PBB Book (finally) Published

The 'Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders' publication (ISBN 978-0-652-355-2) is now available. You can buy a printed copy (for $18.95 US) or download it (full resolution, no cover, 80 MB) for free.

'Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders' was made possible through funding and support from Arts Council England, Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design (MIRIAD) and Lancaster City Council. 'Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders' was presented by Fast-uk in partnership with folly as part of the f.city festival of digital culture in 2006. The publication is supported by MIRIAD.

[N.B. If you were involved in the show I will be getting copies to you in the near future. If your contact details have changed please get in touch and let me know].

Digital Design Futures (exhibition)

Automake and Future Factories: Digital Design Futures is an exhibition that explores the significant role of digital design in the creation of contemporary craft and design.

Automake presents the work of Justin Marshall, a craftsperson/maker whose research investigates the integration of a range of digital technologies into ‘traditional’ art and craft practices, leading to the creation of innovative new work.

FutureFactories presents the work of Lionel Theodore Dean, who has acted as a consultant to the transport and interior products industry for twenty years. His research is based around the use of rapid prototyping for the mass individualisation of products.

The exhibition is at The Hub (national centre for craft & design) in Sleaford, Lincolnshire from 3 May - 8 June.

Photos of the show on Flickr.

Bombay Sapphire Prize Shortlist 2007

Geoffrey Mann and Tavs Jørgensen both of whom showed work in 'Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders' have been shortlisted for this year’s £20,000 Bombay Sapphire Prize. The jury this year included Tom Dixon, Ron Arad, Thomas Heatherwick and Karim Rashid. Source: dezeen

Art As Design/Design As Art (event)

Last night I gave a talk at Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. I ran through a range of ways of thinking about the relationship between art and design. I was interested in doing this after I unearthed the Dan Graham paper ‘Art as Design/Design as Art’ at the National Library of Scotland. This was first published by Fruitmarket in 1987 to coincide with Graham's show there: Interior Design for Space Showing Videotapes. The paper has just been republished in Alex Coles’ new book “Design and Art”, Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2007.

My talk was broken down into the following sections:

Art as Design/Design as Art - Dan Graham

Design≠Art - Barbara Bloemink

Art in the Context of Design/Design in the Context of Art - Troels Degn Johansson

DesignArt - Alex Coles

Design and Art - Alex Coles

Critical Design - Dunne & Raby

Hybrid Art+Design - Me

Transdisciplinary Discourse - Me

An interesting idea that I tried to throw around was the use of the term "avant garde."

“Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm, or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Postmodernism posits that the age of the constant pushing of boundaries is no longer with us. Postmodernism posits that avant-garde has less applicability (or no applicability at all) in the age of Postmodern art.”

Yet, Marcus Fairs has titled his book 'Twenty-First Century Design: new design icons, from mass market to avant-garde.' And,

“In 2002 the Crafts Council held an exhibition called Home Made Holland, which suggested that Droog and other contemporary Dutch designers, such as Marcel Wanders and Hella Jongerius, had found a way forward for design by embracing avant-garde craft. Significantly, one of the chief protagonists behind Droog is Gijs Bakker, a radical jeweller who revolutionised the discipline during the late 1960s by combining throwaway materials with conceptual ideas. It was through applying this formula to a wider range of objects 30 years later that the Droog phenomenon exploded, yet in spite of its genesis in art and craft, the design world has been happy to claim Droog as its own.”
Craft Wars icon016 October 2004 by Lesley Jackson

“…admit that so-called avant-garde strategies operating in art and design today should be seen in a context of ‘post-avant-garde’, in which it is no longer relevant to distinguish between the two…”
Troels Degn Johansson

“First and foremost, all the claims that I have inventoried thus far are predicated on certain clichés of what constitutes ‘progressive’, ‘vanguard or ‘advanced’ art and are based on assumptions about current conditions of cultural practice that are out of sync with their realities. One such assumption is that medium categories in art or disciplinary divisions in the humanities are still oppressively strict, so that any art that touts interdisciplinarity or ‘crosses boundaries’ is attributed with automatic and unquestioned critical value. But it seems to me that even while the disciplinary debates/fights continue in certain sectors of academia, the destabilized state of medium specificity and disciplinary categories is already the dominant or given condition of cultural practice. As such, rather than serving an interventionary function within exclusive art institutions, so-called cross disciplinary practices or events that blur categorical distinctions may simply be symptoms of the tendency towards de-differentiation that pervades cultural experience generally.”
Miwon Kwon ‘Jorge Pardo’s Designs on Design’ published in Alex Coles’ new book “Design and Art”, Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2007.

