Archive for March, 2007
The Eraser
An ordinary eraser subverted by the delete button iconography.
related links
Art Lebedev
Originally from sensoryimpact.com by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 27, 2007, 2:50PM
New Media Art in a Control Society
Transcript from a Performance
Adam Trowbridge: New Media Art in a Control Society :: Transcript from Performance :: The Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN, USA
March 22, 2007 :: video stills here
As noted in the transcript, the majority of the statements read were not original and instead shamelessly stolen (edited and unedited) from various sources: theoretical texts, artists’ statements, manifestos and paranoid rambling. Transcript:
This is…a performance and new media art…or maybe not. [video begins] [text below is read]
- - Gilles Deleuze said “Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of non-communication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” End quote.
- - The phrase “new media art” is pointless.
- - The selection of medium is not the selection of a wardrobe for an idea. We are well past ideas and communication. Medium should be selected like legal and illicit pharmaceuticals: where do you want to go today?
- - What is a digital painting? Idiotic.
- - Contemporary art is both scattered and networked, always in motion. Medium, if anything, is a measure of speed and distribution. Is the texture of an oil painting that different from that of flypaper? Video is faster and shedding the weight of the poetic yet precious medium of film. Photography is a film still. Internet-based art is faster but still flails, lashed down by too many examples of bad information design masquerading as art.
- - THEY create DELIRIOUS RULES and sell you free access to their BACKSTAGE if you follow these sick rules. YOU KNOW IT.
- - Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome has been falsely represented as a metaphor for a network and for networked art. Deleuze and Guattari did not deal in metaphors.
- - Rhizomatic action is a force relationship in which power is distributed then scattered before it can begin to collect. This is not a metaphorical description but a plan of action.
- - Over 650,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by military intervention in Iraq and we are here to discuss…what?
- - Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before.
- - All hoarding, speculation on art, must cease and be seen for what it is: usury and exploitation.
- - In the beginning, you enjoyed it. You were caught in the middle of the WAR between THEM and THE OTHER SIDE, and you were trying to help THEM win the war.
- - All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
- - Six billion worldwide population, all living, have a Computer God Containment Policy brain bank brain, a real brain in the brain bank cities on the far side of the moon we never see.
- - Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.
- - Human beings are not fully conscious of their real life…usually groping in the dark…at every moment groups and individuals find themselves confronted with results they have not wished.
- - Control is short-term and has rapid rates of turnover, but is also continuous and without limit.
- - New media art involves people who make watering plants more complex than it needs to be by using cell phones that call the Internet when the plants need water.
- - If you can talk about it, why paint it?
- - The Dia: Beacon is a tomb for the last gasp of studio art, let it be a monument and move on.
- - Man and machines can make symbiotic art.
- - Psychogeography: The study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behavior of the individual.
- - Inevitability of gradualness. Usually, in a few years, you are made string bean thin or grotesquely deformed, crippled and ugly, or even made one foot shorter or one foot taller, as the Computer God sees fit.
- - In the future we will have foreign genetic material in us as today we have mechanical and electronic implants. In other words, we will be transgenic. However, there’s no excuse but marketing for purchasing a glowing rabbit.
- - Users of the world are presented with fresh, owned content every day. We have the technology, the precedents, and the duty to make new art out of this owned content.
- - A lot of people say that new media is revolutionary. They say the net is subversive. But how subversive can you be in an exclusive club where it costs $1,000 for a computer and $50 a month to connect to the Internet.
- - The main function of Art is to distinguish rich people from poorer people.
- - Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; we re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to us to discover what we’re being made to serve, just as our elders discovered, not without difficulty, the ultimate end of the disciplines.
- - Personal expression and human and artist centrality can be abandoned.
- - Complex machines are an emergent life form in the masturbatory fantasies of those siding with control. I distrust transhumanists but I want to be friends with a computer.
- - Any moralistic or spiritual pretension or representation purposes for art must be abandoned.
- - Primarily, based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, especially your Eyesight TV, sight and sound recorded by your brain, your moon brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold brainwash radio lifelong, inculcating conformist propaganda, even frightening you and mixing you up and the usual, “Don’t worry about it.”
- - Professionalism in the arts (and the accompanying stratification of skills) must be abandoned in favor of a progressive (class-less) artistry of both a personal and collective nature.
- - Over the last decades, using positions of power in your STAGE-WORLD reality, THEY introduced their key words and also their sick DREAMWORLD- TO-SELL key ideas in every aspect of culture in the STAGE WORLD society where you live : songs, movies, humor, even propaganda.
- - Derive: An experimental mode of behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique for hastily passing through varied environments.
- - The economic and cultural exploitation of the artist has reached appalling proportions. The individual and/or collective artist, whose work is plagiarized as commercial ‘technique’, or exported as cultural commodity, has little control over these conditions.
- - Consciousness is not exclusively restricted to the brain. Human bodies have no boundaries.
