123D catch

Following Judy's suggestion on monday, I am playing around with 123d catch. Here's a taste of a tester: 

Re: 99%

So, many ideas were discussed in the podcast -99% Invisible- 78.

To me the most disturbing were:

-The multi-bet and multi-reel system, which made you place a bet a lot larger than you imagined, and frequently getting partial wins. The sense of winning even though you're losing- gladly walking into the snake pit- I find distinctly unsettling, even if I have experienced it with similar versions on a Pokemon gameboy game when I was a little kid.

-Following on from this, the extent that they have gone to to make it feel like you are not spending money. This is a fairly common concept nowadays anyway, with the mighty 'plastic fantastic', spend first-ask questions later mentality we have with credit cards. To have these incorporated into casinos is just wrong. A great business move, but the person who issued this must have absolutely no conscience whatsoever.

-Thirdly, the 'drawing in' of people using the inset screens and legacy levers. It would appear that casinos understand gamblers very well, and have developed ways of drawing them in. This seems equally evil, but as a designer, I seem to have less objection to it. The 'drawing in' and entrapment of gamblers into my battery casino is an important aspect of my design, and I should look at ways to achieve this better.

-Next, the 'flow' gamblers. I can appreciate that gambling to many people is about escapism, but when a machine has been designed to a point where it would be more disruptive to collect coins than continue gambling, there is a problem.

Lastly, the 'chaining' to the machine with a card, and general dehumanisation of gamblers is an aspect I too should consider in my design.

I will leave you with a particularly apt cartoon which Marina brought to the table on week one which summarises how I feel about this:

99% Invisible

https://soundcloud.com/roman-mars/99-invisible-78-no-armed-bandit -hands down, this is one of the most disturbing things I have seen on the internet, and I have seen plenty of disturbing stuff in my time. Will post an opinion piece after I listen to it again,

Hamish

Giving this thing another go

So i'm going to try and give it another go. I can see the value in it, even if I seem to lack the inclination. I'm going to try and run it more like a tumblr blog, with pictures and fewer words, and more posts.

Casino design

I also had some time tonight to think about my casino design. I have rapidly come to the conclusion that my site on Quay St. is a lot smaller than some of the proposed designs that I have produced so far. I will need to find some rough site dimensions, and use these to rationalise my design. The general lack of size (and my admiration for the existing building) means that my building will probably be burrowing underground somehow. This is fine; concept wise, as an architecture of guilt  would be at an advantage buried, hidden and shying away from all human contact. I like the idea of a travelling down a dark entrance tunnel to get into my casino, it would feel especially natural with the 'spiky' space design from earlier in the semester.

I have a couple of quick sketches as to the latest iteration of the design, and as much as the maze-like space was interesting, for a predominantly pokie-based boutique casino, it did not really provide many adequate spaces for pokies to occur. With this in mind and the site size realization, it was not really practical to have as many walls as were being proposed. These are going to be mulled over over the weekend.

Unfortunately, at this point I have but a sketch in my pad, I will be developing these over the weekend and a result will be seen at the critique on Monday.

5/4/13

5/4/13

Hi there!

Mike showed me how to publish archicad documents tonight. This means that I have been able to finally get drawings that keep their' vectorial qualities, and don't blur when you transform them.
Here is one of the pieces from my commitment document reworked so it's a vector piece, and not pixels! [EDIT] Apparently blogs don't like pdfs either. I'll show it to the tutors on monday.

I'm back

Hi there,

After a fairly long break (some of it due to laziness, some to illness) I am back posting. As promised, here are the initial mobile photos. I think they blurred with the movement of the mobile =/