Here are some other articles that I think contribute to this discussion:

What's the use? Art Journal, Spring 2004 by Ross K. Elfline.

Art’s Little Brother icon023, May 2005 by Rick Poynor.

What is Design? icon018, December 2004 by Marcus Fairs.

Historically the use of technology to level out traditional, disciplinary distinctions was a critical driver of De Stijl in The Netherlands, the Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists -whose architects, artists and designers saw industrial modes of production as a means of moving art into life:

“…many artists championed the industrial artefact - generated mechanically and consumed collectively - over the singular work of aesthetic contemplation”
Ellen Lupton

Maybe sensational art and the rarefied space of the gallery are so disconnected from 'the everyday' that the last recourse is to turn to craft, design and domestic objects? Or maybe its just a great marketing hook...

The slides from my presentation are here.

Bursaried MPhil/PhD Studentship (Falmouth)

3D Digital Production Research Degrees (MPhil/PhD)

Applications are invited for research degrees (MPhil/PhD) in the area of 3D digital production.

Project proposals should focus on one of the following:
• innovative methods of integrating digital technologies into the creative processes of designing and making;
• online design tools/environments that facilitate collaboration between design professionals and designers, or designers and consumers, for customisation of 3D digital production;
• intuitive/human centred methods of interfacing with 2D/3D Computer Aided Design software and Computer Aided Manufacturing hardware that facilitate collaborative and customised 3D production.

A small number of studentships are available with bursaries covering UK/EU fees and a stipend of £12,000 p.a.

For more information see www.autonomatic.org.uk or for an informal discussion contact Dr Katie Bunnell on 01326 370497.

Deadline for applications: 11 July 2007.
Interview date: 26 July 2007.

Application forms can be downloaded from the website at: www.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/research

Hard copies are available on request by emailing:
admissions@falmouth.ac.uk.

Seminar, Guldagergaard, Denmark

I've been invited by Flemming Tvede Hansen (a PhD scholar in the field of ceramics, working in Copenhagen, Denmark www.flemmingtvede.dk) to participate in the following seminar:

In the cross-border of digital media and physical form
Seminar, Guldagergaard, www.ceramic.dk , 3/2-4/2 2007:

The idea about this seminar is to meet people working in the cross-border of digital media and physical form. The aim of the seminar is to make an interdisciplinary network for exchanging knowledge, - show and share, - so new hybrids fields and approaches can appear.
The meeting will be structured by presentations of works and issues on the use of digital media from the participants. The participants are invited according to their use of digital media as a base or a catalyst for a physical product or art piece.

THEME: The relationships between the digital media and physical form in your project.
How is the physical media related to the work in the digital media?
How is ones knowledge about the physical media utilized in the digital media?
How is the interaction between the physical and digital media in the creative process?
What do the digital media add in an artistic sense?

PLACE: Guldagergaard, Heilmannsvej 31A, 4230 Skælskør, DENMARK

Design ≠ Craft

Some interesting points from Robert Aish:

“We can characterize design as being different to craft (because the designer does not directly act on the material, but has an indirect, and arguably more powerful, way of controlling materialization). Similarly, we might characterize computational design as being different to conventional design (because the designer is not directly drawing the geometry, but has an indirect, and arguably more powerful, way of controlling that geometry using computational design tools).

In this way we should view computational design as part of a normal progression in which the designer and the artifact are separated by an increasing number of levels of indirection, that in turn introduce higher levels of expression and control. Opponents of this may question whether introducing these levels of indirection is in fact progress, arguing that intuition and spontaneity will be inhibited with the increased remoteness between the designer and artifact, Happily these layers of indirection are not arranged linearly, but can be configured to form a closed loop. The advent of digitally controlled fabrication means that the ‘geometrically aware’ and ‘computationally enabled’ designer is as close to the materialization as in the original craft process, but with precision and control and the ability to explore variation which was previously unimaginable.

The question now is: what are the characteristics of computational design tools that facilitate this approach to design and what are the corresponding abstractions which need to be internalized and operationalised by designers?”

AISH, R., 2006. Exploring the analogy that parametric design is a game in OOSTERHUIS, K., and FEIREISS, L., (eds.) The architecture co-laboratory: game set and match II. On computer games, advanced geometries and digital technologies. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers. pp 203.

