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 small [...]

Cribsheet #9: String Theory

Scientific issues and innovations are figuring into everyday conversation
more than ever before. Recognizing that we could all use some brushing up, Seed offers its Cribsheet.

Read the entire article

Originally from Seed Magazine
reBlogged by michael on Apr 17, 2007, 10:53PM

New experience design school in the Netherlands

The Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands will be starting a new bachelor degree in experience design [website in Dutch only] as of September, the first programme of its kind in Europe, and is now recruiting students. The four-year degree programme is lead by Rob Van Kranenburg, who used to work at Virtual Platform, De Balie, the New Media Department of the University of Amsterdam, and Doors of Perception. He published on RFID and Ambient Intelligence. The programme has a strong focus on the design of ambient devices in a wireless world. It is introduced as follows (my translation): Experience Design is a new study programme at the Utrecht School of the Arts that teaches designers in a new, emerging professional field that brings together (computer) technology, the physical environment and a positive-critical design practice. An Experience Designer develops communication applications that will involve people without them having to sit behind a computer screen. Well known of course are mobile phones, digital organisers, navigation systems in cars and handheld game consoles, but in the coming years we can also expect intelligent clothing, smart spaces (that know who and where we are) and doors that automatically open for some people but not for others. The applications that an Experience Designer develops will add to the quality of life by creating ‘meaningful experiences’ for people with the help of wireless technology. Interestingly, it has a rather idiosyncratic way of differentiating itself from interaction design (that one can also study at the Utrecht School of the Arts) that is not too clear and I don’t really agree with. Interaction Design has a much broader orientation on human-computer interaction, and focuses in particular on graphical interfaces, multimedia design, game design and physical/experimental interfaces. Experience Design deals with the (individual) user experience, has a more social focus, and hardly deals with the graphical interfaces of ‘classical’ multimedia such as websites or interactive cd-roms. But maybe this definition has more to do with internal politics at the Utrecht School of the Arts than anything else, and we shouldn’t focus too much on it. Good luck, Rob

Originally from Putting people first by Experientia
reBlogged by michael on Apr 14, 2007, 6:59AM

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 Regine
reBlogged by michael on Apr 1, 2007, 10:05AM

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 [...]

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 Ã…BÄKE 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 Regine
reBlogged by michael on Mar 12, 2007, 6:09AM

Tobecontinued

Myspace as an interactive platform

Tobecontinued is a group exhibition in progress that starts with some students of the Fine Arts Academy of Rome. Using Myspace as an interactive platform, Tobecontinued is based on the concepts of open art-work, cause and/vs effect, and free association of ideas; where the last art-work is always inspired to the previous one, in order to generate an open art-work in continuous evolution that never completes itself…

The process is constituted by the single works as video, animations, photos, music, net projects, and shows details, nuances and ideas of the whole art-work’s project. Let’s continue, joining with us and sending your art-work (max. 3 mb per email) at tobecontinued.tobecontinued[at]gmail.com” Random

Originally from networked_performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Mar 2, 2007, 4:22PM

Innovators and the university (the b-school)

If the University is no longer so vital as a center of innovation (see yesterday’s post), does it still create innovators?

Call
this the "Canada" model of innovation where an institution/country that
is bad at innovation still manages to export people who are good at it.

The
University is, of course, a house of many mansions.  I will look only
at the professional schools: the b-school, d-school, e-school, and the
law school.  (Though I will say in passing that the liberal arts
continue to supply exemplary  intellectual training even as they too
often insists on political and epistemological orthodoxy that renders
the liberal arts grad next to useless when it comes to innovation.  And
here I define innovation as IBM’s Sanford does: creativity plus
insight.)

B-Schools

B-schools are good at some aspects of
innovation training, and really bad at others.  That "easter egg hunt"
called the case study is very good at giving students the ability to
see through a confusing tangle of factors to the things that matter.
But this is a decompositional ability.  It is good at breaking down,
and much less good at building up. 

If the culture of
Microsoft has a problem when it comes to innovation, it is precisely
this.  Not so long ago, I listened to Microsoft managers interrogate
potential innovations, demanding to know how they could be monetized!
Most innovations begin as inspirations and we should treat them as the
Inuit treat newly born children, as gifts who must be treated with solicitude for fear they will return whence they came.  Spare inspirations
the ROI rack…at least for a little while.

This is a long
standing problem for the corporation and the b-school.  Both are so
keen on a tough minded pragmatism that there are often insufficient
intellectual resources or inclinations with which too nourish or
embrace the new.  After all, the new begins as something barely
thinkable.  It is too much to ask that it make itself immediately
practical.  Both the b-school and the corporation have to get better at ideas that are almost completely weightless and quite
without utility. 

