TEDtalks: Stefan Sagmeister: Yes, design can make you happy
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Analyzing a list of things that have made him happy, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister realized that almost half of the items were in some way related to design. In this intensely personal talk, he shares the details of some of those moments, and gives props to three artists whose work has had a positive impact on his world. Concluding with some examples of his own work, Sagmeister offers a real insight into his aesthetic and philosophy of work — and life.
Originally from swissmiss by
reBlogged by michael
Videos available of the IIT Institute of Design Strategy Conference
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The Chicago-based IIT Institute of Design strongly believes in human-centred innovation which “starts with users’ needs and employs a set of reliable methods, theories and tools to create solutions to their problems”.
In May, the Institute organised the Design Strategy Conference, an international executive forum addressing how businesses can use design to explore emerging opportunities, solve complex problems, and achieve lasting strategic advantage. The conference starts from the premise that design, with its ability to understand users, redefine problems and create systemic, human-centered solutions, can help companies better understand their customer’s daily lives, and lead directly to valuable (and valued) offerings that are effectively tailored to their market. Videos of the presentations are now available. The speaker list featured:
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Originally from Putting people first by
reBlogged by michael on Jun 10, 2007, 1:17AM
Luminous Green
Yesterday, i attended the Luminous Green symposium, organized by the lovely FoAM people, on the Groenhoven Estate, near Brussels. The event was exactly what it promised to be: a fantastic gathering of people from different fields and who all battle for a more sustainable environment. There were artists, fashion designers, grassroot activists, business leaders, people from the governement, etc. The aim of the event is to get them to talk together. Not in a self-congratulory spirit but to collect successful stories and see if people from different background can define a common ground.
If you’re in Brussels on the 4th, i can only recommend you to head to FoAM and see how artists, designers and engineers translate the issues and suggestions that popped up during the conference into sketches and prototypes.
FoAM set up Luminous Green to reflect on the importance of creativity practice into the environmental debate. The aim is to go beyond the discussion about the effects of global warming. The debate is rather to see how we can adapt to life in turbulent and anti-environmental conditions and more precisely: How can designers, artists and other creative people contribute to the discussion? Maja Kuzmanovic, who curated the event, suggested that what designers and artists can bring into the discussion is:
– 1. An integrated approach to complex problem solving.
Problems cannot be isolated, they are part of a big picture. We have created unstable systems and they have to be attacked from different approaches and fields. Everything is interconnected and interdependent. This requires a holistic trial and error approach.
– 2. The participatory nature of creative practices.
Today, prescribing universal solutions doesn’t work. There are as many approaches as there are problems. We shouldn’t look for solutions but for ecologies of solutions
– 3. The ability to design beautiful things that people might want to surround themselves with.
Buckminster Fuller said: “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
If we design or create beautiful things, people will not only want to have it but will also want to be part of the community that made it. Beauty makes it easier to draw people’s attention.
It’s time to be proactive and behave like the avant-garde that many claim to be.
The conference was as sustainable as possible which was not easy at all:
– difficult to find furniture created in a truly sustainable way (good recycling conditions, good working conditions, etc.) The only things they could find were prototypes or showroom pieces,
– they wanted to organize the event in an eco-chateau but nothing of the kind exists in Belgium,
– they got two hybrid cars from Lexus but 50 persons cannot fit in a car. Now Brussels uses hybrid buses for public transport, the only problem is that they cannot go out of Brussels. Regulations wouldn’t allow that.
However, they produced very little printed documents, offered picnic snack in lovely bags designed and hand-crafted by people from the Barefoot College and managed to convince the speakers to either use no projections or be content with the very poorly lighted ones. And it worked marvellously.
Conclusion: there’s still so much work to do, especially for people who don’t have large pockets. We need more tangible products and we need to connect them together to achieve the desired impact.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on May 1, 2007, 8:57AM
Image, Space, Object 2007: People Centered Brand Experiences
at RMCAD, in Denver, Colorado, August 9-12, 2007
I have to say that I am a bit biased — having been involved in producing the last two Image, Space, Object conferences — but ISO offers a workshop-like experience that doesn’t have a true parallel in today’s conference scene.