Coded Ornament

Coded Ornament is an exploration of contemporary and traditional plasterwork. It is the result of a collaboration between Hayles and Howe, a long established ornamental plasterwork company, and artist and researcher Justin Marshall. Justin Marshall’s research combines digital technologies with craft techniques in the creation of contemporary coded plaster ornament. Through an exploration of the potential role of digital technologies in developing new ornamental plaster designs their collaboration is concerned with the future of architectural plaster ornament and craft based skills in 21st century culture.

‘Coded Ornament’ is much more than a static exhibition, and each day of Architecture Week there will be opportunities to take part in practical workshops, see demonstrations by skilled modelers and plasterers and computer controlled equipment, and attend talks around the process, procedures and inspirations which underly the design and production of ornamental plasterwork.

‘One of the key aims of my research is to work in real world situations, integrating traditional skills with digital technologies in order to extend the practical and creative possibilities for making new products. 'Coded Ornament' has been a great opportunity for me to achieve these aims and work alongside a highly skilled workforce.' Justin Marshall, artist and researcher

‘At Hayles & Howe we like to push the boundaries of traditional craft skills and bring in modern techniques and improvements. We aim to further this crossover with this interesting project. The company is delighted to be working in conjunction with Justin and University College Falmouth and hope it is the start of a long association with educational R&D projects.’ David Harrison, Director of Hayles & Howe

For further details of the event and the participants visit:
www.haylesandhowe.com
www.autonomatic.org.uk
www.justinmarshall.co.uk

Craft Research (blog)

Recently I've been having an interesting exchange with Mike Press . Mike has posted some questions and links at the Craft Research blog:

"Karl Marx was perhaps the original prophet of the Pro-Am economy. In The German Ideology, written between 1845 and 1847, Marx maintained that labour – forced, unspontaneous and waged work – would be superseded by self-activity. He evoked a communist society in which: ‘. . . nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes . . . to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.’ By the mid-1850s Marx had already modified this utopian vision and instead looked forward to a time when ‘material production leaves every person surplus time for other activities’. The Pro-Am Revolution: how enthusiasts are changing our economy and society is a book by Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller published by Demos. Available as a download from here, the book describes the rise of "amateurs who work to professional standards", and who are transforming all fields from music through to software, business and astronomy: "The Pro-Ams are knowledgeable, educated, committed and networked, by new technology. The twentieth century was shaped by large hierarchical organisations with professionals at the top. Pro-Ams are creating new, distributed organisational models that will be innovative, adaptive and low-cost." In the passage at the top of this post, the authors are making the point that technological and cultural changes are moving us very close to Marx's ideal of how a communist society would actually work. A more recent article in Fortune suggests the significance of the DIY economy. DIY is thus a mash-up of the post-industrial enterprise economy and good old unreconstructed communism. Today I received an email from the ever-perceptive John Marshall who was trying to link together some of the issues I've been raising in this blog with issues that he too has been exploring. Links he provided led me, somewhat accidently, to the Leadbeater book and the Pro-Am thesis, which strikes me as one way of framing some of this stuff. To quote from John:

I was reading your posts at www.craftresearch.blogspot.com when I made a mental connection to something I was reading at Anne Galloway’s blog:

“In the past I would have considered these things amongst the ill effects of capitalism, but now I think it's a bit more complicated than that. After all, some of this labour is actually being done for free. Out of love even, like with Flickr or any number of mod communities. The DIY ethic, in fact, is based on the power of creative re-use and re-appropriation. But these terms are now being tossed around in software and hardware development like organisations and companies only care about democratic participation, and not profitability. Jean Burgess knows much more about mass amateurisation and vernacular creativity than I do…”

There are some interesting posts at Jean Burgess’s blog creativity/machine on vernacular creativity (see under categories in her sidebar). I think that is a great academic term to describe this type of activity. [edit: concise definition of VC here ] I agree with John that Vernacular Creativity is a useful term to describe these emergent activities which focus around craft and making. The digital culture that manifests VC appears to be growing rapidly: there is HobbyPrincess and her Craft Manifesto, there's the Make blog, from which is arising Craft Magazine. Then we have Readymademag, and the making things blog. Taking an interesting and explicit political position is Craftism. I am trying to document as many of these as I come across on my del.icio.us page. I have thrown all of this down, not to make a point, but rather to pose some questions: What implications does all this have for "fine craft", and how does it change the culture of consuming such craft? How should we regard the rise of vernacular creativity? How should we curate and critically comment on the digitally connected vernacular crafts? What are the political implications of this new culture?"

