TST_003 (project)

We have been working on TST_003 – our ToasterBot for the “Teahouse for Robots” exhibition (The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan. Friday, July 9 – Sunday, August 22, 2010). We have a working set of prototype electronics and we have a first draft chassis built as a proof of concept. The CAD models for the robot shell are about 80% done. Bosses, ribs, intake slots and mounting brackets are next. There also needs to be some branding on the side which is looking very blank at present. The front end of TST_003 is shamelessly ripped off from a Dualit toaster merged with an Airstream trailer on tank tracks.

A test render of TST_003

 Another test render of TST_003

Sensors and servos from Parallax, Chassis constructed with parts from Vex. CAD modeling in SolidWorks and Rhino. Renderings are real-time screen grab previews from PhotoView 360.

Sharing Pillow by Rui Mu

Sharing-Pillow from Rui Mu on Vimeo.

Rui Mu is an MFA student at the University of Michigan's School of Art & Design. She has been exploring how product design can influence the behavior of users. This is what she says of a recent project:

"In 1979, a ‘one child policy’ was introduced to solve the problem of over-population in China. By 2007, there were approximately 100 million only-children in the country. This has had a great effect on Chinese economic reform. However, it has also introduced new problems such as an increase in selfish behavior that children have. This is currently resulting in a highly increased divorce rate in recent Chinese society since many of them are young adults.

Therefore, I have been exploring the didactic potential that product design has in changing selfish behavior by designing products that only function by being shared. I have designed an inflatable two-person pillow, which cannot be used comfortably without a partner. If one partner tries to use it, all the air will be pushed into the other half of the pillow and will provide him/her with no support. This product will not let one partner be lazy while the other one is working to encourage them to share housework fairly. In addition to changing couples’ behaviors, this pillow also improves their relationship by letting them use it together and spending more time with each other."

Anthony Dunne Innovationsforum (video)

Anthony Dunne // Dunne & Raby from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.

Post-Optimal Objects (POO) 3

The final project for Post-Optimal Objects (POO) at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design was to design a placebo object for a real or imagined, physical or psychological phobia that would challenge our expectations and preconceptions and provoke new ways of thinking about designed objects and how we use them. Class participants were asked to explore the complexity of how designed objects can modify our behavior by addressing needs that raise questions rather than just be practical, ergonomic or aesthetically pleasing (this project was shamelessly based on the 'Complicated Pleasures' project at the RCA). These objects were not to solve a problem but rather to enable the needs of the user (as the class participants defined them). The objects were presented with supporting materials to allow the audience to understand the relationship between the object and its user in different social contexts.

“By taking the meanings of others as a fundamental starting point for design, designers must proceed from their understanding of users' understanding, which is understanding of understanding or second-order understanding, and this is a way of knowing wholly different from ordinary (first-order) understanding of things”. (Krippendorff, 1995).

Most conventional products are designed with an idealized user in mind. A placebo is the term applied by medical science to the therapeutic and healing effects of inert medicines (i.e. preparations that are pharmacologically inert but that may have a therapeutic effects based solely on the power of suggestion). The purpose of the project was to explore a way of designing that acknowledges human complexity, contradiction and irrationality and transcends simplistic design characterizations of people as simply ‘users’ and ‘consumers’.

Some examples:

Separation Anxiety Disorder Placebo by Alex Sobolev. This was a Structuralist analysis of the Alfred Hitchcock movie 'Psycho'. The placebo object was a mental girlfriend for Norman Bates (that had killed her own Father who was himself dating Norman's dead Mother, or something like that). We are assured that had this condition existed it would have been a much shorter movie with no deaths.


“De vrees om te zijn niet Duch” (The fear of being non-Dutch) by Andy Sell. Those who experience a sense of dissatisfaction in knowing that they do not come from Dutch origin periodically suffer from Nonneederlandobia. The fear of being non-Dutch addresses a social dilemma of individuals whose work, interests and way of life lies parallel with Dutch culture, yet their lack of Dutch nationality disables them to fully identify as such. A a series of designed objects with the intent of making oneself “feel” more Dutch.


