Interesting projects at Art Center

Two interesting project I saw yesterday at the Pecha Kucha organized at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena:

A Machine Frame of Mind by Brooklyn Brown:

"As the computational environments that surround us rapidly become more sophisticated will we continue to trust them more? If the computer can’t see something, does it not exist? When the world can be read by humans and machines, the way we perceive and interpret it will be radically different. (...) This research trajectory reveals the machine perspective as a source of pleasure, the result of radically different analytical capabilities, and the complicated creation of the abstract, computerized self.

The project suggests that the machine-readable world is something we are both constructing and should continue to design for in order to demystify and expose advanced technological processes."

Be My Satellite by Bora Shin About geospatial literacies:

"BeMySatellite is an initiative that aims to allowevery individual on Planet Earth to be uniquely documented by satellites.

The ultimate goal of this project is for everybody to appear at least once in a publicly accessible satellite image (such as on Google, Yahoo and Bing).

Using social network systems like Twitter andFacebook, we will assign instructions for participants to make a mark in certain locations when satellites will be passing overhead."

Why do I blog this? Two intriguing projects that I find relevant. If the former is close to "machine culture" issues that I'm interested recently, the second one is close to my long-time exploration of geospatial practices.

Summer project: Curious Gestures

So, as I mentioned the other day, I'm in Los Angeles this summer, being a visiting researcher at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The project I'm working on there is called "CURIOUS RITUALS: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday" and we've just set up a blog about it.

It's actually a 7-weeks project conducted by Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon, Walton Chiu from the media design program and myself.

This research project is about gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies (computers, mobile phones, sensors, robots, etc.): gestures such as recalibrating your smartphone doing an horizontal 8 sign with your hand, the swiping of wallet with RFID cards in public transports, etc. These practices can be seen as the results of a co-construction between technical/physical constraints, contextual variables, designers intents and people’s understanding. We can see them as an intriguing focus of interest to envision the future of material culture.

The aim of the project is to envision the future of gestures and rituals like the one above based on:

1. A documentation of current digital gestures
2. The making of design fiction films that speculate about their evolution

Summer in Los Angeles

... oh and btw, I've been quiet here because I've been busy on different fronts: - relocating to California for the summer, doing a "visiting researcher" residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, working on a project about gesture (that I'll blog about as soon as there is something to show) - writing the game controller book which is going to be published in French in January 2013. Called "Joypads! Le design des manettes" and written with Laurent Bolli, it's going to be an overview of the evolution of video game console controllers over time. We're of course looking for an English/American edition if anyone here has en idea about how to proceed - near future laboratory projects (a short project about car culture, a design workshop that Julian mentioned few weeks ago, planning Lift13 and Lift France 12) - experimenting what it's like staying in one city for two months (and avoiding travels)

Flawed "trends" circulation

Just saw this intriguing link called "5 Digital Trends Shaping the Consumer Experience" sent by @iamdanw and I found it fascinating.

The post lists so-called "trends" (a term commonly employed by consultants and marketing persons to refer to a particular form of culture that emerged at a certain moment in time) that can be relevant for "consumers".

What struck me as curious here is simply the way certain concepts that appeared in different fields are defined and eventually understood by the author, whom I expect to be representative of a marketing crowd. See definition examples:

"Calm technology refers to applications that cut down on the digital noise of high-volume data to show the user only enough information so that he or she is able to focus on a task. Mark Weiser is considered to be the father of “ubiquitous computing,” a synonym for calm technology."

The "one-liner" approach to define things makes the concept so basic that it's only vaguely connected to what the persons behind it wanted to express. For people who read Weiser's take on calm computing, this is only a pale version of the research papers.

Nothing new under the sun here, this kind of problems happen all the time. And I don't wanna play the grumpy academic being sad about this. However, what I find fascinating is that it enables to see the various process at stake when concepts circulate.

