Conference
17 posts tagged.
-
Speculative practitioners symposium at the AA
A note on the AA School’s symposium on speculative practitioners, bringing in gaming, film, comics, animation, literature and art as alternative models and test sites for architectural imagining.
-
Graphic language for touch
How do we mark up the physical world so people know what’s touchable, and what happens when they touch it? A set of icons I sketched to find out, presented at Design Engaged in Berlin in November 2005.
-
Design Engaged 2005
Three days of conversation, urban exploration and brainstorming in Berlin, November 2005, the second Design Engaged. Adam Greenfield opened on energy decline and the coming implications for design, Anne Galloway on the parliament of things, Joshua Kaufman on the politics of artefacts, Fabio Sergio on whether interaction design has any material at all. Design Engaged 2005, organised by Andrew Otwell for a second year. Raw notes from three days of sessions, preserved as written at the time. Speakers included Adam Greenfield, Matt Ward, Joshua Kaufman, Anne Galloway, Michelle Chang, Thomas Vander Wal, Louise Klinker, Malcolm McCullough, Fabio Sergio, Stefan Smagula, Chris Heathcote, Jyri Engeström and Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, Matt Webb, Nurri Kim, Jack Schulze, Régine Debatty, Liz Goodman, Eric Rodenbeck with Michal Migurski (Stamen), Molly Wright Steenson, John Poisson and Ben Cerveny. Restorative feeling of getting together The architecture of participation Experience design is participation design Ethical and social implications of ubicomp Has been reading far afield: Out of Gas , Dark Age Ahead , Collapse Growth and decline Models of growth: 1. Health of economy is based on growth 2. Continuous growth: technological singularity, going off the charts 3.
-
Spatial memory at Design Engaged 2004
Presentation notes from Design Engaged 2004 in Amsterdam. Two related strands: the Time that land forgot project with Even Westvang (five months, 8000 photos, visualised by date and time of day), and the research on marking in urban public space.
-
Design Engaged 2004
Twenty-odd designers, researchers and writers sat around a long table in Amsterdam over a weekend in November 2004, taking turns to present. These are my notes, session-by-session, as written at the time. Design Engaged 2004 was an invitation-only gathering organised by Andrew Otwell. A small, intense weekend of conversation. The FAQ has the full list of attendees. There are also lots of photos on Flickr . The growth of the soil How do we comprehend complexity How do we build structures around complex information Accreting meta-data: GPS data, descriptive information Break down of material as it hits the soil Soup, tags, condensed and distilled meta objects Sorting mechanisms, affinity browsers, related, filtering, emergent relationships, interrelationships How do we conceive a metaphor for building these processes? A structure that is meaningful for the users. Application design: movement through states of application to tending a flow of processes Tending to meta-data is a growth process DLA: diffusion-limited aggregation, a natural process model The relationships between metadata can be visualised as this. Should model metadata using plant models: plant models have existed for eons, basic structures for material.
-
Art + communication 2004
Notes from Art + Communication 2004, organised by RIXC in Riga, Latvia, the final event in the Trans-cultural Mapping workshop series. Even Westvang and I presented our Timeland project. A trip to Limbazi for the opening of the Piens (‘milk’) project, milk routes through the EU, mapped through the personal stories of the people along them.
-
Physical computing workshop
Notes from the ‘Making Sense’ physical computing workshop at Atelier Nord in Oslo, September 2004, organised by Erich Berger with Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen of HeHe. The intention was to avoid the screen entirely, to concentrate on simple interactions between sensors and outputs. But here we are, staring at PBasic and JAL while making lots of LEDs blink.
-
ISEA 2004 conference
A short 2004 note from ISEA, the International Symposium on Electronic Art, held that year on a Silja Line ferry between Helsinki, Stockholm, Mariehamn and Tallinn. Polarfront kept event notes through the run, and Grandtextauto covered the installations and artwork.
-
Iceland inside/out workshop
A very short 2004 note from Reykjavik, where I was attending the Trans-cultural Mapping workshop. This workshop was where the ‘Time that land forgot’ project with Even Westvang was made.
