Digital media | EPFL Graph Search

In mass communication, digital media is any communication media that operate in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronics device, including digital data storage media (in contrast to analog electronic media) and digital broadcasting. Digital defines as any data represented by a series of digits, and media refers to methods of broadcasting or communicating this information. Together, digital media refers to mediums of digitized information broadcast through a screen and/or a speaker. This also includes text, audio, video, and graphics that are transmitted over the internet for viewing or listening to on the internet. Digital media platforms, such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitch, accounted for viewership rates of 27.9 billion hours in 2020. A contributing factor to its part in what is commonly referred to as the digital revolution can be attributed to

Digital model-making and the encoding of design intent

Nathaniel Zuelzke

Across many generations, including the digitally naïve and savvy, digital technologies introduce something other to the design process. This other quality ranges from inaccessibility to facile but opaque production of complexity, yet in all cases has obscured the recognition of authorial control. Fundamentally, my research interrogates this loss of control, or confusion of agency. Using the architectural model as a site of inquiry, I seek out sources of authorial control in digital design and ultimately speculate productive forms of digital agency for architecture. Digital models should be understood as continuing the legacy of architectural models rather than as a novel product of technology. As a mediator of communication, all models represent in increasing levels of abstraction. Understood literally, models mediate as images. In the formalization of underlying structure, models mediate as diagrams. Formulating structure as abstract logic, models mediate as mathematics. Digital models continue to mediate in these manners, but the nature of digital media places a new emphasis on the precise, computable definition of all of these roles. The digital process allows an author to construct a creative dialogue with a model. In this way, models are tools which operate on patterns of thought by creating feedback loops in the model- author dialogue. Formalized as the return of output back to a process as input, feedback is a mechanism which may structure both architectural form and the design decision-making process itself. In complex natural systems, feedback explains the formation of organizational patterns. In cybernetics, feedback explains the auto-regulation of an organized system. All forms of feedback can be understood as the cyclical communication of information. As such, processes of transmission and translation play a crucial role in the conveyance of information from source to receiver and back. Applied to digital model-making, feedback becomes an active decision-making mechanism, allowing an author to construct an apparatus to aid evaluation of work-in-progress and definition of increasingly specific intents. Appropriating the techno-industrial concept of design intent and citing the computational mathematical basis of digital models, I speculate the existence of a non-metaphorical solution space which can be instrumentalized by digital designers. The formalized yet iteratively changing set of possible solutions to an interpreted design problem is termed “intention space.” Computational codification of design intent makes mathematical descriptions of a digital model accessible and affords the possibility for a directed search thorough the model’s highly-structured intention space. Intention space demystifies the digital design process enabling architects to directly manipulate digital media both intuitively and deliberately. The idea of intention space is explicitly contrasted with two prevailing theories of control in digital methods: authorless design and split agency. Unlike these assertions, the encoding of design intent through mechanisms of constructed feedback and visualized as intention space proffers digital technologies as uniquely enabling instruments within the creative process.

EPFL2012

Content and Context-Aware Interfaces for Smarter Media Control

Mathieu Hopmann

Since the arrival of the computer at home during the '80s, the importance of the digital world in our daily lives has hugely increased. First centralized on a unique computer, the digital world spread over several devices that surround us: smartphones, tablets, cameras, music players, etc. However, despite the increasing number of devices around our digital lives, the way we interact with them has barely evolved. Digital devices are not aware of their surrounding environment, and they often use interfaces and mechanisms which are computer-oriented. The next step in the evolution of our digital life will be centered on a better integration of the digital world with the ecosystem of devices that surrounds it. In this work, we illustrate this upcoming evolution through the development and evaluation of original interfaces dedicated to the control of digital media. Based on our research, we organize these interfaces in three areas of improvement: unification, automation and familiarity. This thesis is divided in four main chapters. The first chapter presents the evolution of our digital world over the last 30 years. The next three chapters are centered on the three areas of improvement that we defined: unification, automation and familiarity. Unification corresponds to the fusion of digital worlds as a unique and coherent whole that devices should interact with. Automation consists in using information obtained from the user and her environment in order to simplify or automate the interaction with the digital world. Finally, familiarity allows benefiting of users' past experiences in order to create friendly and intuitive interfaces.

EPFL2012

Digital model-making and the encoding of design intent

Nathaniel Zuelzke

EPFL2012