'et dukkehjem' Live

'Et Dukkehjem' is up and running and open to the public. Last night was the opening.

Setting up was not plain sailing. We had to improvise and install our own power. So there are more extension cords visible than I am happy with. Also, we fried 2 electrical transformers and ended up using locally bought speakers that don't sound as good as the ones we brought. Anyway, the site is online and you can see updates from Nora and Torvald there: http://www.etdukkehjem.net/

Timesink...

Yesterday, I spent way too much time playing with the Spore Creature Creator. It's fun, it's clever, EA and Will Wright are going to make shedloads of cash... you can read about all that on the rest of the Internet. But more than that a whole bunch of people that wouldn't otherwise have contemplated it are going to have fun while remixing parametric 3D models. I think the implications of this for design are enormous. FluidForms is just the start. As these tools become more pervasive and accessible the ability to remix and remake our surroundings will only increase. Will that make things better? Of course not, like most of the creatures in Spore most of it is bound for an unplayed-with, dusty corner of the digital toy box or maybe the design equivalent of a Darwin Award. But just maybe it also means that some things will see the light of day that otherwise wouldn't get a look in.

The growth in ownership of relatively powerful, cheap, personal computers and the parallel upsurge in use of and access to the Internet (at least in the industrialised world) has transformed the means by which we communicate, carry out work and entertain ourselves. This has also brought about greatly enhanced functionality for traditional design techniques, helping practitioners from many areas to bring their ideas to fruition with increased speed and productivity.

Over the past decade we have witnessed an unprecedented development and increased accessibility of CAD/CAM technologies. With the adoption of 3D modelling software, CNC machines and rapid prototyping and manufacturing technologies makers have unprecedented opportunities to design objects that circumvent traditional haptic, craft-based skill sets. These technologies have brought about the opportunity for practitioners with no background in engineering to make use of these them. Not everyone welcomes this.

The pragmatic aspect of increased speed and productivity in the use of these technologies is important to all users. However, the conceptual realisations and the possibility of making innovative types of object for new forms of audience or market are of equal importance but are perhaps less immediately apparent. With the availability of these computer-based technologies, practitioners are confronted with decreased concerns of 'how' to physically make something and a greater opportunity to engage with 'what' that object is.

The ability to generate construction information directly from design information has fundamentally changed the relationship between conception and production for many practitioners. CAD was initially an assistive technology that enhanced the existing practices of design – an electronic replacement for pencil and paper. This has rapidly evolved beyond what you can do (easily) with pencil and paper (e.g. computer-based visualization processes such as animation and photorealistic rendering). What we see happening currently goes beyond merely designing things to designing the systems that allow things to come into being. Practitioners I have mentioned here recently (and many others) are doing this: Automake, FutureFactories and THEVERYMANY.

Anyway, my point is maybe I wasn't actually goofing off yesterday when I was playing with the Spore Creature Creator. Maybe I just have to redefine what 'work' can be?

Chain Reaction (event)

rootoftwo will be participating in the 3rd international gathering of the Upgrade! International in Skopje, Macedonia, between 11 - 14 September, 2008. Upgrade! is an international, emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. This 4 day festival was initiated by Upgrade! Belgrade, Upgrade! Berlin - Public Art Lab, Upgrade! Sofia - InterSpace, Upgrade! Istanbul - NOMAD and Upgrade! Skopje - Line Initiative and movement.

The Chain Reaction program will include: an exhibition, live audio/visual performances, lectures, discussions and presentations, a screening program and workshops.

Algorithms and Scripting for Visual Art (event)

I have been invited to attend the workshop 'Algorithms and Scripting for Visual Art' at La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA on May 29 & 30, 2008. This is the first in a series of workshops sponsored by the National Science Foundation CPATH Program: Revitalizing Computer Science through the Science of Digital Media. This workshop will examine how algorithms and computer programming are used in the generation of visual art, graphic design, and creatively imagined architectural spaces. The participants will discuss how to direct curriculum and pedagogy in introductory computer science courses toward both traditional computer science majors and students interested in digital art or web-based graphic design. I'm particularly keen because Marc Fornes will be there. Marc is the founder of THEVERYMANY a design studio and collaborative research forum engaging the field of architecture via encoded and explicit processes. Marc is also a curator of scriptedbypurpose.

Product Scotland (book)

A book has been published (ISBN 978-0-9558468-0-9) as a way of recording and sharing the results of the 4 Product Scotland workshops held at the end of 2007 (more information here). There are lots of pictures, participant comments and some essays in it. These are:

'Design Ethnography for the 21st Century' by Paul Rodgers & Mike Anusas.
'I Love Digital' by Jon Rogers.
'Ontologies of Production: 21st Century Transformations in Manufacturing' by me.
'Creativity - Preaching to the Converted' by Craig Whittet & Alex Milton.