- - The artist must be concerned with the moral relationship that his/her endeavors have to the institutions within which he/she expresses his/her work.
- - The majority of what I’ve read has been shamelessly stolen from various sources: theoretical texts, artists’ statements, manifestos and paranoid rambling. They stand as a collection of connections and disjunctions. I am, we are, a manner of speaking.
- - Art is not knowledge.
- - Art does not communicate.
- - There is nothing here for you.
- - Gilles Deleuze said that new situations could “…at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”.
[via nettime]
Originally from networked_performance by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 25, 2007, 9:12PM
Reactive Environments: Gestural Control for Navigation and Understanding
In the words of a recent song, I’m not dead, just floating. After a busy travel period, I settled in to get some reading and other writing done, hence the pause in Smartspace content. Spring is here, and content will now bloom like the trees outside my window.
BusinessWeek carries an interesting feature on motion and gesture technologies in its latest edition. The article ties together threads that have been ongoing in the area of gesture-controlled media and interfaces (particularly in the area of advertising), motion capture for film and games, and new innovations such as multi-touch, which has gotten hot since the announcement of the iPhone.
Of course, most folks are all excited about the applications in marketing, such as with the interactive ads from adidas and Target the article describes. Less talked about but more interesting in the long-term are public infrastructure uses for gestural interfaces. Imagine being able to use a gestural interface to find your way around a foreign city or airport, based on your own orientation, not that of a flat map (could have used this when I went to Switzerland and back recently - the Geneva tram maps were a pain to understand to me). Or in public health care environments (show the doctor where it hurts, particularly if its inside - a first step before a costly MRI to locate a problem in 3D space). Or in museums (flick through a catalog of art, skip along a timeline, or explore an ancient building).
More and more, interface designers are looking at how to use gestural control to get around issues of literacy and language, and also age and ability. Most of us can point, and move an object to find another. Hopefully interface designers looking into this area will get together more often with information designers to collaborate on projects such as those I mention above.
Originally from Smartspace by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 26, 2007, 2:30PM
Everyone Is a Plumber: Rebutting Nussbaum on Participatory Design
In a presentation at Parson’s School of Design, Bruce Nussbaum discusses the DIY-media movement, sustainability, and rebranding Design as Innovation. While Nussbaum’s conclusions are compelling, the path to those conclusions is fraught with peculiar reasoning.
DIY
Nussbaum first picks up the torch of the DIY movement that was begun out of necessity in the Stone Age, [...]
Wireframing With Patterns
Published: March 20, 2007
When you’re starting out as an information architect (IA), being part of a strong community of fellow practitioners helps immensely. A little over a year ago, on Sunday, February 22, 2006, I participated in an informal workshop on wireframing techniques that took place here in Toronto. Bryce Johnson, Director of User Experience Design at Navantis Inc., facilitated and hosted the workshop at his workplace. The knowledge sharing and the wireframing best practices that emerged from the workshop, plus the sense of community I experienced there, helped me build a foundation as an information architect and got me started on developing my own design workflow. Now, I’d like to share the techniques I’ve learned with a broader community of information architects.
Originally from UXmatters
reBlogged by michael on Mar 19, 2007, 11:02PM
Table Recorder
In terms of its appearance, Frederic Gmeiner’s Table Recorder is slightly remindful of Laurie Anderson’s wonderful Handphone Table. But, while Anderson’s installation merely functions as a poetic playback device for pre-produced music, this table allows you to actually create your own sounds.
After having built a mechanically actuated musical alarm clock as a prototype for this project, his aim was to “create a playful object which may be completely integrated into everyday life”. Besides being a real, usable table, it will echo movements with sound. Below the surface, pressure-sensors feel a user’s touch and actuate custom-built solenoids which inside the drawers then bang on arbitrary objects, at the time including a glass, a plate, a xylophone and a saw.
In one mode, the table acts as a simple sequencer which will loop the recorded sounds in two-second intervals. In the other mode however, it will record movements and play them back with a delay of half an hour. When it is actually being used as a table, it might thus resonate its use, for example to someone who is just coming home. To erase what has been recorded, you simply – wipe it. 
What really impressed me during Frederic’s demonstration though, was when he lifted the tabletop to adjust the sensors with a screwdriver – it suddenly looked as if he was tuning a piano.
Another fun piece from the same course (Kora Kimpel and Dennis Paul’s introductory course to the digital media class at UDK) was Julius von Bismarck’s still unnamed but camera-equipped blimp, which allows you to see yourself from above when you put on the accompanying space-age helmet that contains tiny screens. When asked about the idea behind this piece, he told me that he likes the top-down perspective of the original Grand Theft Auto-games and that he just wanted to try that out in everyday life. It really did look like GTA in the same weird augmented-reality way as U-Tsu-Shi-O-Mi at SIGGRAPH. Too bad we couldn’t take it outside to hijack a couple of cars.
More projects included a moving golf-hole, an enhanced version of tic-tac-toe called Cmatch and another beautiful board game.