*** My own feeling is that the conjunction of technology and culture has shaped new creative opportunities which break with previous domain-specific models of practice. As these technologies become increasingly affordable and prevalent and computing enters its pervasive, networked phase the expectations we have of the objects we surround ourselves with are being transformed. Specifically, the outputs of the current dominant economic and corporate drivers might to some extent, be replaced by artefacts and designed objects whose function is to provide alternate or parallel values to established design discourses. For example, these new objects may be designed to purposely subvert these established models, whereby the end-user is invited to reflect on their cultural role and/or the means of their creation. This has the result that new forms of consumption for audiences, users and/or co-creators of the objects produced might feasibly be developed (e.g. design for exhibition and/or publication in the manner of conventional fine art objects, design to order, mass-customisation, etc.). In my research I am working with a core group of texts that underpin my current thinking on this: CHAPMAN, J., 2005. Emotionally durable design: objects, experiences and empathy. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd. GERSHENFELD, N., 2005. Fab: the coming revolution on your desktop - from personal computers to personal fabrication. New York: Basic Books. STERLING, B., 2005. Shaping things. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. THACKARA, J., 2005. In the bubble: designing in a complex world. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. VON HIPPEL, E., 2005. Democratising innovation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press – particularly in light of the fact that IBM has agreed to have its patents vetted by the public in the community patent peer review project "Peer to Patent." I have a hunch that the current upsurge in vernacular creativity can be seen as the reintegration of practices that have been left out on a limb (in terms of value) since the Renaissance. I think what we are seeing is a new form of “postindustrial design” (Peter Lunenfeld - Professor in the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in his 'endtroduction' to Shaping Things.) Gershenfeld has discussed this in his book:

“The trivium and the quadrivium together make up the seven "liberal arts." Both of these words warrant comment. "Liberal" in this sense is not the opposite of "conservative"; it referred to the liberation that the study of these subjects was thought to bring. 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 this rather rousing meaning as a mastery over the means for 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 mere 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.

My research is concerned with designed objects created from the application of industrial means, methods and processes (out with the strictly commercial environment) and cultural contexts which offer possibilities for new forms of convergent practice. I also find myself having to keep using the words "mere" and "just" to make distinctions between objects that experience slippage from one domain to another. Gershenfeld has been implementing Fab Labs (Fabrication Laboratories) http://fab.cba.mit.edu/ These include $25,000 worth of kit: a laser cutter, a sign cutter, a CNC milling machine and a suite of open source software and programmes written by researchers at the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This Fab Lab programme "brings fabrication capabilities to under-served communities that have been beyond the reach of conventional technology development and deployment. Fab Labs have been opened in rural India, northern Norway, Ghana, Boston and Costa Rica". In his book, Gershenfeld writes about reflecting on the Fab Lab they set up on a farm owned by S.S. Kalbag in rural India:

“…I had returned to the United States and was visiting the research labs of an integrated circuit manufacturer that was developing devices based on work at MIT. Those chips were designed by teams of engineers and produced in billion-dollar chip fabs. We were discussing new applications for the first version of the chips, and measurement strategies to use in the next generation. When I suggested that we try these ideas out, the reaction was the same as in Delhi: they looked at me blankly. There was no way for an individual with an idea there to invent something alone; the corporate development process demanded the skills of groups of specialized engineers, using expensive facilities distributed over multiple sites. When I jokingly suggested that we go to Kalbag’s farm, the silence in the room suggested that the joke was very serious. The possibility that a rural Indian village had technical capabilities missing in a facility at the apex of the technological food chain had, and has, unsettling implications for survival at the top of the food chain.” pp 170.

We should all be rethinking our relationships with the apex of the technological food chain.

Radical Craft

Stories from the Source: Radical Craft will examine advanced craft as an antidote to slick mass production and mass culture in many arenas. From space explorers to fashion icons. From wizards to information mavericks. From social entrepreneurs to science gurus.

Stories from the Source: Radical Craft will examine the most advanced examples of craft in architecture, the arts, science, technology, storytelling, fashion, food, magic and more.
Over three exhilarating days, Radical Craft will explore the extremes of craft, including:

satellites and space exploration
invented worlds in stagecraft and animation
digital-game wizardry
haute couture vs. “UnFashion”
craft in the service of humanitarian need
the art of the 30-second story
new paradigms of industrial production
sleight-of-hand craft
extreme custom car design
crafting the news

March 23-26, Pasadena, California.
http://www.artcenter.edu/designconference/

Posts from the conference at: http://www.craftresearch.blogspot.com/

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.

PC/furniture?

A PC case mod done in a Japanese furniture style. From Extreme Tech. An interesting blend of technology and furniture. Reminds me of the 'wireless' we had when I was a kid: big, wooden and sat on the floor.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1898200,00.asp