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

Transcript from a Performance

Adam Trowbridge: New Media Art in a Control Society :: Transcript from Performance :: The Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN, USA
March 22, 2007 :: video stills here

As noted in the transcript, the majority of the statements read were not original and instead shamelessly stolen (edited and unedited) from various sources: theoretical texts, artists’ statements, manifestos and paranoid rambling. Transcript:

This is…a performance and new media art…or maybe not. [video begins] [text below is read]

- – Gilles Deleuze said “Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of non-communication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” End quote.

- – The phrase “new media art” is pointless.

- – The selection of medium is not the selection of a wardrobe for an idea. We are well past ideas and communication. Medium should be selected like legal and illicit pharmaceuticals: where do you want to go today?

- – What is a digital painting? Idiotic.

- – Contemporary art is both scattered and networked, always in motion. Medium, if anything, is a measure of speed and distribution. Is the texture of an oil painting that different from that of flypaper? Video is faster and shedding the weight of the poetic yet precious medium of film. Photography is a film still. Internet-based art is faster but still flails, lashed down by too many examples of bad information design masquerading as art.

- – THEY create DELIRIOUS RULES and sell you free access to their BACKSTAGE if you follow these sick rules. YOU KNOW IT.

- – Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome has been falsely represented as a metaphor for a network and for networked art. Deleuze and Guattari did not deal in metaphors.

- – Rhizomatic action is a force relationship in which power is distributed then scattered before it can begin to collect. This is not a metaphorical description but a plan of action.

- – Over 650,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by military intervention in Iraq and we are here to discuss…what?

- – Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before.

- – All hoarding, speculation on art, must cease and be seen for what it is: usury and exploitation.

- – In the beginning, you enjoyed it. You were caught in the middle of the WAR between THEM and THE OTHER SIDE, and you were trying to help THEM win the war.

- – All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.

- – Six billion worldwide population, all living, have a Computer God Containment Policy brain bank brain, a real brain in the brain bank cities on the far side of the moon we never see.

- – Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.

- – Human beings are not fully conscious of their real life…usually groping in the dark…at every moment groups and individuals find themselves confronted with results they have not wished.

- – Control is short-term and has rapid rates of turnover, but is also continuous and without limit.

- – New media art involves people who make watering plants more complex than it needs to be by using cell phones that call the Internet when the plants need water.

- – If you can talk about it, why paint it?

- – The Dia: Beacon is a tomb for the last gasp of studio art, let it be a monument and move on.

- – Man and machines can make symbiotic art.

- – Psychogeography: The study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behavior of the individual.

- – Inevitability of gradualness. Usually, in a few years, you are made string bean thin or grotesquely deformed, crippled and ugly, or even made one foot shorter or one foot taller, as the Computer God sees fit.

- – In the future we will have foreign genetic material in us as today we have mechanical and electronic implants. In other words, we will be transgenic. However, there’s no excuse but marketing for purchasing a glowing rabbit.

- – Users of the world are presented with fresh, owned content every day. We have the technology, the precedents, and the duty to make new art out of this owned content.

- – A lot of people say that new media is revolutionary. They say the net is subversive. But how subversive can you be in an exclusive club where it costs $1,000 for a computer and $50 a month to connect to the Internet.

- – The main function of Art is to distinguish rich people from poorer people.

- – Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; we re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to us to discover what we’re being made to serve, just as our elders discovered, not without difficulty, the ultimate end of the disciplines.

- – Personal expression and human and artist centrality can be abandoned.

- – Complex machines are an emergent life form in the masturbatory fantasies of those siding with control. I distrust transhumanists but I want to be friends with a computer.

- – Any moralistic or spiritual pretension or representation purposes for art must be abandoned.

- – Primarily, based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, especially your Eyesight TV, sight and sound recorded by your brain, your moon brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold brainwash radio lifelong, inculcating conformist propaganda, even frightening you and mixing you up and the usual, “Don’t worry about it.”

