The Future Of Smart Things Is Dumb:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3033781/innovation-by-design/the-future-of-smart-things-is-dumb
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3033781/innovation-by-design/the-future-of-smart-things-is-dumb
Other Recommendations by Barry Katz:
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Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects
www.moma.org Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects thrives on this important late-twentieth-century development in the culture of design, which can be described as a shift from the centrality of function to that of meaning, and on the twenty-first-century focus on the need to communicate in order to exist (fig. 2). From this new perspective, all objects occupy a unique position in material culture, and all of them contain information beyond their immediate use or appearance. It is not enough for designers today to balance form and function, and it is also not enough simply to ascribe meaning. Design now must imagine all its previous tasks in a dynamic, animated context, as Khoi Vinh points out. Things may communicate with people, but designers write the initial script that lets us develop and improvise the dialogue. The post-digital design movement is an extreme expression of this romantic attachment to physical things. It is made up of technologically savvy designers and artists who prefer the innocence of old-fashioned objects, such as the London-based Newspaper Club: sexy geeks who declare themselves to be “about ink on newsprint” and will help anybody publish a newspaper. In 2010 James Bridle, one of the club’s founders, published a compendium of Wikipedia entries on the Iraq War, collected between December 2004 and November 2009, in twelve classically bound, encyclopedia-style volumes, because “physical objects are useful props in debates like this: immediately illustrative, and useful to hang an argument and peoples’ attention on. This project makes a crucial point: in an era when so many mediums and channels are available, the key to effective and elegant communication is choosing the right one, the right interpreter. The most recent technology, in other words, may not be the most appropriate. Transmedia storytelling, a technique for telling stories on multiple platforms—such as a combination of television, Internet, and mobile text—is not a novelty anymore, and a few years have gone by since the first college application submitted on video made news. Our fever about virtual and augmented reality has subsided, as Kevin Slavin points out in his essay. Sometimes the best way to say it is still with flowers. |
RCA Design Interactions Projects
Julika Welge: DMW / Irreality Office Mathias Vef: Me-Loop
Julika Welge: DMW / Order For Breakfast
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Watzlawick's Five Axioms
http://www.wanterfall.com/Communication-Watzlawick's-Axioms.htm Axiom 1: Cannot not One cannot not communicate: Because every behaviour is a kind of communication, people who are aware of each other are constantly communicating. Any perceivable behaviour, including the absence of action, has the potential to be interpreted by other people as having some meaning. Axiom 2: Content & Relationship Every communication has a content and relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a meta-communication: Each person responds to the content of communication in the context of the relationship between the communicators.[2] The word meta-communication is used in various ways (and therefore not at all, by me) but Watzlawick uses it to mean the exchange of information about how to interpret other information. Just as the interpretation of the words "What an idiot you are" could be influenced by the following words "Just kidding", it could also be influenced by the relationship between the communicators. In the example given, the word "idiot" might be accepted quite happily from a close friend, but convey an entirely different meaning in other circumstances. Axiom 3: Punctuation The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of the partners' communication procedures: In many cases, communication involves a veritable maelstrom of messages flying in all directions. This applies especially to the non-verbal messages. The "punctuation" referred to is the process of organizing groups of messages into meanings. This is analogous to the punctuation of written language. In either case, the punctuation can sometimes alter the meaning considerably. For example, consider the occurrence of an angry response after an interruption, the latter having followed a suggested course of action. This might be interpreted as anger at the suggested course of action, if the interruption was "punctuated out" of the sequence, so that the suggestion and the anger were effectively grouped together as a tight sequence. However, if the receiver punctuated the information so that the interruption and the anger formed a tight sequence, it might be interpreted as anger at the interruption. |
Axiom 4: Digital & Analogic Human communication involves both digital and analogic modalities. This one needs a bit of translating! The term "digital", which today usually refers either to numbers, computers or fingers, is used in this axiom to refer to discrete, defined elements of communication. These are usually words, but very specific gestures with generally agreed meanings would also qualify. The term "analogic" also needs some translation. It is a variant of analogical, the adjective derived from analogy. It therefore refers to a correspondence, in certain respects, between things which are otherwise different. In this case, it describes a type of communication in which the representation to some extent evokes the thing to which it refers. For example, shaking a fist in front of a person's face would evoke the idea of violence. What else needs translating? Oh yes, "modalities". As mentioned in Appendix 1, the word "modality" is used in very many different ways. In this case, I think Watzlawick is using modalities in the sense of types or sorts of information transfer. Axiom 5: Symmetric or Complementary Inter-human communication procedures are either symmetric or complementary, depending on whether the relationship of the partners is based on differences or parity."A "symmetric" relationship here means one in which the parties involved behave as equals from a power perspective. The chance of airing all the relevant issues should be greater, but it certainly does not guarantee that the communication will be optimal. The parties could simply be equally submissive, or equally domineering. However, communication between equals often does work well. A "complementary" relationship here means one of unequal power, such as parent-child, boss-employee or leader-follower. This is much more efficient in some situations. For example, the unequal (complementary) relationship between soldiers and their officers means that soldiers are very likely to obey a surprising order, such as "Get out of the truck and jump in the river!" without delay – rather than debating it, perhaps with great interest, but quite possibly at fatal length. |
Project Intro
More Sensors: Accelerometers, GPS, Cameras, Soft Sensors (software that understands to feed your devices with more information). |
Blink of an Eye
"The combination of sensor technology and AI had made him a consenting dependent of caretaking technology. One half of mankind suers from scarcity, the other from its own laziness. Tomorrow I’ll nally have the computer readjusted, he thought." |
Switch
A body of 20 videos that explore the ambiguous rift between the digital and the analog, where notions of reality and illusion overlap with each other equivocally and strangely. |
Loading...