Keno-phobic Sound Generation Device by Rob Knecht. Keno-phobia is an abnormal fear of large, empty spaces. This is a synthesizer and sequencer that analyzes the current environment and generates a musical composition for the individual to enjoy and share.

Post-Optimal Objects (POO) 2

As already indicated, this semester at University of Michigan School of Art & Design I am teaching an elective studio course: (ArtDes 300.015) Post-Optimal Objects (POO). This course focuses on designed objects and their cultural contexts. The current project is a Chindogu Challenge:

“Chindogu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that, on the face of it, seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem. However, Chindogu has a distinctive feature: anyone actually attempting to use one of these inventions, would find that it causes so many new problems, or such significant social embarrassment, that effectively it has no utility whatsoever. Thus, Chindogu are sometimes described as 'unuseless' – that is, they cannot be regarded as 'useless' in an absolute sense, since they do actually solve a problem; however, in practical terms, they cannot positively be called 'useful'.” (From Wikipedia).

This project has an additional parameter that participants should make one component part of their Chindogu object that starts out digital and becomes physical (i.e. make use of laser cutting, cnc milling or rapid prototyping).

Lilienne Chan's pant hem saving system.

Andy Sell's laser cut, totally biodegradable collar for urban environments with heirloom seeds embedded in it.

Isaac Krauss's food spill saving device.

Devon Russell's anti booger freeze device.

Ronen Goldstein's Open Source beardguard.

A spin off of this project is Alex Sobolev's (pictured above with his toilet seat for public restrooms) new blog 'Chindogu or Not?' that is a placeholder for a future site http://www.un-useless.com/

Post-Optimal Objects (POO)

This semester at University of Michigan School of Art & Design I am teaching an elective studio course: (ArtDes 300.015) Post-Optimal Objects (POO). This course focuses on designed objects and their cultural contexts. The class participants are exploring the territory between fine art and design and addressing approaches for developing the aesthetic and critical possibilities of objects outside a commercial context. Participants are also investigating various ways of creatively communicating ideas about objects, such as making appearance models, mock-ups and storyboards. The creative works made in Post-Optimal Objects will be shown as prototypes or communicated via publication (online or print). Participants are thinking conceptually about what they want to achieve, translating these ideas into visualizations, and developing some of these into fully executed and documented works. Digital 3D modeling, scanning, laser cutting, and rapid prototyping can be used together with traditional media such as wood, metal, and plastics.

We started the course with Product 2.0: Design Yoga - a couple of quick projects to introduce the themes of the studio and to establish a number of generative brainstorming techniques. The first exercise involved the Critical Browsing of a list of practitioners’ websites that could be considered to be producers of Post-Optimal Objects. The purpose of this was to identify some characteristics of what might constitute a Post-Optimal Object. The goal was to come up with a working definition of what a Post-Optimal Object could be. This resulted in a Post-Optimal Mindmap.

Next, we generated some Random Products using manual and online generators for wacky product ideas. We spent some time playing with these tools to come up with some interesting textual descriptions/titles of Post-Optimal Objects and developed short statements that contained an outline of a situation, context, problem, need or opportunity that each of these objects addresses. From online image-hosting sites we found images for each of these 'objects'. These images were not necessarily representative of what the objects were but characterized the values or intentions that might support the objects that participants had come up with. The combinations of the description/title of the object, short statements and images were then shown as presentations.

Examples:Soni-Pill® - these easy to swallow little pills actually prove that your internal body movements have a music of their own! Just take one of these tiny, FDA approved pills, turn on your Bluetooth-compatible computer and be amazed as they convert your digestive habits into melodious music to your ears! The music changes with your diet and their position in your digestive tract! Pills stay in your system for approx. 1 day, then come out the other end for easy disposal in your toilet. Safe for flushing! (By Robert Lester).

Random words: bubbles, robots, iron lungs.
An iron lung meant for kids that provides entertainment as well. Every time with then child takes a so-called 'breath', the machine emits bubbles of varying colors, shapes and sizes. Keeps the child alive, keeps you happy and gives you a reason to stay by their bedside to visit until they are better. A critique on the willingness of people to visit their hospitalized loved ones over time. (By Lilienne Chan).

