Interactive Manhattan

[Image: Via Interactive Architecture dot Org].

New Yorkers! Be sure to stop by the Eyebeam/Interactive Architecture dot Org event tonight in Manhattan:

Organised by Ruairi Glynn of Interactive Architecture dot Org, Eyebeam is pleased to co-host, with the Bartlett School of Architecture, an evening of presentations on interactive architecture. Presenters will include Phil Ayres of Sixteen Makers, Eyebeam residents Carmen Trudell and Jennifer Broutin, Marek Walczak of MW2MW and David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang of the NYC architecture firm, The Living. Presenters will discuss their work for 15 minutes followed by a panel discussion moderated by Professor Stephen Gage of the Bartlett with a reception from 9-10pm.

It’s all going down at 540 W. 21st Street – if you go, tell Ruairi I said hello.

[Images: 1 and 2].

More info on the event; more info on architecture at the Bartlett.

Originally from BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh
reBlogged by michael on Jan 26, 2007, 6:53PM

Shades of Online Community

The topic of online community has come up a lot on a recent project. I’ve heard some powerful stories about Yelp, Gay.com, Craigslist, Tripadvisor, Citysearch, Amazon… and more. It occurred to me that there is more than one way to engage with users and foster a sense of community online. Here are some ideas on the shades of community.

1.The Inner Circle
Two common characteristics this type of online community seems to share are 1) the presence of a strong point of view and 2) clear values that people can align with and use to identify themselves in the world. Unlike strong corporate brands, the values of this type of community are created by and evolve with the ebb and flow of the community. Credibility is created through users contributing relevant content that aligns with the values. It seems to be less about numbers and more about relevance. Users here have editorial control of the content. This is where the zealot-like participation happens – as it should since users here own and shepherd the brand.

2. Word on the Street
From rating an experience with a product to seeking retribution for bad restaurant service, folks love these online mechanisms that surface user opinion. Not really sure if this constitutes community since it’s more about people taking ownership of their experiences and using those experiences for self expression than providing the mechanisms for a dialogue. Users get the “real story from regular people like me” here. The power and credibility comes from the timeliness of the information. This is where numbers start to matter.

3. Co-existence
This flavor of community is where user feedback co-exists with an editorial position – Citysearch and Amazon are good examples. Users enjoy a good degree of anonymity – it’s less about ‘who’ is contributing and more about numbers. A funny thing starts to happen with opinion here; variance is good if not required for credibility. A review that is “too positive” could have been bought or the negative reviews were edited out.

4. Brands that Resonate
This is the “I am the brands I buy” – where people appropriate brands to express themselves in the world. This is a top-down kinda place where it’s less about expressing your own unique perspective and voice and more about aligning with the brand values that have been determined by somebody else. Credibility is created by the brand having strong characteristics that resonate with people. Here is where brand shepherding and management at the corporate level is important.

Make sense? Off the mark?

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Originally from Adaptive Path by Rachel Hinman
reBlogged by michael on Jan 26, 2007, 9:18PM

The target pill bottle isn’t a bottle, it’s a system

It’s unfortunate that the 2005 design of the Target pill bottle has too often been treated as just a product design and graphic design solution. Yes, it received much earned respect for being a collaboration of graphic design with industrial design and for its sensitive approach to addressing sometimes life-threatening circumstances. But perhaps because it’s been put on a pedestal at the MoMA that we forgot to check out what’s going on behind the scenes at Target.

Target appropriately calls the bottle ClearRX, describing it more broadly as a, “prescription distribution and communication system.” That’s because it required quite a bit of work on the back-of-the-house to make the pill bottles work on the front-of-the-house.

Let’s take one aspect of the design as an example. The bottles have rings that fit around the collar of the bottle which are color coded to identify different members of the family — 7 colors in all. The concept is simple enough: Make sure you’re not accidentally taking someone else’s prescription just because the bottles look similar. However, the implementation is much more difficult because Target has to ensure the right color ring is going around the right subscription. Therefore Target’s Pharmacy IT system has to track which family member has which color ring so the colors are not accidentally switched when prescriptions are filled.

