7.25 General Idea about Final Essay

For the final project, I am looking into the topic about how the computational design tools will be improved in the future and what aspects they are into. To be more specific on the essay direction, I mainly focus on Mental Canvas , a drawing application which augments the imagination and sharing of ideas by spatial stroke, 3D navigation and shape transformation. Thoese zoom-in, zoom-out and free-form animation can simply be done by a tablet and a pen.

So I am wondering how can Mental Canvas shape the future design field with its features? How will people react or behave differently when facing this change? Is there something new about this application that is critical to the improvement of future computational design tool?

The biggest advantege and feature of Mental Canvas, I think, is that it breaks the limitation of 2D sketch and 3D space. It allows users to using 2D graphics to create a inner world that has multiple dimensions without costing too much work. Users can control how the camera rotates and how much it zoom in. In general, mental canvas just gives us a different window to observe the design world. Thus, how its features will facilitate future design tool is a great starter.

As for the prototype, I decide to use Processing as the visual tool and try to create a mock-up visualization of future city with the mental-canvas-like interactions. For example, users can touch screen or move mouse to see different directions of a city inside the canvas.

7.28 Continuing research on final essay

The general topic that I am interested in is that how the features of Mental Canvas can incorperate into furture design field and how it can be improved to be more useful for common field. Mental canvas supports sketching on what the app calls “canvases” that are situated in space. Artists can switch between drawing (sketching) and navigating spatially at the same time in a fluid way. This enables the artists to rethink and modify the work, advancing iteration and creativity. I think Mental canvas is a a great example of hardware and software coming together to harness pen, screen touch to help architects, designers and engineers bring their ideas to life in a more natural and personal way.

For further extension on my research topic, I digged into the world of how 3D space design tool can coorperate with other fields and what the space transformation and 3D navigation in 2D sketching bring to computational design.

8.1 Continuing research on final essay 2.0

To further extend the topic of my research, I thought about another conditional question that is how this technology will develop or help other field in the future 2042. At first, I wanted to create a crime-solve application that incorperate the features of Mental canvas. This app will allow users, or witnesses to draw what they saw at the crime scenes and how everything happened. The sketches they drew will automatically shape a 3D world through the careful calculations of 3D space coordinates and orientation. However, there are some website that currently exsit already being used in crime solving cases. One of these website can generate a 3D space module to simulate the crime progress. Therefore, the question about how features of Mental Canvas could be inovated in the future poped up. The world updates and changes everyday. New technology keeps coming out adn waking up people's mind. So I wonder, what if Mental Canvas, like its name, can help people store thier memories and generate a unique environment or scene that is valuable to users.

Therefore, I wanted to build a interactive canvas prototype in Processing that provides users a drawborad to sketch thier memories about a specific thing. The drawing will be placed in 3D space and the content can be in the location users desired, just as how Mental canvas works. As for the artifact, I want to hypothize that there will be a memory extractor machine and everyone can input thier own memories to the canvas. The canvas will intergrate all the memories into one unique scene that stores everyone's specific focus and happiness.

Unfortunately , I didn't find out how to hand sketch in Processing. But I canme across this intertsting library called Handy render. It can simulate a geometry shape that looks like being drawn by hand. So in my prototype, I plan to create a interactive canvas. Users can pick the color and size of a geometry they want and after selection, the geometry they picked will appear in a 3D box.