If you're in NYC soon, make sure you don't miss Paola Antonelli's (and her overly talented female team) new exposition Talk to Me. Talk to Me is an exhibition on the communication between people and objects, and how designers write the initial script that enables the two parties to communicate effectively and elegantly. Some interesting people like Rob Faludi, BERG and Jer Thorp have mentioned they're also collaborating. After the fantastic and avantgarde Design and the Elastic Mind in 2008 this should be the must-see exhibition this year.

The exhibition hinges on an important development in the culture of design (and in culture at large), a shift from the centrality of function to that of meaning. From this perspective, all objects contain information that goes well beyond their immediate use or appearance. In some cases, objects exist to provide us with access to complex systems and networks, behaving as gateways and interpreters. Whether openly and actively, or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us, and designers help us develop and improvise the dialogue.

Talk to Me will focus on objects that involve a direct interaction, such as interfaces, information systems, visualization design, communication devices, and projects that establish an emotional, sensual, or intellectual connection with their users, ranging from the early 1980s (few iconic examples) all the way to projects in current development (the bulk of the show). It will feature a diverse array of examples, from computer and machine interfaces, to websites, videogames, devices and tools, furniture and other objects, all the way to installations and whole environments.

Practical info

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I've mentioned Michael Lebowitz, the founder of Big Spaceship, before and again he comes along with some great insights about their way of working.

Teams are guided by four principles

1. Work as a multi-disciplinary team
2. Produce exceptional work
3. Be profitable
4. Take care of each other

– The rest is up to you.

(Fostering a creative culture)

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Austrian / Croatian design collective Numen / For Use develops a new site-specific installation for Z33's high spaces. The project consists of flexible nets suspended in air to form a floating "landscape" open for visitors to climb in and explore. The installation resembles biomorphic architecture and urban utopias of former decades.
Numen / For Use acquired international fame through their walk-in installations Tape: huge self-supporting cocoons built entirely out of packing tape.

You can experience this 'floating landscape" youself until October 2 2011 at the "High Space" at Z33, entrance beguinage house number 5.

via z33.be – photo copy; Kristof Vrancken / Z33

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Just like the eCLOUD, this installation by David Bowen takes real data and uses it to recreate a certain natural phenomenon.

This installation draws information from the intensity and movement of the water in a remote location. Wave data is being collected in real-time from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data buoy Station 46246 (49°59'7" N 145°5'20" W) on the Pacific Ocean. The wave intensity and frequency is scaled and transferred to the mechanical grid structure installed at The National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland. The result was a simulation of the physical effects caused by the movement of water from this distant location.

via Arduino

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Loveloy design exercise by BERG London. Redesign something we come by every day.

Icon’s “Rethink”: turning receipts into ‘paper apps’

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By Isaac Cordal who had an exposition in Brussels earlier this year (CEMENT EXCLIPSES at A210).

via Unurth

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This is the emergence of open crowdsourced data being the basis for complex and commercially viable applications. We are now just a breath away from a completely new business model where developers are building rich experiences on top of a mass of third-party and/or user-supplied data. The result is a new economic engine where all parties win: everyone gets insight into the environment around them, data contributors get applications that are directly relevant to their immediate environment, and application developers get access to a marketplace for their software.

If you consider the alternative ways of generating the entire stack needed to deliver a similar type of application, you'll quickly arrive at the reason as to why it hasn't been done yet; the resources required to develop any one piece is enormous, let alone the entire thing. Here, open has clearly trumped closed -- you can't put this behind a firewall, OldschoolM2MVendorGuy!

This is a glimpse of the open "Internet of Things" in action, happening right now, and the landslide of innovation has only started to build. We owe this to the people who are on the frontlines of this thing, who have literally changed the world and put real radiation information at the fingertips of the planet. We look forward to helping facilitate this movement further so more and more people will participate.

via Crowdsourcing + Open Data evolving into commercial opportunity

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We don't have creative directors. We're probably the only agency in the world – it's certainly the only agency in the world that I know of – we don't have anyone who has "creative" in their title. Creativity is table stakes, in my opinion. It's cost of entry.

Michael Lebowitz, Founder Big Spaceship

via Swiss Miss

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from LeonIV via Unurth

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Don't be small because you can't figure out how to get big. Consider being small because it might be better.

Seth Godin

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The photo department of Threadless, the well-known community based t-shirt company that will soon celebrate its 11th anniversary, was featured in an interesting short doc. Their unique style of product photos has set them apart from any other t-shirt company and allowed them to carefully build up a reputation that suited and even amplified their line of products.