I'm not sure how the book is being distributed but if you have to have a copy, contact:

Dr Paul A. Rodgers
Reader in Design
School of Creative Industries
Napier University

Creativity (event)

The final Product Scotland workshop (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Methods Network programme) was held at The Lighthouse (Scotland's Centre for Architecture and Design) on 17th December. The subject for this workshop was 'Creativity'. The day started with a presentation from Craig Whittet and Alex Milton about various understandings of and approaches to creativity. There followed some exercises for those attending in hastily assembled groups that tried to show that less-structured, nonlinear approaches to problem solving were more creative. However, given that most of the groups immediately tried to subvert the system as presented, it was actualy hard to tell which approach was more or less creative (it was all very wacky). The organizers had addressed this aspect of the workshop with the subtitle/caveat 'Preaching to the Converted'.

The organizers of the other 3 workshops were then invited to provide a brief review of the outcomes of these for the benefit of those that had not attended them. We were then introduced to the brief for the day's main activity. This consisted of working in groups to produce a 'pitch' for a project, product or service that was to be developed in response to the overarching workshop themes of 'Future Body, Future Food and Future City'. We were encouraged to begin discussing ideas over lunch and informed that representatives of the funding body Nesta would be attending our presentations.

The pitches ended up being quite diverse and involved everything from slide presentations, paper prototypes of interactive web-based applications, systems models and mocked-up business plans. Each group had 5 minutes to pitch. As in the other workshops the most striking thing about the results was the breadth and scope of what can be achieved in a ridiculously short amount of time by disparate individuals that embrace the spirit of the event with a sense of adaptability.

A Product Scotland DVD has been produced, a book is in the works and eventually more documentation of the 4 events will go up on the Product Scotland website. There are also discussions occurring to make subsequent funding bids for more money to conduct more events in the future. If you want to know more contact Paul Rodgers on 0131 455 2313 or at p.rodgers@napier.ac.uk

de-form (event)

Thursday 6th December was the third Product Scotland workshop (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Methods Network programme). The subject for this workshop was: scanning, sampling and rapid prototyping. It was introduced and led by Jon Pengelly and was held at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen. Again the themes explored were: Future Body, Future Food and Future City with an emphasis on the use of computer-based technologies to transition between the digital and the physical and vice versa. The workshop explored how these technologies are impacting on the traditional role of the product designer. Participants were asked to bring to the workshop an object that they had a personal emotional attachment to, or something associated with food on the move, personal space or urban escapism. The workshop went something like this:

10.30 – 11.00 Arrival and coffee
11.0 - 11.30 Jon Pengelly: overview - themes & format for the day
11.30 – 11.45 Geoffrey Mann: scanning moths & clouds
11.45 – 1.00 Body scanning
1.00 – 1.45 Lunch
1.45 - 2.00 John Marshall: 21st Century transformations in manufacturing
2.00 - 3.45 Group working: generating and manipulating data from digital scans, printing work from body scanning, object scans etc.
3.45 – 4.00 Coffee
4.00 – 5.30 Finishing up and bringing together thoughts related to theme
6.00 – 8.00 Reception at Peacock Visual Arts

This workshop was slightly different than the previous two (see below). There was certainly more of an emphasis on computing. However, there was the same focus on the 'hands-on' that has carried through all the workshops. Various strategies were explored to make digital objects physical and physical objects digital. These ranged from the 'misuse' of ultra high tech 3D scanners (e.g. moving around in a body scanner - it crashed) to 'rapid prototyping' that can be done on your kitchen table and 3D object scanning without a scanner. The slides from my presentation are below and some useful links can be found here.

| View | Upload your own

The next workshop will be about 'Creativity' and will be held at The Lighthouse in Glasgow on 17th December, 2007.

Digital Product Design (event)

On Friday 23rd November was the second Product Scotland workshop (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Methods Network programme). The subject for this workshop was the emerging field of digital product design. It was introduced and led by Jon Rogers and was held at the Visual Research Centre (VRC) at University of Dundee. Following on from the previous workshop, the themes explored were: Future Body, Future Food and Future City. These were explored through augmenting a found or bought object acquired by doing a rapid "city-sample". Basically we all went out and got something and brought it back to the VRC where we spent the afternoon enhancing these objects by embedding a piece of electroluminescent (EL) material into them. Afterwards there was a reception at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) to look at the objects and talk about the day's activities. There was an emphasis on not being intimidated by the technology (in this case it really couldn't have been simpler) and having fun with it. Which we did. Like the previous workshop, the surprising thing was how much can be done in a short period.

