Music Apps

I've been hunting around the app store and have discovered a few apps for my phone that should be able to help me make some tunes for MC Sustain to rap to. The most interesting and powerful one is called iMaschine which looks really cool and fun to play with. I've actually had it on there for a while but haven't really had a chance to play with it yet. Now should be a good opportunity to get to use it without feeling guilty that I'm not doing any Uni work. I WILL be doing Uni work :) The only problem with this is that it's quite complex and I'll have to make the music from scratch, record the lyrics seperately and then combine them together in a separate music program.

Another good one I found is called Cipher. This one has been created for rappers to freestyle to and comes with a collection of pre made beats for you to rap over and record your lyrics to just using the phone. You can then export the finished product directly onto Facebook which should be handy.

Another good one was suggested to me by Sam Bartlett and is called Autorap. This one is a bit simpler again and all you need to do is choose a beat and record yourself talking and the app magically converts it into a fully sick rap for you. Sweet as!

MC Sustain

Students as Villains

After seeing all the mess that got left on campus the other day I was thinking in today's tute about portraying the students at UC as being villains that were polluting the campus with their laziness and unwillingness to pick up after themselves. I see it all the time. People go through Maccas drive through then decide to park by the lake and eat because they enjoy the view and feeling of being out in nature. Then when they finish, they just dump all their rubbish out the window and drive off. WTF!?

I wish I was a super hero sometimes so I could deliver people like this the flying head butt they so desperately deserve.

Unfortunately this behaviour seems to be the norm more than the exception in the younger generations and cleaning up after yourself seems to be thought of as being uncool. I wonder what the best way to change this mindset is. Would the threat of violent retribution work best or would the message work better coming from someone that they can relate to? Somebody who is down on their level yet respected enough to be looked up to.

I think that music would be a good way approach. An artist's lyrics and image can reach people in such a way that they are not being told what to do, they are merely being informed and educated and allowed to come to their own conclusions. If people can make their own mind up, it's likely to be a longer lasting lifestyle choice and not just a temporary change born out of peer pressure.

The only problem is that I'm not much of a musician. Sure, I played piano and saxophone when I was a kid, played drums for a while and have been DJing for the last ten years or so....So actually I uh do have quite a bit of musical history and maybe just a little bit of know how.

But the question is:

  Could I produce some music that could help get the sustainability message across to the UC massive?  

In a serious way, relying on deep lyrics and quality musicianship? No.

In a piss taking way relying on lyrical and musical cliche's and delivered in a fun and amusing way? Mmmaybe....

Makeup Workshop Week 8

This week we had a super quick workshop (1hr) that tried to make up for us all missing the real (3hr) super awesome one that happened last Wednesday. In the real workshop they came up with a few categories for the main audience demographics at UC which included;

• Students
• Staff
• Businesses
• Admin 
• Clubs

They broke this down further into a huge list that Stephen has posted on his blog.

Between the workshop and our supplementary one this week Stephen came up with a few more that he gave us the choice of using for the next step. They included;

• Health Centre Patients
• Banks
• Gym Junkies
• Concert Goers
• Bike Riders
• Car Drivers
• Bus Travellers
• Motorbike Riders
• Deans (who have underground car parks outside building 1)
• Walkers
• Joggers
• Builders & Tradies
• Ping Pong Players

Somehow my group ended up with the Deans as our demographic which made it really hard to do the next step of identifying media forms that the Deans identify with because I have absolutely no idea what they are like.

Working on the assumption that any dean would be super highly educated we came up with a bit of a list of media forms they would use;

• Email
• Moodle
• Intranet
• Academic Journals
• Monitor Magazine
• Linked In
• Mobile Phones
• Advertising & Marketing
• UC FM

From there we guessed that the media forms they would probably identify with the most would be email and academic journals.

Character Development

So the next step was to sketch a character that the Deans might relate to to help create awareness of sustainabilty at UC.

Huh? What sort of character would deans relate to?

People more powerful and educated than themselves I would imagine. But who? Obama? Kevin Rudd? Nelson Mandela?.... How about...The UC Vice Chancellor Stephen Parker?

I really don't know much about him at all but apparently he grew up in the 60's and rides a bike to work everyday. He's obviously well educated and well respected around UC as he is the Vice Chancellor but is he suitable to use as a character to help spread the message of sustainability at UC?

Probably not.

Yuk

I was walking from UC down to Belconnen the other day when when I came across this:

It looks like the kiddies living on res have had themselves a little party and probably chose to do it outside because it was a nice day to be out on the grass enjoying nature. 

Not Anymore!

So UC needs to develop a culture of sustainability on campus? Yeah, no shit. By the looks of all the rubbish and how many goon bags there are hanging about there must have been at least 10-15 kiddies at this shindig and every one of them just walked off and left all this crap behind. It's right outside all the res buildings too so it's not like they wouldn't have seen it the next day either.

Little shits.

What UC needs is somebody to get out there and open up a can of whoopass on people like this who blatantly litter and leave their mess for other people to clean up. 

UC needs a hero...  

Week 5 Tutorial

In this week's tute we got broken up into groups and talked about who we had interviewed for last week's exercise. While each person was speaking the others in the group wrote down questions we had about their story on post it notes. We then analysed the questions we'd written to see if there were any common themes and grouped them accordingly.

From our questions we came up with the groups: "What & Why, Who, How, When & Where".

