Above the Noise

The project methodology combines autoethnography (Ellis, Adams and Bochner, 2011) with practice-based design research (Frayling, 1993's "research through design" — where the act of designing and building serves as inquiry itself, rather than an illustration of prior conclusions).

The interactive artefact is structured as a continuous scroll of twelve scenes. The experience moves progressively from an initial domestic environment through the growing prominence and intimacy of a recurring machine, arriving at a scene that deliberately breaks tone to compare the personal account against external data, before reaching its resolution.

The structural approach builds on precedents such as A Memoir Blue(a Master's thesis project using two visual registers for childhood memory versus present reflection) and Wu's Immersive 3D Story(a scroll-navigated cinematic biography using comparable WebGL spatial tools).

The central thesis of the project argues that "the importance of the object to a child is not determined at the first meeting but is instead built up through use."

The narrative involves three materially different machines across the timespan covered. The visual language tracks this transformation, shifting from tangible physical hardware into a BIOS boot sequence and desktop navigation environment before expanding into an abstracted digital space.

The project was evaluated against Zimmerman, Forlizzi and Evenson's (2007) four lenses for interaction-design research contribution: process, invention, relevance, and extensibility, with process serving as the primary claim (demonstrating that the making was documented rigorously enough for the reasoning to be verified).

A small round of outside viewer feedback was conducted specifically to test whether the private account communicates as intended to audiences without the researcher's personal context.