The further problem with the business school
is that it continues to treat the consumer and producer as economic actors and the
market place as the sum and total of the transactions creating between
these actors.  All the larger, collective contexts that
establish value, create context, supply meaning and motivate purchase
are dismissed or diminished.  Culture never gets talked about in a systematic way. 

When
I was teaching at a business school we taught a cases on DeWalt power
tools and Land’s End merchandising, both of which turn on the cultural
specifications of gender.  (Briefly DeWalt repositioned a brand
by regendering it.   Land’s End was gifted a new segment of female consumers because
cultural ideas of women and women’s clothing were changing.)  These cultural
specifications were never mentioned.  When I raised them as
possibilities people looked at me as if I were mad.  (I hasten to add
that I am not one of those social scientist who wants to neglect or
exclude "economic man."  The challenge for anthropology is indeed
how to make him feel as welcome as an Inuit child.)

B-schools were
founded and largely staffed by economists.  Over the years, the
economists were displaced and a supra-economistic understanding of the
consumer, the producer and the marketplace were smuggled in.  The work
of this transformation is however not complete, despite the fact that
the intellectual work has been in place for some time: Durkheim,
Polanyi, Sahlins, Granovetter.  Let the revolution continue.

In
sum, the innovators produced by b-schools are hampered in two ways.
First, the b-school discourages the the full creativity that innovation
requires.  Second, it artificially constrains the problem set, so that
students are discourages from combining creativity with insight, that
is, with a full reckoning of the world in which the creativity
must make itself useful. (I refer once more to  Linda Sanford’s distinction.)

I have run out of time but by this first reckoning it looks as if the
University might be failing in the production of both innovation and
innovators.  This is scarier, still.   

Tomorrow: the d-schools and innovation

Reference

Sanford, Linda.  2006.  Building an Innovation Company for the 21st
Century.  MIT-IBM Innovation Lecture Series.  October 17, 2006.  here.

Originally
from This Blog Sits at the

by Grant McCracken


reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 27, 2006, 7:51PM

8 Ways to Shoot Video Like a Pro

By Rick Broida

Nothing brings out the camcorders like the holidays, which is why this is the perfect time to admit an ugly truth: You suck at making home movies.

No, really. I’m sure you’re a nice person and all, but there’s more to videography than just taking the camcorder out of the box and pressing Record.

As with photography, good videography requires a bit of know-how. Luckily, I know how, so here’s my list of ways you can improve your home movies. You won’t come out Soderbergh on the other side, nor even Singer, but your Uncle-Henry-dropped-the-turkey-on-Aunt-Edna’s-head submission to America’s Funniest Home Videos will look a lot better.

1. RTFM

A good fisherman knows what’s in his tackle box, and a good videographer knows his camcorder. The moment Junior takes his first steps or a spaceship lands in the backyard, you should be able to adjust the shutter speed, turn off the autofocus, or do whatever else is necessary to capture the best images. In other words, learn your camcorder inside and out. Read the manual–twice. Know how to access the menus, which menus contain which settings, and so on. Keep a crib sheet handy if necessary (laminate a 3×5 card, hole-punch it, and attach it to the neck strap). A little bit of study and preparation can go a long way toward helping you shoot better video. Now, onto the advice you might actually follow.

2. Be prepared

Anytime you go somewhere with your camcorder, here’s what you should be packing:

• • At least one spare battery, fully charged.
• • At least two more blank tapes than you think you’ll need.
• • A lens-cleaning cloth. No matter how careful you are, the lens is going to get smudged. There’s no post-production software filter in the world that can correct for that.
• • A tripod. Throw it in the trunk, even if you don’t think you’ll need it.
• • The battery charger/power supply.
• • An extension cord for the power supply, which you’ll invariably need.
• • Duct tape, for taping down the extension cord so people don’t trip over it.
• • Lighting gear, lens filters, microphones, and any other accessories you own. You bought them for a reason, right? Bring ‘em!

3. Use a tripod

It’s a lot harder than it looks to pull off that cool shaky-camera look. Most home video just ends up looking shaky, which is absolutely no fun to watch. By mounting your camcorder on a $20 tripod, you’ll get rock-steady footage. At the same time, you’ll free yourself to perform pans and zooms, or even to get in front of the lens. If you’re planning to rely on your camera’s digital image-stabilization feature, don’t. All that does is lower the video resolution by cropping to the center of the frame. Optical image stabilization is better, but it still can’t beat a tripod.

No tripod? Lean against a wall. That’ll help keep the shakiness to a minimum. No wall? Put your butt on the ground, bend your knees, and prop your elbows on them. Presto: instant tripod.

