Category: Design

Book Sprint on The New Aesthetic

July 24th, 2012 · · Analysis, Art/Performance, Criticism, Culture, Design, Feature, History, Information Visualization, Research/study, Theory No comments

Post by Eduardo Navas

Note: Previously this entry read “book print.”  This was a mistake on my part. It should be “book sprint.”

I recently read the “book print” New Aesthetic, New Anxieties by a group of media researchers, theorists and curators, who got together for three and a half days from June 17–21, 2012,  at V2, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

The concept of coming together for just a few days to brainstorm a book is certainly something worth considering as an act of creative critical practice.  The book from this standpoint functions surprisingly well, especially because its premise is delivered to match the speed of change that its subject (The New Aesthetic) experiences in the daily flow of information throughout the global network. I personally find amazing that a book of this sort can be put together with some cohesion.

Continue reading »

How social media stopped design theft in a world of remix culture

April 2nd, 2012 · · Design, Social Media No comments

Katie Briggs’ resume has developed a personality of its own.

Not only does it beautifully display her work experience, but potential employers are given a glimpse into her personality. She loves mashed potatoes, NPR and sunglasses. She has, or I should say had, a fancy hamster named Belafonte (the little guy passed on last year).

She designed the resume while still in college, utilizing her skills in typography and graphic design to make one of the most visually appealing and celebrated curriculum vitae on the Internet.

Since Briggs and her CV were featured on Mashable in May of 2011, a score of people have asked if she would design their resumes, which made for a lucrative business until she graduated and was hired at 42.

Read the complete entry at the42.com

A tactile 3D phone for the visually impaired and gamers alike

January 23rd, 2012 · · Design, Mobile App, Mobile/Telecom, Research/study, Technology/Gadgets No comments

[...] we always have the future to look forward to. And manufacturers, visionaries and engineers around the world are working around the clock to make the smartphone easier and more comfortable to use … for everyone. Recently, we’ve witnessed the showcasing of a lot of new and impressive technologies, like flexible display panels, flexible and transparent batteries and the beginnings of wearable computers. While we’d like nothing more than to see all of these things happen by year’s end, the chances of that happening are slim.

Read the complete story at phonedog.com

Feature: Google Gravity, a Collage of Search Results

September 14th, 2011 · · Art/Performance, Design, Feature, Internet/Web, Programming No comments

Written by Yong Kim

Google Gravity comes from the imagination of Ricardo Cabello, whose Google+ profile shows his occupation as “Pressing buttons” and employment as “Mr Doob.”  His actual occupation is designer/developer. His site, Mr Doob, contains a variety of interactive new media projects, one of which is Google Gravity.

Back in March, in our own feature, No Man’s Land, I wrote about Google Sloppy, a lazy and inaccurate counterpart to Google, a humanistic version that yawns, makes mistakes and has malfunctioning parts. The search results I got from interacting with Google Sloppy didn’t yield any proper results, meaning Google Sloppy searched for something other than what I’d entered.  When I searched for “Charlie Sheen Winning,” I got the results for “charlie shee nwinning.”

Unlike Google Sloppy, Google Gravity yields the correct results (i.e. the results you’d get from Google).  As the name suggests, every link on Google’s home page–including the search field and links that are normally at the top of the screen–drops to the bottom when you enter the site.  All subsequent searches get piled on top until you have a collage of search results. If someone doesn’t like the arrangement of the links, then she can move them around at any time, including the search field.  As you can see from the screen capture above, I got my search field upside down, which was an accident, and couldn’t get right side up once the search results piled up.

Continue reading »

The nexus of data, art and science is where the interesting stuff happens

August 29th, 2011 · · Art/Performance, Data/Data-Mining, Design No comments

Jer Thorp (@blprnt), data artist in residence at The New York Times, was tasked a few years ago with designing an algorithm for the placement of the names on the 9/11 memorial. If an algorithm sounds unnecessarily complex for what seems like a basic bit of organization, consider this: Designer Michael Arad envisioned names being arranged according to “meaningful adjacencies,” rather than by age or alphabetical order.

The project, says Thorp, is a reminder that data is connected to people, to real lives, and to the real world. I recently spoke with Thorp about the challenges that come with this type of work and the relationship between data, art and science. Thorp will expand on many of these ideas in his session at next month’s Strata Conference in New York City.

Read interview at O’Reilly Radar

DEVELOP 100: The top five studios profile

June 3rd, 2011 · · Design, Gaming No comments

Sponsored by Gamecity: Hamburg and based on data compiled by Metacritic, the Develop 100 ranks the world’s games developers based on their critical reception.

See the complete list at Develop Online

Designing an Augmented Reality

June 3rd, 2011 · · Augmented Reality/QR Code, Design No comments

Costas K is a graphic designer who used Cyborgology Editor Nathan Jurgenson‘s post on digital dualism as part of a design project. The physical book explores the intersection of atoms and bits. The creator was invited to write a short essay about the project.

As kids, we were told to stop ‘wasting’ our time with electronic devices and that we should be outside, engaging with the ‘real’ world. Early on, the idea was planted into us that what we do using a computer is an alternative false state that bears no value. To still believe this is naive. Personally, I have met some of my best friends online. I make transactions, articulate opinions, receive feedback and get commissioned professional projects. How is this not real?

Read the complete story at The Society Pages

Take It to the Old School

January 25th, 2011 · · Art/Performance, Design, Technology/Gadgets No comments

For some reason, this terminal emulator reminds me of War Games…  Only for the OS X, unfortunately.

Download

Via Boing Boing

The Service Ecology of a City

January 20th, 2011 · · Architecture, Design No comments

Milan has approved a new Territorial Government Plan (Piano di Governo del Territorio) in which public services, and the way they are planned, are at the centre of the whole project.

Since 2008, Id-lab has worked alongside the City Administration to change the way Milan thinks about urban development. Each of the city’s 88 existing quarters, with its own characteristics and identity, is treated as a core element in the new approach. An ongoing conversation with citizens has elicited an understanding of which services are considered important for daily life — such as schools, kindergartens, libraries, health and social services.

Read the complete post at Design Observer

Size Matters: Small Towns with Big Things

September 20th, 2010 · · Architecture, Design No comments

We expect buildings to be large, larger than ourselves anyway, so that they may accommodate our bodies and our activities. A giant building, then, doesn’t surprise us the way a huge corkscrew (Hurley, WI) or an enormous loaf of bread (Urban, OH) does. Combined with her isolation, Chatty Belle’s unexpected vastness and lack of familiar bovine purpose give her a peculiarly arbitrary quality, a fantastic strangeness. As Stewart puts it, we measure things against the scale of our own bodies, and so giant versions of things that are normally much smaller make us into miniatures. [10] This can be exciting, disorienting or disconcerting. As in a Surrealist painting, we are confronted in such cases with unsettling juxtapositions, the combining of things from worlds that don’t typically overlap, things adjusted to violently oppositional systems of scale. This collision undermines the presumptive local order and apparent truth of things; it proposes previously unnoticed connections, meanings and possibilities. Poised on America’s rural roadsides, gigantic things thus vibrate between kitsch and the sublime. They might have been put there originally to shill product or tout points of pride, but like the detritus of a vanished race of leviathan Walmart shoppers, they now survive as the last traces of an otherwise unknown civilization.

Read the complete article at Design Observer