From listening to Deborah Adler tell the story of working with Target, it’s clear that considerable (if not more) design effort went towards the processes and systems surrounding the pill bottle. It was, “an enormous undertaking… a huge collaborative effort,” she said. Here’s a hint of some of the overall system that had to be coordinated:

“I work with the pharmacy team, pharmacy operations… the Target technology team to build the software to accommodate the new labeling system, the marketing team… there were major training sessions to train all the pharmacists on how to use this new system because they were the most important people to us… they were the front line… they had to explain how to use this new system, and they had to learn how to use it.. there was a bit of a learning curve involved.”

I’m guessing that it’s not just the design patents that have kept other pharmacies from mimicking the Target pill bottle. The pill bottle isn’t just a new SKU in a retail environment or just a piece of packaging that can be swapped out for the old design. The bottle is just the visible tip of a much deeper system of drug delivery that would take significant time and investment to emulate.

For me, the inspiration of this story is how a design artifact and a compelling story from Deborah Adler could spark the evolution of Target’s drug delivery system. When the-way-things-should-be aligns with a competitive advantage, great design ideas are more likely to come to fruition. In these cases, design prototypes and good storytelling can show the way things should be, and allow a productive discussion around what’s necessary to make things happen.

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Originally from Adaptive Path by Brandon Schauer
reBlogged by michael on Jan 27, 2007, 12:43AM

Avatars in the Flesh

The logic of sites like Second Life comes to bear on the ‘first life’ in The Girlfriend Experience, a project by Martin Butler and his Liminal Institute. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings from January 26 until March 9, four members of the group, who have been styled to look like avatars in a virtual community, will inhabit a web-monitored space at Amsterdam’s Mediamatic space. Online players are invited to command the ‘flesh and blood’ avatars as they would their more common digital counterparts, using the borrowed bodies to interact with other users. Taking its title from a prostitution-related term for well-fabricated intimacy, the project creates a caricature of the personal yet anonymous desires underpinning relationships formed in virtual communities. For example, the control fantasy implicit in molding a detached, idealized second self becomes embarrassingly obvious when the avatars are humans who can resist a player’s will. Players can request any action they want, but the avatars ultimately decide where they go and what they do. Inevitable comic scenarios aside, the experiment offers a chance to find out what happens when we start to force the rules at play in our online social lives back onto reality. – Bill Hanley

http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-13553-en.html

Originally from Rhizome News
reBlogged by michael on Jan 26, 2007, 8:00AM

Web App Summit: Learning from Social Web Applications

At the UIE Web App Summit in Monterey, Joshua Porter walked through what designers can learn from the success of Social Web Applications:

• Most people tend to focus on visual design when evaluating the quality of Web sites. However, several highly successful Web sites (My Space, Craig’s List, & Amazon) are not designed well from a visual or interaction design perspective.
• These sites, while lacking in visual & interaction design, have great social design.
• When conducting a large-scale e-commerce study, UIE found that users often went to amazon.com before buying something on another e-commerce site to research their purchases. They called this the “Amazon Effect”.
• The content people used on Amazon was highly social: user reviews, recommendations, user-generated shopping lists, and more. In fact, Amazon had 11 social features on each & every product page.
• Sites with good social design model the social lives, goals, and interactions of their users.

Design Elements: the lowest-level building blocks of design that can be used to form higher-level structures.

• Visual Design: line, size, color, shape, texture, pattern, light, value
• Interaction Design: button, input, link, screen, navigation, cursor, check box
• Social Design: messaging, sharing, collaborating, rating, reviewing, gossiping, recommending, voting, arguing, networking

Design Principles: higher-order guides that deal with the relationship between elements.