ISO participants are divided up into [...]
A look back at Kinnernet 2007
A few weeks ago, Rafael Mizrahi told me about the 4th Kinnernet, a hyper-geek event organized each year on the southern shores of the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret Lake) in northern Israel. I checked out the website and started bombarding Rafael with questions “What’s this robots?” “And that vehicle?” “How about this gaming arcade?” Here’s a few notes from our conversation:
Computer Crash Course and Game Rider
Set up in cooperation with Hubert Burda Media, creators of DLD conference, and following Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, KinnerNet intvited about 150 technology addicts and creative people to gather informally and discuss topics and concepts such as software development, internet culture, social networks, web services, Wi-Fi, open source, cellular services, computer games, interactive TV, VOIP, technological trends, gadgets, security, etc. The general purpose is to share thoughts, work-in-progress, show off the latest tech toys and hardware hacks, and tackle challenging problems. The camp is a closed and private event and participating to it means contributing.
Rafael defines himself as an “artificial vision explorer” at Feng-GUI lab (which developed the ViewFinder, an algorithm that simulates the human eyes and brain and what would be the gaze path of the eye movements while being exposed to visuals. Similar algorithms are embedded into robots) and a member of GarageGeeks (which looks like “crazy projects paradise”.)
As part of the Robot Extravaganza of KinnerNet 2007 camp, he presented the GuitarHeroNoid which he built together with Tal Chalozin. The full-scale humanoid autonomously plays the Sony PlayStation game Guitar Hero II (video of GuitarHeroNoid playing the song Woman by Wolfmother).
Can you tell us more about the robot that plays the PlayStation game “Guitar Hero”? How does it work and play?
At the game, each song is presented on a set of five columns, resembling a real guitar fret board, that scroll constantly towards the player. The five columns correspond to the five fret buttons and appropriately colored notes appear in these columns.
We connected the PlayStation video output using a capture device into a computer and by live video streaming filter capture the video frames as images. Each image is being processed and the detected notes are sent through the parallel output or through network cable directly into the robot. This distributed architecture is also used by a robotics bio-technology called Remote Surgery 
and actually this distribution saved us when my parallel output was burned by an electric shock coming back from the robot solenoids, and we separated the process into two laptops.
Tal built computer-controlled, solenoids fingers that matched the fret board and strings in the game. Getting the fingers to press the fret buttons and hit the strum correctly was the hard part.
Tal took a storeroom mannequin and positioned the arms to hold the guitar. But the arms couldn’t be put in the right position, so he had to break and glue them to hold the guitar right. All the robot wiring is inside the mannequin ending at a control panel on the back of its neck.
This first public demonstration of GuitarHeroNoid received a rock star ovation from the ultra-geek audience. We also prepared a multiplayer mode, so you can play against the robot. Pushing the envelope higher, maybe next year we will build a robot that plays the game “dance dance revolution” (known as Dancing Stage in Europe).
Now how about “Real Pacman”?
The Real Pac Man (Tal Chalozin, Niv Efron) main idea was to build some old school tech symbol using as much nowadays-technologies as we can find. Right away we knew that we want a large scale game that will give the feeling of the “PacMan come to life…”
The game board made of a projector mounted on a stand, projecting a 15-square-meters game board on the floor. The PacMan was a wireless Pac-look-a-like robot which “drives” over a game board, equipped by RFID reader, Bluetooth transceiver controlled by ATMEL microcontroller, riding on a game board marked with RFID tags.
At the button of the PacMan there is an RFID reader that reads the tag location and sends it back to the game “engine”. The game engine is a java game we hacked, running on a laptop computer.
The result is that you are playing with a completely realistic PacMan over a full virtual game board, but they communicate as if they are one.
To make it more useless tech powered, we’ve written a J2ME application running on a cellular phone for controlling the PacMan. So, instead of playing with the laptop keyboard, you play the game on your cell, which sends via Bluetooth the control commands.
The next step is to make it a multiplayer, PacMan and ghosts…
Pac Man does not get anymore realistic than that!
