“We’re using bodies evolved for hunting, gathering, and gratuitous violence for information- age tasks like word processing and spreadsheet tweaking.”
- David Liddle (as quoted in Tap is the New Click, a presentation by Dan Saffer)
I have been subscribing to the Future Perfect blog for quite some time now and I am beginning to enjoy it more and more. Future Perfect is about “the collision of people, society and technology” and is written by Jan Chipchase, a principal researcher for Nokia Design. His job essentially involves traveling all over the (mainly developing) world and observing how people use their mobile phones then supplying this data to designers at Nokia who use it to create new products and services. His most interesting research focuses around Sente (a home-brewed method for transferring cash via mobile phone in Uganda), street hackers in Africa and Asia who, amongst other things, outfit phones to run multiple SIM cards (thus saving the user money by allowing them to call call contacts across different service providers) and the ways that illiterate people interface with their phones. However Future Perfect does not delve into these topics in any detail. It only hints at the work done with Nokia and makes subtle observations about everyday life, cultural nuances and the influence of technology for people across the world. In fact, maybe it is best summarized on his website here:
Pushing technologies on society without thinking through their consequences is at least naive, at worst dangerous, though typically it, and IMHO the people that do it are just boring. Future perfect is a pause for reflection in our planet’s seemingly headlong rush to churn out more, faster, smaller and cheaper.
Tuesday night marked the beginning of the open lecture series organized by CIID and DKDS. The lecture was titled “It’s More Fun to Compute” and was given by The Product aka Dennis and Patrick aka our instructors of the past two weeks.
Speaking on the topic of computational design, they exhibited a variety of projects from across several disciplines while also discussing their own studio’s output. Listed below are some of my favorite examples of computational/procedural/generative projects from their lecture, plus some more that I stumbled upon over the past week. Enjoy!
A former teacher of mine once used the music videos of Michel Gondry to demonstrate how the general approach to creating software can be applied outside of the computer in fun and creative ways. Or that creating procedures can play just as an important role in film or music as it does in writing code. Or maybe letting us watch these videos was just a Friday afternoon treat, but Gondry has stated that his father was a computer programmer and I know his brother and frequent collaborator Olivier Gondry was also a programmer at one time. So I think there is some value in this comparison and worth sharing! Click the link below fore more videos