Gillian Crampton Smith – Research?
Gillian Crampton Smith is regarded as one of the pioneers of interaction design. In 1989, she established the Computer Related Design Department at the Royal College of Art in London. In 2001 she set up the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy, a graduate school and research institution sponsored by Telecom Italia and Olivetti which gained wide recognition as a leading centre for interaction design research and education. She is also the Chair of Convivio EU Network.
She is now developing together with Philip Tabor a graduate programme of interaction design in the faculty of design of the IUAV University in Venice.
The craft of Interaction Design has developed through experience without thinking too much about rationalizing it. Like Bauhaus’ work in the ’20s, the new grammar of film making developed by Eisenstein, it can be a platform from which those coming after us can build upon. Many designers work in a very intuitive way. So far any attempt to systematize design has proved inconsistent. The only way to research design is by doing design.
Design as research.
– Argument 1. Design isn’t research: design has no theory, no fool-proof methods, design is intuitive and overrationalism will ruin it.
Design reflects on what has been done and draws on it. It’s risky to apply paradigms of science to design. Theories about architecture have been around for centuries, design is much younger. There are thousands of interaction design projects and only a few are really relevant for research. She reminded how hard it had been years ago to convince the Design Council that what interaction design was doing was relevant for research. Now it’s much better accpeted and understood. Research projects seek to provide knowledge and insight. If a research project fails, there is still a gread deal that has been learnt by doing that research. This doesn’t apply to design, you can’t say to a client: “it didn’t work, but we’ve learnt so much in the process!”
Argument 2. All design is research. Each design problem is unique. Design progresses through exemplars. Design repertoires.
Argument 3. Includes the invention and generation of ideas, images, performances and artefacts, including design, where these lead to substantially improved insights.
Looking for 3 types of insight:
– Medium: what is possible within the constraints of technology;
– People: ways technology could better support people’s needs, values, desires;
– Process: improving the way systems, products and services are designed.
What is possible to do with technology? How can we communicate it in implicit and explicit ways?
Examples.
Victor Vina and Massimo Banzi’s Box. The platform allows non-technical people to experiment freely with designing interactions between physical devices and their wireless networking. These networks could connect objects in different rooms of a building-or even in different countries or continents.
Each cardboard box can do one simple input or output thing. Each box knows where it is, the time and where the other boxes are. Interactions can take place anywhere in the world; for example, a box in Ivrea can have a switch that turns on a light in Tokyo-all done via the Internet.
Gilian Crampton-Smith then showed several projects from Strangley Familiar, a series of explorations into physical computing by ex-students of Ivrea. The first rule the students were given was “No button.”
Message Table, for example, is an answering machine that forces you to have a clear desk.
The cord connecting each of the Tug Tug telephone to its base is a shared interactive object, allowing each person to affect the distant phone physically by pulling the cord. If you pull the cord, the receiver at the other end falls of the hook.
Hardware platforms developed at Ivrea that build on processing: Wiring and Arduino.
Need to make a difference: after some 20 years of interaction design, we still spend a tremendous amount of time staring at a screen and typing with two fingers. Good ideas need to be sustainable, understandable and not just implementable.
Aequilibrium is an interactive environment developed for the Rialto fish market in Venice. The project shows how to use a technology without loosing the quality that makes the city so special. The fish in Aequilibrium react to your presence: they get scared and avoid your arrival but they become your friends when you are quiet. Four columns on the sides show predictions and pollution. The prediction can change accoring to your behaviour, by interacting with Aequilibrium you get a sense of how your actions can influence nature
Bad pictures of the slides.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 1, 2007, 10:05AM
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
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, [...]
We need theories of experience design
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“We lack an objective perspective to measure the success of our work and commentaries to improve upon it,” argues design consultant Bob Jacobson in a recent post on his blog Total Experience.
Instead we have to place our reliance “on first-hand, insider accounts as a source of knowledge”. Jacobson focuses particularly on the lack of formal criticism in the field of experience design. It is a realisation that is all the more prominent to him now that he is working on a book on the field.