Loading… is a series of transitional objects that are activated when your browser detects that you’re waiting for content to load on the Internet. |
Designing Interactions
Bill Moggridge, 2007
Bill Moggridge, 2007
Durrell Bishop
Durrell wants to design objects that are self-evident, whether they are physical or virtual. He looks at electronics and notices that the shape of the objects does little to describe what they are actually doing, there is a contrast between these objects that are supposed to be interactive and the real world around us, which is full of self-evident things, we immediately recognize and understand through the mechanical properties they display by their shape: "The mechanical world has got a lovely solution for this, they are often descriptive of what they do"
Durrell points out that coins and banknotes are abstract representations of value, and suggests that physical tags can be designed to represent any abstract item, as long as we can remember what they mean by recognizing their form and behavior. Durrell is constructing a physical world to construct the computer space. |
Durrell Bishop, Marble Answer Machine
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Hiroshi explains the difference between graphical and tangible user interfaces. He illustrates the multisensory potential of digital technology by using sound in his Music Bottles project, and tangible interactions that allow the direct manipulation of input representations coupled with projected overlays.
Tangible representation is coupled with computation, and it can be controlled physically. One of the problem with physical representation is that it cannot change color or shape dynamically easily, so tangible representation is usually coupled with Intangible representation like a video projection or a sound |
musicBottles
MIT Media Lab, Tangible Interfaces Group Hiroshi explains the difference between graphical and tangible user interfaces. He illustrates the multisensory potential of digital technology by using sound in his Music Bottles project, and tangible interactions that allow the direct manipulation of input representations coupled with projected overlays. |
Dunne and Raby
Designing Interactions Tony and Fiona describe their fascination with complex pleasures and existential design. How can you design products that provide complex, complicated pleasures. They experiment with designs that pander to the bad side of people, appealing to contradictory and irrational emotions. The GPS Table: On the top surface the display shows the position, but when in doors, it just says "lost", by being lost, it asks the owners to do something. |
Bill Gaver
Designing Interactions Bill Gaver is interested in broad issues of mediated social behavior. Bill gives three examples of experimental designs that use weight and force sensors to enable designs with subtle interactive sensitivities. The Drift Table has a window in the center displaying slowly moving satellite images; the Key Table indicates the mood of people in a house, and the History Tablecloth illuminates around objects that are placed on it. More about the project |
Svenja Keune
Communicative Surface What kind of effects do interfaces+interactions have to our everyday life, our senses, our behavior? How can textiles make a change? As the world of communication is more and more entmaterialized, this talk focuses on haptical and emotional languages of interaction. I´m working with textiles and technology, my special interest is the humans´ relationship to an object and vice versa. What kind of effects do interfaces and interactions have to our everyday life, our senses, our behaviour? We will take a look on exemplary projects and will ask some objects for their very own point of view. Svenja's Site EmotionLab Site |
Camille Scherer: http://www.chipchip.ch/
Resonate http://resonate.io/2014/ Products Of Design Program MFA Student Works HapiFork back, like a fork that vibrates when you’re eating too fast. Designing Electronic Furniture for the Curious Home Link |
Terry Winograd
Designing Interactions Terry says that there are three main ways that we interact with the world in general; conversation, manipulation and locomotion. In the design of computers, the early time-share machines were thought of as conversational, the desktop and mouse introduced direct manipulation, but for the web people started to think about locomotion, about visiting a site by going to it. |
IDEO
Made in the Future Made in the Future is an effort to capture our musings about what a not-so-distant tomorrow might look like. Our tools—faster, cheaper, and more out of control than ever—have triggered seismic shifts in how we design, manufacture, and distribute. And that has us asking lots of questions: What new tools or technologies will we create? How will they change the way we behave and learn? How will they shape our world? |
Spoons with Embedded Knowledge
We make tools to help us solve specific problems. They have anembedded knowledge that helps us get things done. Think about a hammer, the claw to help remove nails is a piece of embedded knowledge. Someone solved that problem years ago and built it into the tool. New tools are more dynamic, they are responding to how we work and, in some cases, learning our habits. What could new tools with embedded knowledge look like? Will they read our minds? Would they change behaviors based on context? We wondered how embedded knowledge could help in the kitchen with everyday cooking. |
Simone Rebaudengo
Simone's Site Addicted Products In every vision of near future homes, households products are those ones that are connected to each other and always working together in harmony, creating that perfect, modern, and yet somewhat boring scenario. However connectivity changes not only the way we interact with objects, but also their meaning in our life. From tools they can became agents or companions with their own behaviour, motives and agency. I explored this scenario from the point of view of one of these products, looking at connectivity as a drastic change in its life. Suddenly a product could start to compare to others and its being used becomes relative. A sort of “peer product pressure” could emerge and change the behaviour of the product. Pushed by the pressure in its addiction, it would act in ways that are not completely understandable by humans, but that are driven by the increasing need for pleasure and relief. What could a product do to try to be used? What limits could it break? What would be its ultimate extreme decision? Stop working? Sell itself? Suicide? |
Addicted Products is a speculation, a question pointing towards our relationships with objects and the implications of designing smart and connected.
