pinpoint key influencers on social media and understand what social media channels matter for the brand.

“Telling the story of the brand through sound”. If you were to close your eyes at a fashion show, it would be hard to get a basic feeling of what the clothes are intended to make the seer wearer feel. With this concept, members of the catwalk audience would be able to create another layer of meaning for the visuals through carefully designed sound. Ideally this concept would also allow any soundscape that was created to be repeated in other locations, like at a fashion school’s open house day or at a retail store location. Perhaps also those tuning in from home via a live stream could also experience elements of the created soundscape as well. The concept is innovative in that the process of creating the sounds to be played back live at the show will involve sound design and engineering techniques that haven’t been deployed at a show before. At least not in the ways that we’re thinking. The insights that drove this idea to an actual concept is that sound is a member of the new media family that is often downplayed to the favor of the visual sense. In fact, what most people don’t realize is that sound is creating a large majority of the emotional experience of looking at an image.

“A highly visual portal to store and share parts of the creative process” This concept is a digital toolkit that makes it possible render student-submitted digital artefacts of the creative process in a 3D space timeline. Digital artefacts are any piece of material such as a video, a sound clip, an image, or digital representations of things in the physical world like a swatch of fabric or a handwritten note. This system would allow the artefacts to be approached real-time collectively and re-arranged, filed, or even just simply perused. The insight that led us to developing this concept was that the necessity of documenting the physicality of fashion’s creative process is afforded in the difficulty of repeating it. What makes this concept innovative is that the environment in which the digital artefacts exists contributes to their usefulness.

Our assigner came to the MediaLAB for our presentation yesterday, and the discussion that followed was delightedly deep and meaningful. Although ‘mum’s the word’ for which specific idea has been chosen, we’re proud of having developed together and delivered three feasible, viable and desirable solution concepts to our innovation partner. For now, it’s off to work – we’re running a “sprint” research phase, in which we’re making the planning for the final ten weeks of the project!

By kwaldbillig March 20th, 2013

C o n c e p t _ d e v e l o p m e n t s

Three directions

This week has been one of asking critical questions. Each member of the team has been tasked with playing Devil’s advocate for each other’s big ideas. We’re not only getting serious about how a particular concept might be technically feasible, but pushing each other as to the “why should people care?” aspects as well. This hasn’t led to an all out fistfight (luckily), but has definitely led each of us to have a deeper motivation to make something that really “hits the nail on the head”.

Reviewing our research question and the insights from our research phase has helped us sincerely in getting back down to earth from the idea generation phase. We pitched our three main concepts to our peers yesterday, getting feedback not only on our form, but our content. Our visuals need to be decidedly, well, more visual.We’ll spend the rest of the week developing storyboards and lo-fi prototypes to show our assigners how each concept will work.

Each of the concepts is so drastically different from one another it will be very interesting to see which one the assigners take hold to.
We’re finding out just about now how exactly difficult it is to be able to meet all of the needs of all the stakeholders to the project, especially those with differing opinions.

What’s more, we’ve been beginning the quest to work in tandem with the students who are branding, designing, and managing the brand. Of course, their feedback has been critical in helping us understand what’s possible, what’s useful, and what’s outright innovative. Our meetings with them this week have put a spotlight on who we’re actually designing these solutions for – information about the actual end users – vital.

Naturally we’ve been going through reams of flipchart paper, been doing a whole lot of fast talking, and huddling together around a computer screen to tweak visuals for hours on end. Our big presentation’s next Wednesday – over and out until then!

By kwaldbillig March 13th, 2013

I d e a _ g e n e r a t i o n

Ideas? Not enough ideas? Read on.

Time is something we don’t have a lot of here at the MediaLAB, that any LABber would affirm. Charlie Mulholland worked his magic on the group of us yesterday, pushing us to develop ideas. He said 100 ideas to build toward a concept were simply not enough. As Charlie says, 99 out of 100 ideas are “rubbish”.

