Following the feedback from the previous week, I focused on the question “What makes the screen unique?” to make my inquiry more specific. I started to find the unique character of the screen at this stage.
The characters on the screen I found were:
- Light(digital screen)/non-light(screen for projection)
- Even though the size of the screen is the same, we can show the size of the contents with any size. That makes the different perception of the screen and contents for audiences.
- The screen make us(human, users) information. Our movement itself could be information, our touch-motion itself could be information, and the contents on the screen are reacting to our touch-motion so it could be related to user experience.
- The screen is medium. We look through something by watching the screen.
- The size of the screen we made changes our way of thinking and the way of acquiring information. For example, the smartphone has been changing our reading habits.
Among these characteristics of several types of screens, I focused on the touch screen’s characteristics because I thought that touch screens are the latest screen. Also, it was because smartphones, which are the representative of the touch screen, are the most daily item in current life.
And here, I found an interesting relationship between the touch screen mechanism. Just as in the following image, supersonic(smartphones these days are using supersonic) is flowing on the screen. There are supersonic generators on one side and receivers(sensors) on the other side, and this mechanism makes the invisible supersonic grid on the screen. When we touch the screen, the device lost the connection of the supersonic on that spot and starts to find the exact spot where the connection has been lost. And by finding the point where the connection has been lost, the device perceives the ‘touch’. In other words, when we touch the screen, we’re finding(touching) an exact point of the screen, but at the same time the perspective of the mechanism, they lost the connection of the supersonic. It was an intriguing mechanism for me because I’ve never thought about the mechanism of the touch screen even though I’ve been using them every day, and also most people are not recognizing this mechanism.
when we touched the exact point.
I was interested in this dualistic relationship of the mechanism of the touch screen and wanted to play with the invisible grid system as a beginning.
As a starting point, I did a screenshot of 96 pages on Safari that I’ve been opening for almost a year.
Then, I made the grid and tried to spot the points that I might have touched and swiped. And I gathered them altogether to see what it brings out.
After the previous process, I thought that I want to bring this invisible mechanism into real life, which means giving materiality to the grid and points.
Since the ‘light’ is also one big characteristic of screens, I wanted to use this in the process. I traced all same spots on the same size paper and burned the exact spots after folding them based on the grid. For me, this version is also meaningful because by finding the spot I touched on the paper, the exact part of the paper is lost by the fire.
Feedback:
The mechanism that we don’t recognize in daily life is interesting. But what’s my passion? What do I want to do with this ultimately? Want to present the mechanism?