Ok so yes, I admit it’s time. I’ve been cruising around Europe for long enough without proper paperwork, so it’s time for a trip to the Motherland Montréal. I’ll spend some time practicing my dying québecois skills, drinking some sangria with long lost friends who think i’ve abandoned them, and do the best shopping in the world with loved ones…
Yes i’ll be on GMT -6h for the whole of June, so expect blogging at odd hours if you’re reading me from Europe :)
Before that, I’ll be dropping by the Big Apple to attend Fresh Dialogue 23: Designing Audiences, an AIGA event, go seePostopolis with Miss Steenson and generally hang out and test out the vegetarian restaurant scene with Matt.
America, here I come!
Went to see Design products show from the RCA (headed by Ron Arad) and I have to say I think the general trend in product design master’s is to make designers become more and more conceptual to the point of hovering in a grey area between art and design.
In any case, I wasn’t moved by the work at all, only by this little girl sleeping in one of the projects. I’d like to see one day a product design exhibition that includes people in it, and not photoshopped ones.
I’m sitting here in Schipol airport, majorly delayed, so I thought I’d do something constructive and write about a few projects from Sacral design a great exhibition put together at the Designmai festival in Berlin. I think it’s interesting to look at a body of work that addresses the presence / absence of belief in our everyday connected lives especially after Godtube made it to the Guardian.
The Way of the cross by Jens Wunderling is a project that enables the actor to relive parts of the last days of Christ according to the Bible.
“the traditional way of the cross which normally appears in the form of 14 images in a church or 14 stations along a pilgrims’ path is transformed into a sound installation. Its core element is a large wooden cross which is carried along a path marked by 14 prtable stations.
At each Station, the cross comes to life and from inside the wood news articles, read by a computer voice, become audible.”
The other project, which isn’t documented on the site for some reason, adressed the idea of anonymously connecting with your fellow believers. Using Bluetooth networks, the little trinkets , symbolically shaped like fish, will vibrate if they find other holders of the fish within a 15 meter radius. It’s interesting to see this project replace church going with the connectedness of urban space.
There’s something to be said for the systems we are designing now that create a sense of community in urban space now that we are culturally estranged from the use of traditional architectural communal places like a piazza, a library, a church.
I’m in a non-descript hotel in Amsterdam, a place I called my home for 8 months. Now I stay in hotels here.
There’s something terribly disturbing about traveling to 4 different cities in the same week especially when you’ve lived significant amounts of time in some and no time at all in others. You brush by the old memories as you create new ones. Memory full as the new McCartney song goes.
I just finished Biographie de la faim from my favorite french author Amélie Nothomb. She writes about her experiences of having moved quite often as a child, something I lived myself, oscillating between Paris, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Canada, and the identity crisis that can accompany these journeys. In particular this quote struck me:
“C’est peut-etre cela, etre de quelque part: ne pas voir de quoi il s’agit.”
It’s almost impossible to translate but it goes something like this: “Maybe that’s what being from a place means: not getting it”.
Had a great time at Xtech on monday and basically tweaked my talk in light of the great things I had seen at Designmai. I talked about product design, how designers see objects and how that influences how the future “internet of things” will be designed.
So you can download the pdf of my slides here (2,1 MB). Enjoy!
Caved in to popular demand and have put it on Slideshare. You can still download it though : )
New: Vie the talk on blip.tv. Thanks Ian.
I’m sitting in Berlin in a great café with a bear on the logo, on my way to Paris, not ready at all for my talk tomorrow, but have been terribly impressed by what I saw at the Designmai event. More on that later I promise.
I was also part of a panel, invited by my friend Goerg Bertsch, and lead by Mel Byars about “what do people hate about the world of design” with fellow panelists Sophie Lovell, German editor of Wallpaper* and V. Ragunath, architect and photographer.
Strange to find myself surrounded by people from my former life in industrial design as we found ourselves talking about design, designer/client relationships, how can the internet help designers, and the lack of theory in design to make for good critiques (in a more evolved way than “i publish what i like”) but not at all about what we hated about design and what can be improved. Too bad, that conversation needs to happen and be seriously directed and orchestrated.
Strange also because i now find myself talking in between 2 roles, too advanced in my understanding of the web and it’s dynamics for most product designers, not enough for most geeks. At least I understand them both and in Paris tomorrow I’ll try to talk to the geeks about why they should be talking to industrial designers. Maybe one day i’ll be invited to talk to designers about why they should care about what the hackers do with their soldering irons in their kitchens.
A Stuttgart-based painter asks me over a typical meat-based breakfast:
“But isn’t design supposed to be easy on the eyes?”
I didn’t know what to answer. Maybe she’s right.
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