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Originally
from Putting people first
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Dec 12, 2006, 7:55AM
Signposts for the Week ending November 24, 2006
Design theory edition! (C’mon, it’s a long weekend (in the US anyway), and you’ve got time to read!)
Generation C sees Products as Verbs and needs Experience Hooks
Dan finishes his exhaustive review of What Things Do
You can’t design experiences, says Tom Guariello in UXmatters
How much of product design is about overcoming unwelcome intimiacy? asks Tim Leberecht on the frog blog
What does interaction design have to do with bikes? Find out in An Interview with Grant Petersen of Rivendell Bicycle Works
Josh Porter predicts The Death of Information Architecture
Mobile TV is about the personal experience, says Jan Chipchase
How do we design accountability into our interfaces? asks Jono DiCarlo
Why Designing Systems is Difficult
Bill DeRouchey presses the reset button
Originally
from Adaptive Path
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Nov 25, 2006, 2:13AM
Getting Political About Media Studies
Two conferences taking place in Europe, this weekend, trace new political movements in the field of media theory. Both consider the role of representation in entrenching or perpetrating war. ‘Under Fire’ (underfire.eyebeam.org) at Spain’s University of Seville, in partnership with the city’s International Biennial of Contemporary Art, focuses on war and armed conflict, with a special component on media (mis)representations of Islamic culture. At Genoa, Italy’s Villa Croce Contemporary Art Museum, a conference entitled ‘Resistant Maps: artistic actions in the interconnected urban territory’ looks to cartography, that medium long problematized by postmodern scholars, for answers to questions about shifting balances of agency. Taking as its premise the idea that the ‘representation of territory holds a historical role in the privileges of power,’ participants will consider the role of psychogeography, new locative media devices, and other means of redrawing lines in reclaiming contested space. The two conferences seem catalyzed by current struggles in the Middle East, and the lineup for both features some of the most active media ecologists and activists in the field, including Jordan Crandell, Friedrich Kittler, Ana Valdes, and Eyal Weizman at ‘Under Fire,’ and Vittore Baroni, Nicola Bucci, Brian Holmes, and Alessandro Ludovico, at ‘Resistant Maps.’ The latter also coincides with an exhibition featuring work by Cartografia Resistente, Giuseppe Chiari, Guy Debord, and others, bringing a deeper artistic context to intervention. All in all, the conferences reflect a refreshing movement towards engagement with contemporary political issues and an effort to think not only of how new media contributes to these issues, but also how it might adequately address them. – Marisa Olson
Originally
from Rhizome News
reBlogged
by michael
on Nov 24, 2006, 8:00AM
architectural-theory.pdf
The fellows at Archfarm have added to their series of architectural PDFs – unfortunately referred to as “fascicles” – with Peter Yeadon’s recent thoughts on nanotechnology. In that paper (download the fascicle), Yeadon introduces us to structures in “an age of molecular manipulation,” in which we’ll see “the dawn of nanofactories, robust molecular machine shops that harvest atoms from a reservoir of molecules to make sophisticated materials, devices, and systems one atom at a time.”
- What could such minuscule inventions possibly have to do with the making of architecture and cities? A nanometer is about a million times smaller than the diameter of a pinhead, and a thousand times smaller than the length of a typical bacterium… How could these tiny achievements possibly have any bearing on the work of an architect?
Read his fascicle and find out.
Archfarm has also published an interview with Sonia Cillari (download the PDF), about emotion and interactivity in architectural design, as well as Usman Haque’s rough guide to “open source architecture” (PDF), published last summer.
The series veers a tiny bit too close to the world of Deleuzian eyeglasses and trendy jargon, I have to say, but it’s a great format and I’ll be interested to see where they go next. For instance, might I humbly recommend they publish The Pruned Guide to Futurist Geo-Hydrology… That, or BLDGBLOG will start its own series of PDFs – and then everyone can stare in awe at my fascicles.
Originally
from BLDGBLOG
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Nov 21, 2006, 9:29PM