-
Loop city workshop
Bill Hillier at University College London describes cities as movement economies, the structure of a city is the pattern of people moving through it. The workshop took this as the starting point and spent two days walking that idea across related fields: spatial organisation, relative space, time-space, taxicab geometry, mental mapping, text maps. Notes from the Loop City workshop at the Outside In symposium in Gothenburg, Sweden, June 2004. The workshop was led by Dietmar Offenhuber and Sara Hodges with participants from the symposium, working across geography, architecture, mapping and locative media. Raw notes below. spacesyntax.com Space explorers : children, homeless, vendors, skateboarders Space utilisers : commuters, workers Exocentric : external, connected Egocentric : centred, point of view Large, diverse research field Abler, Ronald Adams: Spatial Organization: The Geographer’s View of the World Expressing thematic data through spatial differentiation Political maps based on size of army Map of USA based on Elvis concerts Irina Vasiliev: Design Issues for Mapping Time Time as a way of measuring space (one conclusion: the world is shrinking) Grid systems make diagonal move…
-
Mobile outskirts workshop
A bus full of GPS receivers, cameras and impromptu artworks drove fifteen hours from Trondheim up to the islands of Lofoten. The workshop wiki and media archive are being kept updated via fairly limited wireless coverage. A short dispatch from the Mobile Outskirts workshop in Lofoten, June 2004, part of the Trans-cultural Mapping workshop series . A painless and creative bus drive up the Norwegian coast.
-
Outside In
Outside In was a two-day forum at Röda Sten in Gothenburg on 14–15 June 2004, about new voices, media and practices in the design and use of public space. The venue is extraordinary: below a suspension bridge, surrounded by huge concrete creations. Really windy outside, calm inside the lecture space. These are my notes from the talks, written on the day. Occasional asides in italics are things I’ve added looking back. I’ve left the note form mostly as-is. (I missed the first workshop of the day.) Putting memories in spaces. Spaces aren’t the same after having been disrupted. After ‘Reclaim the Streets’ or a Circle Line party you can’t see the space in the same way. Distinction between public and private. What is it? Public space doesn’t exist anymore. Ken Livingstone’s new City Hall is half-private, half-public, private investment was involved in the building, so protests cannot happen outside. Do we need institutions in order to do events? Is that the only way to do them legally? What’s stopping people from doing these things is not necessarily capitalism but the fear of looking like a pillock. Self-regulation is a big factor. Can spark things to let down inhibitions or shackles. Example of the scooter, became a kids’ toy and then it wasn’t cool anymore.
-
Notcon 04
Two things from Notcon 04 in London worth writing up: Spotcodes, very simple circular barcodes readable with a Series 60 camera phone, storing 42 bits of data and usable for positional tracking; and Reverend Rat’s 10-watt Bluetooth receiver, a hundred times more powerful than a Bluetooth dongle.
-
Transcultural mapping workshops
A brief announcement from May 2004. Two workshops on the calendar this summer. The Transcultural Mapping workshop (‘Mobile outskirts: cultural mapping of northern geographical outposts’), in Lofoten in June, looking at GPS, photography and field-recording in remote Norwegian coastal places. The Loop City workshop at the Outside In symposium (‘Emerging expressions, interventions and participation in public space’) in Gothenburg shortly after, on walking and mapping urban public space with Bill Hillier of Space Syntax. Update: new workshop website .
-
Creative Crossings workshop
A triangular research network, practitioners from Britain, Canada and Finland, gathered in London to work on participatory and creative applications for mobile, locative and cross-platform media. Organised by m-cult, the Banff Centre and Arts Council England in April 2004.
-
Interaction and narrative workshop
Notes from a lecture given at Channel 4 in London in February 2002, as part of the Mesh Scheme for digital animation filmmakers. The lecture is aimed at designers and filmmakers thinking about how to make narratives that involve user or audience interaction. Ideologies, examples, processes and the practicalities of stories that aren’t linear. Full notes from the lecture are here .
-
The Landscape of Experience
Three days of conference notes from Living Surfaces 2001 in Chicago, November 2001, an AIGA conference on experience design, interactive media and the design practice emerging around them. Written as a trip report for UK colleagues in the days after returning to London. Speakers included Mohan Sawhney, Nick Durrant, Michael Schrage, Tim Parsey of Motorola, Hugh Dubberly, Don Norman, Idit Harel of MamaMedia and Julie Pokorny of Lante, among others. At the time, “experience design” was a new enough term that the conference was partly an exercise in defining it. The notes are preserved as written in November 2001, lightly tidied but otherwise intact. Speakers were reasonably diverse, with no overall design, HCI or usability focus, definitely attempting to be inclusive under the term “experience design”. I have a clearer overview of the state of the US design landscape, and the kind of work that intelligent agencies and individuals are undertaking. There were a number of very sharp individuals presenting. Experience design is a widely accepted term, widely understood as a process, and validated by the client and market reaction. There is a vacuum waiting to be filled after years of new-media mishap and recent financial failure.