Baby Love is art that moves you and your imagination…. Climb aboard a giant teacup and glide into a futuristic fantasy with a dummy-sucking baby doll clone to your favourite love song at Sydney’s new home for contemporary arts, CarriageWorks. Its cathedral-scale foyer will play home to 6 giant teacups, each with a larger-than-life baby doll clone. Baby Love is a wi-fi mobile installation by New York based Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang, who calls cyber-space ‘home’. Shu Lea is a multi-media artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production.

Baby Love is an embracing interactive, kinetic and sonic experience, alluding to both past and future as the teacups evoke the nostalgia of amusement park rides and clash with the futuristic vision of cloned babies. The public can contribute to the joyride soundtrack by uploading songs via the web which go directly to the installation. The songs are transmitted wirelessly via Memory-Emotion data to the babies. When the rider selects their love song of choice to begin their teacup ride, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes.

The cloned babies of Baby Love are an updated version of the central figures in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies. In the novel, twins born from lockers at a Yokohama Station spend their lives haunted by the sound of their mother’s heartbeat. Cheang’s clones were inspired by scientific research into the development of biobots and artificial life forms. It is an installation which fuses nostalgia for a seemingly simpler age without boggling interactive technology and our contemporary obsessive immersion in the virtual life of the internet. Cheang seems to be asking where will the ever new frontiers of the web take us?

Presented by CarriageWorks, Experimenta and Awesome Arts Baby Love is an umbrella event of Art and About 2007, presented by City of Sydney.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 8:11AM

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 design teams, and are set a design problem that involves some bizarre confluence of circumstances. Working closely with the studio mentors, the participants derive solutions that are surprising and innovative; solutions that have the potential to be creative business models, incredible technological experiences, or unorthodox approaches to existing challenges of brand deployment. Really, the ISO workshop forces you to stretch yourself as a designer, and think about your work from a different standpoint.

The best part of this workshop, is this rare opportunity to get direct contact and personal feedback with people who, in addition to being some of the most renowned designers and design-thinkers in the US, are intelligent, articulate critics of the products of design practice. The mentors all give feedback that helps you to reflect critically on your own work, criticism which actually makes your work better. If you don’t know who these people are, start Googling. You’ll come up with a wealth of reasons why you should go.

The studio mentors are:
Connie Birdsall, Lippincott Mercer
Hugh Dubberly, Dubberly Design
Hugh Graham, Hugh Graham Creative
Chris Hacker, Design Director of Johnson & Johnson
Michael Arnold Mages, RMCAD
Katherine McCoy, High Ground Design Workshops
Michael McCoy, High Ground Design Workshops
Bill Moggridge, Co-Founder of IDEO
Fred Murrell, RMCAD
Dr. Rick Robinson, Co-Founder of E-Lab

Additional studio mentors/presenters to be announced.

Image, Space, Object 4: People Centered Brand Experiences

A Rocky Mountain/High Ground Workshop in partnership with AIGA
Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design
Denver, Colorado, August 9-12, 2007

DIY

Nussbaum first picks up the torch of the DIY movement that was begun out of necessity in the Stone Age, lately revitalized by punk culture in the 1970′s, zine culture in the 1980′s documented by Elliot Earls through Licko and Vanderlans’ emigre magazine in 2001, and profiled by Time Magazine in the “Person of the Year” article several months ago.

Sorry Bruce, but I think that you’re a little late to the party.

Since the introduction of MacPaint and MacDraw in 1984, the tools of the Craft of Design have been slipping through the fingers of designers and top-down managers. But are we really to the point where crafting an iTunes playlist, structuring TiVo recording rules, or navigating the 19,000 potential different combinations of Starbucks ingredients is called an act of Design? Do you become a videographer because nearly 6,000 people watched videos of your dog that you uploaded to YouTube? Designing is a multiform process more complex than arrangement of forms or files or software settings to suit one’s personal preferences. TiVo clients are no more Designers than I am a Plumber (even though I do own a small assortment of pipe wrenches, and know how to sweat a joint). Being a plumber requires a more thoroughgoing knowledge of water delivery systems, that goes beyond the simple act of fixing a leaking faucet. While the creation of forms and the re-shaping of our environment is perhaps one of the most fundamental of human acts, the act of Design implies understanding of a broad range of potential frames of reference that may view the work, and takes into account and accommodates a broad set of potential interactions and reactions that that work may foster.