• Visual Design: contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity
• Interaction Design: anticipation, autonomy, consistency, readability, learnability, metaphor, explorability, etc.
• Social Design: motivation, identity, control, independence, privacy, authority, gaming, community, emergence
• Motivation: identify primary motivation & create a golden path to achieve it. (del.icoi.us bookmarking)
• Identity: let people manage their identity online like they do offline (MySpace profile)
• Control: Users want control though they may never take advantage of it (Facebook news feed)
• Independence: a necessary part of enabling the wisdom of crowds. If achieved, then popularity is valuable.
• Privacy: different for everyone but a key consideration for application design.
• Authority: built up over time based on agreement on who is right or in charge.
• Gaming: it is human nature to compete and a site can benefit (digg)
• Community: it is not a feature set. It is a feeling people get with shared interests or experiences.
• Emergence: effects over time & effects at larger scales.
• Personal benefit always precedes social benefit: the Delicious lesson.

Tags: social software, web2.0, interaction design

Originally from Functioning Form: Interface Design by LukeW
reBlogged by michael on Dec 31, 1969, 11:59PM

Interview with Art Orienté objet

Very few artists have intrigued me as much as Art Orienté Objet, a French duo concerned with issues of environment and animal experimentations. Art Orienté Objet means “art oriented object” but it can also be read as “art oriented by objects.” The projects of Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin aim to raise the debate on what’s going on behind the closed doors of laboratories and in our society.

Their work, deeply grounded in current research, explores the inter-related fields of science and art. On some occasions they use the same tools as scientists. For one of their most iconic works, Culture de Peaux d’Artistes, they asked researchers of the MIT skin production laboratory in Boston to take biopsies of their epidermis. Then they got samples deposited on a pig’s dermis which they tattooed with animal motifs, mostly of endangered species or those used in biology. The skin became the site of a symbolic alliance and a questioning of the ‘species barrier’.

However, Art Oriente Objet’s work also demonstrates that, when engaging with biotechnology, the most challenging artistic metaphors do not necessarily require bio-reactors, sophisticated instruments and hig-tech procedures. The main component of Rabbits were used to prove, for example, is the taxidermied body of a white rabbit found in trash. Its insides have been replaced with entrails knitted out of wool obtained from the Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to have been cloned from an adult somatic cell. The piece questions the relationship between ethics and aesthetics and comments on the correlation between certain aspects of art and science.

Their series of doll museums recall Box in a Valise –Marcel Duchamp’s portable museum of favourite works– and the cabinets of curiosities so popular during the Renaissance. The em>Museum of Natural Horrors

, the Museum of Mental Horrors and the Museum of Human Horrors look like adorable doll houses but expose upsetting scenes of vivisection, animals in bell jars that are delivered electro-shocks, pets in cage, battery hens that have some human characteristics, etc.

The fact that the house and its inhabitants are tiny and cute makes the reality that the objects evoke even more disturbing. One of the artefacts displayed in The Museum of Natural Horror is the “Wire-Mesh Surrogate Monkey Mother” that recreates one of Harry Harlow‘s experiments on the “science of affection.” In the ’50s, Harlow separated infant monkeys from their mothers. The young animals were “raised” by surrogate monkey mother machines, both equipped to dispense milk. One mother was made out of bare wire mesh. The other was a wire mother covered with soft terry cloth.

Another striking project is Pioneer Ark, a hanging mobile inspired by a visit of the Pioneer Farm. This Australian center collects animals victim of mutations due to human activity (toxic chemical and radioactive pollutants) or naturally occuring factors. The artists were granted the authorisation to visit but not the right to take any picture. After their visit at the Farm, AOo gathered all the descriptions of mutant animals they could find into scientific publications and made a gigantic Noah’s ark inhabited by transgenic porcelain species.

AOo was formed in 1991. Did you have the objective to explore issues raises by biotechnology, experimentation on animals and ecology right from the start? Did your objectives and approach evolve over the years?

We decided right from the start to work on the manipulation of the living, the vegetal, the animal and the human, by society and science. As we were very involved in ecological groups, it seemed only logical to engage with issues realted to biotechnology and experimentations on animals.

In fact, we never strayed from those issues, we just broadened the approach according to the fields of experimentation we immersed into in order to make arise visionary images and processes. I use this term on purpose as it expresses adequately the logics of our work: let the vision emerge after having dived into knowledge.

What is your background? Has either of you been trained as a scientist?

