designswarm thoughts

I had the pleasure of meeting very briefly Boris Anthony at Xtech in Paris. He’s an interaction designer working and living in Montreal and these days is organising the local edition of Pecha Kucha. I think he feels, like me that there must be more to design that what we are made to believe or to see.

I hope I get a chance to speak to him more about this soon. In anycase I’ll be there, presenting the Good Night Lamp project which is slowly but surely, being put together. Hope to see you there!

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!

As I prepare my talk for next week’s Xtech in Paris, frantically trying to read the books that got delivered too late, I wonder about the people who do the conference circuit and have to give talks every other week. I think, from what I’ve seen and heard, that there are 2 types of speakers who work very differently on their talks:

1. The gardener: Matt is a good example of someone who starts off talking about a subject on a smaller scale and slowly adjusts it and adds content as time goes by.

2. The improviser: Bruce Sterling would be the prime example here of someone who masters their material extremely well. He flavors it differently picking up some things for a certain type of audience and shaping it to make it relevant to them. I’ve seen him speak twice and seen a number of videos of his talks and it’s always quite impressive.

So there, this is my first proper conference talk, and I am quite nervous, especially since i’m addressing the main subject of Ubicomp in a very different way. Hopefully I’ll try to string together the things that interest me the most about ubiquitous computing, the internet as a product designer and what this means for our cultural perception of the material world. More on that very soon I promise : )

A psychological analysis of me by Alejandro

“i was thinking about you, i think you are really strange
4/25/07 10:09 PM
cause you;re an industrial designer and all that, so you are supposed to be a very 3d person
4/25/07 10:10 PM
but it turns out that no, your 2d to the bone
4/25/07 10:10 PM
you’re
4/25/07 10:10 PM
i mean the lamp, that’s 2d, like an ipod, you see.. that’s a 2d thing (im talking only about the appereance)
4/25/07 10:11 PM
and topoware.. that’s 2d.. 2d that is used to indicate 3d, but is 2d
4/25/07 10:11 PM
the stint thingy. 2d
4/25/07 10:12 PM
the list goes on and on
4/25/07 10:12 PM
you know
4/25/07 10:12 PM
you can fool everyone but not me, you;re 2d”

Since i can never stand still for very long, I’m very proud to announce the 2nd project that will be exhibited at the Milan Furniture Faire this year: Topoware, a collection of cheeky tableware that examines the territories of our eating habits. This was designed with my great friend Karola Torkos.Go and visit the site and come and say hi if you’re in town!

I am quite proud to be presenting at the Milan Furniture Fair this year 2 projects, I’ll talk about the second one very soon. But for now, the Good Night Lamp will be exhibited at the Dotdotdot space in Milan. Come and say hi! Videos and pictures will be available after the fair, so you really have to come ;)

Major update:

Now: I am a strategic designer for Blast Radius until the end of April. I’m also doing some screen-based interaction design for Thinglink, Jaiku and Independent IP.

Jan 28th to Feb 2nd: I taught a workshop on service design to undergraduate students at the Higher Institute of Integrated Product Development in Antwerp, Belgium.

Feb 28th to March 4th: Went to new Delhi for Doors of Perception 9: Juice to represent Ulla-Maaria from Thinglink. Live-blogged some talks and took way too many pictures.

April 18th to 23rd: OMG, it’s that time of the year again! I will be presenting 2 projects for the Milan Furniture Fair. Topoware and the Good Night Lamp. Come and say hi!

May: I will be based in London, available for coffee, tea, whatever. I’ll be looking for new collaborations at that point. I will also be speaking at Xtech in Paris about semantics of objects and ubicomp.

June: After 3 years abroad, I return briefly to Canada to see my brother get married. Brief stop-over in NYC.

July onwards: Based in London and available for work!

Sometimes glitches in Twitter are reflective of how I feel at the moment, in this case: repetitive.

1.

(Phone rings)
Matt: “Hey you”
Me: ” Hey! Let me just move away from this street, a monkey just threw an energy-saving light-bulb in our direction”

2.

12 people squeezed in a car, all dressed in white, singing a capella Honeysuckle Rose while the car tries to avoid cows and horses in the streets.

Happy Holi party!

Just letting you know I’m deep in workshops, eating street food, walking around the most desolate areas of Delhi and generally taking about a million pictures of Doors 9: Juice on my flickr stream. Enjoy!

Back to the usual rants on the 8th of March.

Just a little public service announcement that until the 7th I will be in Delhi for the latest edition of Doors of Perception 9 conference in Delhi in India. If there’s internet, expect thorough live-blogging, if not, then see you next week!

As I mentioned previously I’ll be teaching a service design workshop at the Higher Institute of Product Development in Antwerp next week. This is the brief I wrote for them:

“Industrial designers, in light of our growing environmental concerns, are being asked to be more and more “green” or eco-friendly, choose the right materials to make more biodegradable, easy to recycle or disassemble objects. Another wave of thought though, fueled by the likes of John Thackara, Ezio Manzini and Live|work advocate for the development of services where objects become “touch points” to an experience or a service being provided. Who you are should be defined as what you have access to and not what you own in this model.

In this workshop we will be working to dig a little deeper in the roles that objects and products take on within services. We will try to design services, the objects that allow these services to exist and will explore some presentation and design techniques such as experience prototyping and video prototyping.

Useful for the workshop: Camera and/or Videocamera”

I’ll be working on the actual layout of the workshop and the presentations I will make at the beginning of the week and post them up this weekend.

Snailmail experience of 2006:

Sent package with RoyalMail in London to Bogotà, in Colombia in October 2006 … never made it to it’s destination.

Now in 2007 I get book sent through Amazon.com to the Netherlands, (not Swaziland!) and i get this:

Bastards!

So I thought that for my first actual post of the year I’d be a little audacious and inspired by this meme reveal 5 things about me. I’m not promising they’ll be interesting though : )

1. I NEVER have cereal WITH milk in the bowl. I’ll always have a glass of milk on the side, have a spoonful of cereal and then gulp down some milk after. Always done it, don’t ask me why, can’t remember.

2. I always make my bed because of John Le Carré’s book “The perfect spy”. There’s a bit in it about making your bed as a way to order your life or something.

3. I wore the Hijab when I was 14, when my family and I were living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for 6 months. That was not a fun time for a teenage girl let me tell you.

4. I would kill for dark chocolate. Milky chocolate is so inferior.

5. I used to be a lifeguard. Worked on a lakeside beach for 2 summers, red bathingsuit and all.

How’s that for blog confessions? : )

Matt pointed me to this the other day, and it’s become really how i’m making decisions these days. I also hope to keep taking risks in my life and jumping into crazy adventures and situations, it’s so much more fun that way : )