Month: March 2023

Who are you?
My name is Jeff Murray. I am a graphic designer living in the Seattle area. I’m back in school right now to round out my skills and learn more about the best practices for the design process. I am getting married this summer and am getting super nervous as it draws nearer.

What is it that you want to do?
I want to work as a designer doing user experience/user interface design or motion graphics.

Why?
Because I love it! When working on projects for school I find myself getting swept up in the process of designing. It’s fun designing and creating and solving problems. I’ve been working as a designer or in design adjacent fields since 2016 and have yet to grow tired of it.

Where do you want to go?
I want to find a position where I can be financially stable. Something that will allow me to start a family and live comfortably with the people I love. It’s hard to see myself in a leadership position, but once I’ve developed my confidence I think I might find myself changing my mind and if offered a leadership role I think it would be pretty hard to say no to the opportunity.

What would you want to say?
Right now I mostly want to tell stories and solve problems for others. I like designing for myself, but without some level of guidance I find myself without direction and am more prone to loosing momentum. I want to be the person others turn to when then have a question or need something that looks amazing or when someone else isn’t able to solve a problem.

I found watching the videos from the CUT channel to be more difficult than I would have thought. I watch a lot of videos on YouTube during my free time and the types of videos CUT produces are very different from the content I typically enjoy. Scrolling through their recent videos I just found myself growing uncomfortable. Everything felt like it was meant to be edgy and going against the grain and I didn’t want to be part of the video participants’ discomfort. The videos I ended up watching were good overall, a bit emotional, and occasionally funny in a sometimes schadenfreude way.

My idea for a video SCC could produce is to have a number of people who have been randomly divided into groups of two (possibly three) be given a task to complete, such as assembling IKEA furniture, a Lego model, or something similar. The twist is that they are separated by a divider, one of them is given the assembly instructions while the other has to perform the physical labor involved but has not been given any information on what they are assembling.

I believe this could be an interesting experience for those involved and show how different people approach and solve problems differently. By having the participants interact only verbally they will have to be really cognizant of how they communicate.

For participants, I think using as diverse a group as possible would be most interesting. Pairing people of different beliefs, upbringings, ages, genders, disabilities, and more could potentially change the ways the other person in their group interacts with them and vice versa.

I am not sure how many groups you would need to participate in order to have enough footage to make a compelling video. The higher the number of groups the more expensive I could see this project being unless whatever is being assembled is disassembled afterwards (which seems like it would take too much time and effort, especially if you only have a single day of shooting). Potentially around five groups could make for enough diversity and representation among participants and lead to a good range of interactions and outcomes.

The event I found while exploring the metaverse was in Decentraland, LaLigaLand’s Crazy Golf experience. I couldn’t tell from the event wether or not the event was to usher in the Crazy Golf itself or just a new leaderboard feature. I’ll want to say that from what I’ve seen so far of the metaverse, I’m not impressed. I suppose there is a lot of room for improvement as technology improves to make the experience more enjoyable, but for now everything feels unfinished and unpolished. For me, the experience of interacting in the metaverse is everything I dislike about massive multiplayer online games (I’ve never been a fan of online multiplayer games because they give me anxiety) but without the stuff that makes it a game.

When entering La Liga’s online arena the I first thing I prompted to do was create an account or continue as a guest (I chose guest). I then had to create my avatar which I just randomized so that I could get into the Decentraland world quicker. Once I was in I couldn’t help noticing the difference between Decentraland and the world Michael Pierce showed us around. Decentraland was much more colorful and cartoonish. The avatars were more actual people rather than three dimensional skeching dummies.

La Liga dropped me into there welcome area which was mostly populated with none playable characters, most of whom you couldn’t interact with. I found the one NPC I could interact with who told me to explore and look for hidden shirts and that if I found them all I would get a prize. Not long after I found a pad that teleported me to the Crazy Golf course. It took me a minute or two to figure out how to play the golf course and then many more to finish all the wholes. I then teleported back to the welcome area where I found a 3D map of their locations. I went to the arena where another NPC told me to look for more shirts. This area had a number of issues, like people’s hair and eyes not loading and everyone in the stands turning to stair directly at my character (very unsettling).

I explored the rest of La Liga’s locations trying to find their hidden shirts and check off other items that had appeared on a list on my screen. It was probably the check list that got me to stay as long as I did because it gave me more of a reason to be there. Throughout my time in La Liga’s facilities I maybe saw one or two other avatars controled by actual people.

When it comes to the metaverse as a whole I see some potential, but it is nowhere near where it needs to be for me to want to actually be a participating member of it. I kept thinking of the dystopian book Ready Player One where the majority of the story takes place in a digital space, mostly because the outside world is such a piece of shit. Personally, I still prefer the real world and interacting in it and with actual people.