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Dominique Browning
A Manifesto for the Well Worn Home LIVE WITH FEWER THINGS THAT HAVE GREATER MEANING would rather have one beautiful wheel-thrown bowl than a set of five from a factory. I’d rather spend too much on something special than spend just a little bit on mediocre things. Decide to use the best of what you have, often. Every day is a special occasion. STRIVE FOR IMPERFECTION Accept blemishes and wrinkles—live with materials that age, rather than degrade. After having succumbed too often to their ways, I’m now wary of modern materials that age poorly. What’s more beautiful than a heavy wooden cutting board etched with the marks of countless meals? What’s more revealing than the scars around keyholes from trembling hands unlocking a desk drawer to hide love letters? What’s more charming than the cigarette burns in the top of an old pub table, testifying to years of intense arguments and affairs? THE HANDMADE GLOWS WITH A HUMAN TOUCH There’s nothing more appealing than the feel of the crafter’s hand. Every morning when I drink my tea from a cup made by a friend, its two handles resting on porcelain hips, I am comforted. The slight chip in the lip that I’ve contributed reminds me to slow down when I handle what’s precious. DON’T BE AFRAID TO FALL IN LOVE If something—a shape, a color, a touch—turns your head, then go for it. If you’re undecided, walk away. Objects have an afterimage that burns into your soul. If it was meant to be in your life, then you’ll return and take it home. But nothing waits forever. So follow your instincts.\ |
BE INTIMATE Never keep your hands to yourself around the house. When was the last time you ran a palm over the surface of your old kitchen table and felt the ripples of hand-planed wood? Home is a place to peel back the layers, a place in which we feel safe enough to turn things upside down and inside out. HONOR THE PASSAGE OF TIME Everything has a beginning, a start in life. Everything was once new. Every yard of fabric comes fresh and wet off the dyer’s table. Every board leaves the sawmill gleaming. That’s just the beginning of the history. Living in our houses is about letting our rooms mellow, letting our fabrics fade and soften, letting our tables scuff and scar, letting our rooms capture our stories. Those are our traces; they’re born of our accidents and intentions. HANG ON FOR DEAR LIFE Our things, and even our homes, seem to be more disposable than ever. We feel trapped in a cycle of using and tossing. We don’t repair: We replace. We’re bombarded with a new cultural imperative, reinforced by countless advertising messages to renew and refresh our furniture, our fashions and our faces. It’s time to resist. We’re in for a cultural—and domestic—reset. |
Matt Webb, Berg
Products Are People Too Design can be easier when we acknowledge that products share our homes and malls, and have wants and lives of their own. In short: Products are people too. Matt traces a path through social software, adaptive design and engaging technology, and puts forward an experiential approach to product design. Excerpts from presentation: (Slide 18) You know, and we don’t just use products. From the product design world, I’ve seen that products use us. They use us to sell themselves. They push experience into our lives, making us act different individually and with our friends. We, and products, live in the same world, acting on each other, in a huge network of relationships. We are none of us, humans or non-humans, ‘sovereign individuals,’ to use a phrase I heard earlier today. (19) Products are not our servants, nor we theirs. Our relationship is more symmetric. We tell them what to do, and they tell us what to do. We negotiate. Products exist over time. We meet them, we hang out with them, we live life together. Products communicate in ways from the subtlest of personal psychological interventions, to acting in our social worlds. They act in the market, by carving out niches for new product types. Or they prove points. Or they make us more playful, or flirt more, or more dogged, or whatever. I don’t sound like I’m talking about products anymore, I sound like I’m talking about my friends. So it struck me that, with all these constraints, maybe there’s another way of looking at designing products. A way that doesn’t have ‘design for a purpose’ first and then all these millions of constraints and inadequate perturbations afterwards. Maybe the assumption of perturbation theory has totally failed, and we need a new starting point instead. And so ladies and gentlemen, I would like to submit this: Products are people too. (20)I don’t mean that we should make products like intelligent agents, or anthropomorphic products, like little computers with faces drawn on them. All I mean is that it’s better to operate under that assumption that products have wills and that they act in the world and that we relate to them… than under the assumption that none of those things are true. So what does this phrase mean? How does this effect what I design? Well, two points: First is that we, users, already treat products as actors in the world. We already bend to their will, already defer to them, and already buy other products to fit in with them. It’s only as designers that we’re negligent, designing for specific utility instead of the whole story. By changing to think like this, we’ll make more humane products which go along, better, with how we want to relate to them. Second. Now we understand the emergent properties of products better – by saying they’re like people – we can use human solutions as approaches to deal with these same properties. |
(24) Instead of a definition, what I’m going to pick out a few things I’ve noticed from watching people, and apply them to products and see what happens. I don’t have any kind of system here, I just want to demonstrate that people-watching can be inspirational.