At the beginning, i was the only one who had made scientific studies, for family reasons, i have a master’s degree in physics-chemistry, which i earned in paralled with art studies and later on i studied ethnology and clinical psychology jusqu’au troisieme cycle. Benoit’s background is more in literature. He studied scenography, theatre, literature and history of art.

When dealing with research centers how open can you be about your motivations and the fact that your perspective is one of artists? I’m thinking in particular about the project “Cultures de peaux d’artistes”. How did you convince researchers to help you achieve your goal?

It is very difficult to find research centres open to artistic approaches… We are artists first and foremost, the research proposals we suggest are extremely astonishing compared to the protocols they establish. Besides, our proposals have to meet with a particular curiosity they might have. In fact, the research is a bit of a boot camp and the result of a long negociation. I narrate in detail the story of “skin culture” in an article published in the Fall 2006 issue of the Canadian magazine “inter art actuel”.

Culture de Peaux d’Artistes

How do the works Museum of Natural Horrors and the Museum of Mental Horrors respond or are related to a previous project called Museum of Human Horrors?

The initial project involved the creation of an anthology of the three research fields on manipulation that motivated us: the ecological field (Musee des horreurs naturelles/Museum of Natural Horrors), the biological field (Musee d’horreurs humaines/Museum of Human Horrors), and the psycho-scociological field (Musee d’horreurs mentales/Museum of Mental Horrors). The three museums were put together at the request of galleries and collectors who wanted more coherence from us. We reacted by showing them how our past and upcoming works could co-habit with ease.

What could artists and scientists gain from more frequent collaborations?

Artists present original approaches which scientists may not be able to follow due to the logics of productivity of current laboratories. Quite often such approaches meet with desires scientists might have to experiment the “in-experimentable” and the artist becomes the medium that opens up heavy protocols. However, it’s often a difficult process. From the artists’ point of view it’s a win-win situation. That’s if they want to enter the scientific codification… which might seem quite heavy.

Could you explain us what you were trying to achieve with Pioneer Ark? What was the impetus for this project?

Pioneer Ark is a revealing work, it presents a scientific reality well-known but which hasn’t been documented with images, because images generate polemics. This reality is the rise of spontaneous genetic mutations and aboratory hybridization. Because there wasn’t any proper images of such realities well-known by the scientific press, we have created a kind of gigantic Noah’s Ark. Animal figures belonging to this genetically modified reality are walking inside its tubes. The work is meant to be both revealing and fascinating so that each person can freely decide what is his or her own position in a world in perpetual mutation. However, it is a disturbing work. The complete installation has only been exhibited once…

I remember reading in a magazine that TC&AP‘s Victimless Leather Jacket disturbed the public. Some would rather wear the skin of a slaughtered cow on their back than imagine that one day they could donne such leather coat even if it didn’t require any animal to suffer. I suspect the Roadkill coat, a garment made with the fur of dead animals found on the road, generated the same kind of reaction. How did the public react to it? Do artists need to shock and disturb in order to get their message through?

Reactions to the Roadkill Coat were more in the order of fascination than horror. The work has been interpreted as a finger pointed to the damage that the urban world is causing to the natural world. Everyone was trying to find out which animals the coat was made of. They seemed to admire it.

The coat was more political than horrifying and its shape highlighted the beauty of a sacrified wild world. People tended to interpret it more as a call for increased awareness than as a provocative object, and that’s exactly what it was. In reality, what shocks us most of the time is not provocation but the fact that provocation leaves one indifferent… It’s the pure message of reality that disturbs most. That’s why we’ve always worked with it, producing objects embedded with a fundamental antagonism: repulsion and fascination.

Who are the artists whose work you find particularly inspiring?

Talking about inspiration would take us too far back in time… *grin*

We work in a very autonomous way. However we like plenty of artists. They range from Chris Burden to Jeffrey Vallance, Jun Takita and many others.

Are you working on new projects or preparing exhibition?

