canpakes wrote:honorentheos wrote:You're in a field with which I'm familiar, or so I recall, and deal with visuals in a way that understands how to use a cool color in the foreground with warm colors in the background to illicit certain perceptions of a space that can be flipped by reversing that design decision while the space itself doesn't change. Things like that.
That's one technique. But it's highly situational. At the moment, part of what I do includes creating active renderings ('walk throughs') or static imagery that strives to be as accurate as possible in replicating intended conditions, materials or textures. This is a requirement because what we create must match client expectations as closely as possible, and getting to that point requires presenting material that redirects biased emotive interpretation in favor of an agreed-upon perception of environment.
If I were doing hand renderings relating more to biological than structural components, then what you describe would be more in the mix, but even then I've worked more with line art - and eschewed color - to tilt the client's understanding of the space more towards structure. This can still be emotionally manipulative but it is in my best interest to limit framing perspectives to how the client will actually experience the environment (e.g., a flyover perspective can look awesome on paper, but a person would never experience that POV unless they learn to levitate). Still, I understand what you're getting at, and a client's perceptions of space and content can certainly be 'guided', although not without ethical ramifications.
I was looking at it more from the design side than the visualizations side though that's worth consideration. Being a designer is being a capable manipulator of perception and experience. It's what a designer is paid to do, and what they are expected to be able to do that a person who lacks the same training, experience and talent can't. When thinking about a design, you think about what you want a person to experience, to focus on, to be distracted from. Part of the education of a designer is learning how to be effective in doing so. The greats, the ones we talk about decades or centuries after they're gone, are the ones who do/did it so well that you can't see the strings. Sometimes while golfing with friends, after they comment about how nice a hole is, I'll point out some of the strings to show it wasn't just coincidence that the view from the tee lined up as it did, or certain borrowed landscapes are framed the way they are, why one just has a general positive sense of well being in one place, and a sense of urgency to move on in others. The approach to the north rim of the Grand Canyon from Jacob's Lake is one of those masterful design decisions on the part of the National Park Service designers to enforce the sense of awe and one's sense of self juxtaposed against the scale of such a significant geological and beautiful feature. All the first year design principles are what they are, and never go out of fashion regardless of the state of technology or the tools used to create and convey a design, because they tap into our subconscious responses. As a designer, you may make decisions that gratify a person's expectations to cause pleasure, or you may subvert them to cause surprise. You may recess or elevate a space to create a sense of intimacy or a sense of elevated superior detachment. You may pick materials that draw attention where you want someone to focus, and you may do so in part to distract from looking at something you are attempting to screen or minimize.
Being a designer is being a skilled manipulator, and positively so. Of course, a client doesn't want to be manipulated into having a design visualized in a way that misrepresents what they are buying. And a visual resource specialist being paid to prepare photo realistic simulations to support an Environmental Assessment that has to be legally defended for it's accuracy is being asked to not manipulate the perspective of a viewer and instead make professional judgements as to where key observation points will occur and what someone will see from them from a typical view. But when a person is making decisions about camera placement and views in developing a visualization, even if its being professionally objective regarding the views chosen and the accuracy depicted, if the underlying design is good then the camera is going to move to focus on the places that SHOULD draw the eye, pass over the screening intended to not attract attention, and otherwise convey the experience the designer intends. Not because the camera choices do this, but because the design does.
As a designer, you would know a thing or two about ways to manipulate experience because every form of design is an art based on manipulating a person's experience when interfacing with it.
With the viral video, and breaking it down a bit, anyone who has a sensible idea of who Trump is recognizes he is a bully. He appears to largely have an oversized sense of his own abilities and is contemptuous of people who he views as weak, insignificant, or lacks something he wants. He and his administration have a history of putting minorites and people of color in that catagory by default. And his base is perceived to be an extension of him as a bullying racist.
