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Second Life and relationships… never thought they’d make it to tv.
Archive for January, 2008

links for 2008-01-31
January 31, 2008
links for 2008-01-30
January 30, 2008-
Really great prototyping and fabrication work here
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My office at Tinker is here, if you’re in London and looking for a desk, join us!

Why am I in this handbasket and where are we going?
January 30, 2008I hope Jimmy will forgive me for the copy-paste.
I really would like to think I haven’t been policing anything on this blog and that a normative approach is only a starting point for a conversation. I often invite discussion and hardly ever receive it (I don’t consider this blog to be very popular by any standard). I’m interested in a range of things, things I’m usually passionate about and like to rant about often. Design is one of those things. I’d like to think design can change things for the best, has it’s strength and it’s weaknesses in it’s applications and having had one of the best educations there is, I think there is so much potential in how it’s taught.
“Qui ne dit mot, consent” as the french saying goes and I hope that good conversation whether it’s on this platform or in real life (if you’re ever in Hackney drop by) doesn’t always have to be about agreeing with the general state of things.

Quote of the day
January 30, 2008Me:
- While you’re away, I’ll take the time to watch a lot of movies, read some books and eat meat.
Matt:
- Yeh so when I see you again, you’ll have bacon sunglasses and a steak scarf.
(Coz clearly some of you were wondering :) )

Bacon sunglasses or how far should we future cast?
January 29, 2008
I went to see the impossibly crowded opening of the Work-in-progress show at the RCA yesterday and although I really should try to go back, the feeling I got coming out of it was one of being puzzled by what it all meant.
Fact is, I’m not sure of RCA’s overall design rhetoric anymore. Durrel Bishop who once headed taught Design Interactions is now teaching at Design Products and the product design projects start to look like the works for Design Interactions a few years ago (especially the radio project, a late cousin of the IDII’s Strangely Familiar project when I was there in 2005). The Design Interactions projects are conceptually mostly based on either statistics, exploitation of the edges of society and in general not very self-explanatory. Maybe that’s what that course aims to do, to make us aware of problems to come and simply attempt to illustrate solutions or consequences. But then is that even design anymore or simply creative naysaying?
Few projects were really self-explanatory, and well isn’t that what art is about? You read the description to give you a contextual framework in which to understand what you’re seeing. Devoid of those explanations, I would challenge anyone to understand what was happening. Again, not a good or a bad thing, just a trend it seems.
Bless their hearts the IDE course presented loads of great work, themed on the next generation of mobiles (with the network 3) and global warming solutions for the household.
In strange way, the whole show could have been presented along an axis of time, answering the question: For who is it you are designing?
IDE would have answered: “someone from 2009″,
Design Products: “someone from 2011″ and
Design Interactions: “someone from 2025″.
Perhaps then for me would the show have made sense and so would the activity of designing and future-casting associated with it.

links for 2008-01-29
January 29, 2008-
meh, from what I’ve experience so far on Hackney buses, this sort of campaign is not going to have much impact. Adults aren’t usually the ones being obnoxious, but the younger generation.

Hungry?
January 29, 2008Reminds me of The Hungries project I was involved in with my friends Dana and Alejandro.

links for 2008-01-26
January 26, 2008-
Really nice teaser for what seems to be some sort of mobile/music/stuff device.

links for 2008-01-23
January 23, 2008-
My talented friend and fellow IDIIer Alejandro on BoinBoing! Fab!