All around the room were screens and gaming consoles and a hydraulic driving simulator, so you could just sit down and rumble. At the center of the gaming room there were two home made arcade tables, one crafted by Davidi Silberstein and the other by Amit Jurgenson, both musicians, handy-men and old-school gamers.
Arcade Machine Quest and Amit’s Arcade Machine
And the hydraulic driving simulator?
Power tool drag racing took place inside a large and crowded tent. Crossing the middle of the tent, were two long wooden strip tracks in which the racers ran, dragging their electricity cables behind them. The race judges where Michael Shiloh, co-founder of MakingThings and an annual participant of drag racing, World class notorious hacker Pablos Holman who breaks and builds new technologies and Eyal Gever with the “from a designer perspective” opinion.
Image on the right: Vladimir’s Warm vs. Shy Vardi’s Spider (photo: Yaniv Golan)
Of course, the fastest racers were the ones Michael and Pablos brought. Michael had Jim Mason’s blazing fast “monorail” that runs as a monorail train on top of one of the sides of the track, and Pablos had borrowed an “Old Killdoggie” model racer, which is a modified grinder with inline-skate wheels. But getting first to the end of the track is not the goal of such a race.
At least half of the races were built by Yedidya (Didi) Vardi and his crew. Didi, a junk collector, designer of hands-on science models and screws-and-bolts seller. On Didi’s team were Shy Vardi, Vladimir Zviagintsev an aircraft engineer, who built the kites that were raised to thousands of feet in height, and Shlomo Abayoff.
Babylon Tower Racer was built by the GarageGeeks Zvika Netter, Yuval Tal, Ohad Pressman, Gil Hirsch and Tal Chalozin. A laptop sitting on a wagon with electric lawnmower wheels, motivated to move forward by SMS sent by the audience to Yuval’s phone number. Each time an SMS arrived, the light blob was blinked the message in morse code, and a Text-to-Speech algorithm announced the message using the racer’s speakers.
More racers such as the bottle Xylophone, playing on bottles set at the sides of the track, containing various amount of water for different tones. A CleanTech racer that needed no electricity but the moments of falling parts, Vacuuming Hovercraft, Skateboard Ventilator, and Parking, which actually did park most of the time and didn’t finish the race.
Crocodile “rocket” Handy by Naama, Achi and Yariv
KinnerNet looks like a hell of fun. Why is the number of participants limited to 150?
Are there like-minded events in the country during the rest of the year?
KinnerNet is a a lot of fun and in order to participate, you have to contribute and not act as a “camp potato”. I guess that the number is limited because only super geeks are invited. Since there are many people who wish to share and expand their connections, forks of miscellaneous camps and events are being formed. For example, GeekCon, EureKamp, and even us, the GarageGeeks are hosting (images) content evenings, barbeques and Gaming Lan Parties (images.)
I saw on the programme that there was some place dedicated to digital art? What happened there? Any good work you’d like to highlight?
I think digital art was everywhere. In the evening we all gathered in the dining room and watched videos prepared by participants. Michal Levy, for example, a saxophonist and graphic designer, presented a beautiful visual interpretation that she made for John Coltrane’s Giant Steps.
We were asked to bring from home any junk we don’t need anymore and Hanoch Piven hosted a face making workshop that was one of the most popular happenings. Hanoch has been making collages with objects – mainly illustrations of faces for magazines and newspapers since 1992.
The GraffitiPrinter
Ariel Schlesinger, presented his GraffitiPrinter, a handheld printer, feed from punch card that translates to spray writing on the wall.
Inside a large room, Ezri Tarazi along with the creative industrial designers Maayan Hagar and Yasmin Yotam, and anyone who wished to help, built a chain reaction sculpture called a machine that does something that does something.
Next to that sculpture, and the Superman Simulator, Didi Vardi presented his Vibrating Laser Balls Organ, a 400 pound golf-ball-and-aluminum Stradivarius, a wonderful, real musical instrument inspired by the Animusic’s virtual Pipe Dream. (video)
I’m also very curious about the Cooking Madness event. Was there anything edible there? What does “Cotton Candy with ambient touch” taste like for example?