There's also simplication and confusion, as "game theory" seems to equal "gamification":

"Game theory is one of the key components in the theoretical research surrounding singularity. Marketers can make the argument that by having multiple people taking the same action at once, in ways that are deemed safe by them, they can drive massive change. According to Gartner’s 2011 study of Gamification,"

But the best part comes when the marketing person tries to grasp a concept that is elusive and only meant to spark debate in a community of practitioners or researchers:

"Currently, the new aesthetic remains fragmented and extremely hard to put into a coherent example that would allow a marketer to grasp its full potential. But, because the subject matter of aesthetics relates to how beauty is perceived and valued by us as humans, retailers are making strides to test it via digital consumer experiences."

Why do I blog this? Being interested in digital culture and the circulation of concepts in this context, this kind of blogpost is curious as it reveals various underlying assumptions: the necessity for some people to turn any concepts or novelties into something that help selling or communicating (while some notions are not intended to go beyond pure speculations) or the over-simplication of the world.

Of course this happens a million times everyday and I don't know if it's important to pay attention to it... but analyzing the arguments and the simplifications at stake seems important to me. That's perhaps something I'll add in my course next year.

"I've been playing the same game of Civilization II for 10 years"

The other day, in a conference about video-games I co-organized in Lausanne, I instagramed this presentation by Brice Roy in which the game designer mentioned a game that can only be completed in 250 years. One of my contact (@carinaow) wondered about the very fact that "it's longer than a lifetime" and that "nobody can vouch for it". Sure, that's quite big amount of time but the point of the game is to question the notion of trans-generational play.

250 years is certainly very long, especially for a digital program to continue its life on different generations of devices. However, this notion of "long play" is interesting as it's close to another weak signal that caught my attention: the story of this guy who has been playing Civilization for ten years.

The guy said he grew fascinated with this particular game and that we wanted to see how far into the future he could get and what sort of ramifications he could encounter. Here are some excerpts of what he learnt doing this:

"The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation. (...) The ice caps have melted over 20 times (somehow) due primarily to the many nuclear wars. As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn't a mountain is inundated swamp land, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway.

As a result, big cities are a thing of the distant past. Roughly 90% of the worlds population (at it's peak 2000 years ago) has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm. Engineers (late game worker units) are always busy continuously building roads so that new armies can reach the front lines. Roads that are destroyed the very next turn when the enemy goes. So there isn't any time to clear swamps or clean up the nuclear fallout. (...) You've heard of the 100 year war? Try the 1700 year war (...) Every time a cease fire is signed, the Vikings will surprise attack me or the Americans the very next turn, often with nuclear weapons. Even when the U.N forces a peace treaty. So I can only assume that peace will come only when they're wiped out. "

Why do I blog this? These kinds of accounts of long-time play are so scarce that it's great to find one of them. It would be so fascinating to watch a replay and see how a narrative of such play could be inscribed in book or movie, surely an intriguing project to be done.

These new aestheticians were a bit too literal, weren't they?

Why do I blog this? Probably because this encounter with a weird table, whose shape has been generated by a computer program, seem to exemplify the excess or the mere simplicity of adopting this approach in design/art. We'll probably see more and more things like that.

Perhaps this signal can also be connected with some of the insights Regine brought up in her interview with Jeremy Hutchison. This artist contacted a bunch of manufacturers around the world asking them to produce an item which had to be imperfect, come with an intentional error. In this blogpost, i was fascinated by this part:

I got a frantic call in the middle of the night: Waleed was at the customs port. The authorities had seized the ball. When he explained than an Englishman had ordered a ball with errors, all hell broke loose. They said it was illegal to fabricate incorrect products, and they would revoke his company's trading licence. I explained that this product wasn't incorrect since it was exactly what I'd ordered. Days passed: nothing. Lost in the bureaucracy of Pakistani customs, I eventually got through to the high commissioner in Islamabad.

She was very apologetic, and explained that 20kg of heroin had recently passed under the radar at Sialkot customs. So everyone was feeling a bit paranoid. She issued a document stating that "the sculpture/artwork looks like a football but in fact is not a football and primarily this object is not for using as a football but is an artwork." But it was too late: someone had destroyed the ball, and it disappeared without a trace. I never quite found out who.

The intentional creation of failed object and the influence they can have on people or organization's behavior is always a fascinating research avenue.