I don’t love technology. I’m not married to it.
But…
I appreciate technology’s ability to mediate human activity, and if a machine could marry me to the one I love, then I’d say we’d achieved something there.
This Spring, DWIG is investigating the realm of craft and folk art mediated through digital technology. And, of course, I’m stoked.
Nothing makes me crave tangible forms more than a long stint working through a medium composed of bits, powered by electrical current, traditionally output on a screen. Nothing.
Each lab member will be developing a craft (and developing a closer connection with/ deeper understanding of that word as it differs from the “art” or “design”). I jumped immediately to crochet, since I’ve got a bucket o’ yarn scraps, every hook under the sun and some ump-teen years of experience.
But then there’s…mobiles. Alexander Calder. Kinetic forms. Happy memories as a child in my father’s workshop.
I’m leaning toward this practice over textile design. Here’s a few reasons why:
- Mobiles are a medium of gestalt. The pieces are integrated with the use of surrounding space so that the impression of the whole unit is more impressive than any of its constituent parts. Kinda sounds like programming.
- Calder also went to tech school. I know, what?
- You can build a mobile from anything. Textiles, feathers, rocks.
- You can exploit circuitry and integrate wires as a critical design element. (New year’s resolution: Make peace with cords).
- Mobiles are modular. One person can start it, another person can add to it .
- Mobiles may never be “finished.” They can reflect a growing network of user-contributed forms.
- Mobiles are reactive. They act differently in different environments. They are responsive technologies.
- Mobiles can grow. The caveat is that with each addition, the structure maintains its ability to move through the space. The pieces must work in concert. Much like programming.
The Instructables post on mobile construction portrayed them as wired constructions (one more metaphor and I’m going to embolize).
"Kinetic" by Stephen H. Kawai
Imagine a world where we all see eye to eye.
The bright blue wedges walking the room at Hans Hemmert’s party make everyone 2 meters tall, with the added effect of charting height differentials like a bar graph!
My blooming fascination with information visualization just found its hummingbird.
image from core77
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I like this mashup of crowd-sourced geiger readings in Japan for 3 reasons:
- Labels are color coded with hotter colors indicating higher levels of radiation. But the labels also explicitly state the actual numerical readings from government, educational and individual geiger counters. I don’t have to click to find this simple number. Happily, the designer has allowed the consumer to make his or her own comparisons after they draw the eye to anomalies.
- The numbers are put into perspective, once you click for contextual information. If the numerical reading means nothing to me because I’m not a scientists and unfamiliar with normal levels, I am certainly able to asses the danger of walking through an area that exposes me to a quarter of the radiation in one hour that I would receive from a single chest x-ray.
- The designer, Haiyan Zhang of OpenIDEO fame, did the all of the above on purpose
Swimming through the data’s complexities, a humanstic connection to one’s personal tolerance threshold translates these numbers into something that speaks to our idea of safety. And further, one might ask, what’s next?
Read MoreAmazing demonstration of Daniel Rozin’s Wooden Mirror. I’m loving the dissonance of representing digital pixels as wooden tiles. The input is so electrical, but the output is as organic as it gets.
Read MoreWhen I first think about a project I don’t think about the technology I want to use. I think about the idea and I think about what I’m trying to convey. And then I think about the technology that’s right for it. And then I start to approach people, different specialists. And often when I approach engineers or programmers, they haven’t done anything like it before.
Words from fashion designer Hussein Chalayan, whose Spring/Summer 2012 in Paris in September deployed a technological twist on the conventional runway setting. Often tacked on as a flashy afterthought, technology embedded in cultural settings manifests itself as a projection, a QR code leading to a non-mobile site, or a grandiose setup billed as “interactive” but in reality performs the same whether it’s a person in the room or a cricket.
Chalayan’s show is different. He sees fashion as a mature field where at this point in time, everything has been done before. So technical invention opens new possibilities for wonderment. The keystone of his concept in the Paris show was the placement of small hidden cameras in the models’ champagne glasses. While the models paused in front of a screen as if contemplating art in a gallery setting, they became an unwitting audience to the live recording of their own mouths.
I’ll vouch for the humor of peering inside a model’s mouth, as we boldly go where [not much] food has gone before. We see a new image of ourselves and receive Chalayan’s comment on self-reflection.
This simple intervention reminds me of Gabriel Barcia-Colombo’s “Vindictive Printer,” which constructed a new image of the office device as a free-willed thing with desires. We don’t normally have to listen to our printer’s dreams, much as we don’t normally have to look at the inside of our mouths in an art gallery.