More on Flickr.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 15, 2007, 12:53PM
Typotheque: Eric Gill got it wrong; a re-evaluation of Gill Sans by Ben Archer
Gill Sans: Pride of England?
Gill Sans is the Helvetica of England; ubiquitous, utilitarian and yet also quite specific in its ability to point to our notions of time and place. As a graphic designer’s in-joke once put it ‘Q. How do you do British post-war design? A. Set it in Gill Sans and print it in British Racing Green’. As the preferred typeface of British establishments (the Railways, the Church, the BBC and Penguin Books), Gill Sans is part of the British visual heritage just like the Union Jack and the safety pin.
Icons of the British mid-20th century.
So to pick an argument with something that is akin to a typographic national monument might appear unwise; it is so very much ‘ours’. But it is a flawed masterpiece. How flawed? Well, monumentally flawed, in fact. In 2006, now that Gill Sans is distributed freely with Apple’s OS X and Adobe’s Creative Suite products, it is time to re-examine those flaws. Ever since Gill Sans was incorporated into the Adobe/Linotype library in the early 1990s what used to be Monotype Gill Sans became GillSans. The new compound name and the missing foundry attribution serves to distance today’s users of this type from any awareness that Monotype used to issue Gill Sans in a range of different series with alternate cuts. Readers with experience of metal and phototypesetting may recall this system, but for now, the majority of us only have this ‘bundled’ version of GillSans to go by.
The older Gill Sans MT appellation and Monotype icon set.
Since the inspirations of Optima (1958, by Hermann Zapf) and Syntax (1969, by Hans Eduard Meier), there has been a steady rise in the number of sans serif faces that have a humanistic structure and are good for a variety of tasks. FB Agenda (1993 by Greg Thompson), Bliss (1996 by Jeremy Tankard) and Fedra Sans (2001 by Peter Bilak), are some of the recently-produced typographical riches that all owe some part of their provenance to Edward Johnston’s sans serif lettering for the London Underground in 1916 – a project that the younger Eric Gill briefly assisted on and freely acknowledged as being the original model for Gill Sans.
However, writing his Essay on Typography in 1931, Gill claimed that Johnston’s letters were not entirely satisfactory or ‘fool-proof’, and that his new Monotype Sans Serif, the prototype of Gill Sans, was superior. Although other writers have celebrated the individual qualities of Gill Sans Q, R, a, g and t, as designs in their own right, I contend that the majority of character shapes in Gill Sans are actually worse than in Johnston’s design of fifteen years previous. Gill Sans achieved its pre-eminence because of the mighty marketing clout of the Monotype Corporation and the self-serving iconoclasm of its author. Thus, rather than Johnston’s lettering, it was Gill Sans that became the English national style of the mid-century. There were other, arguably better, typefaces derived from the ideal of making a monoline sans serif based on humanist structures. That this project has returned to inform some of the really great type design of the last fifteen years is a testament to how the problem was not solved in 1928.
The claim made against Johnston’s earlier design; pages 48-49 of Eric Gill’s Essay on Typography.
Origins of Gill Sans in Johnston.
Like Johnston’s Underground lettering, Gill Sans began life as a piece of signage, a fascia board for the shop of Douglas Cleverdon. To complement the exterior signage, Gill produced a smaller alphabet in a blank book intended as a guide for Cleverdon to make future notices and announcements. To be fair to Gill, the initial intention was perhaps quite casual – but the result was seized upon in such a way that it forced Gill to step into Johnston’s shadow, on a commission that was to have far wider implications. Gill’s patron, Stanley Morison, as advisor to the Monotype Corporation, was probably the single most powerful individual in British typefounding in the 1920s. Gill knew that despite an existing commission for the serif face Perpetua, his working relationship with Morison, and his wider reputation with Monotype, the trade, and ultimately the reading public, would come to rest on this design. In the face of this, Gill may have deemed his relationship with both Edward Johnston and his style of lettering expendable, but the evidence suggests that Eric Gill was ‘learning on the job’ with this assignment.
Three variants of lowercase ‘a’; the more rational forms are the ones that didn’t make the final cut.
There are three developmental forms of the Gill Sans lowercase ‘a’ on record; revisions were made at the Monotype drawing office and passed back to Gill for approval. The original design for ‘a’ is strikingly similar to Johnston’s (as might be expected), followed by a second attempt which was put into production and can be seen on early specimen sheets. The third and least satisfactory character is seen in all versions of Gill Sans since the early 1930s. Stylistically it calls into question Gill’s deletion of the foot serif for the lowercase ‘l’ in Johnston’s model – a feature which had an essential function within that alphabet, as it allowed distinction between the numeral 1, uppercase ‘I’ and lowercase ‘l’. In Gill Sans (appointed typeface to a nation of shopkeepers), this feature is absent and Monotype were obliged to produce a complete alternate cut for Gill Sans, designated ‘F’ that included a ‘proper’ numeral 1 that could be used for numerical setting, such as shop window prices and timetables. This tradition, upheld by Monotype until the early 1990s, was not carried forward to Adobe GillSans.
