APD WEEK 1: Obervation+Self

Xianyao Li - s3875720

Theme: observe self
 

Context:
The theme of this week is to observe ourselves. We all have been observing ourselves for years, so I was wondering how I look or feel from others' points of view, that is why I decided to 'observe' myself through another perspective. The next question is whose perspective should I choose, I would like to try someone who is really close to me but has not got a chance to discuss this kind of question, like how do you think I am or what kind of person you think I am. I could not think of a person, because I just stay home most of the time, especially Melbourne locked down recently, I just sit in front of my computer, play games, or work. And that's when I thought why not figure out how my computer 'feels' about me.

Method:
So the target is to understand how the computer feels about me if my pc is a 'person'. So all the outcomes will be information that we humans can understand, but the ways and methods to get the results will be more objective, through statistics, calculations, to pretend the 'person' is a computer. The only way that humans can 'talk' with a computer is by typing on a keyboard, so I downloaded a keyboard monitor software to record all the typing I did last week. Then import the file into Excel to figure out what letters I typed and how many times they appeared. Except that, I track those letters back to see what are the words I typed by using those letters as an initial letter, for example, letter b, it used for words like a boss, because, but, I gave all of that word an emotion, for example, the word 'because' give me a rigorous feeling. So every time this letter has been used the percentage of the emotion will increase. After all of the preparation work, the last step is to sum all the data up, I got a table with all the emotions' percentages from last week.

Response:
According to those data, I am a relatively rigorous person. I think the reason is that I discussed a lot with my group members about our studio 2 project, settings, character designs, research, and everything, I might use a lot of rigorous words to describe. Simultaneously, typed a lot of wrong words, so last week, I am a person who talks a lot about rigorous content but often typed wrong words, from my computer's point of view

Reflection:
The process was actually more interesting than I thought.  Last week, when I turned on the keyboard monitor app, I really cared about what words to type, because it would influence the result, which made me feel like the computer is really someone who I need to care about. To pretend someone's point of view, you really need to think and act that way. After this exercise, it feels like my computer has become a character, it is not an emotionless machine anymore. At last, I took a photo with my computer’s camera, maybe that’s how I look like if it is a human. So, these are the outcomes, a meaningless photo with some useful data.

Downloads:

Download File: statistics-without-emotion.pdf
Download File: raw-.pdf
Download File: statistics-with-emotion-.pdf