(25) Here’s one thing people do: They gossip. They chitter-chatter. Could our products gossip about one another? (27) To be honest, I’m a lot happier talking to people if I know their motives or ambition. If someone knocks on my front door, it’s important for me to know if they’re trying to sell me something. I wonder whether we’d be happier with products if we knew they had some goal, some “I want to go to the moon” kind of goal. We might not understand why they had that goal, but maybe if we understood their overall motivation, we wouldn’t be so annoyed when it didn’t do exactly what we wanted. What if my wristwatch had aspirations which were above and beyond the purpose for which it was manufactured? Would that lead to a different kind of respect? Okay, products with motives. It sounds spurious, but I think it’s actually really solid. When we deal with other people, we have a little model of them in our head that lets us anticipate their needs and responses. It helps us anticipate what they’ll do in any given circumstance. It builds trust (29) What if we treated tidying up our homes more like we treat sport? (33)
(34) That said, we don’t all of us make products. So really what I’m saying is that we’re now provided with a happy excuse to just look at people. To hang out, and look at people of all kinds: Humans, Dogs, cats, horses. Bushes, benches, products of every description. Once we know where to look this picture is jam-packed full of actors, each changing the world. |
Nonobject
Branko Lukic, Barry Katz, 2011 The mystique of functionalism: The idea that the legitimacy of an object derives from its performance. Form Follows Function:
In architecture: Architectura Da Carta, explorations of the unbuilt and unbuildable. For industrial designers, a few have dared to use design as an epistemological probe, as a means of surveying the bounds of the believable and pressing, against the perimeter of the possible (xxv) Often reduced to utilitarian problem solving, there is an aspect of design that might better be described as "cultural research". Branko uses: Humor, Disruption and Radical Extrapolation. (xxvi) The designs presented are applied anthropology, psychology and sociology, they begin with out most fundamental human experience, our ability to craft the artifacts that define our place in the world, and ask how we have reduced them to dull commodities. |
Nonobject is an approach to design that takes advantage of technical innovation but is not driven by it. It is human centered but does not pander to the market. It starts not with the user of the object but with the space betweeen.
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Alien Phenomenology or What It's Like to be a Thing
Ian Bogost, 2012 The speculative realists share a common position less than they do a common enemy: the tradition of human access that seeps from the rot of Kant. To be a speculative realist, one must abandon the belief that human access sits at the center of being. Object-Oriented Philosophy: Object-Oriented Ontology: contents that nothing has special status, but everything exists equally. Environmental philosophy has argued that humankind is to ecology as man is to feminism or AngloSaxonism is to race. But posthuman approaches still preserve humanity as a primary actor. The "akinness" of various material behaviors to human thought and feeling has promise, but it also draws far too much attention to the similarities between humans and objects. We need not discount human beings to adopt an object-oriented position, but we can no longer claim that our existence is special as existence. The wire tries to take apart the institutional complexities of bureaucratic experience, Ace of Cakes does the opposite: it deletes human rationales as much as possible. The act of wonder invites a detachment from ordinary logics, of which human logics are but one example. |
Sentences of Conceptual Art
Sol Lewitt, 1969
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Speculative Everything
Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, 2013 When thinking about "The Future", it is usually concerning predicting or forecasting the future, sometimes it is about new trends and identifying weak signals, but it's always about trying to pin down the future down.. . when it comes to technology, future predictions have been proven wrong again and again. (2) The role of the expert is not to prevent the impossible but to make it acceptable (4) The problem with speculation, for designers at least, is that it is fictional, which is still seen as a bad thing. The idea that something is not "real" when real means it's available in the shops, is not good. Yet designers participate in the generation and maintenance of all sorts of fictions, from feature-heavy electronic devices meeting the imaginary needs of imaginary users, to the creation of fantasy brands worlds referenced through products, their content and their use. Designers today are expert fictioneers in denial... Design has become so absorbed in industry, so familiar with the dreams of industry, that it is almost impossible to dream its own dreams. (88) |
Shaping Things
Bruce Sterling, 2005 The world of organized artifice id transforming due to:
Object classes:
The technosocial world |
Research / Part 1
Winter Quarter
Winter Quarter
Oskar Fischinger
John Whitney
Catalog 1961
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Matrix III
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Mary Ellen Bute
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Matali Crasset
matalicrasset.com |
Connecting
Film Every piece of technology that we use is a augmentation of our abilities as humans. When augmentation works, it feels natural and not on the way. “Chrome is devoid of meaning, aside from just a signal of what metaphor is being used for. When you see it after that it’s just noise, whereas the content is always real” - Blaise Aguera y Arcas 8:08: Where the future lies, “There will be software in everything” |
Dunne & Raby
Probable / Potential / Possible Futures: Preferrable Futures Critical Design vs. Affirmative Design More notes above. |
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Leah Buechley
http://web.media.mit.edu/~leah/ http://web.media.mit.edu/~leah/publications/buechley_CHI_08.pdf More notes coming soon. |
Dish: International Design for the Home
Julie Muller Stahl, 2005 Foreword Suzanne Yelavich p5: The story of recent industrial design has been the thawing of the object. Cold functionality has been eschewed in favor of the pull of emotion. The great anxiety about the increasingly expendable nature of the things in our lives (particularly those things digital) sent designers to the attic looking for ideas that would make their work as desirable as heirlooms past. However the new millennium embraced the sensuality of craft and materials on their own terms. Where the previous generation (1980s) looked to the authority of classicism, this one is drawn to the subversive swing of the stylistic pendulum: the baroque, the mannered, and the vernacular. p6: Underneath the narratives and critiques lie more profound possibilities: the potency of beauty and prospect of a revitalized role for ornament. Beauty demands a physical response, a heightened sense of self in relationship with the object of desire. The satisfaction we find in these pieces comes from discernment, not comparison-shopping. The Evolution and Revolution of Home Product Design Joanna Grawunder p47: Many home products have been designed over centuries by layering information and information to the point of perfection: spoon, fork, teacup, sugar bowl, bread knife, scissors, water kettle, cheese, and the chair. It is not necessary to revolutionize these designs. What is interesting is to interpret them using the few variables we are occasionally given, such as new materials or techniques, cultural resonance and the "spirit of our times", or the more influential but even more rare