Entry 8
Avery Slote
November 19, 2024
With the amazing developments our technical team has been making, this week I wanted to highlight their contributions by taking a deep dive into their perspective throughout the progression of this project.
As team lead, I sat with the technical team members, Taryn Young and Joshua Lien, to get a glimpse into their work process. As The Flow Within’s main component is a code-based visualizer made from real data on Stratford’s Avon River, their work has been crucial to our team. They outlined the creation of this installation into 4 different stages.
Stage 1: Planning
For approximately the first two weeks, Taryn and Joshua spent majority of their time in the planning stage of the code development. Separately, each member worked and tested on different components of the code such as the particle effects and the gradient background. This stage consisted of testing numerous effects to find out which methods translated properly on screen to match the vision of The Flow Within. Beginning from the ground-up, this stage included placeholder values for the future dataset that would be incorporated into the installation, including both numerical values and colour combinations. Although this stage was overwhelming, as the remainder of the project was still to come, Joshua and Taryn had lots of fun experimenting with many different effects.
Stage 2: Decision Making
After the individual portion of the work, Taryn and Joshua had to make difficult decisions on which tested effects would make it into the prototype code combination. The team noted the difficulty of combining the two codes together as each effect reacted differently to the order and naming conventions of the other member’s code. Through hard work and dedication they were able to overcome this barrier to create a combination for our prototype our team was very pleased to see! In this stage, the technical team also developed the click functionality hit test for the prototype that would act as a placeholder prior to creating the sister screen interaction and they added the real values from the data set for an accurate visualization.
Stage 3: Refining
Taryn describes this stage as “making it pretty”. Considering a large portion of why The Flow Within will be effective is based in aesthetics, this perspective is a nice one to have! During this stage, Taryn focused on refining the details of the prototype to align with the style of our brand, such as making the fish more recognizable and separated from the sediment effects as intended and upgrading the placeholder circle into a ripple for interaction. Meanwhile, Joshua focused on upgrading the placeholder interaction of a mouse click to a server that is functional with the participants mobile device. This was a big feat, and Joshua spent countless hours ensuring it’s success.
Stage 4: Compiling
The final stage is the stage that Taryn and Joshua are on currently! Right now, their tasks are to ensure everything is working properly and the interaction from installation to sister screen is seamless, the effects are accurate to the data, and the installation includes details that provide more context to the participant about what period of time they are viewing. This is the stage in which everything comes together.
Overall, it was interesting to see the full scope of the technical team’s workflow and the work that went into creating this installation!
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