Talk:Paige DeRaedt

You were able to really convince me that you were being honest in this project. You seemed to deeply consider each part of your face and body, and then realized how that fragmentary approach--which seemed to be built into this assignment--is at odds with how we really form our identities, as enunciated by the Palahniuk--nice pick!--quote.

I wondered a bit whether the focus of your source was the quote or Fight Club. You can of course be using both of them, as the assignment broadly specified using at least one outside source, but you introduce the quote, then spend a few sentences on the film, then go back to the quote two other times in your essay. I realized that you had a potential balancing act to perform, in not giving away spoilers to the film while still being specific enough for us to grasp the connection between the movie and your ideas; I think it's open as to which you could lean towards. When referencing the quote in the latter part of your essay, though, I think more specificity would have helped; for example, instead of "Like Palahniuk said..." you could say "When Palahniuk says [such and such], then [your own point]."

Back to the issue of creating your avatars, though, I thought you were very impressive. You struck at a good point in mentioning how our "imperfections" actually give us that human element that computer-generated avatars lack. You seemed to be very on top of the features of your face, so I trusted your decision-making through and through. Your second avatar was the most creative one I've seen, and you tied it well into the assignment by pointing out how you seemed to be projecting features of your own identity onto the identity you were (re)constructing of your cat. Enjoyed reading this.

- Fay David

I found Paige's essay to be a very frank and honest about her experience working with Evolver. Her incorporation of quotes from Palahniuk and a description of Fight Club were more than superfluous and instead offered a unique jump off point for her assessment. Indeed, she used them to create insightful commentary on the current approaches for digitally creating avatars. She describes this process as disconnected from the reality of how people generally conceive their notions of self-identity. Specifically, she points to the notion of constructing features individually as a foreign concept. I had not previously given this any thought, but upon reflection, it seems valid. She goes on to suggest that a person's identity is constructed as a whole, from the amalgamation of several unique traits. Perhaps, then, future systems should be focused on somehow directing users in the creation of the whole rather than individual features. Something like this would be a much more top-down approach rather than the bottom-up idea we see in evolver. Certainly, such a system would be a novel approach to the avatar creation problem.

Paige follows this discussion with another idea that I hadn't previously pondered. She pointed out that inherit to most of these systems is the concept of perfection through symmetry. In most systems, certain features, like eyes and ears, are controlled as a pair, offering no chance to decouple the two. She alludes to the fact, and the field of Psychology proves, that while humans consider symmetry to be a sign of beauty, nobody is truly perfect. Future systems, therefore, should take this fact into account and allow users the opportunity to design imperfections into their avatars.

-Kitty Allen