behavioral modification that sometimes occurs. There is another world, a parallel universe of home products where blank state design can occur. In this world, new design solutions stem from new condition: 24-7 lifestyles, people occupying what were once considered uninhabitable spaces, the state of our cities as they fall into an ungraceful middle age, the impersonality of services, the hardness of our environment, and the dictates of commercial culture intent on marketing the lowest-common-denominator television. These products are not evolving, they are coming into being. They exist contemporaneously with the elderly statesmen of home products, but they address problems never encountered before, problems that go beyond convenience and economy into existential ideas about the way we live now. I think these new problems - more so than new materials, computer programs, or production technologies - may be catalysts for the most interesting new design. In a third parallel universe, it does not matter. If you hate your wife, you will hate having tea with her whether you are using a fine antique Chinese ensemble or a paper cup. Some things cannot be solved or improved by design. These comprise the real gifts of life, and in the face of these, design is merely terrestrial. |
Adapting Production to the Object
Patrizia Moroso p82: I am horror-struck at this world split into tribes. My work springs from the desire to create products with soul, which is the antithesis of making worlds in which to belong. The Difference of Female Design Hazel Clark p157: Women tend to be more active in certain areas of design practice than in others, notably design for the home and design related to the body. At the same time women designers remain cautious about promoting their gender. Why is this? Perhaps because when the female (the biological given) is expressed as feminine (the culturally acquired characteristics associated with womanhood), it carries an implicit association with triviality and passivity. We must rather look at the work (of the women in the book) for what it offers: 1. Attention to context and user and the way that the object is seen as an interface between people and their wants or needs. 2. Recognize the female body as women experience it, as visceral and transitory rather than as objectified. 3. A number of designs are for children. They are not just miniaturized adult designs, they originate from the actual experience of having children. 4. Much of the work draws upon an understanding of our wants and needs from our homes, the practical, the relaxing, the sensual and the playful; a high sensitivity towards the user. 5. Highlight user responsibility |
Genevieve Bell
Why People Really Love Technology: An Interview With Genevieve Bell
The Atlantic Intel’s Sharp-Eyed Social Scientist The New York Times
Ducks, dolls & robots: a genealogy of socio-technical anxieties
UX London Talk Video The introductions of new technologies are rarely seamless and silent affairs. There are the inevitable boosters and utopian dreamers who will tell us and sell us on the notion that this new technology will change our lives, in both big and small ways: we will be cleaner, safer, happier, more efficient, more productive, and of course, more modern with all that implies. The message here is everything will be different, better. There are also the equally inevitable naysayers and dystopian dreamers who worry along equally familiar but slightly different lines: we will be less social, less secure, more isolated, and more homogenous. The message here is everything will be different, but perhaps not so much better. Of course, running in between these larger conversations are the practicalities of living with new technologies — how much does it cost? where does it live? Who should look after it? what will we will do with it? and, in the end, what will we do without it? Perhaps it is no surprise then that we worry, that new technologies are frequently accompanied by anxiety, and sometimes even fear. In this talk, Genevieve traces the roots of these hopes, fears and anxieties back through our history with machines — Vaucason’s Duck, Edison’s Talking Doll, the tea-cup robots of the Edo-period in Japan, Frankenstein’s monster and Ned Ludd’s polemics are all part of this story. She takes an expansive view, crossing cultures and historical periods, to create a genealogy of our socio-technical anxieties. Ultimately, she suggests a framework for making sense of these anxieties, and in so doing, a new way of thinking about the next generation of technologies we are designing. |
The Construction of the Socio Technical Imagination
Excavating the Future of Mobile Technology
Digital Deception: Secrets and Lies
- Ppl lie about where they are, no self presentation was accurate - Digital deception - Tech changes faster than people do. - Culturally there are reframing of the truth 20:30: Sites like twitter are about making an art out of confabulation What Will Personal Computing Look Like in 2020?
Not so much an interaction, but a relationship |
Home+Tech: Research Labs and Researchers
Labs Intel Labs: Digital Rim AT&T Digital Life: Site People Bill Buxton, Papers Index |
Sci Fi Recommended by the Loftees
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Microsoft Future Visions
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Martin Kersels
Pink Constellation |
Sven Ericjuhlin
Knorf Fork |
Jeppe Hein
Modified Social Benches The bench designs borrow their basic form from the ubiquitous park or garden bench, but are altered to various degrees to make the act of sitting a conscious physical endeavour. With their modifications, the benches transform their surroundings into places of activity rather than rest and solitude; they foster exchange between the users and the passers-by, thus lending the work a social quality. Due to their alterations, the benches end up somewhere between a dysfunctional object and a functional piece of furniture, and therefore demonstrate the contradiction between artwork and functional object. |
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Eleanor Antin
100 Boots is Antin's best-known conceptual work, consisting of 51 postcards that were mailed to hundreds of recipients around the world from 1971 to 1973. It documents the boots in a mock picaresque photo diary, beginning at the Pacific Ocean and ending in New York City, where their journey was presented in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Antin's photographic series "The Last Days of Pompeii," a commentary on the affluent residents of the paradise of La Jolla, California. There is a comparison to be made, Antin explains, “between America, as this great colonial power, and one of the early great colonial powers, Rome.” In her highly-theatrical films, photographs, and performance art, Antin draws from the childhood play, an infatuation with stand-up and slapstick comedy, and the tragic humor that is part of her Jewish heritage. “I always tend to see the funny side of things,” she says. “That’s the richest experience, when it’s the laughter and it’s the tears together.” |
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The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women. A further 999 women are honored by named floor tiles. It was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration and was first exhibited in 1979. Subsequently, despite art world resistance, it toured to 16 venues in 6 countries on 3 continents to a viewing audience of 15 million. Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). The Dinner Party, 1974–79. Ceramic, porcelain, textile, 576 x 576 in. (1463 x 1463 cm). |
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The Decorative Art of Today
Le Corbusier
- Le Corbusier proposed renegotiating decorative art fors to integrate the new technology of history
- Type Objects: objects that are well made, neat, clean, pure and healthy, vs the personal, arbitrary, personalized.