Designers now can produce products that can become a framework for user interaction. Many of these products are highly configurable and extensible. And Nussbaum is right to say that users now want to be part of the Design sandbox. Enlightened users may even create a portion of a product, or develop an important insight on how an experience is crafted. But it is incumbent upon the designer to observe these acts of design-play, analyze the user’s behavior, draw inferences from the observation and analysis, and apply their Design Thinking to create holistic approaches that meet a range of user goals, and interface well with the user culture.

Sustainability

When global megacorporation Johnson & Johnson hires ex-Aveda sustainability darling Chris Hacker to lead global Design efforts, sustainability is serious business. Sustainability has arrived. But I can’t agree with Nussbaum’s examples of good models for sustainable products. Nussbaum mentions the mink coat as a sustainable product. Fur finishing, a similar process to leather tanning, produces many toxic by-products and emissions. True, better fur finishing processes exist, but like dry-cleaning, it is an ongoing process to switch providers to these processes. As regards the Navajo and Hopi reservation dwellings, the trailers and houses that have supplanted the hogan as the main dwelling for Navajo were often arranged in models of higher-density European-style villages. The trailer-park arrangement of the dwellings is problematic for Navajo culture. Design that does not acknowledge the user culture is a bad application.

Conclusion

The need for broader awareness of sustainable design practice, the need for innovation in product design and experience design to drive profitability in US business are important points. But the problematic statements mentioned earlier diffuse power of these contentions.

Using Ben Schneidermann’s principles for creating visualizations of information as a metric for evaluation, we find several problems immediately. The graph does not successfully provide an overview of the data on any of the aspects that were to be included in the presentation. Viewing the presentation as a gestalt, the figures that are supposedly representative of categories of casualties are so self-similar that no coherent patterns can be discerned in the data. The three different types of soldiers are so similar in shape and orientation that the silhouettes read as nearly identical. Further, the graphic for police or civilian casualties are barely different enough to render them distinctive. The designer of this graph would have done far better to use more abstracted representations of each category, to permit the viewer to view the categories of deaths as an aggregate, and to be able to determine if there patterns in the data. Colored icons would be one possibility, but as only black is available, a stronger orientation of each graphic would have been a better solution. For example:

| | | \\ | | \\ \\ /
| | - - | | / - -
\\ \\ | | - - - | /
/ / | | - - \\ \\ |

As you can see above, if the designer had incorporated a strong axis of orientation in each of the icons, it would have made groupings of the information more discernible, and given the viewer a clearer visual “handle” on the information. Further, the icon created to represent civilian deaths is unnecessarily inflammatory. Are we to conclude that the only civilian casualties are mothers of infants?

Another aspect that this graph attempts to present is the location of the deaths. The designer chose to do this with thin lines linking sets of deaths to a geographic location. However, the lines that map sets of casualties to locations where the deaths happened are obscured by other graphics, intersected with other lines so much so that they are rendered completely useless as they depict any kind of cartographic relation.

The last aspect of the data – how the casualties died, is depicted by small, regularized icons in the upper-left corner of each casualty graph. Again, these icons are so self-similar that there is no way to detect any patterns or discern any trends in the data.

One would hope that a viewer could gain a better understanding of the impact of the war on Iraqis, US and foreign troops. This graph, however, does nothing to diffuse the fog of war. The nature of this graph prevents the communication of any understanding except that war has death as a component. If the designer’s editorial intent was to bring people to the conclusion that war has a negative impact upon a range of people in a range of ways, that point could have been far better communicated with a simple, clear visual.