The first full project was a Product Autopsy. The aim of this project was to gain an understanding of and to re-conceive a product through its dissection and reconstruction. The goal was to uncover the Post-Optimal potential of an existing object by conducting a Post-Mortem on a disposed-of designed object. Participants explored how materials, manufacturing techniques, systems and values are brought together in their chosen objects by taking this product apart systematically and documenting this process. Once the object had been dissected and its function and design had been analyzed the task was to re-make the object in a manner that is ‘emotionally-durable’.

“In their current guise, consumer products lack the sophistication and layered complexity for this degree of long-term empathy to incubate. Most consumer products relinquish their tenuous meaning to a single fleeting glance, while rarely delivering any of the life-altering rewards they so confidently promise. In this respect, waste is nothing more than symptomatic of a failed user/object relationship, where insufficient empathy led to the perfunctory dumping of one by the other.”

“… designers must first increase the intensity and perceptibility of subject-object dependency, enabling products to achieve deeper and more immersive modes of prolonged user engagement. This can be achieved in numerous ways: but if the simulation is not genuine, it will be cast off by the user as gadgetry or a deceiving quirk. The illusion of dependency is therefore insufficient; we must conceive products that actually depend upon users and genuinely need our emotional and physical support in order to survive - facilitating the creation of authentic and meaningful interactive experiences that go beyond the virtual, toward the actual.”

“It is therefore essential to avoid the notion of industrial design objects as static in meaning and appreciate that, like paintings and literary works, the meanings evolve over time.”

From: CHAPMAN, J., 2005. Emotionally durable design: objects, experiences and empathy. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd.

Example:


(By Devon Russell).

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.

Woman's Hour

You can hear Nana Ruth teaching Granddaughter Lauren to cook what was possibly the most delicious Lemon Meringue Pie ever made on Woman's Hour (BBC Radio 4). Human Beans will be talking about http://www.whatscookinggrandma.net - explaining why they built a website for the Grandmas of the world to share their special recipes and how add a Grandma you know.

[edit]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/04/2007_16_thu.shtml - RealPlayer Needed.

Practice Oriented Product Design (workshop)

Practices, Materiality and Product Design
A workshop at Durham University, 6-7 July, 2006.

I participated in this workshop. Tim Dant, Gordon Hush, Graham Powell and I formed a loosely affiliated, fun-loving, anti-manifesto collective to come up with 'StuffIt' as a counter-proposition and built an algorithmic manifesto generator (based on a Cootie Catcher). Hopefully, this un-movement will replicate virally...

Programme
Thursday
12.00 Registration opens.
12.30 Lunch.
13.15 Introductions.
13.25 1. Towards practice oriented product design - themes and contexts.
13.35 2. Designers, users and products - examples and experiences. Short presentations from designers and design academics who have experience of using innovative methods to study products in use and relate this knowledge to design.
Graham Powell Guinea Pig Design and BIAD.
Susie Bowman and Charlie Hill Glasgow School of Art.
Jack Ingram Birmingham Institute of Art and Design.
Pete Booth Tin Horse.
Matt Watson Durham University.
14.45 3. Six Times Tables. Progressive discussions in dynamic small groups of issues emerging from presentations so far.
15.45 Afternoon tea.
16.15 4. Manifesto launch. Presentation of the Manifesto of Practice Oriented Product Design.
16.45 5. Manifesto remodelling. Small group revision, reformulation and reconstruction of the Manifesto.
18.00 End for day.
19.00 Dinner, then to the pub.

Friday
09.00 6. practicing POPD. In the same small groups as in 5 above, an exercise to interrogate POPD through attempt at critical application to empirical case study.
10.30 Coffee.
11.00 7. Harvey Molotch.
11.40 8. Manifestations. Groups will exhibit/present the outputs from remodelling the manifesto and practicing POPD.
12.40 9. Discussion, summing up - wither POPD?
13.00 Close.