- Why should "tools" be called decorative arts? They are objects of utility
- Previously, the decorative was rare and costly, for special display. Now, it's commonplace and cheap
- Decoration not only hides the faults of manufacturing, it also allows for price increase (149)
Le Corbusier
- Le Corbusier proposed renegotiating decorative art fors to integrate the new technology of history
- Type Objects: objects that are well made, neat, clean, pure and healthy, vs the personal, arbitrary, personalized.
- Why should "tools" be called decorative arts? They are objects of utility
- Previously, the decorative was rare and costly, for special display. Now, it's commonplace and cheap
- Decoration not only hides the faults of manufacturing, it also allows for price increase (149)
A Battle Against Kistch
Milena Veenis
- In the GDR, politics entered the home
- Everything made in the GDR was in fact made against the West (155)
- Even by the end of the 1980, concepts like succinctness, purposiveness and necessity
- The functionalist principles coincided w/economic requirements (156)
- Attractive was seen as superficial and banal
- But no matter how good were framed, their quality left much to be desired, there was a high scarcity of materials (158)
- Daily life in the GDR turned our to be distinctly materialistic (159), the material was one of the most important guidelines, scarcity forced ppl to put a lot of time and energy on the acquisition of goods.
Milena Veenis
- In the GDR, politics entered the home
- Everything made in the GDR was in fact made against the West (155)
- Even by the end of the 1980, concepts like succinctness, purposiveness and necessity
- The functionalist principles coincided w/economic requirements (156)
- Attractive was seen as superficial and banal
- But no matter how good were framed, their quality left much to be desired, there was a high scarcity of materials (158)
- Daily life in the GDR turned our to be distinctly materialistic (159), the material was one of the most important guidelines, scarcity forced ppl to put a lot of time and energy on the acquisition of goods.
Strangely Familiar
Andrew Blaubvelt
- The concept of lifestyle coalessed: one's preference in disparate such as clothing, cars, furniture, etc (156)
- Post 1990's economy: Products as props in the staging of moments of consumption, objects are given meaning in addition to value (worth) and use value (utility)
- Blobjects and Blobitechture: Blob
- LeFevre's Critique de la Vie Quotidienne (1947): Argues against much of what everyday like has been reduced to
- De Certau The Practice of Everyday Life: Shifts attention to acts of consumption, consumption as not empty or passive, but imaginative consumption, not authorship but reading, not urban design but walking (168)
- Perec Approaches to What coins neologisms such as infraordinary (not extraordinary) and endotic (not exotic) to discuss everyday life (169)
- Perex imagines an apartment that is organized around the senses instead of rooms (170)
Andrew Blaubvelt
- The concept of lifestyle coalessed: one's preference in disparate such as clothing, cars, furniture, etc (156)
- Post 1990's economy: Products as props in the staging of moments of consumption, objects are given meaning in addition to value (worth) and use value (utility)
- Blobjects and Blobitechture: Blob
- LeFevre's Critique de la Vie Quotidienne (1947): Argues against much of what everyday like has been reduced to
- De Certau The Practice of Everyday Life: Shifts attention to acts of consumption, consumption as not empty or passive, but imaginative consumption, not authorship but reading, not urban design but walking (168)
- Perec Approaches to What coins neologisms such as infraordinary (not extraordinary) and endotic (not exotic) to discuss everyday life (169)
- Perex imagines an apartment that is organized around the senses instead of rooms (170)
Toward a New Interior: An Anthology of Interior Design Theory - Intro
"To live means to leave traces"
Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, Walter Benjamin
(19)
Interiors show wear and tear marks.
Quay Brothers and James Casebre's interior models romanticize dust
Janitors know interiors in ways architects and designers don't
Voos: The Story of a Poor Rich Man
Aesthetics / Manufacture / Nostalgia / Consumption
"To live means to leave traces"
Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, Walter Benjamin
(19)
Interiors show wear and tear marks.
Quay Brothers and James Casebre's interior models romanticize dust
Janitors know interiors in ways architects and designers don't
Voos: The Story of a Poor Rich Man
Aesthetics / Manufacture / Nostalgia / Consumption
The Rules of Her Game: A-Z at Work & Play
Trevor Smith
Over the last years Andrea Zittel has offered a timely and playful critique of the conflation of leisure and freedom in contemporary consumer culture. (176)
Her A-Z models refuse segregation of work and play so central to marketing of leisure lifestyle as recompense for thankless and unrewarding work.