Comparison of lowercase l, i and numeral 1 in Gill Sans and Johnston.
Gill obliterated the terminus endings of the vertical stroke in ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘p’ and ‘q’; the Monotype drawing office again came to his assistance and revised the forms so that they were preserved in the medium weight (this can be seen on early samples of the series 262). Today however, this feature only persists in the lightest weight of the digital GillSans.
Gill Sans Light (above) and Gill Sans Regular (below); flattening of the bowls and subsequent loss of terminal stroke details in lowercase ‘d’, ‘p’ and ‘q’.
The Gill Sans ‘g’ is another instance of ‘do as I say not as I do’; elsewhere in Gill’s Essay on Typography is a diagram of the forms of lowercase ‘g’ accompanied by the sneer “…comic modern varieties – as though the designer had said: A pair of spectacles is rather like a g; I will make a g rather like a pair of spectacles.” Sebastian Carter, writing in ‘Twentieth Century Type Designers’, called this the ‘eyeglass g’, claiming that it had been kept and improved from the Johnston alphabet. Looking at the original trial drawings for this ‘g’ in which the link is weaker, longer and the bowl correspondingly lower, it is easy to rebut this argument. The directional stress of the lower bowl is not consistent from weight to weight in Gill Sans, and it changes form entirely (to a continental or italic g) in the Ultra Bold weight; the fatness of the letter does not allow four strokes and two counters to fit within the allotted vertical space.
Variation of the directional stress from weight to weight of Gill Sans in the lower bowl of the ‘eyeglass g’ – no longer ‘eyeglass’ or double storey by the time it becomes Ultra Bold.
The lowercase ‘y’ was designed with a straight descending tail which makes the character appear rigid and unbalanced. This feature, like the overdrawn arms of ‘a’ and ‘r’ with their conflicting terminations, puts paid to any notion of rhyme or reason in the ‘improvement’ of the ‘unsatisfactory’ Johnston letterforms. The question to ask is this; if Gill found it necessary to introduce his (strictly unnecessary but aesthetically defensible) curves into the tail of ‘Q’ and the leg of ‘R’ in the uppercase, where none had been drawn in the existing model, why did he find it expedient to remove the existing curve (which was both necessary and defensible) in the tail of the lowercase ‘y’?
Examples of conflicts in stroke terminations; lowercase r, t and y compared.
Gill Sans is the ‘New Black’: Revival or Reaction?
One of the abiding eccentricities of Gill Sans is that its range of weights appears darker and less evenly distributed than any comparable face (even Futura is better moderated in this respect). Gill Sans Light (series 362) may equate to the book, normal or even the regular weight in other typefaces, just as Gill Sans Medium (series 262) looks like boldface in comparison, and Gill Sans Bold (series 275) is already well on the way to what Gill himself called Gill Sans Double Elefans. A likely reason for this is that Gill, as a stonecarver and sculptor, had his ideas about the apparent desirability of darker types formed by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris nearly 50 years earlier. However it is perfectly clear from reading Gill’s own Essay on Typography what he thought about the advisability of making extra bold weights of display typefaces: “…as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools. I myself am responsible for designing five different sorts of sans-serif letters – each one thicker and fatter than the last because every advertisement has to try and shout down its neighbours.”
Diagrams of how not to make letters – 7, 8 and 11 are ‘overbold’, 12 is ‘hardly recognisable’; page 51 of Eric Gill’s Essay on Typography.
This is why series 442, the Ultra Bold weight, is otherwise called Kayo for ‘knockout’ – it was envisaged as an (English) heavyweight champion capable of slugging it out with (German) Futura Extra Bold. Elsewhere Gill labels his diagrams with terms ‘sans overbold’, ‘hardly recognisable’ and ‘fatuous’, to drive home his point about the distortion of letterforms in the heaviest weights. Yet this is exactly what happened to Gill Sans – rather than refuse commissions for Extra Bold and Ultra Bold (well beyond the weight of what was considered normal), he continued to draw up and deliver designs that he knew to be aesthetically unjustifiable.
Aside from inconsistencies of the weights in Gill Sans, Gill changed proportions between capital height, stroke width and character width. This leads me to disagree with the many descriptions of the design of Gill Sans that still contend that the typeface is “based on Roman character shapes and proportions” or “does not reject traditional forms and proportions”.
Comparison of uppercase E and F in Gill Sans and Johnston. Shorter middle arms help balance and legibility in Johnston’s case.
This is debatable – only with ‘J’ and ‘Q’ is there a potential argument about their improvement. While most of the uppercase appear compromised against their Johnston counterparts, the significant demonstrations concern the simplest shapes. With uppercase E and F, Gill standardised the length of the lower and middle arms to match the width of the topmost arm, narrowing the overall widths of both letters to compensate. This alters the letterforms’ balance in direct contradiction to the idea that he was somehow preserving classical proportions. While Gill narrowed the proportions of the M, his version of L, N and T are all much wider than in Johnston’s alphabet. Crucially this also makes extra white space around the letterforms – therefore N and T dominate the appearance of Gill Sans with their broad diagonal and open white space, requiring extra care with kerning and letterspacing.