The next workshop will be at Gray's School of Art on 6th December, 2007.

Research Methods for Design (event)

Yesterday was the first Product Scotland workshop (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Methods Network programme). The subject for this workshop was the use of ethnography as a research method in design. The schedule and brief were as follows:

Emerging Research Methods for Product Design Workshop
Thursday 8 November, 2007

10:30 – Arrive Napier University, Merchiston Campus and have tea or coffee

11:00 – Meet and Greet – introduce the day’s activities

11:30 – Introductions (between people)

12:00 – Kick off Project

Future Body, Future Food, Future City

What will the future body, food and city look like? How have the things we carry on our body changed during the last decade? What do we regularly carry to and from work? Will our body have to adapt to the pressures of the future?

How have our food consumption patterns changed? How do deal with the transaction of food for cash? What kinds of conversations do we have about food? Do we really enjoy eating or is it a task that we just do to survive?

Are cities of today prepared for tomorrow? How do we exploit the physical man made structures of the city? How do we alter or adapt the purpose or context of things in the city to meet our end needs, wants and desires?

Please remember, that it may be the little things (minutiae) that will reap the real insights into the future body, food or city. Someone once said “The Devil is in the detail”, so perhaps you should focus on the little things and leave the grand phenomena to someone else.

12:30 – Research – explore – investigate - observe

13:30 – Return to studio – Food served - analyse & interpret data collected

14:00 – Analyse & interpret data collected

14:30 – Start presentation

15:00 – Prepare work for presentation

16:00 – Pin up work

16:30 – Reflection and discussion of the day’s activities

17:00 – End of the day’s activities

Move exhibition and materials to Edinburgh College of Art (eca)

18:00 – ‘Open Evening’ opens

19:30 – ‘Open Evening’ closes

There were about 30 participants in the workshop from very diverse backgrounds. After a brief introduction we were all sent out into the city armed with digital cameras to explore aspects of 'user-artefact interaction' and to listen to and observe people doing everyday things. Then it was back to the studio to compile our findings as montages of images and texts. Karen Magazine was indicated as an example of what we were aiming for. One of the reasons we created Product Scotland was to create a network through using our design skills rather than talking about it - as at a typical conference. This was certainly the case. Each participant produced a book within a few hours and we gathered at Edinburgh College of Art to look at these and round off the day with a drink. I think everyone's expectations for these books were surpassed. There are some outstanding individual efforts and collectively they offer up insights about familiar activities. Eventually some of these will appear on the Product Scotland website.

The next workshop will be held at University of Dundee on 23 November 2007.

Gray's School of Art (event)

I will be a visiting lecturer this week at Gray's School of Art. I will be looking at the process of setting up and running personal design blogs and web sites.

Useful links here.

Ponoko is Live

http://www.ponoko.com/ is up and running and fully functional. I'm really interested in what they are doing and mentioned them in my thesis in a chapter titled "Ontologies of production: 21st Century transformations in manufacturing." This breaks down into the following sub-categories:

Desktop manufacturing

Personal fabrication

Mass-customised production

Design to order

Individualised production

Democratised production

Open Source and crowd-sourced design

What Ponoko say:

"The post-industrial revolution is changing the way products are created, traded and distributed. Now everyone can engage in the manufacturing process through their PCs - bringing personal manufacturing of individualized products to the masses. Ponoko is the world's first personal manufacturing platform. It's the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand. The ponoko.com marketplace connects creators, consumers, digital manufacturing hardware and service providers to promote, make and trade products on Ponoko and social networking websites."

Atilano González-Pérez describes this development, thus:

• centralised design in the industrial era, with very constrained choices for designers, and limited choices for the consumer
• a decentralised design phase, where the designer no longer designs, but creates the possibility for design for others, thereby also limiting their possibilities, and also localised in corporate sites
• fully distributed design, by the user, who is also able to have the product produced, without leaving her/his desktop.

Treehugger calls this 'Downloadable design'.

These non-standard means of manufacturing and new material processes present an exciting array of opportunities. However, it also raises questions for designers and makers about the kind of objects we are able to make and whether we should do so merely because we can?

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

Haque + Bleecker

The Poker Club at the Beehive Inn in Edinburgh featured Usman Haque (artist/architect) and Julian Bleecker (technologist/artist/think tank leader) to discuss the "internet of things" and "open source architecture". Hosted by New Media Scotland.

Both presenters took us through a short run down of their work and then there was a lively exchange between everyone present. Hopefully there will be a podcast from New Media Scotland in the near future.