This problem becomes more difficult when subjected to the pressure of time. The one thing I find most interesting about these representations of the variables of project management (which are extensible to any life activity – sex, writing an article, quiet conversations) is that the primacy of time is not represented visually in any of these graphs. With trepidation of setting off eye-rolling reactions in those averse to cliches, time is the limiting factor in our brief lives. Yet all these graphs treat time visually as if it was merely one more element in the equation of completing a project.

Despite the PM’s graphical undervaluing of time, in accountancy, as I have been told by a friendly CFO, every aspect of every project or manufacturing process should be traceable back to the employee hours needed to complete the task, and its value weighed against the cost of those hours. In this environment, the temptation to succumb to speed and multitasking in an attempt to squeeze as much work, life experience, and pleasure into the unknown yet determinate number of minutes is a siren’s call. Volunteering to help that important organization, curating that show, writing that paper, agreeing to take on one more must-complete project, playing with the kids, each opportunity attempts to wangle a few precious minutes for it’s own. The challenge, for me, is that I want to do all these things. Life is incredibly rich, and I want to layer experience upon experience and dwell in the richness of that time.

Unable to divide my attention and simultaneously read a book, write a blog posting, and carry on a conversation, I feel like an ancient time-sharing server dividing a set of given tasks into packets that can be completed in one to five minutes. Each packet iteratively interrupts work on the previous item, creating a certain level inattention to everything. While this method of working allows more to be completed, the quality suffers. Certainly it is difficult to have sustained complex thinking on one matter over the course of days.

To return to our Project Management models, perhaps the most significant bargain for me, is that of time and quality. Some activities and experiences require extended disengagement from the culture of multitasking. Some of these activities are concentrated, task-oriented experiences that yield poor results without the effort of sustained attention. Some other activities are the equivalent of graphic white space – a place to rest and breathe before the next surge of content. Yet despite my best efforts to kindly say “no” to new requests for commitment, tiny time-robbing ducklings emerge to nibble away minutes and hours from my day. These ducklings are the killers of quality. Quality of time, quality of work, quality of experience are degraded by serial distraction.

To yield a final thesis, and a promise to myself: I will finally obey that exhortation given by the Franklin-Covey seminar lady, fill my life with my high-priority, long-term goals first, prioritize lower-priority or smaller projects next, and say “no” to low-value, low return requests.

processing’s instructional demos

Sourceforge’s Audacity download page

Making Things (manufacture PC boards that convert a voltage-producing device into a USB signal)

To reform the venerable IDCA into a conference centered around altruism and social responsibility seems to be optimistic, to say the least, and reflects great credit upon an organization whose former primary Ethical output could be distilled down to: Don’t steal from your clients, vendors, or other designers; don’t reveal your clients’ secrets; try to keep the environmental impact of your design solutions to a minimum.

These efforts seem to fall short of the mark. Perhaps it is because I encountered it at a liminal point in my youth, but Uncle Ben’s exhortation to a newly enhanced Peter Parker still rings in my mind: “With great power there must also come — great responsibility!” Designers occupy a key and influential position in the relationship between Industry and the consumer. As designers, what responsibilities have we assumed to act as ethical citizens in the trans-media network of conversations?

After the close of the event, I had a conversation with John Thackara, where we discussed the role of designers in facilitating social change. For me, my most vivid realization of the conference came while listening to the extended presentation of Maurice Cox‘s redesign of the Bayview community. Maurice spoke of one of the Bayview’s residents, Alice Coles, as a key figure in the reconstruction and community mobilization effort. Maurice went to great lengths to point out that without the efforts and community mobilization that Alice contributed, his project would have never come to fruition.

A designer is a partner, perhaps even a catalyst in creating social change. As an outsider, the designer does not have the privileged knowledge of the system that they are trying to effect. Without active dialog and iterative testing of solutions with local agents, in local environments, Design Intervention will be at best, ineffectual, at worst, a detriment. But, Design applied judiciously, with respect to and dialog with the individuals that one is trying to help, might actually make things better.