Aesthetics

Interesting Commentary On Smart Homes / Design / Technology / Humanity

davidroyer October 23, 2007 3

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…

Other People’s Dreams

thismarty October 14, 2007 0

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…

Plastic Reality

thismarty October 7, 2007 0

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…

When It’s Done

thismarty September 30, 2007 0

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…

Q&A: Pierce @ Bardzell

jeffreybardzell September 27, 2007 4

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…

Is this world hybrid culture?

gimhyewon September 17, 2007 1

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…

Q: What is the difference b/w needs and desires?

jimmypierce September 15, 2007 3

The dialogue following Marty’s post raises some questions about why we design, what should the role of the designer be, and how do we value our designs (e.g. is beauty a need? is a particular design “superficial” or “deep”?). One distinction I see get thrown around a lot to describe design is the needs/desires distinction……

new media and its users

yenning September 9, 2007 3

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…

The Medium is the Massage

thismarty September 9, 2007 6

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…