Post it Questions

From this we deduced that if we wanted to learn a new skill, first we needed to decide "What" we needed to know out and "Why" we needed to know it. "Who" we could find to teach us. "How", we would learn it, and "Where" & "When" we could put our new found knowledge into practice.

We made a rough flow chart to show the process;

Flow Chart

Make Up Workshop Week 4

In the makeup workshop this week we broke up into groups again and spent some time developing ideas based around the user groups we identified last time. As a reminder, these were: Businesses, Residents and Procrastinators.

I somehow ended up working with procrastinators again which was fine with me because I know how they think. All too well...

Procrastinators are attracted by shiny, flashy things that distract them from what they are doing and them get them hooked without them even realising. We thought the best way to do this was with cartoons and browser based games that are simple and addictive.

Garden Survival

We had an idea for a multiplayer game called "Garden Survival" where four players would compete to grow and maintain the healthiest garden with the highest yield of vegies and flowers. The game would be turn based and players would only have limited resources to work with each turn. The aim would be to strike the balance between yield and durability. Every few turns random "events" would happen such as floods, drought, locust plagues and human/animal interactions, both positive and negative. Different crops and gardening methods would produce different outcomes depending on the event and the player who's garden is best suited to withstand certain events could deflect the event onto the other players for additional damage or even summon new events to target certain players.

Scores would be posted on an online leaderboard and people with the best scores at the end of each season would get to pick the plot of their choice in the real UC garden for the next season.

Garden Life

Another idea we had was for a cartoon series called "Garden Life". Which would involve characters based around what was growing in the actual UC garden that would come to life when nobody was around and talk to each other. The storylines would generate interest in the garden by representing what was actually happening there in real life and would be used to give the gardeners tips about the how to look after their plants, the best things to plant for the coming season and the characters would comment on the garden's users and either praise them for their efforts or take the piss out of them depending on how well they were caring for their crops.

Discovery

As part of the task set in this weeks' tutorial to interview someone to help us gather inspiration for the design challenge, Sam and myself thought we should take the opportunity to learn a little bit more about the facilities on campus to see if we could discover anything that already existed at UC that could help us create awareness about sustainable practices.

The first we thing we found absolutely blew me away because even after studying at UC for three years, I had no idea that it even existed. Introducing....

The UC Greenprint Centre

The Greenprint Centre was opened in 2011 and is the only targeted environmentally friendly green print centre in the ACT and manages to recover over 97% of all materials used.

When we poked our heads in down at the print centre we were greeted by the Operations Manager James Dumar. James was happy to answer all our questions and even agreed to let us record the conversation. We recorded the audio on a mobile phone but unfortunately the quality was really poor and definitely isn't good enough to upload on here so I'll provide a transcript of our conversation:

James Dumar, Operations Manager, UC Greenprint Centre

Sam: If we wanted to get something printed here, what are the steps we'd have to take and how would we get it done?

James: You can either register through the website UCGreenprint.com and then submit the job online either through the website or by sending an email with the job to printroom@canberra/edu.au, or you can just come up to the counter.

Sam:  What formats do we need to have our stuff in?

James: PDF

Sam: How are your products sustainable?

James: Well we print on FSC certified 100% recycled paper and we've won numerous global awards including the Deming Award three times and we are the only company to have done that. All of our machines are zero waste to landfill. All of the excess tones is recovered and used for print and we've got quite a few other initiatives that you can see on our website.

Sam: Ok, we'll check that out. If we wanted to get, let's say 50 A4 colour pages printed off, how much would that cost us?

James: It's 28 cents a page.

Rob: And that's regardless of how many colours you want printed?

James: Yes, it's a digital colour print.

Sam: So then if it's in digital does that mean it can be in RGB or does it have to be in CMYK?

James: Yes, because it's a digital print it can be in either format. It'll work itself out.

Rob: Do you advertise at all around the Uni?

James: Yes, we are in the Monitor magazine, we have a regular newsletter that goes out to the staff at UC and we have brochures that we send out to the heads of faculties, particularly in Architecture and Graphic Design so yeah, we do. 

Operations manager James Dumar and print room manager Malcolm Marshall at the UC Greenprint Centre.

 I expressed my disbelief to James that I had been studying at the university for three years and had not heard a single thing about the Greenprint Centre from any of my tutors or lecturers. James agreed and said that the centre was very underutilised by the staff and students at UC and that his emails to the various faculties usually didn't get any response.

As a Graphic Design student, we are often asked to submit high quality, printed versions of our assignments and it just seems crazy that we have all been driving all over Canberra to get high quality prints of our designs when we could have done it right there on campus instead. This is especially baffling considering that sustainability and ethics have become such a large part of the curriculum in the last couple of years so you'd think the staff would be trying to make the students aware of the existence of the UC Greenprint Centre.

The UC Greenprint Centre is owned by Ricoh, who according to James, have been dedicated to sustainable practices since the beginning. Even before it was cool. This dedication spans across all the company's  operations from manufacturing through to printing and is definitely worthy of praise, particularly its policy of Zero waste to landfill. I got this info from their website:

"The Ricoh Group defines Zero Waste to Landfill as a 100% resource recovery rate, or no waste used as landfill. Zero Waste to Landfill was achieved at its major production sites in Japan in March 2001 and at production sites outside of Japan in March 2002. Thus, the Group achieved Zero Waste to Landfill at all its major global production sites."

So there you go, on our first outing to explore what facilities are available that could potentially help increase the campus' environmental kudos we came across that gem. Who knows what else UC may have lurking about that nobody knows about.