Comparison of uppercase ‘K’ and ‘T’ in Gill Sans and Johnston.
Was Gill Sans ever designed as a jobbing typeface – suitable for a variety of purposes? While Monotype’s older publicity material never claimed Gill as being suitable for extended text setting, tastes and applications have changed; a recent assignment at my University showed nearly a third of second year degree students choosing Gill Sans as a headline and text face for a publication assignment. That the face is now as convenient to use as a Palatino or Helvetica may have something to do with this continued popularity. Identifont.com currently lists Gill Sans at six out of ten most requested fonts. In 2006, with Apple/Adobe GillSans about to amass the ubiquity of a lesser-known Arial, it would be all too easy to forget what came before GillSans. Now that the new OpenType format allows for extensive support including alternate sorts and contextual spacing, the typographic community should look forward to a better version of Gill Sans OpenType Pro; perhaps a complete overhaul in the style of Frutiger, Sabon, Optima and Syntax?
From the Monotype .pdf catalog at myfonts.com; apparently the only alternative glyph in the entire Gill Sans Opentype Pro font is the proportional numeral one.
Meanwhile, students should be urged to approach Gill Sans with caution; it is a hard typeface to use well without making considerable effort. When one’s view of a historic facade includes a very large and well-known monument, it can be hard to see which background details are obscured by the foreground presence, and this is where English sans serif type design has been for the last sixty years.
Light at the end of the tunnel for Johnston?
In addition to sanctioned and licensed revivals such as P22’s London Underground (1997 by Richard Kegler) and ITC Johnston (1999 by Dave Farey and Richard Dawson), a number of recent type designs now remind us of the original beauty of Edward Johnston’s vision rather than Eric Gill’s.
Fedra Sans by Peter Biľak, 2001; diamond-shaped dots show historic character at larger sizes.
Contemporary sans serifs Bliss and FB Agenda join forces with revivals from ITC and P22.
As reported in issue 58 (winter 2005) of Eye magazine, Jeremy Tankard was commissioned by Sheffield City Council to create Sheffield Sans. Now publicly released as Wayfarer, this type was partially inspired by the spirit of Granby, which had originally been released by the Sheffield foundry Stephenson, Blake in 1930. Created at a time when Gill Sans was the new sensation, Granby was formulated to be the local competition. It’s easy to see from today’s perspective, that to beat the competition, Gill employed a certain amount of bombast and hyperbole to secure critical success, while the Monotype sales force were able to supply volume discounts to institutional customers. In terms of design, however, Stephenson, Blake’s secret advantage may have lain in the fact that they had cut the wooden masters for Johnston’s original London Underground lettering.
42pt Granby in metal from the Stephenson Blake Foundry.
The old metal version of Granby has a faithfulness to Johnston’s proportions and characteristics that Eric Gill missed in such a way as to suggest he did it deliberately. Nearly a century later, Edward Johnston’s pioneering work is still the big noise in contemporary sans serif typeface design. So much for ‘fool-proof’!
References:
An Essay on Typography by Eric Gill, J. M. Dent & Sons, London, UK 1931. Reproduced by kind permission of The Orion Publishing Group Limited.
Creative Type by Cees W. de Jong, Alston W. Purvis and Friedrich Friedl. Copyright ©2005 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London, UK 2005.
Device Fonts: 10 Year Itch 1995-2005 by Rian Hughes, Device Ltd, London, UK 2006.
Johnston’s Underground Type by Justin Howes. Capital Transport Publishing, London, UK 2000.
Lettering Alphabets (Third Edition) by Alfred Bastien. Bastien Brothers, West Drayton, Middlesex, UK 1948.
Specimens of Type from the Stephenson Blake Foundry St. Bride Printing Library, Corporation of London, UK retrieved October 9 2000.
Specimens of Type from the Monotype Foundry St. Bride Printing Library, Corporation of London, UK retrieved October 19 2006.
The Encyclopedia of Typefaces (Second Edition) by W. Turner Berry, A. F. Johnson, W. P. Jaspert. Blandford Press, London, UK 1958.
The Letterforms and Type Designs of Eric Gill by Robert Harling, David R. Godine, Boston, USA 1977.
Three new typefaces for local institutions draw on Sheffield’s cultural and typographic history by Catherine Dixon and Phil Baines, Eye Magazine issue 58, Haymarket Publishing, London, UK. Winter 2005.
Twentieth Century Type Designers (Second Edition) by Sebastian Carter, Lund Humphries Publishing, London, UK 1995.
