Portigal Consulting helps Netflix find out what people really want

Here’s another insightful video from Eastman Innovation Labs featuring
industrial design guru Richard Seymour, who talks about the gap between the capability of our tools and the extent of our imagination.

Here’s a quote:

We don’t need to talk about what we can do, we need think about what we should do. And that’s the role of the designer, because they might be the only person in the room who’s got that imagination, that capability to think beyond it.

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As a compliment to the series “This is Sculpture,” the Tate Museum Liverpool has commissioned film director Mike Figgis to produce a series of short films that document conversations with Liverpool locals about works of art found in the first floor displays.

In this video, schoolchildren from Liverpool discuss the meaning of Dan Flavin piece “Untitled,” installed for 24 hours in their school hallway. Though most of them are not on board with Dan, my favorite part is when one kid utters “It just looks like a masterpiece.”

It seems that Liverpoolians are, in general, equally suspicious of Jeff Koons:

Now if only there was a similar series on design…

Thanks, Thom!

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Installation artists and visual designers Grosse8/Lichtfront developed the above “Augmented Sculpture,” working in both 3-D and time-based media, presented to a public audience for the first time in January at the Interior Design Week Cologne. The documentation of the installation is now online, and though we know it’s not an animated rendering or a Processing script, our brains aren’t quite convinced.

The sculpture comprises of two parts: a 2.5m tall wooden sculpture that acts as a screen for a precisely registered 360° projection system. Lichtfront elaborates in the comment section of YouTube:

We did it with 4 projectors, placed around the object. The graphics were done in AfterEffects. We worked in a composition that was [cut] into the 4 output movies at the end. Then we played the 4 videos on 2 computer, synchronised by a vvvv patch.

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2010/02 Allan Chochinov from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

I am very appreciative of the opportunity to have spoken at SwissMiss’s Creative Mornings event last month, and as I mention at the start of the video, I wanted to do something special for Tina’s new baby Tilo. Given the monumental snow storm the preceding day and morning-of, it was a thrill to see so many people come out early for the event.

We arranged the chairs in a semi-circle, turned down the lights, and I have to say that a morning song format did lend itself well for what was going on outside. Given my vantage point during the talk, I think I was the only one who could see the snow drifting down out the windows, but it added a sweet romance to the thing (and made it extra hard to concentrate on the lyrics). In case you were wondering about them, they’re pasted below (I abbreviated a stanza near the end for the sake of brevity…it was getting long). It’s a great song for kids, but now I know it’s a great song for designers as well. It sure was fun to take a look at it through that lens—that’s in the second half of the video!

Thanks to Roland Lazarte for doing the video; thanks to Liz Danzico for hosting and the SVA MFA Interaction Design for the space, and again to Tina for the invite. Hope you enjoy.

There’s a Hole in the Bucket

There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza,
There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole.
Then fix it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry,
Then fix it, dear Henry, dear Henry, fix it.

With what shall I fix it, dear Liza, dear Liza?
With what shall I fix it, dear Liza, with what?
With some straw, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry,
With some straw, dear Henry, dear Henry, some straw.

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IxDA has done a phenomenal job documenting all of last month’s presentations from the Interaction Design 2010 conference in Savannah, GA. There are so many gems here, but we’ve picked out a few favorites, The first is Ben Fullerton’s talk on Designing for Solitude. Alone time— or the “ability to switch off and contemplate”—is becoming harder and harder to find as our media is increasingly socialized; Ben discusses why this is not a good thing. Solitude is important and we now find ourselves with a particular need to create it. What does an off state look like?

Timo Arnall, who works with near field communications and emerging RFID technology, delivered a talk entitled “Designing for the Web in the World.” A nice contrast to Fullerton’s main points, Timo discusses the ‘on’ state in depth—we can move off the screen and into the world by embodying our digital services in real, tactile, networked objects.

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Sandbox produces a series of videos where they tie things to an unseen moving vehicle, drive it off and see what happens. Above is their amazing Ikea Product Test, conducted in just this manner. If you like that, check out their attempts to swipe a tablecloth out from under breakfast…

Thanks, Thom!

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Eastman Innovation Lab brings us a video from Peter Booth, the managing partner and director of Tin Horse. Peter engages in “practice-based innovation” and looks to what people actually do with the stuff they have for insights into design. He says that “the remit of the designer has to be beyond just designing things, it has to be involved in looking at the practices that the people who are using them are involved in.”

As an example, he points out that a bag of chips (or as he says, crisps) was never meant to be designed for sharing, but that people tear it down the middle to serve that function anyway.

Click here to watch.

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Core77’s Allan Chochinov gave a presentation at last month’s IxDA Conference in Savannah entitled Girls and Women: Object Lessons in the Primacy of Interaction. Here’s the pitch:

As more and more design challenges move from artifact to service, and from service to system, the considered role of interaction design has become an imperative. But in the arena of design for social impact, the power of interaction design, deliberately paired with appropriate products, can make for an explosive combination.

This presentation will cover the outputs of a series of projects aimed at creating design interventions along deliberate gender lines, focusing on girls and women, and covering topics ranging from nanny contracts, “ovulation power days,” and breast feeding, to campus date rape, cancer rehabilitation, and leveraging the collective wisdom of grandmothers (one phone call at a time). Through each project, I will articulate in detail how interaction design unlocks the potential for social impact, and how artifacts, paired with those interactions, can be leveraged to create compelling, repeatable recipes for social change.

View all the IxD10 videos (and slides) here!

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Just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss this awesome stop motion from Maya Rota Klein and Diego Lorenzo Zanitti, made as an entry to the AdobeYouGC competition.

Thanks, Becky!

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