4. Raise the lights

To paraphrase the old real estate maxim, good videography is all about lighting, lighting, lighting. Most of the camcorders I’ve reviewed over the years do a really crummy job under poor lighting, producing grainy, washed-out video that can’t be improved in post-production. (Hey, there’s only so much your video-editing software can do.) The easiest way to overcome lighting issues is to shoot outdoors, where even a cloudy day produces enough ambient light to keep your video crisp and colorful. If it’s sunny, try to shoot in the morning or late afternoon when the sun is lower in the sky. When it’s directly overhead, it casts unflattering shadows on subjects’ faces.

When shooting outdoors isn’t an option, bring as much light into the room as you can. Turn on lamps and open blinds to let outside light in. If your camcorder has a built-in light, use it. At the very least, it will help bring out faces in close-up shots. A shoe-mounted external light can be helpful as well. Many camcorders allow you to adjust aperture, white balance, shutter speed, and other light-oriented settings, but these will get you only so far unless it’s a really high-end model. My advice for when the lights are low is to disable the autofocus, otherwise you risk getting that annoying pulsing effect from the lens trying to lock onto a subject.

5. Ace the audio

If lighting is the most important element in quality video, audio runs a close second. Unfortunately, this is one area where it can be difficult to achieve professional results. The microphones built into most camcorders are fairly basic, recording audio from any direction. If you’re trying to film someone talking near a busy street, the traffic may drown out the person’s voice. Your best bet is to get your subject(s) as close to the microphone as possible (without sabotaging the shot, of course).

Ideally, your camcorder should have a jack for plugging in an external microphone. There are many varieties to choose from, including: shotgun mikes for capturing audio directly in front of the lens; lavaliere (a.k.a. tie-clip) mikes for sit-down interviews and stand-up reporting; and pzm-type mikes, which are omni-directional and therefore suitable for auditoriums, large conference rooms, and the like. Hopefully, any camcorder outfitted with a microphone jack will also have one for headphones, which is essential for monitoring audio levels as you record.

6. Set up your shots

Smart photographers obey the “rule of thirds,” and you should do the same. Imagine a tic-tac-toe board over your viewfinder. The lines intersect in four spots. Your goal should be to frame the action using one or more of those spots. Or, to put it another way, keep the birthday girl out of the center square.

Of course, if you’re feeling creative, you can always throw this rule out the window. But don’t go overboard: Many amateurs fall in love with their camcorders’ built-in special effects, then later regret filming an entire birthday party in “old movie” mode. Although these effects can be fun, use them sparingly–or not at all. Better you should start with pristine color video, then apply special effects using your editing software. Likewise, skip the camcorder’s auto-fade features; your editing software will give you far greater control over transitions, and greater variety as well.

7. No digital zoom!

Optical zoom, good. Digital zoom, bad. Very bad. Sorry if you were suckered into buying a particular camcorder because it touted some astronomical digital-zoom number (240X! 300X! 800X!), you should never use it–unless you like grainy, pixilated video. Digital zoom is actually a big fake: As you increase the zoom level, the camcorder crops further and further into the center of the image, enlarging that cropped portion so it fills the screen. As a result, your video looks, well, awful. Stick with your camcorder’s optical zoom (usually you can turn off digital zoom from within the camera’s menu system), which relies solely on the lens for magnification. If you need to get closer to your subject, follow the old photographer’s maxim: zoom with your feet.

8. Shoot B-roll

B-roll is secondary footage that you splice into your primary video to flesh out the story. For instance, if you’re filming a wedding, you might take shots of the church, the invitation, and the little bride and groom atop the cake. When the time comes to assemble your final movie, you can mix in this footage to add variety.

Anything can be B-roll. During the warm-up before the soccer game, for instance, get some footage of just the kids’ feet. Grab a close-up shot of the ball hitting the net. Get there early and record the empty field; then record from the same position during the game and you can do a neat fade-in. This is where planning comes into play: You should not only allow extra time to shoot B-roll, but also determine in advance what shots will make the best additions.

Rick Broida, Lifehacker’s new associate editor, is the co-author of How to Do Everything with Your Digital Video Camcorder, which was written before the age of YouTube but still makes a great gift.

Originally
from Lifehacker

reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 13, 2006, 5:30PM

The Adobe Design Achievement Awards 2007

“The Adobe Design Achievement Awards pay homage to the best and the brightest students around the globe who push the limits of creative innovation,” said Ann Lewnes, senior vice president of corporate marketing and communications at Adobe. “This program continues to cultivate new generations of design talent and reinforces Adobe’s commitment to design and film education.”

Full details and application forms.

…

Originally
from core77.com's design blog

reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 12, 2006, 8:19PM