- – Professionalism in the arts (and the accompanying stratification of skills) must be abandoned in favor of a progressive (class-less) artistry of both a personal and collective nature.

- – Over the last decades, using positions of power in your STAGE-WORLD reality, THEY introduced their key words and also their sick DREAMWORLD- TO-SELL key ideas in every aspect of culture in the STAGE WORLD society where you live : songs, movies, humor, even propaganda.

- – Derive: An experimental mode of behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique for hastily passing through varied environments.

- – The economic and cultural exploitation of the artist has reached appalling proportions. The individual and/or collective artist, whose work is plagiarized as commercial ‘technique’, or exported as cultural commodity, has little control over these conditions.

- – Consciousness is not exclusively restricted to the brain. Human bodies have no boundaries.

- – The artist must be concerned with the moral relationship that his/her endeavors have to the institutions within which he/she expresses his/her work.

- – The majority of what I’ve read has been shamelessly stolen from various sources: theoretical texts, artists’ statements, manifestos and paranoid rambling. They stand as a collection of connections and disjunctions. I am, we are, a manner of speaking.

- – Art is not knowledge.

- – Art does not communicate.

- – There is nothing here for you.

- – Gilles Deleuze said that new situations could “…at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”.

[via nettime]

Originally from networked_performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Mar 25, 2007, 9:12PM

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.

Instead we have to place our reliance “on first-hand, insider accounts as a source of knowledge”.

Jacobson focuses particularly on the lack of formal criticism in the field of experience design.

It is a realisation that is all the more prominent to him now that he is working on a book on the field.

“In it, I’ll be highlighting best practices drawn from case studies in a variety of experience-design disciplines. My goal is to extract certain overarching principles and methodologies that can be synthesised as theories of experience design.” […]

“Experience design is still considered mainly an art, because (in my opinion) of a radical disconnect between those who study experience (cognitive scientists, environmental psychologists, etc.) and the designers who create experiences.”

Read full story

Originally
from Putting people first

by Experientia


reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 12, 2006, 7:55AM

Originally by Experientia from Putting people first on December 12, 2006, 12:55am

Generation C sees Products as Verbs and needs Experience Hooks

Dan finishes his exhaustive review of What Things Do

You can’t design experiences, says Tom Guariello in UXmatters

How much of product design is about overcoming unwelcome intimiacy? asks Tim Leberecht on the frog blog

What does interaction design have to do with bikes? Find out in An Interview with Grant Petersen of Rivendell Bicycle Works

Josh Porter predicts The Death of Information Architecture

Mobile TV is about the personal experience, says Jan Chipchase

How do we design accountability into our interfaces? asks Jono DiCarlo

Why Designing Systems is Difficult

Bill DeRouchey presses the reset button

Originally
from Adaptive Path

by Adaptive Path


reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 25, 2006, 2:13AM

Originally by Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on November 24, 2006, 7:13pm

http://neural.it/projects/rm/

Originally
from Rhizome News

reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 24, 2006, 8:00AM

Originally from Rhizome News on November 24, 2006, 1:00am

What could such minuscule inventions possibly have to do with the making of architecture and cities? A nanometer is about a million times smaller than the diameter of a pinhead, and a thousand times smaller than the length of a typical bacterium… How could these tiny achievements possibly have any bearing on the work of an architect?

Read his fascicle and find out.

Archfarm has also published an interview with Sonia Cillari (download the PDF), about emotion and interactivity in architectural design, as well as Usman Haque’s rough guide to “open source architecture” (PDF), published last summer.

The series veers a tiny bit too close to the world of Deleuzian eyeglasses and trendy jargon, I have to say, but it’s a great format and I’ll be interested to see where they go next. For instance, might I humbly recommend they publish The Pruned Guide to Futurist Geo-Hydrology… That, or BLDGBLOG will start its own series of PDFs – and then everyone can stare in awe at my fascicles.

Originally
from BLDGBLOG

by Geoff Manaugh


reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 21, 2006, 9:29PM

Originally by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG on November 21, 2006, 2:29pm