Interview with Anthony Dunne
Recently i stumbled upon a survey in some posh English art magazine. The journalist was asking readers whether they had already travelled only to see an exhibition in a foreign country. As you can guess i ticked the box “Yes, at least once a year.” If there had been a question asking “Have you ever travelled just to see one single piece in an exhibition?” I would have answered “Yes, i did that once.” It was in 2005, i took the plane to Paris just to see one work in the exhibition D.Day Modern Day Design at the Centre Pompidou. It was Fiona Raby and Tony Dunne’s Evidence Dolls. The dolls are hypothetical products that could be used by single women to store DNA samples from potential partners, gaining thus an increased sense of control in the dating game. Any reason to go to Paris is always welcome anyway.
If you follow the blog, you must be familiar with the work, and writing of Dunne & Raby.
Dunne is the Head of Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London. As demonstrated during the recent Work in Progress Show of Design Interactions students, the focus of the department is shifting. While electronics and computing remain essential elements of the course, his students are also exploring how design can connect with other technologies, such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. The result is a wide range of projects, often speculative and critical, which aim to raise the debate on the human consequences of different technological futures.
I actually first thought this interview for World Changing (where it’s been posted… with a less lazy introduction) and i realize now that if i had prepared the piece for wmmna, the questions would have been slightly different. But mister Dunne is a busy man, i couldn’t ask him to face two interviews, could i?
Placebo: The Electro-draught Excluder and the Nipple Chair
Your works express the belief that design shouldn’t just be used to turn technology into something eye-pleasing, sexy and easy to use. What other role should design play then?
It could make us think and encourage us to ask more from industry! There is no need to rush into the future frantically styling up new technology and getting it to market as fast as we can. We need to reflect a bit more and ask some questions, I know this is completely at odds with the industrial system we have today, but I think as a profession we could take on more social responsibility and use some of our time, resources and know-how to explore alternative ideas about everyday life to those put forward by industry.
I think there is a real need for design to address the public as well as industry, and to explore new ways of getting discussions going about what people really want and how industry can help us achieve it, rather than the other way around.
Teddy blood bag and Meat eating products
Your installation about future energy sources at the Science Museum in London is extremely surprising. The scenarios you picture there are deeply grounded in scientific research, yet they are miles away from our dreams of solar-powered cars and hydrogen-based cities: “poo” is envisioned as a resource, a radio is fuelled by blood kept in cute teddy-shaped pouches, and churches, school, even families are developing their own energy brand. Why didn’t you follow the trend and show more positive and bright visions of the future?
The exhibit is aimed at children between the ages of 7 and 12. Everywhere they look they will see images showing how bright our technological future will be once we embrace new energy sources like Hydrogen. But things are not so simple, with every new technology there are of course other consequences — economic, cultural and ethical. With this project we wanted to encourage children to think about the implications of 3 different technologies, all real, but some more likely to happen than others. The first is Hydrogen, here we wanted to deal with economics by portraying a scenario children could relate to — having to produce a certain amount of hydrogen in order to get their pocket money. Human Poo as energy was about a major cultural shift where something once thought of as dirty would become valuable, so people would want to keep it, disconnect themselves from the sewage system and even offer it as a gift. And with the blood scenario, we wanted to show that often, reality is stranger than fiction, there is a growing area of research looking at how microbial fuel cells can be used to make self-sufficient robots and other products; pacemakers that run on the blood in our own bodies for example. In this case we wanted children to think about ethics: where would the blood come from? Of course we slightly exaggerated everything to make them more engaging.
Why do you think that biotechnology, synthetic biology or nanotechnology, like electronics, are areas in which design should play a role?
All of these technologies, separately, and in combination, are going to have a huge impact on our lives in the near future. I think it’s important that designers, start thinking about how to get involved. It’s not just about new skills or a new medium, but very different ways of thinking. What does it mean to design living or semi-living materials and products? It’s important too that design, with its powerful visualisation skills, makes abstract concepts tangible and discussable. It can help us debate different futures before they happen. Otherwise the ‘future’ is just going to happen to us and the products and services we get will be driven by economic and technological factors rather than human needs, let alone desires.
I think it would be a great shame if designers stayed on the margins while these technologies begin to shape the world around us. The time it takes for science to turn into technology and then products is speeding up. There is no comparison with the trajectory electronics took so we need to start getting involved now and exploring what impact these new technologies will have on our lives.
Interaction Design grew out of the meeting of digital and cultural worlds and the need to make computers more useable, it will be interesting to see what other forms of design will emerge over the coming years.
Can you give us one example of a student(s)’ project that best represent the “design for debate” approach?
I think the best example has to be Tobie Kerridge and Nikki Stott’s Biojewellery, partly because it has evolved so much over the last 3 years. They started it in response to the first bio brief we set at the RCA in 2003. Later, with bioengineer Ian Thompson, they followed it through to a really impressive level. I particularly like some of the documents they produced on the way exploring the ethics of the project and whether or not it would be OK to operate on someone for basically poetic reasons. The project has generated debate and discussion throughout its life at all levels — aesthetics, practicalities, business, design, methodology … I don’t think all projects need to reach this level of resolution to be successful, but it’s a good example of what’s possible.