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Lily Rothman, in this week’s Atlantic, writes a visceral defense of adverbs. Strunk and White, William Zinsser, and yes, even Stephen King have famously cautioned against the adverb as “clunky” or “annoying.” (“Frankly, I don’t give a damn!”).
And while I do advocate tossing two words when a stronger one will do, I lament with Rothman the readiness of grammarians to grab their red markers. With heavy hands, they impose a cursory understanding of the masters’ rules, missing all the qualifiers.
In a roundabout way, this reminds me of my initial frustrations studying HCI. One year into graduate school, I had this unsettling realization that the ultimate goal of any human-machine system seemed to be, well, increasing human performance. The problem is, when we take this as a rule without asterisks, both humans and machines start to look more and more unappealing in concert, especially in the throes of a professional program. It’s difficult to see just how much more my peers could increase their output without stopping first to jump off the Bank of America, building during rush hour.
The problem, to which I’m happily finding new solutions in third-wave literature, is that we have brought technology into the home, made advances in CSCW to increase workplace efficiency, and yet we’ve been unclear about how to fill that void. What do we do with the free time that new technology gave us? If we follow the rule, it would say we should spend it doing more productive work.
By crusading against the adverb in defense of lean, polished syntax, we nix the flourishes that give our thoughts variety, cadence, color, emphasis. And when we crusade against idle reflection in the name of productivity, we HCI practitioners threaten to close the doors on society’s ability to explore and play. All these things we do while we wait. Is it any wonder we have our best ideas on trains–when we have no options than to idle and reflect on the world that appears to be going so much faster than ourselves?
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It’s called a design challenge. It works like this: You have a problem that needs fixing. So you intervene to solve the problem with improved design. The challenge is this. I’ve got this name, Ashton, and I’m working in a male-dominated field. I send out resumes and I get responses like these.
“Thanks Mr. Grosz. I’ve sent your information over to human resources.”
At this point, I know “Mr. Grosz” is an address to me, even though it’s what everyone else calls my dad.
There’s something tragic about all this. Let’s take a look at the history. My mother’s name was Weslie, a feminized version of Wesley, the name of her uncle who was killed a few weeks before she was born when his silo exploded on a farm in Missouri. As homage to his legacy my grandmother named her daughter after her brother, and started this cycle of mistaken gender identity for women in the Middendorf family (There are others: Tracy, Jessie). When I was born, she liked Piper, Kirsten, Ashton. Piper Ives would make my initials PIG, so they went with Ashton Yves. And here we are.
It’s annoying, yes. It’s empowering, yes. You can defy expectations at a first meeting, walking into a room beng a woman and all. If your writing is forward and direct, you aren’t “a bitch.” You’re given easy access to a world that still harbors an Old Boy’s Club, and then you get to crash the party.
That’s cool.
But this reveals a larger issue in our language and culture, and that’s the fact that there’s no politely conventional way to ask, “Are you a man or a woman?” Not only does it sound strange, it might be illegal to ask such a binary differenting question to someone in your job applicant pool. Would you only hire me if I was a man? Or are you asking because you don’t want to write Ms. Grosz if I’m a man?
Whoa. This is getting awkward. Let me help you out.
Pink. Turned up the kerning. Skinny letters and lots of white space. My solution to this quandary is to employ affective design in any material that brands me personally. Here’s an earlier typographical treatment of my resume, which I abandoned because the bold, pink letters conveyed a sense of flippant irony. In other words, the association with femininity wasn’t strong enough.
In the absence of a face-to-face first meeting, I am communicating the subjective association of myself with design styles and colors traditionally ascribed to women. If I’m accused of pandering to gender tropes in order to convey something about myself that’s ultimately irrelevant to my success in the field, I stand guilty as charged. I just don’t want my dad’s mail anymore.
From Fritzing, what looks like a nifty piece of open-source software to document electronic prototypes.
Read MorePoking around examples of work done in Processing this morning, I stumbled on Niklas Roy’s whimsical curtain. Blew some coffee out my nose, scared the cats, still giggling hours later. This is the stuff robots should be made of. Nevermind that the curtain is ineffective, drawing attention to it’s inadequacy. But it tries so hard to prove the point (“don’t look in here!”). The behavior of the object lends it more humanity than an afterthought of affective design. Infused with personality, even likeable.
The whole charade reminds me of the miniature pinchers at dog shows, prancing around like they’re out to eat the world.
Find more of Roy’s work here.
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