Cooking Madness was more than edible all right. As you cannot be in all of the activities, I didn’t get the chance to taste that Fluffy Clouds Cotton Candy. But I ate two pieces from Tal’s mother’s terrific passion fruit cheese cake, which was introduced by 3 Powerpoint slides at the camp’s first gathering. Most of the time I stood next to Yuval Tal who prepared the Extra alcoholic chocolate drink, and verified the quality of the cocktail.
At night, things were getting weirder, people juggling, geeks playing arcades or fighting each other with light sabres, and Vladimir, inspired by The Burning Man Project, was riding a bicycle while dragging another bicycle with a burning doll, which was created earlier by Didi’s team.
I’d like to finish by send a enormous thanks and hugs to anyone who helped in the great 2007 KinnerNet event and also thank Yaniv Golan and Alex Sirota for the photos.
Thanks Rafael!
A last tip from Rafael: Gil Rimon and Lior Katz’s Supermarket 2.0 parody (video.)
More images at Flickr tag KinnerNet2007. Photo of GuitarHeroNoid by Yaniv Golan. More images.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 7, 2007, 8:10AM
The Fine Art of Context Creation
Last week I heard Sara Diamond, President of Ontario College of Art & Design, talk about The Fine Art of Context Creation: Cross-Disciplinary Methods in New Media. Here’s some of what I heard:
Artists
- Artists are social critics & lateral thinkers that identify and fill in gaps in tool kit.
- They develop their own tools and fill gaps in dominant tool systems, which often results in pushing technology & science forward.
- Do it for selfish reasons: want to make something but the technology is not there.
Designers
- Designers sniff the zeitgeist. They have a “trained” gut feel.
- Designers also push technologies but they are more process based: understand the user, understand materials
- Designers are eager for stuff to work (generalization). They really care if things works (unlike artists).
- Represent a productive mix of optimism & pessimism; mix of pushing boundaries & containment
Contemporary Context Demands Cooperation
- A co-reliance of knowledge is needed for developing solutions
- Need to bring processes and knowledge together to achieve viable prototypes
- Boundary Objects are gifts between cultures, terms that are redefined through collaboration or emergent use
- Taught to approach problems in different ways in science, engineering, and design
- Our challenge is not the technology but the communication between people.
- Leadership needs to shift within teams based on tasks
- Share physical & network process+ spaces
- People like structures and will do incredible things with them
- Method 1: Participatory Design
- Method 2: Rapid Prototyping
- Method 3: Take things out to the public
- Really important for engineers to engage with the design process
- Important for designers to understand how hard it is to build things
Tags: collaboration, context, process
Originally from Functioning Form: Interface Design by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 31, 1969, 11:59PM
Art Basel Miami Beach 2006, Part One
For CH’s second annual video series about the series of art fairs, parties and events that take place around Art Basel Miami Beach for a week in early December, we go from the literal fringes (artist-designed blimps on the beach) to Basel itself. This first of two parts is a glimpse at the many sculptures, paintings and installations that fill buildings and tents (and beaches) throughout Miami during these few days, including the growing ancillary fairs NADA (New Art Dealer’s Alliance) and Scope. With a few quotes from artists Paper Rad, James Rosenquist and others, as wells as collector Marvin Friedman and gallerist Rudiger Lange, this episode is mostly a visual collage of CH’s experience earlier this month in Miami. Next week, check out Part Two for a more in-depth look at Art Basel Miami Beach and the art world as told by Rosenquist, Friedman and the director of NADA.
Originally
from Cool Hunting
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Dec 19, 2006, 6:23AM
Vida 9.0 and Artbot Gent
Robot maniacs and fans of artificial intelligence, rejoice! The list of the winners of Vida 9.0, Art & Artificial Life International Competition is online (congratualtion to Andy.) So is the casting of the upcoming Artbot, it will be held in Gent on December 2 and 3. And if you’re in the neighbourhood join us at Art+Game, a series of conferences, screenings, performances and exhibitions about game culture in Brussels, Dec. 1-4.