Photography is our main representation of not only the community and the art that we produce every week, the people in the company, as we use employees for our models; but also to represent the products that we release. Mostly we try to bring the designs to life. (Sean Donohue, Creative Director)

The photos are an essential part of their transmedia-like storytelling that connects artists with t-shirts and customers with employees, as they are all part of the story that is built around a single t-shirt design that evolves over several media. The product photos' main purpose is to communicate their product line and the company's playful and being different mentality to build up an analogous reputation around it. They are a cornerstone of their online marketing and carry within the accidental and fun mindset that characterised the origin of the company. As Jake Nickell mentions in The Threadless Book:

Threadless was never intended to be a business. When Jacob DeHart and I started out it was all just a hobby — a fun thing to do for the other designers we were friends with.

It's an interesting case for the marketing power of the product photo. A creative use of product photos is of course a marketing trick as old as the stars but this shows it's still a powerful one, even in a climate where social media presence is taking over lots of companies' marketing budgets.

via Photo Shelter

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One of these collaborations was New Times New Heroes and featured an interesting art installation by Belgian design studio Unfold. With 3D printers becoming more affordable every day, the craftsmanship that used to characterise some of the most well-known design icons is now at stake or at least at the verge of being trivialised. The Kiosk allows design objects to be scanned in 3D while they are immediately being reproduced at a street stand.

Kiosk is a project that explores a near future scenario in which digital fabricators are so ubiquitous, that we see them appear on street corners, just like fast food today is sold in NY style mobile food stalls. A place where you can quickly get a custom made fix for your broken shoe, materialise an illegal download of Starck’s Juicy Salif orange squeezer that you modified for better performance or quickly print out a present for your sisters birthday.

It will be a challenging time for brands and product designers who have been playing the craftsmanship & exclusivity card as their unique selling proposition. Because the question is whether this niche market business model will still be feasible in the near future when the blueprints for these iconic designs will be shared via the internet and the cost of an exact reproduction will be affordable for a mass market audience.

via Kiosk, design sampler, photo by Kristof Vrancken / Z33

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[…] That's the pretending layer. The layer you add when you've solved the important problems, made the thing work properly and seamlessly. It's the extra bit. The things I love the most have a pretending layer, so they're not just for the practical me, they're for the imaginary me.

by Russel Davies

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A sort of openIDEO for urban farming/green city projects in and around Amsterdam.

The Farming the City project and FarmingtheCity.net are demonstrating that we can make better use of existing city assets such as green spaces and neglected places, and we can investigate how new technologies, both high and low tech, can make the city more edible, healthier, wealthier and happier.

via A Smarter Planet

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This great little installation caught my eye last week. Now Mikko from the Umeå Institute of Design created a video to demonstrate how the user interaction works.

Draw or write on it, hit the big red button and erase the board for the next user.

The image on the whiteboard is sent off to Flickr and Twitter. I think it would be cool to OCR the image and post the text to Twitter but as it's more of a hack for now I don't think that's possible.

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A DIY documentary film on new art and the young artists behind it. Directed by Isaac Niemand, and produced by ROJO in collaboration with BossaNovaFilms, it was all filmed on the heat of live action at Nova Contemporary Culture which happened in July and August 2010, in the Museum of Image and Sound, São Paulo, Brazil.

via the always inspiring Brain Pickings

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Your Guide to 21 Awesome DIY Projects. A great list by Wired starting with Rob Faludi's recently updated Botanicalls.

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I think by now everyone knows Blinkendroid. It's an Android app that lets you combine the screens of several phones by using a nifty sound and vibration hack to detect the different screen positions. Well this is like Blinkendroid on steroids because you're no longer limited by the type of device and the interface is interactive.

The Junkyard Jumbotron lets you take a bunch of random displays and instantly stitch them together into a large, virtual display, simply by taking a photograph of them. It works with laptops, smartphones, tablets – anything that runs a web browser.

So grab the code or create one.

via interactiondesign.se

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«L'Artisan Electronique» is a virtual pottery wheel powered by a 3D scanner and a 3D printer. A great example of combining different technologies to create an intuitive interaction, resulting in an easy DIY pottery construction. Created by the Antwerp (Belgium) based design studio Unfold and Tim Knapen. «This pottery wheel gives visitors a chance to ‘turn’ their own forms.» The virtual pottery wheel was part of the Design by Performance exhibition in Z33 last year. I have no idea how I was able to miss this.

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