Test samples and Previous prototype of a ring using a combination of cow marrow-bone and etched silver
Two years ago, you showed Evidence Dolls at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The plastic objects were created to provoke discussion amongst a group of single women about the impact of genetic technology on their lifestyle. Can you tell us more about that project?
What was the impetus for this project?
Valerie Guillaume, a curator at the Pompidou Centre was very keen to have something about critical design in an exhibition she was curating so she commissioned the project. We had already sketched out the idea in BioLand and we thought this was a nice opportunity to take the idea further and also explore how it could be used to produce some new insights.
In the projects we ran with students about biotech, there would always be something to help men avoid leaving DNA behind so that they wouldn’t be implicated in future paternity cases. We, well Fiona, thought the woman’s perspective should be represented too. We were inspired by the story of a famous English actress who hired a detective to rummage through an ex-lover’s bin looking for material that could be analysed for DNA and used to prove he was the father of her baby. The detective found some dental floss and it provided enough DNA to prove he was the father. Fiona thought this process should be made a little easier. The doll is effectively a storage device for DNA from a woman’s various lovers. It would be collected in the form of toenail clippings, hair and other bodily materials. Later, if necessary, they could be analysed. The material is stored in a S,M or L penis drawer. The dolls can be personalised to represent each lover. For the exhibition we worked with ÅBÄKE who interpreted the interview transcripts through drawings on each doll. the interviews with the women were included in the exhibition.
And how did the women understand, react to and welcome this unconventional project?
This was all done behind closed doors. As you can imagine, the conversations were quite intimate as each woman spoke candidly about her past lovers. But most of the women reacted to it as something they could imagine using, I found this strange to believe myself, but that was the reaction. The project was not about whether they would want or even use one, it was more about finding a way to explore the impact a new technological possibility might have on ideas of love, romance and dating.
Anxious Times: Hideaway Furniture, Huggable Atomic Mushroom
You’re now Head of the department of Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London. A year ago, the department was still called Interaction Design. What motivated such change?
The name interaction design is beginning to mean something quite specialised and focussed on designing interfaces for electronic and digital products and systems. This is probably a very good thing if you are trying to establish a discipline or a group within a company, but it’s not so good if you are interested in pushing boundaries and exploring new ways designers can make technology relevant and meaningful to everyday life. Designing better interfaces is one way of doing this but not the only way.
I think originally, the interesting thing about interaction design was the emphasis on designing interactions rather than things. We changed the name of the department around to emphasise this. But by changing the name we also hoped to decouple interaction design as a design approach, from purely digital and electronic technologies, and to allow it to continue to mutate and evolve in relation to design challenges created by a whole range of other technologies like bio- and nanotech as well as new social and cultural developments.
Our intention is to broaden the technological focus of the department so that new design contexts, methods and roles can begin to emerge, and possibly, even provide new perspectives on how we design interfaces for digital technologies.
To work in such and open space can be quite challenging and students need to have a very strong sense of self, but we think that ultimately, this will prepare designers for working at the cutting edge of a very fluid and exciting area of design.
Your students work closely with people outside the College, some of them are scientists. Or do these scientists see this “intrusion” of designers into their own sphere of research?
This is something we are still evolving. The scientists we have met so far are all dedicated to engaging with people outside science and have been very enthusiastic about student work. I’m sure there are scientists who would see us as intruders, but I doubt we will meet them very often, I think we are moving in different circles and networks.
Which (work) future do you see for students who want to fully engage in “design for debate”?
Often, when I give a lecture and show work from the design for debate projects, designers find it a bit too weird and extreme or try to label it as art rather than design (to defuse it), but always, there are people in the audience who come up afterwards to talk about commercial possibilities and see it simply for what it is, a way of getting a discussion going about the impact technology might have on everyday life by imagining positive and negative future scenarios.
The Design for Debate project is only one of 6 we run in first year each exploring different design approaches, roles and contexts but it produces some of the most striking results. I think for most students it’s an interesting learning experience, but I’m not sure how many of them plan on taking this approach further when they graduate. For those who do, I think there are several possible directions. The most natural is the exhibition route, showing in various venues and crossing between art and design worlds. But other possibilities are emerging.
Last summer, two of our students did internships in the Department of Trade and Industry’s Foresight Group working with scientists and civil servants on a project about obesity. The students enjoyed it and the DTI wants more this year. So there also seems to be a place in organisations, government or otherwise, for this kind of design. Companies like Philips are very interesting, they have a small group looking at the cross over between biological and electronic systems in relation to new products and interfaces, and I could see possibilities there which I guess are more research orientated. They do projects called probes which are intended to provoke and open up new possibilities, design for debate projects would prepare students well for this role. And then there are all the yet to be discovered possibilities.