The images above show a work by US/ Taiwan artist Shih Chieh Huang, EX-DD-06. Prefabricated electronics are stripped down and then recombined in a way which is at once familiar, and alienated by a playful recontextualisation where they are made to interact with one another, and with the spectators.
For example, by linking an automatic light switch to video footage of the artist’s eye, the relationship established between human blinking and a flashing light bulb appears both oddly logical and deeply poetic. When movements of multiplied eyeball images on a video screen are used to control inflatable plastic tubes and coloured lights connected to the monitor, the resultant creature seems to live a life of its own. All “organs” of the creatures inhabiting this interactive space are deliberately kept transparent through the use of different kinds of plastics. Paradoxically, this legibility of their “bodily” functions makes them still more mysterious and biologically convincing, like luminescent jellyfish.
Originally
from we make money not art
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Nov 17, 2006, 7:40AM
SHiFT: Reality Computing
António Câmara’s Reality Computing presentation at Shift 2006 highlighted several of his company’s (YDreams) experimental interface designs. Câmara defined Reality computing as human computer interactions “where the distance between user and content is almost zero.”
Câmara , inspired by Steve Job’s mantra that “real artists ship products”, applied his academic research to the following products:
- Virtual Site Seeing: interactions with digital information layered onto the real world.
- Undercover2: massive mobile multiplayer game with location-based services.
- Adidas Eye Ball: large-scale interactive display that measure speed, volume, and more.
- Interactive Street Furniture: real world imagery utilized within large-scale advertising.
More reality computing interfaces can be found on the YDreams site.
Tags: shift2006, advertising, games, innovative UIs
Originally
from Functioning Form: Interface Design
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Dec 31, 1969, 11:59PM
the trouble with theory (EPIC ethnography III)
My EPIC presentation took a position impatient with theory. I will
later accused of being anti-intellectual. This must be wrong. As my neice pointed out, I am uncle-intellectual.
The trouble is not with me. The trouble is with what it means to solve
problems in a dynamic culture. The trouble is with theory.
Marshall Sahlins argues that every theory is a bargain with reality.
It gives us certain kinds of knowledge by denying us the possibility of
other kinds of knowledge. (My phrasing. All regrets if the master had
hoped for something more nuanced.)
Working for clients, we are obliged to deal always with shifting
perspectives, mountains of data, complicated problem sets and an urgent
time line. As good marketers, there is lots to crunch, much to
contemplate, and the BFI (big f*cking idea) can come from any where.
Anyone who is a slave to any one theory puts the enterprise at risk.
Solving the problems of most clients demands methodological lability and
an intellectual opportunism. We want to have all the theories we have
ever encountered at our disposal. In my case, this must mean a
willingness to draw upon structuralism, semiotics, structural
functionalism, functionalism, post modernism, and much else besides.
We want to be agnostic.
Theoretical loyalty is a terrible idea not least because we are willing
away all the other insights that promiscuity make available.
Theoretical loyalty, that’s precisely the sort of thing that is likely
to appeal to academics for whom tribal loyalty is the very point of the
exercise, not least because it is so often used to decide whether and
where they will be allowed to teach and publish.
No, a certain intellectual mobility is called for. Typically, we have
10 days between our introduction to the problem and the our
conclusion. That’s 10 days to get from, say, a deep ignorance of the mutual
fund industry to insights and recommendations that are capable of
adding real value. I think we can not unless we are prepared to press
into service any and all the intellectual patterns with which we are acquainted.
I am not arguing the case for no theory. The world of marketing began, I guess, in retail. Someone would go to the shop floor and see what was selling. This was all the intelligence one needed to stay in business. This was no theory. But every corporation is now a ship in high seas. Every kind of data must be consulted. Every kind of strategy contemplated. Only consultants who are prepared to make use of everything they know can serve. We do not wish these consultants to forsake theory. We want them to forsake the idea of a single theory. But a blue helmet on them if we must, but "ecumenical" is the watch word here.
Originally
from This Blog Sits at the
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Sep 28, 2006, 11:35PM