Haque's presentation was broken into three categories: Invisible Stuff, Collaborative Stuff (produced by non experts - or vernacular creativity) and Social Space. He talked about Architecture as an operating system for the collaborative production of space. He stressed the importance of the necessity of the system (whether an augmented object or space) to have the capacity to build 'its' own perceptual categories. Several examples of previous and current work were shown.

Bleecker started with the question 'Is life hackable?' He characterised the upsurge of activity as a renewed or second order humanism. The term 'change agents' was used and it was pointed out that these are no longer well positioned parties such as New York Times reporters. Several projects were shown which showed how digital networks can shape physical activities in a sort of network practice - social practice continuum. It was stressed that we're not just talking about data transactions.

Some interesting points that came up in the discussion:

• We are surrounded by invisible information, how do we make this visible or legible?
• Technology extends the zone of our perception/agency.
• Is the web of objects the end of subjectivity or a new beginning for subjectivity?
• The role of human beings as filters.

The issues emerging for me are what do we mean by 'understanding' in relation to all the information we have access to and how do we have agency within it? One thing that came up over and over was the spatial or prepositional nature of our relationship to the digital networked public. As Bleeker points out in Why Things Matter are we 'on' or 'in' the network?

Things + Open Source (event)

Beehive Inn (18-20 Grassmarket), Edinburgh, Wednesday 24 May, 2006, 6 PM Usman Haque (artist/architect) and Julian Bleecker (technologist/artist/think tank leader) discuss the "internet of things" and "open source architecture". Hosted by New Media Scotland.

Haque Design + Research specialises in the design and research of interactive architecture systems. Architecture is no longer considered something static and immutable; instead it is seen as dynamic, responsive and conversant. Our projects explore some of this territory.
Usman Haque has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and choreographed performances. His skills include the design of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. He has been an invited researcher at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy, artist-in-residence at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, Japan and has also worked in USA, UK and Malaysia. As well as directing the work of Haque Design + Research he was until 2005 a teacher in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.
He is a recipient of a Wellcome Trust Sciart Award, a grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, the Swiss Creation Prize, Belluard Bollwerk International, the Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence prize and the Asia Digital Art Award Grand Prize. His work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Hillside Gallery (Tokyo), The National Maritime Museum Greenwich and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His work has also been presented at international conferences including Siggraph, VSMM (International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia) and Doors of Perception.

Julian Bleecker heads the Mobile and Pervasive Lab, a near-future think tank and research and development lab at the School of Cinema-TV and the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. Bleecker is an expert technologist with over 20 years of hands-on experience. He is fluent in many modern programming languages and best-practices development approaches for distributed networked systems, desktops and mobile devices. He is Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California in the School of Cinema-TV’s Interactive Media Division and is a researcher at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Since 1988 he has been involved in a wide variety of technologies from virtual reality to mobile experience design and location-based media applications. His past and current clients include MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Scholastic, Sun Microsystems, Volvo Cars, Barnes & Noble, MCI, The National Building Museum, Continental Airlines, The New York Sun and TheStreet.com. Bleecker’s proficiencies include emerging technology design, research and development, implementation, concept innovation, and strategy consulting. His areas of expertise include media and entertainment, mobile designed experiences, location-based media, and social software. His background in electrical engineering and computer science, coupled with his work on emerging technology design allows him to provide a unique perspective on the near-future possibilities of technology-based mobile, location-based, social and networked applications, products and services.

Bleecker wrote the Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things that I posted about previously.

Should be a good one.

Spime: A Theory Object

The link to Bruce Sterling's speech at Emerging Technology 2006 is online at:
http://www.viridiandesign.org/2006/03/viridian-note-00459-emerging.html

"In the Internet of Things debate, people are still trying to find the loose
verbal grab-bag just to put the concepts into. So I would argue that this work
is basically a literary endeavour. When it comes to remote technical
eventualities, you don't want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you
need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something
commercial, governmental, academic or military.... Otherwise you are trying to
freeze an emergent technology into the shape of today's verbal descriptions.
This prejudices people. It is bad attention economics. It limits their ability
to find and understand the intrinsic advantages of the technology."

"It's turning into what Julian Bleecker calls a "Theory Object," which is an idea
which is not just a mental idea or a word, but a cloud of associated commentary
and data, that can be passed around from mouse to mouse, and linked-to. Every
time I go to an event like this, the word "spime" grows as a Theory Object. A
Theory Object is a concept that's accreting attention, and generating visible,
searchable, rankable, trackable trails of attention."

Julian Bleeker's 'Manifesto for Networked Objects' is here: http://research.techkwondo.com/files/WhyThingsMatter.pdf