In part through the use of the ‘75 tools for creative thinking‘ deck, Charlie’s mashup of methods triggered us to develop over 200 ideas in thirty minutes (naturally, the focus was on quantity not quality). After an hour of introducing the concepts of divergent thinking and convergent thinking, this thirty minute sprint put our theory into practice. After the seemingly ridiculous number of Post-It notes were created, we had to make sense of it all. Convergence time: Here’s Myrthe taking a pass at what we discussed for the last hour of our session.

As time is so limited, our goal this week is to converge into three workable concepts. To achieve this, we’re seeking as much input from our colleagues here at the lab. As it concerns our project, our interviews and continuing digital ethnography are helping us to define requirements and functionality for the concepts. In order to build three complete concepts to present to our innovation partner in two week, we still need at least 100 more ideas for our third concept. For next Tuesday, we have to transform these hundreds of ideas into three lo-fidelity visualized models, or paper prototypes. The clock is ticking!

By kwaldbillig March 11th, 2013

D i g i t a l _ M o o d b o a r d s

Groovy moodboards

Although none of us were lucky winners of the €26.4 Staatsloterij, we’re still lucky that we’re beginning the week with a fresh outlook on concepts. After spending the weekend getting inspired, today we’re creating digital moodboards of our inspiration. We spent a large portion of the morning getting familiar with the techniques required to construct digital moodboards. Since we’re still in the early stages of concepting, having a moodboard is valuable because the group can continue to refer to it when we get more attached to concepts. As Marissa would say: “When you’re in the flow, you have a tendency to forget”. When we asked ourselves why a moodboard is useful, we came up with the answer that it triggers the mind to associate what you see with other things, or new ideas. These new ideas wouldn’t come up if we don’t have something digital to spark the imagination.

As it regards making a moodboard that’s digital, its therefore easier to make the board available 24/7 to others, even those outside of the internal group. Initially, we discussed using Pinterest, but it doesn’t have enough functionality to support the tasks we need to do collaboratively. Although Moodshare.co is still in Beta, but we decided to use it because it supports real-time collaboration as well as multiple types of media. Here’s a small screenshot of our work in progress.

By kwaldbillig March 7th, 2013

C o n c e p t i n g _ p h a s e

Workshop brainstorming

Despite his tendency for slapstick humor and making Darth Vader impressions, our morning session on Design Thinking and Brainstorming with 2011 HvA teacher of the year Charlie Mulholland was a smashing success. With his background in the marketing world, the Irishman taught us that a common way to name the needs and wants of a customer are problems. Challenging us to define our stakeholders and why they care about our project.

Problem definition leads to divergent thinking, which eventually must lead to convergent thinking in order to make sense of the “loads of crazy ideas” that are generated during the divergent phase. Charlie showed us a graphic he snagged from TU Delft’s Marc Tassoul to demonstrate that the process of clustering and categorization directly after the divergent phase leads to a better selection of the best ideas.

Charlie says: “An IDEA on it’s own is not enough. Neither is creativity. The difference between creativity and innovation is that creativity is just an adjective. Innovation is an action that turns creative ideas into reality through design”. These creedos will be especially useful, especially considering we’re entering the Twilight Zone of the concepting phase, what those familiar with design thinking would call “the ill-defined problem”.

During the workshop Charlie introduced the 5 W’s and 1H method to help us redefine the problem from the perspectives of all of our stakeholders. By brainstorming out loud as a team, we triggered our brains to think of other options than if we were trying to do the same activity alone silently. The most important rule for any brainstorming activity is that there is no critique or evaluation of ideas. Of course, after this is over, there has to be a critical convergent phase – otherwise all the ideas that came out of brainstorming are essentially useless.

Defining our stakeholders and our interests led us to see our problem in new ways. Although it seemed childish at the outset, asking WHY that particular stakeholder would think that way several times in rapid-fire succession allowed us to uncover additional viewpoints that will be valuable in documenting our user (stakeholder) requirements. Of course Mr. Mulholland gave each team the assignment to come back next week with their user requirements documented. But he gave each team another task – get inspired; get out from behind the computer screen and provoke our minds with new experiences. We’ll present a mood board of our inspirations with our Part II session with Charlie next week. Needless to say, today was a very exciting start to our Concepting phase!

CREATING TOMORROW

amfi's design-driven fashion label

reviving the narrative of fashion culture

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