Even as Zittel extended the visual vocabularies and design strategies of modernism to work with the unique constraints of each of these sites, the environments she created for herself operated in critical contrast to the separation of work and leisure privileged in the modern consumer culture. (179)
It's hard to not escape the echo of William Morris in Zittel's individual customizations and her celebration of work-based freedoms. Where Morris posited a celebration of craftsmanship and the manmade as a challenge to the banalities of industrial production. Zittel's do-it-yourself approach to production, and her creation and experimentation with her own rules, offers a challenge to the passivity of consumer culture. Yet where Morris dreamed of a socialist utopia where creativity would be unleashed through the abolition of alienated labor and through democratic control of the means of production, Zittel is more ambivalent about collectivity, proposing instead a socially responsive self-awareness where each person examines "his own talents and options, and then based on these begins to invent new models or roles to fulfill his or her needs". Strategically positioning herself in opposition to the tired cliche of the artist as bohemian rule-breaker, Zittel proposed instead that " the formation of rules is more "creative" than the destruction of them. Their creation demands a higher level of reasoning and the drawing of connections between cause and effect. The best rules are never stable or permanent, and they evolve naturally according to the context or need. I like to make rules - but I don't really like to impose rules on other people. I guess that is why I am always making rules for myself" (180)
It is more interesting to consider Zittel's use of her initials A-Z as a branding strategy. The A-Z brand is not suggestive of contemporary corporations, but of the kinds of small companies from the 1950s and 1960s that engendered consumer confidence through the projection of encyclopedic competence, the types of companies that would have closed shop in Williamsburg in the 1990s. (181)
A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit: It's square channel metal frame and birch plywood construction evokes the look of mid-century modernism, but unlike one of Charles and Ray Eames, Zittel's unit had to facilitate all the aspects of living. Within an extremely constrained footprint of sixty square feet, she attempted to "satisfy the often conflicting needs of security, stability, freedom and autonomy. Owning a Living unit created the security and permanence of a home which could then be set up inside of homes that other people owned. It provided freedom because whenever the owner wanted to move they could collapse it and move the unit to a new location" (184)
- Images from Zittel.org
Trevor Smith
Over the last years Andrea Zittel has offered a timely and playful critique of the conflation of leisure and freedom in contemporary consumer culture. (176)
Her A-Z models refuse segregation of work and play so central to marketing of leisure lifestyle as recompense for thankless and unrewarding work.
Even as Zittel extended the visual vocabularies and design strategies of modernism to work with the unique constraints of each of these sites, the environments she created for herself operated in critical contrast to the separation of work and leisure privileged in the modern consumer culture. (179)
It's hard to not escape the echo of William Morris in Zittel's individual customizations and her celebration of work-based freedoms. Where Morris posited a celebration of craftsmanship and the manmade as a challenge to the banalities of industrial production. Zittel's do-it-yourself approach to production, and her creation and experimentation with her own rules, offers a challenge to the passivity of consumer culture. Yet where Morris dreamed of a socialist utopia where creativity would be unleashed through the abolition of alienated labor and through democratic control of the means of production, Zittel is more ambivalent about collectivity, proposing instead a socially responsive self-awareness where each person examines "his own talents and options, and then based on these begins to invent new models or roles to fulfill his or her needs". Strategically positioning herself in opposition to the tired cliche of the artist as bohemian rule-breaker, Zittel proposed instead that " the formation of rules is more "creative" than the destruction of them. Their creation demands a higher level of reasoning and the drawing of connections between cause and effect. The best rules are never stable or permanent, and they evolve naturally according to the context or need. I like to make rules - but I don't really like to impose rules on other people. I guess that is why I am always making rules for myself" (180)
It is more interesting to consider Zittel's use of her initials A-Z as a branding strategy. The A-Z brand is not suggestive of contemporary corporations, but of the kinds of small companies from the 1950s and 1960s that engendered consumer confidence through the projection of encyclopedic competence, the types of companies that would have closed shop in Williamsburg in the 1990s. (181)
A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit: It's square channel metal frame and birch plywood construction evokes the look of mid-century modernism, but unlike one of Charles and Ray Eames, Zittel's unit had to facilitate all the aspects of living. Within an extremely constrained footprint of sixty square feet, she attempted to "satisfy the often conflicting needs of security, stability, freedom and autonomy. Owning a Living unit created the security and permanence of a home which could then be set up inside of homes that other people owned. It provided freedom because whenever the owner wanted to move they could collapse it and move the unit to a new location" (184)
- Images from Zittel.org
Andrea Zittel - PBS Art21
From Consumption Segment: 29:20
"Were obsessed with perfection, innovation and moving forward, but what we really want is the hope of a new improved better tomorrow.
From Consumption Segment: 31:00
Tour of the bathroom
From Consumption Segment: 32:00
About the uniform project: "Variety (having to have different clothes to go to work) seemed more oppressive than continuity"
From Consumption Segment: 29:20
"Were obsessed with perfection, innovation and moving forward, but what we really want is the hope of a new improved better tomorrow.
From Consumption Segment: 31:00
Tour of the bathroom
From Consumption Segment: 32:00
About the uniform project: "Variety (having to have different clothes to go to work) seemed more oppressive than continuity"
For The Love Of Things
Louise Schouwenberg
For Proust, an object that collected marks over time, whether a scratch or patina, took the role of a container representing the past, able to hold memories. (191)
The trouble with today's useful articles is that they hardly have a chance to worm their way into our lives before it's time to replace them with a new improved version. What most of these products have in common is a short life span, and none of us expects otherwise. Another thing they share is the way they shamelessly screm for attention, without denying their complete replaceability. (192)
Marcel Proust sought time lost and rediscovered it in trivial, everyday useful objects. Memories of personal experiences were considered in his time, the early twentieth century, as invaluable components of the personality, and these memories seemed intimately connected with the objects with which one surrounded oneself.