POPD Manifesto
Designers fear they are the lackeys of capitalism. Of course they are. But they are also architects of society. They hold in their hands [a little bit of] the means to define the practices of which human experience and social order are constituted. Practice Oriented Product Design [POPD] recognises the opportunities and responsibilities this power entails. Of late, designers have been interested in User-Centred Design [UCD]. The radical idea - that products and services should be designed for the people who use them - is welcome progress. But it does not go far enough. UCD focuses on single products and on individual users; it encourages a fragmented pick-and-mix methodology for understanding user needs - needs which are taken to exist even before the designer's intervention.

POPD tenets:
POPD holds that practices are the basic unit of society. POPD renounces all approaches, whether in social science or in design, that focus on specific products or upon individual users.
POPD focuses on the routinised ways of doing, understanding, knowing, and desiring which comprise human experience and social structure at all scales. It is in the performance of practices that users and products come together, in complexes of skills, meanings, materialities and temporalities. It is in understanding the dynamics of practice and in identifying points for intervention that the power of POPD resides. POPD knows we are all PODers [practice oriented designers], engaged in assembling components of practice - products, competences, meanings -with skill and occasional creativity in the process of accomplishing everyday life. POPDers accept the limitations and opportunities this represents. POPD goes beyond the 'verbal' Kelley and Littman explain that IDEO thinks of products "in terms of verbs, not nouns: not cell-phones but cell-phoning". POPD has a more radical understanding of how practices structure society.
POPD realises that no object is an island so it attends to the relations between products, not to objects in isolation. POPD understands that history matters! Understanding the dynamics of practice means understanding continuities and patterns of co-evolution over time: look backwards to see forwards. POPD recognises that needs are made. Needs do not exist, ready made. They emerge from the dynamics of practice. Products, designers and consumers are all agents of change but none can change alone. Their interdependence defines and limits the scope of POPD. POPD assumes the relationality of value. Value does not reside in the product itself, nor in the meanings attached to it. Value emerges in practice, it is defined by relations between products, and between objects, skills, meanings and temporalities. Design success is situated and situational. POPD never ends! POPD is implicated in the long term evolution of practice. POPD refutes the temporal linearity of contemporary product design. POPD does not end when a product sits on shelf. That moment is but one in the POPDer's ongoing relationships with the practices in which they intervene.

Implications
By seizing hold of the means by which products intervene in practices, POPD shows destgners how they shape everyday life and the structures of society. POPD matters for designers who want to change the world and for those who want to sell more stuff.

POPD provides a critical understanding of design in cycles of production, consumption and use, It recognises the flow of meanings, competencies, purposes and products in which designers intervene. POPD integrates concepts from science and technology studies, consumption and design. POPDers are happy with terms like diffusion, innofusion, domestication and coevolution.

Methodologicallly POPDers study practices now and over time. This requires an eclectic and pragmatic approach: large scale data sets, statistics on the use of time, money and energy, market research, and detailed qualitative exploration of situated practice - all can help in following the traces of practice across time and space.

See also Heidi's Design Conferences blog post.

Critical Technical Practice (article)

People derive and create meaning, identity and value through things. Most of these are designed by professional designers and manufactured within a commercial framework. However, some are made by individuals for personal use, and some are made in order to exploit the capacity of objects to provoke reflexivity and convey meaning through their physical attributes as a means of communicating ideas.

Critical technical practice (CTP) is a method for developing value-sensitive design and an approach to identifying and altering philosophical assumptions underlying technical practice. Phil Agre originally proposed CTP as a means of converging technology development (in computer science) with critical reflection (in critical studies and design research) in order to expose and deconstruct hidden values and assumptions in the design of technology.

Link: Critical Technical Practice as a Methodology for Values in Design by Kirsten Boehner, Shay David, Joseph Kaye and Phoebe Sengers.

Also worth a look: Reflective Design by Phoebe Sengers, Kirsten Boehner, Shay David and Joseph Kaye.

Practices, Materiality and Product Design (Workshop)

Designing and consuming: objects, practice and processes is a theoretical project that seeks to enrich and extend understanding of the relation between product design and consumption, and the dynamics of both. It does so by exploiting the potential for theoretical development at the interface of science and technology studies, design theory and the sociology of consumption. Four strategically positioned case studies, each addressing specific gaps in the existing literature, promise to generate new ways of conceptualising the objects, practices and processes of consumption.

