Wiki Update

Made some changes on the Designed Objects Wiki.

Updated the Bibliography http://designedobjects.pbwiki.com/SELECTED%20BIBLIOGRAPHY
and added a list of Tags to the Keywords page http://designedobjects.pbwiki.com/KEYWORDS

Added a sidebar with links to interesting stuff http://designedobjects.pbwiki.com/

Books on order

I'm currently waiting on another delivery from Amazon.

Design Tools

Design Tools: Digital technology for the crafts Saturday 11 February: 2 – 4pm Lecture Theatre V&A, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL This talk presented by Metropolitan Works, considers how makers, designers and artists can exploit the capabilities of digital technology to produce one-off, highly bespoke and collectable objects. The programme includes an overview of support now available to London's creative industries through Metropolitan Works and RapidformRCA.
Speakers include:
Guy Beggs and Marc Collinson of Metropolitan Works
Dr Katie Bunnell & Tavs Jorgensen - the use of digital technologies in ceramics, glass and metal (University College Falmouth)
David Goodwin & Gregor Anderson - Metal Rapid Protyping in jewellery and silversmithing
MA Design Products students, Royal College of Art - 'Rapid Manufacture' projects sponsored by 3D Systems.
FARO UK - Demonstration of reverse engineering equipment
To reserve your place, email info@metropolitanworks.org or telephone 020 7320 1827. Please state clearly your full name and email address. Free.

Shaping Things

ISBN: 0262693267

Picks up where Sterling's Siggraph keynote of 2004 leaves off. That is available at: http://www.boingboing.net/images/blobjects.htm

Excellent stuff. Crammed with ideas. Sometimes his terminology and neologisms are a bit dodgy - he also forgets to explain that a SPIME is a 'speculative imaginary' object.

"Rapid prototyping is a form of brainstorming with materials. It's not simply a faster way to plunge through older methods of production, but a novel way to manage design and production. By previous standards, it looks as if it is profligate, that it "throws a lot away"- but with better data retention, "mistakes" become a source of wealth. Rapid prototyping seen in depth is an "exhaustion of the phase of the problem" - it isn't reasonable, thrifty or rational, but it has the brutal potency of a chess-playing computer." pp. 48.

There is some great stuff on the evolution of human engagement with objects: artifacts, machines, products, gizmos, spimes and biots. A nice diagram on the mirrored S-curve of technological adaption, too.

Sterling, B., Shaping things. 2005 (The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts).

FAB

ISBN: 0465027458

On the (MIT) class 'How To Make (almost) Anything' and the impact of programmable personal fabricators and Fab Labs http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69495,00.html -

"These surprises have recurred with such certainty year after year that I began to realize that these students were doing much more than taking a class; they were inventing a new physical notion of literacy. The common understanding of "literacy" has narrowed down to reading and writing, but when the term emerged in the Renaissance it had a much broader meaning as a mastery of the available means of expression. However, physical fabrication was thrown out as an "illiberal art," pursued for mere commercial gain. These students were correcting a historical error, using millions of dollars' worth of machinery for technological expression every bit as eloquent as a sonnet or a painting." pp 7.

"And "art" did not mean just creative expression; it meant much more broadly the mastery that was developed over each of these domains. Liberal arts originally has the rather rousing meaning as a mastery over the means of personal liberation. They're now associated with academic study that is remote from applications, but they emerged in the Renaissance as a humanist pathway to power... Unfortunately, the ability to make things as well as ideas didn't make the cut; that was relegated to the artes illiberales, the "illiberal arts", that one pursued for economic gain. With art separated from artisans, the remaining fabrication skills were considered just mechanical production. This artificial division led to the invention of unskilled labor in the Industrial Revolution." pp 34.

"The invention of industrial automation meant that a single machine could now make many things, but it also meant that a single worker who used to do many things now did only one."
pp 35.

Gershenfeld, Neil, 2005. Fab: the coming revolution on your desktop - from personal computers to personal fabrication. (Basic Books: New York).

Blog Tweaks

I've been tinkering off and on with the template and the stuff in the sidebar of this blog. Anyway, in a bid to get my head around what is hot in web 2.0 I've been messing about with various applications and trying to get set up so I can keep track of the plethora of stuff I'm looking at. The latest is have added a blog to this blog - a reblog of interesting stuff from my news aggregator. Nothing original - just a way for me to keep tabs on things. I pondered with backdating it but decided to spend my time more productively.

Its over there >>> and at: Designed Objects Reblog

Hopefully, I'm done tweaking for a bit.

Model

A proposed relationship model showing the interaction between 3D computer technologies and transdisciplinary discourse leading to the emergence of a new object grammar in the field of designed objects.

Hertzian Tales

It is excellent to see that Anthony Dunne's "Hertzian Tales" is to be reprinted by MIT Press. It is set for publication in March 2006. ISBN: 0262042320. I got a used copy of the original RCA CRD version online. A brilliant resource.

"Hertzian Tales explores a space between fine art and design, showing how designers can use fine-art means - provoking, making ambiguous, making strange - to question how we cohabit with electronic technology and to probe its aesthetic potential." Gillian Crampton Smith in the Foreword to the RCA publication of "Hertzian Tales."

RM Book

Hardcover 304 pages (November 11, 2005) Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
ISBN: 0470016132