ARK-INC installation at the 2006 RCA Summer Show
Last year, at the RCA Summer show, one of your students presented a project that i liked a lot, it was called Ark Inc. Jon Ardern looked at our ineffectual attempts to live a truly sustainable life. His project suggested that we adapt our life style to life “after the crash”, to the time when our actions have exhausted the resources of the Earth upon which we depend. Can you comment on this particular project?
Only that I really like it. I think it’s very interesting to design organisations as well as systems and services and Jon worked hard to avoid the usual forms of ‘evidence’ these projects can generate. One thing we struggle with is how to communicate work like this in a show with 200 other designers. Having said that, you found it and enjoyed and I know many others who did too, but it would be good to reach a wider audience with work like Jon’s. We have two students this year building on Jon’s approach one is looking at “11 solutions to an impending apocalypse“, and the other is designing communication and other systems for a group of extreme eco-guerillas that places the survival of the planet above all else.
What are you working on now?
Well the new course is taking up a lot of my time, but besides that we are working on a few new things. We did a small project for an exhibition at the Science Museum about spying which we enjoyed working on, Noam Toran, Troika, and Onkar Kular did some work for it too.
We’re working on a collection of electronic prototype products with Michael Anastassiades that extends the Fragile Personalities project into the electronic realm for an exhibition in October, and we’ve just finished some work for an exhibition at z33 in Hasselt, called Designing Critical Design that’s just opened. We are showing with two designers whose work we really like, Marti Guixe and Jurgen Bey. It consists mainly of existing work but the curators have commissioned some new work as well which I will say a little about as we really enjoyed doing it.
After a trip to Tokyo in November we became very interested in Robots and developed some conceptual products for the show, as well as a video with Noam Toran and some sounds with Scanner.
All the robots (Image by Per Tingleff)
Robots are destined to play a more significant part in our daily lives over the coming years. But how will we interact with them? What kind of new interdependencies and relationships might emerge? The objects we developed are meant to spark a discussion about how we’d like our robots to relate to us: subservient, intimate, dependent, equal? We presented 4 ideas.
Robot 1: This one is very independent. It lives in its own world getting on with its work. We don’t really need to know what it does as long as it does it well. It could be running the computers that manage our home. It has one quirk; it needs to avoid strong electromagnetic fields as these might cause it to malfunction. Every time a TV or radio is switched on, or a mobile phone is activated it moves itself to the electromagnetically quietest part of the room. As it is ring shaped, the owner could, if they liked, place their chair in its centre, or stand there and enjoy the fact that this is a good space to be in.
Robot 2: In the future products/robots might not be designed for specific tasks or jobs. Instead they might be given jobs based on behaviours and qualities that emerge over time. This robot is very nervous, so nervous in fact, that as soon as someone enters a room it turns to face them and analyses them with its many eyes. If the person approaches too close it becomes extremely agitated and even hysterical. Home security might be a good use of this robot’s neurosis.
Robot 3 and Robot 4
Robot 3: More and more of our data, even our most personal and secret information, will be stored on digital databases. How do we ensure that only we can access it? This robot is a sentinel, it uses retinal scanning technology to decide who accesses our data. In films iris scanning is always based on a quick glance. This robot demands that you stare into its eyes for a long time, it needs to be sure it is you.
Robot 4: This one is very needy. Although extremely smart it is trapped in an underdeveloped body and depends on its owner to move it about. Originally, manufacturers would have made robots speak human languages, but over time they will evolve their own language. You can still hear human traces in its voice.
During this project we also became very interested in microbial fuel cells that use bacteria to break down ‘food’ such as slugs, meat, rotten apples and flies. In the future, some robots will have stomachs. How will the way we interact with them be affected when we have to feed them rather than recharge them?
And finally, I think our big interest right now is exploring how a critical design approach can be applied to future scenarios and emerging technologies in relation to public engagement and debate, this work is more theoretical and ongoing, and hopefully, will eventually result in a new book.
Many thanks for your time, Tony!
You’re welcome, and thank you for your questions.
Images from the websites of Raby & Dunne, Design Interactions, Jon Ardern, pictures of the robots by Per Tingleff.
Look out for their books:
Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects by Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne (UK - USA)
And the recent re-edition of Anthony Dunne’s Hertzian Tales - Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 12, 2007, 6:09AM
one million image masterpiece
“world’s largest artistic collaboration” celebrating the diversity of global society through art. 1 million ordinary people from all around the world are invited to work on a single picture together. people of all ages & abilities are allowed to squiggle, doodle, in any shape, color, word or sketch in a large collaborative mosaic of small squares.
see also wallright & collaborative visual mosaic & pixelfest & gridlove & kollabor8 & infoscape.
[link: millionmasterpiece.com]
Originally from information aesthetics
reBlogged by michael on Mar 6, 2007, 2:43AM
Motion Designers Speak Out Against the War in Iraq
The following videos have been blogged on a few sites, but I wanted to consolidate them here, as representatives of the power of type, motion and simple graphics to communicate opinion effectively.