Yes, we never stop. We are working now on ethological delusions, on vegetal biotech works and smells, on architectures of the physiological memory and i write… I’m the author of a novel about creation, “Premiere peau” (“First Skin”) which has been published in Germany, under the titled “Dreigestirn” at Piper Verlag.

Merci Marion.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Jan 8, 2007, 7:50AM

Moving Structure – Pavel Hladik

Video (8Mb)
I’m always interested in kinetic architecture so I was excited to hear about Pavel Hladik’s current project which investigates the possibility of material systems that could enable new forms of interactive environment. This project aims to find an elegant [...]

Originally from Interactive Architecture dot Org by Ruairi
reBlogged by michael on Jan 8, 2007, 11:14PM

Flesh and blood avatars

During two weeks four avatars in flesh and blood will attend your orders at the Mediamatic gallery in Amsterdam.

The Girlfriend Experience, a work by Martin Butler, will let you choose a human avatar and make him or her walk around the space. You can observe them live in the Analog Villa. All that from the comfort of your home.

The project is of course a comment on online avatar communities, be they Second Life or World of Warcraft. In The Girlfriend Experience you have first to “explore” each other. Player and avatar explore what they can do for each other and the avatar has to think about how far he or she wants to go to comply with your wishes. In fact who’s in command is not always clear. You get ten minutes to play with your avatar, then someone else take your place.

The title of the project, The Girlfriend Experience, refers to the paradoxical nature of online social behaviour. On the one hand, the avatar provides you with a sense of anonymity. On the other hand, a close look at the characteristics of your avatar can reveal a part of your intimacy and the secret desires you might have. The best paid prostitutes are the ones with whom the client feels as though he is with his girlfriend, or with whom he has a Girlfriend Experience.

Be a puppeteer from 26 January 2007 on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 20.00 till 23.00 via the Mediamatic Internet site.

Btw, Mediamatic has a few interesting workshops coming up soon: Radio–to-Go, on February 14 and 15; Machinima, on February 27-March 02; Arduino Unplugged, March 12-14.

Via trendbeheer.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Jan 12, 2007, 9:39AM

37 Isolated Events

Contemporary Butoh Dance and Immersive Video Performance

37 Isolated Events: a Contemporary Butoh Dance and Immersive Video Performance

:: Thursday January 18, 2007 – 7pm :: San Francisco Asian Art Museum :: free w/ $5-after 5 pm museum admission.

Blindsight Artistic Director/Choreographer Paige Starling Sorvillo collaborates with Los Angeles-based media artist Lucy H G and UK-based Australian composer duo imaginationandmymother.

this ocean is also the desert and I am walking into a minefield, into this installed landscape this land no longer part of the soul, I swallow, I listen, I can see your body cut into foreign lands.

37 Isolated Events begins with the normal running temperature of the human body and gradually fabricates a facsimile body. Within the noise of networked society, our intimate distance and distant intimacy induce a virtual, mediated sensibility. We are anesthetized – our breath mechanized – as the human biological system becomes hybridized with the global system. At thirty-seven degrees Celsius, in isolation, we have unprecedented potential to risk exposure and make contact inside the noise of a growing global network.

concept/direction | paige starling sorvillo
collaborating media artist | lucy hg (LA)
sound artists | imaginationandmymother (UK)
performance/choreography | sorvillo, monique goldwater, isabelle sjahsam, jez lee
lighting design | elaine buckholtz
photography | ian winters

San Francisco Asian Art Museum :: 200 Larkin, Samsung Hall (Civic Center BART)

37 Isolated Events is a supported in part by the Zellerbach Family Foundation and Asian American Dance Performances. Paige Starling Sorvillo is honored to be a 2007 CHIME awardee with Marc Bamuthi Joseph.

Originally from networked_performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Jan 15, 2007, 5:22PM

Girl Power Accessory

The Head Hand Bang is really an actual hand bag shaped like a head for the sole purpose of enabling females to experience a sense of girl power without the need for violence. It’s not available commercially but I could easily see something like this work commercially.

related links

Yaelmer

Originally
from sensoryimpact.com

by adnan


reBlogged

by michael

on Jan 17, 2007, 10:04PM