The video clip that went viral couldn't be better selected and edited to trigger a negative response based largely on the above. The hat makes the easy connection to Trump. The kid is elevated above Philips. The smirking expression conveys contempt, the object of that contempt is a Native American with a hand drum chanting. The person showing contempt is too young to warrant being able to judge the elderly, assumed to be wise Native American drumming in the face of confrontation causing the youth to embody unwarranted self-importance and entitlement - it couldn't be scripted better. The title was superfluous. Your own eyes are telling you that right in front of you on video is the realization of everything that is wrong with Trump. And it's RIGHT THERE! Your eyes are seeing it, it's not a "manipulated" video where the kid is CGI or the clip is two seconds long. In design terms, your expectations are rewarded, and then some.
But watching it play out from multiple angles, over longer periods of time, and combining it with more knowledge and information that backfills behind the viral video segment starts to undermine or weaken the message conveyed by the viral video. The kid is, well, a kid. He bought the hat as a souvenir while in D.C. If you've been around D.C., you know how expensive everything is around the mall, and the guys selling souvenir items are all around it, every building has a gift shop, and everything in it costs much more than if you bought the same thing from home online. The only time in my life I ever saw someone actually open up a coat to reveal the inside lined with sunglasses they were selling (stolen or knock-offs, I don't know) was in D.C. just after leaving the National Archives building. I'd always thought it was some weird trope from a movie or TV. Anyway, watching longer clips show Philips move into the space. Most of the adults that show up in the videos say overtly racist things about the people around them, and there is a sense that the confrontational aspects of it preceded the kids even arriving and last after they get on the bus. When Philips moves in, he is obviously pausing and basically engaging the entire group of kids. When he moves closer to them, it doesn't appear to be the case he is trying to move up the stairs so much as towards the kids. When you see videos of him and the kid standing face-to-face for longer segments of time, they show the kid's face with a range of expressions most of which are largely neutral. At one point, he turns and taps another kid on the shoulder to try and get him to stop engaging verbally with another of the Native American group where both had said offensive things.
Point being, if you never, ever saw the viral clip and had the associations it triggers go off in your mind, it's difficult to recreate that same experience watching the same event without the editing choices made in creating the viral video. Seeing the clip with this large context in mind makes the strings it pulls apparent.
If you read EA's bookend in the previous thread which I quoted a few posts back and linked to, the article he linked acknowledges that it really isn't about the kid it's about the things regarding Trump that it evokes. That article can't bring itself to acknowledge that putting the kid in the middle of it was a mistake, much like...well. But it's point is accurate in so far as it rightly states at the end of it all this is about the things we associate with Trump that the video evoked. Trump's a bully, he's contemptuous, he holds minorities in particular contempt, he's the embodiment of all kinds of privilege, etc., etc.
As we know, there are psychological behaviors involved when we make choices. We tend to immediately lock in our decision, reduce the apparent value of the alternatives we didn't select, and the choice or decision we make becomes part of our identity in a way. It's personal to then suggest something about the choice could have been off because it feels like saying something about us is off.
Setting aside this particular incedent but looking more at the context in which social media plays such a role in informing people's initial impressions of an event, it seems the most critical thing to take away from this that we can't avoid being biased or having the reactions we have built in that get triggered by a skilled presentation. But we ought to look for the strings rather than believe the magic trick is real, hold off on committing to a position so we can reduce the further urge to defend an initial reaction because it's part of us and that operates using all kinds of mental processes that appear to be objective while being anything but that, and acknowledge that we're all primed to be manipulated and what we experience daily is largely built on the work of skilled manipulators which is not bad per se but is the reality of the modern world.
ETA: I would add, I think part of the heated debate that surrounds this is the extension of the idea it represents Trump rather than it being about what actually happened that day in that place. It can seem like a dismissal of Trump's nature or his influence to argue that the original video misrepresented what was going on, and the kid at the center of it all is being publicly whipped as a scapegoat for Trump. That should also be cause for reflection.
are not defenses either. Again I am commenting only on this minor part of the action, and how it would be viewed as a student behavior. Just because other worse things happened doesn't mean this should continue to be glossed over as acceptable behavior in the moment.