The importance of sensory contact with the world of concrete, tangible things is brilliantly expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenologie de la Perception. He argues that for centuries we have been relying entirely on our vaunted superior rational powers, while rationality is itself inconceivable outside our own physical realm. He therefore identifies the most important human mode of perception as Etre-au-Monde or Being in the World. We accord purpose and meaning to the world around us through our bodies. (193)
We no longer distinguish ourselves by our character but by our possessions (194)
Proust discovered the "stories" embedded in everyday artifacts that reach further than the objects themselves. However, a significance beyond the physical product is traditionally more the preserve of art. We expect works of art to give us a sensory access to deeper layers and meanings. (195)
With the rise of the consumer society, not only did the durable value of utilitarian objects disappear, but the story we can link to them became short-lived and general. At the same time, these same objects refuse to veil themselves with their short lived usefulness but screamingly draw attention to their illusory character. We have surrounded ourselves with products, objects, stuff, and attention-demanding things that have no significant impact in our manner of being. (195)
Louise Schouwenberg
For Proust, an object that collected marks over time, whether a scratch or patina, took the role of a container representing the past, able to hold memories. (191)
The trouble with today's useful articles is that they hardly have a chance to worm their way into our lives before it's time to replace them with a new improved version. What most of these products have in common is a short life span, and none of us expects otherwise. Another thing they share is the way they shamelessly screm for attention, without denying their complete replaceability. (192)
Marcel Proust sought time lost and rediscovered it in trivial, everyday useful objects. Memories of personal experiences were considered in his time, the early twentieth century, as invaluable components of the personality, and these memories seemed intimately connected with the objects with which one surrounded oneself.
The importance of sensory contact with the world of concrete, tangible things is brilliantly expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenologie de la Perception. He argues that for centuries we have been relying entirely on our vaunted superior rational powers, while rationality is itself inconceivable outside our own physical realm. He therefore identifies the most important human mode of perception as Etre-au-Monde or Being in the World. We accord purpose and meaning to the world around us through our bodies. (193)
We no longer distinguish ourselves by our character but by our possessions (194)
Proust discovered the "stories" embedded in everyday artifacts that reach further than the objects themselves. However, a significance beyond the physical product is traditionally more the preserve of art. We expect works of art to give us a sensory access to deeper layers and meanings. (195)
With the rise of the consumer society, not only did the durable value of utilitarian objects disappear, but the story we can link to them became short-lived and general. At the same time, these same objects refuse to veil themselves with their short lived usefulness but screamingly draw attention to their illusory character. We have surrounded ourselves with products, objects, stuff, and attention-demanding things that have no significant impact in our manner of being. (195)
Relational Art
From Wikipedia
Relational art or relational aesthetics is a mode or tendency in fine art practice originally observed and highlighted by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. Bourriaud defined the approach as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."[1] The artist can be more accurately viewed as the "catalyst" in relational art, rather than being at the centre.
From Wikipedia
Relational art or relational aesthetics is a mode or tendency in fine art practice originally observed and highlighted by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. Bourriaud defined the approach as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."[1] The artist can be more accurately viewed as the "catalyst" in relational art, rather than being at the centre.
Pepon Osorio - PBS Art21
From Place Segment: 41:15:
No crying aloud in the Barbershop: Coming of age, issue of machismo as a whole, piece pays homage to father.
43:30:
Coming from a working class family, being an artist is not an option, it's more of a challenge, it was not a possibility or alternative.
This isn't the way I live, I'm making a very calculated intervention.
Scene of a Crime: I have delineated these very specific issues and spaces as sacred spaces.
As you stand and are not allowed to come in, you need to reflect, and you need to confront yourself, like a giant mirror in front of you.
47:00
I'd like for ppl to come out thinking about who the are in relationship to what they've just seen.
Who I am, where do I stand, very much aware that I'm trying to provoke.
Home Visits: Loosely rooted in religious popular traditions of the visiting saints. Why can't contemporary art visit one home a week.
Since childhood I've felt there was a piece missing, that somehow I couldn't understand completely what was going on, and sometimes feel that I'm eternally displaced. But as an artist I've found my own place.
From Place Segment: 41:15:
No crying aloud in the Barbershop: Coming of age, issue of machismo as a whole, piece pays homage to father.
43:30:
Coming from a working class family, being an artist is not an option, it's more of a challenge, it was not a possibility or alternative.
This isn't the way I live, I'm making a very calculated intervention.
Scene of a Crime: I have delineated these very specific issues and spaces as sacred spaces.
As you stand and are not allowed to come in, you need to reflect, and you need to confront yourself, like a giant mirror in front of you.
47:00
I'd like for ppl to come out thinking about who the are in relationship to what they've just seen.
Who I am, where do I stand, very much aware that I'm trying to provoke.
Home Visits: Loosely rooted in religious popular traditions of the visiting saints. Why can't contemporary art visit one home a week.
Since childhood I've felt there was a piece missing, that somehow I couldn't understand completely what was going on, and sometimes feel that I'm eternally displaced. But as an artist I've found my own place.
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Makeshift Magazine, The Copycats issue
- Biohacking: GenSpace
- Marblar: Old technology gets replaced, the Post-It note case is rare
- ThingyVerse, Github, The RepRap Project: A self replicating 3D printer that reproduces itself
3D printing was expected to:
- Benefit the rural
- Bring democratic manufacturing
- Allow for user needs to be met
What will be the 3D printing niche?
- Things that are impossible to make, but layer by layer
- Ultra personalized items
- Things that don't make financial sense to reproduce, but a few copies in the right hands make a difference
- Biohacking: GenSpace
- Marblar: Old technology gets replaced, the Post-It note case is rare
- ThingyVerse, Github, The RepRap Project: A self replicating 3D printer that reproduces itself
3D printing was expected to:
- Benefit the rural
- Bring democratic manufacturing
- Allow for user needs to be met
What will be the 3D printing niche?
- Things that are impossible to make, but layer by layer
- Ultra personalized items
- Things that don't make financial sense to reproduce, but a few copies in the right hands make a difference