The project is part of the Cultures of Consumption research programme funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the Economic and Social Research Council (award no. RES-154-25-0011). The project is running collaboratively between Lancaster University Department of Sociology, University of Durham Department of Geography, and Birmingham Institute of Art and Design at University of Central England. The project runs for 24 months to December 2006.

http://www.dur.ac.uk/designing.consuming/index.html

http://www.dur.ac.uk/designing.consuming/media/flier%20july%2006.pdf

Anthony Dunne - Hertzian Tales 2005

I got my copy of the 2005 edition of Hertzian Tales earlier this week (seems a bit early as it supposedly wasn't due till March - not that I'm complaining). Its pretty much the same as the 1999 edition. There is a new Preface. The layout is clearer, the text more readable and most of the images are larger. If you are (like me) a fan of Dunne and Raby you need this book.

Dunne, A., Hertzian tales: electronic products, aesthetic experience and critical design. 2005 (The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts).

Books on order

I'm currently waiting on another delivery from Amazon.

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."

Edgy Products

We submitted an expanded version of identityware for ISEA 2006. identityware www.idware.co.uk is an experimentation lab for ‘art-products’ based on an e-commerce model. The project includes innovative products and artefacts which challenge cultural, creative and economic conditional norms. The project focuses on the development of ‘object variants’ (i.e. modifications; creative departures, options, substitutes, mutations or evolutionary trajectories arrived at through an engagement with specific design technologies.) These art products tread the line between artist multiples, designed objects, and collectibles. As well as the existing rootoftwo work on the site we have new ideas from:

Peter Eudenbach (USA) http://www.petereudenbach.com/index.html
Jon Pengelly (UK) http://www.greenham-common-trust.co.uk/resident.htm (scroll down a bit)
Rob Price (USA) http://www.thwartdesign.com/index.html
Ken Rinaldo (USA) http://accad.osu.edu/~rinaldo/
Simon Ringe (UK) http://www.newtopologies.org/
Amy Youngs (USA) http://accad.osu.edu/~ayoungs/

Hopefully we'll get the new work up on the site soon.

Edgy Products - ISEA 2006

http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/edgyproducts/

"The consumer electronic device has become the standard currency of technology in contemporary global culture. The light bulb and the home sewing machine have bred and multiplied to fill every part of our homes, offices, pockets and purses. They have colonized industry after industry: publishing, photography, music, film, communications, and entertainment. Consumer electronics have gradually colonized publication and photography, music and film, communications and entertainment. With the constant promise of increased efficiency, these devices may be seen as improvements over previous techniques. But for every measure of ease or efficiency there are secondary effects, artifacts, and renegotiations. Far from being neutral, consumer products are powerful arguments for norms and lifestyles, suggesting and facilitating specific ways of acting and being in the world. Made by researchers and marketers working for corporations, they form a sort of culture industry. And as Theodor Adorno suggested, their products serve the interests of this industry as much as they serve their users.

Artists and designers have tried to refigure the product, with varied results: Modernist painters, for instance, often incorporated coffee grinders or industrial aesthetics; Warhol even ran a factory. Electronic artists, though, are in a unique position to develop functional alternatives. Dunne and Raby have theorized a darker, more complicated _design noir,_ comparing traditional products to the banality of Hollywood film. Others have moved towards turning Consumer Off The Shelf (COTS) tools into weapons for activism and non-violent political dissent. Such projects acknowledge the importance of products to shape our lives, and then use the idiom of an _edgy_ product to offer alternatives, stage critiques, or subvert market interests.

Edgy Products is a call for work by artists and designers who are manipulating, hacking, subverting, queering, hijacking, recombining, or reformulating the notion of product. We are looking for projects large and small, for gallery installation or public intervention, for showing, selling, or gifting."

CALL COMMITTEE:
Co-Chair, Susan Joyce, Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Kelly Dobson, Anthony Dunne, Nathan Martin, Eddo Stern.

SUBMISSIONS
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/register/submission.php

TIMEFRAME:
Announcement November 1, 2005Submissions due December 15, 2005Accepted proposals announced February 10, 2006

If you have questions contact: mailto:edgyproducts@yproductions.com