Aesthetics

Here is a presentation I found last year when I was Marty’s RA, looking for new material for his course. – http://web.archive.org/web/20040407205056/www.richgold.org/SMART/HTML/slide2.html This guy, Rich Gold, was a researcher at PARC before he passed away. Pretty cool stuff, my favorites are: How smart does the bed in your house have to be before you are…

Read more Interesting Commentary On Smart Homes / Design / Technology / Humanity

Without getting into the deeper philosophical concept of identity as performance or sign, i find the recent news of MySpace founder Tom Andersen’s alleged age-shifting mildly amusing. “Tom Anderson, the co-founder of MySpace and the first friend to anyone who creates a MySpace profile, isn’t really 32 like it says on his MySpace profile. His…

Read more Identity as Advertising

While we were discussing our Dourish reading and the necessary and implicit philosophical assumptions that people make when they design tools, I re-remembered a quote by John Maeda that I’ve mentioned before. Maeda says that when we do design with tools, we live in other people’s dreams. The idea being that those tools were themselves…

Read more Other People’s Dreams

All of this talk about realistic and expressive language, constructing meaning, subjectivity and so on, got me to thinking about how plastic reality can be when we depict it visually. For instance, in this painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, he has intentionally elongated the proportions of the subject in order to achieve a more…

Read more Plastic Reality

One line in Gimhyewon’s post got me to thinking about a topic that comes up a lot in art and design – the notion that creative work always feels incomplete and that a mature artist/designer develops the ability to know when to walk away from their work. I’ve seen this play out in a particularly…

Read more When It’s Done

Jimmy has sent me a deluge of questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them here. Some answers I am more confident about than others. AMM >What are the defining characteristics of AMM? What is it NOT? I think the defining characteristic that I am settling on is creativity practiced by populations, rather than…

Read more Q&A: Pierce @ Bardzell

Shkiwoora, Gohey (杉浦康平) who is a graphic designer in Japan, studied the schematization of human sense in order to have an insight of the world. In general, the schematization of information system is based on expressing time, number, or space. His schematization, however, pursued some things different beyond the elements. He studied how to map…

Read more Is this world hybrid culture?

Marty cited the well-known quote from Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the message.” Although the expression elicited lots of debates and some scholars even raised a different idea, “the message is the medium”, his thinking still makes sense to me in some degree. I believe that the characters of different medium would influence how people…

Read more new media and its users

Christian’s excellent introduction to Lev Manovicht focused in part on the power of the medium to shape communication. The term “medium” refers to the communicative substrate that we chose to “fix” a given message, different examples include: print, radio, film, television, web and so on. What’s fascinating about media is how they invariably shape both…

Read more The Medium is the Massage