All about me and my super crazy interweb antics

Hello, you have found the blog and online portfolio of Christian 'Cookie' Cook, a final year Digital Art & Technology student from the University of Plymouth. On this site you will find the various ramblings and progressions of his studies in the digital world. Heavily influenced by the gaming industry, he aims to incorporate game into every day life; because life should be fun.

If you wish to contact Christian, you can find him on such sites as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn or alternatively you can send him a traditional email if you fancy.

POSTED 21.01.2012 @ 12:48

Mixing the Material & Immaterial

So far we have come to an agreement, Devonport needs to be rediscovered. Not only by the residents, but by outsiders too; including me. I have only been to Devonport once or twice, both times for the purposes of this project. Usually I am really good navigating myself around an unknown foreign space, but I really struggled to find my bearings this time. Looking at maps has no uses, pathways which were once there have disappeared since or are cordoned off by construction sites; something needs to be done. Our concept is essentially a re-imagining of the “Marauders Map” from [...] (read more…)

POSTED 20.01.2012 @ 12:29

Devonport: The Inbetween

From my previous blog post, I briefly mentioned the aiding in reconstruction of the Devonport community. Since then we have once again met up in our groups to discuss what problems the community currently faces, and went through picking apart the area plucking out keywords we found relevant. The physical structure and layout of Devonport has been forever changing. Once before it used to be its own town, but since the Blitz bombings in 1941 during World War II much of the area of Devonport had been practically wiped out. During the redevelopment phase which happened much much later private [...] (read more…)

POSTED 16.01.2012 @ 20:25

Digital Architecture: Material/Immaterial

It has revolved around to taking part in embedding the digital immaterial into physical material. Architecture and physical space is somewhere which I haven’t ventured to much in my studies, but have been presented with the perfect opportunity to dabble around. Presented with an area of Plymouth called Devonport, we have been presented with a pretty open brief on aiding the reconstruction of a community which has been deprived of attention for so long. All of the research activities in this module are group-work, and our lecturer has taken the task of mixing together students from the 2nd/3rd year of [...] (read more…)

POSTED 09.01.2012 @ 16:49

Smarter Parking for a Smarter Planet

Well, I will be honest. This idea had no time to incubate or develop over the Christmas holidays. Each member of the group had full plans over the Christmas holiday and didn’t get time to put any serious thought into the final outcome of this project. In some ways this is really good, especially for our group. Overanalysis is something commonly done which can detract an idea from its original roots. Having a short time period to work on an idea has allowed us to think up a very simple and intuitive idea which will change how we can live [...] (read more…)

POSTED 08.01.2012 @ 17:37

Elevator Pitch… ’nuff said!

After a couple of days going mental in my room I cranked out this short video to represent my elevator pitch for NIGHTLY. I’ll let the video do the talking, as intended! The music is royalty-free from the interwebs, titled Daddio by David Austin. Voiceovers done by myself, which sadly aren’t the greatest but will do! Enjoy.

POSTED 08.01.2012 @ 16:32

Living in a Smarter Planet

Another project done, another research task set! This time we have been presented with the technology of IBM’s Websphere MQ, which utilises a publish/subscribe methodology behind sending messages to and from different devices. In the first set of sessions representatives from IBM gave a demonstration of the software, and a workshop detailing the basics of how the system could be integrated into Arduino technologies. In the previous research task we also worked with Arduino, so having already worked with this technology before was a great advantage. The test system we first built together involved triggering a microphone threshold on one [...] (read more…)

POSTED 06.01.2012 @ 15:04

Useful List of Resources

When starting a business it is always useful to have a resource database, with links for support, funding etc. I have gathered a small list (for now) which will hopefully help me start up my business. Office Locations Name: Formation Zone Contact: www.formationzone.co.uk Initial Cost: £60.00 Monthly Cost: £100-150 per month. £60-90 per workstation The Formation Zone offices are located on campus at the University of Plymouth. Name: Tamar Science Park Contact: www.tamarsciencepark.com Initial Cost: varies by unit Monthly Cost: £150 + VAT The Tamar Science Park is located by Derriford Hosptial in Plymouth, which is just outside the city. [...] (read more…)

POSTED 23.12.2011 @ 15:27

Critical Analysis of Nightly Pitch Presentation

For the Venture Culture module I aim to develop an application that allows students/business to find/advertise events. With this I have previously had to pitch my idea in front of the class, not once but twice. The initial pitch was intended to be a short 2-minute presentation explaining the basics of my idea. I then went away and refined my idea, coming back to do a 5-minute presentation which contained slideshow visuals to aid my thoughts. To start I would like to address the negative points of the 2-minute presentation. I have only watched this presentation twice, which straight away [...] (read more…)

POSTED 23.12.2011 @ 13:32

NIGHTLY Branding & Resources

So prior to my previous post I have video footage of me pitching my NIGHTLY idea. The second video posted contained a powerpoint, and to make it easier I have here images of my powerpoint slides. Within these slides I hope you can get an understanding for the brand, and the final slide contains a mockup of a beermat idea, using a QR code to direct the user to the nightly system. Alongside this I have a master vector of the logo so it can be used on any sized media in the future. I wont post this vector online, [...] (read more…)

POSTED 20.12.2011 @ 16:01

Gamification of Dull User Experiences

There has been one thing this year which I have really been putting off, and that is my Final Project. It’s an individually marked piece which is worth twice the amount of the other modules, yet I have spent the least amount of time on it. Illogical I know, which is what im aiming to fix. My original thoughts before starting the year was to work on some new age game controlling device which would use usually ignored input schemes to control games. I wanted to do a bit of hardware hacking, maybe a bit of soldering and Arduino to [...] (read more…)

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