designswarm thoughts

London design festival guide 2007. Tee hee.

If you like architecture, illusions and trying to figure out how someone does something: just watch this movie!

Go visit him at La Noche Blanco and Ars.

Quick update on something else that keeps me busy :)

I’m really happy to announce that Topoware will be part of Designboom’s “Handled with care” exhibition as part of the London Design Festival, hosted by designersblock in Shoreditch.

Additionally, it is being featured in the Stanford-based design magazine Ambidextrous 7: Food.
Download the article here (pdf)

Karola and I are looking into selling the china collection as of September, so stay tuned!

Update: Thanks to Mark from Experientia for featuring Topoware on core77.

Sorry about the lack of news, but I’m in the middle of the Hardcore Hardware Hacking weekend I’ve put together for tinker.it. Lots of fun! Wish you were here!

Just a quick update regarding the upcoming Hardcore Hardware Hacking weekend workshop I’m helping organise:

We have the great pleasure of having Moritz Waldemeyer come by to do a 30 minute presentation of his work to the workshop participants on Sunday morning. Very exciting.

if you don’t know him or his work, he’s behind some of the lateststar designer and architects interactive pieces.

So what are you waiting for! Sign up!

A molecular biologist, at the RCA Design Interactions show:

“What’s all this “science” crap?”

I’ll be speaking tonight at Montreal’s very own Pecha Kucha about my Good Night Lamp project, how it came about, where it’s at now, and why on earth it’s still not out there!

Update: Here are the slides from that night’s presentation. Enjoy!

In my spare time (ha!) I’ve been helping put together a Hardcore Hardware Hacking workshop. On the weekend of the 21-22 of July, 15 hardware hackers will get to have fun with Massimo Banzi and Matt Biddulph, who will do demos and hand out cool toys with which to hack! We’ll do an open presentation on the sunday of all the projects.

All details HERE.

Spread the word!

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!

Spending time in New York is always a story of compromises. I planned to go to the MoMa but didn’t get a chance to. Nice people were in town but triangulating was a nightmare. I think it has something to do with the scale and the spread of urban life there. In some cities, you clearly have a “downtown” area where you’ll eventually bump into people (Milan is a good example) but in New York, you can go from one end to the other really quickly and there are interesting things to do and visit at pretty much at every corner. Making plans with other people becomes an odessey.

So the trip consisted of hanging out in the West Village, getting great coffee at Jack’s Stir Brew, eating at some nice vegetarian restaurants that Daverecommended, going to see Design Life Now at the Copper Hewitt Museum, breifly dropping by the venue for Postopolis and getting my new favorite ice-cream in America: Green tea Pinkberry topped with coconut flakes.

In any travel plans however there’s also a little bit of work involved and so Matt and I went to see Designing Audiences an AIGA talk at the beautiful Fashion Institute of Technology.

The panel was lead by the infamous Ze Frank with guests graphic designer Stefan Bucher, game designer Katie Salen, and head of Stamen design, Eric Rodenbeck.

They each made a short presentation of their work, Stefan with his daily monsters, Katie with her Ice Karaoke project and Eric with the work that Stamen does (presenting Trulia Hindsight for the first time).

Each spoke about their relationship to audiences both offline and online and I must say I was at first skeptical about this wide array of experiences in drawing a set of conclusions but 2 themes seemed to emerge from the conversation nonetheless:

1. Setting rules is key: Not unlike a school teacher, the designers, apart from Eric perhaps, all spoke of the need to set rules to grow a good community. If you left things too open, people would start wandering away from the “goal” of the community and produce what Ze referred to as “crapucopia”. This is a social phenomenon that teachers, babysitters and mothers all know too well. Makes me wonder if these designers haven’t all turned to become design teachers handing out briefs. The tighter the restrictions, the more creative you are forced to become in order to impress your peers and win the love of the teacher. Is this web2.0 all just an extension of school then? Strange notion worth exploring. In a way this has nothing to do per se with designing a community but more to do with maintaining one and maintaining the conditions that will make every participant feel special and look great by rewarding even their most meager attempts, and keep them interested in contributing. Seen under such a light, “web2.0″ seems almost a maternal activity, closer to real life than a truly unique “internet phenomenon”.

2. Platform makers: I asked them during the Q&A whether they thought that designers would become simply platform makers and their value would come from how great a platform they would create for people’s enjoyment. This is a question that I myself struggle with as a designer in an age that pushes us to think more and more about services and less about “stuff” more particularly in product design. The answers they provided pointed to a balance between these 2 roles for the future designers. Yes we will be building more platforms but the content creation will still be important to launch that community and gather people’s reactions around an initial body of work.

It seems almost impossible to think that most designers will not be following this trend even if it means more maternal maintenance work and less ego-driven creation.

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.