Friday, July 25. 2014Algorithmic creationism | #code #games
This algorithmic creationism game makes me think, to some extent, to the researches lead by philosophers, mathematicians, or physicists to prove that our own everyday world would be (or wouldn't be) the result of an extra large simulation...Yet, funilly, even so this game world is announced as "algoritmically generated", planets populated by dynosaurs or similar creatures are still present, so as the dark emperor's cosmic fleet! There's probably some commercial determinism within their creationism rules... At some point though, we could make the following comment: what is the fundamental difference between the use of algorithms to carve a digital world for a game (a computer generated simulation) and the pratice of many contemporary architects that uses similar (generative) algorithms to carve physical buildings to live in, not to speak about all the other algorithms that structure our everyday life? If not by somebody else, we are creating our own simulation, so to say.
----- No Man’s Sky: A Vast Game Crafted by Algorithms A new computer game, No Man’s Sky, demonstrates a new way to build computer games filled with diverse flora and fauna. By Simon Parkin
The quality of the light on any one particular planet will depend on the color of its solar system’s sun.
Sean Murray, one of the creators of the computer game No Man’s Sky, can’t guarantee that the virtual universe he is building is infinite, but he’s certain that, if it isn’t, nobody will ever find out. “If you were to visit one virtual planet every second,” he says, “then our own sun will have died before you’d have seen them all.” No Man’s Sky is a video game quite unlike any other. Developed for Sony’s PlayStation 4 by an improbably small team (the original four-person crew has grown only to 10 in recent months) at Hello Games, an independent studio in the south of England, it’s a game that presents a traversable universe in which every rock, flower, tree, creature, and planet has been “procedurally generated” to create a vast and diverse play area. “We are attempting to do things that haven’t been done before,” says Murray. “No game has made it possible to fly down to a planet, and for it to be planet-sized, and feature life, ecology, lakes, caves, waterfalls, and canyons, then seamlessly fly up through the stratosphere and take to space again. It’s a tremendous challenge.” Procedural generation, whereby a game’s landscape is generated not by an artist’s pen but an algorithm, is increasingly prevalent in video games. Most famously Minecraft creates a unique world for each of its players, randomly arranging rocks and lakes from a limited palette of bricks whenever someone begins a new game (see “The Secret to a Video Game Phenomenon”). But No Man’s Sky is far more complex and sophisticated. The tens of millions of planets that comprise the universe are all unique. Each is generated when a player discovers it, and is subject to the laws of its respective solar systems and vulnerable to natural erosion. The multitude of creatures that inhabit the universe dynamically breed and genetically mutate as time progresses. This is virtual world building on an unprecedented scale (see video below). This presents numerous technological challenges, not least of which is how to test a universe of such scale during its development – the team is currently using virtual testers—automated bots that wander around taking screenshots which are then sent back to the team for viewing. Additionally, while No Man’s Sky might have an infinite-sized universe, there aren’t an infinite number of players. To avoid the problem of a kind of virtual loneliness, where a player might never encounter another person on his or her travels, the game starts every new player in the same galaxy (albeit on his or her own planet) with a shared initial goal of traveling to its center. Later in the game, players can meet up, fight, trade, mine, and explore. “Ultimately we don’t know whether people will work, congregate, or disperse,” Murray says. “I know players don’t like to be told that we don’t know what will happen, but that’s what is exciting to us: the game is a vast experiment.” The game also bears the weight of unrivaled expectation. At the E3 video game conference in Los Angeles in June, no other game met with such applause. It is the game of many childhood science fiction dreams. For Murray, that is truer than for most. He was born in Ireland, but the family lived on a farm in the Australian outback, away from civilization. “At night you could see the vastness of space,” he says. “Meanwhile, we were responsible for our own electricity and survival. We were completely cut off. It had an impact on me that I carry through life.” Murray formed Hello Games in 2009 with three friends, all of whom had previously worked at major studios. Hello Games’ first title, Joe Danger, let players control a stuntman. The game was, according to Murray, “annoyingly successful” in the sense that it locked him and his friends into a cycle of sequels that they had formed the company to escape. During the next few years the team made four Joe Danger games for seven different platforms. “Then I had a midlife game development crisis,” says Murray. “It changes your mindset when a single game’s development represents a significant chunk of life.” Murray decided it was time to embark upon the game he’d imagined as a child, a game about frontiership and existence on the edge of the unexplored. “We talked about the feeling of landing on a planet and effectively being the first person to discover it, not knowing what was out there,” he says. “In this era in which footage of every game is recorded and uploaded to YouTube, we wanted a game where, even if you watched every video, it still wouldn’t be spoiled for you.” When players discover a new planet, climb that planet’s tallest peak, or identify a new species of plant or animal, they are able to upload the discovery to the game’s servers, their name forever associated with the location, like a digital Christopher Columbus or Neil Armstrong. “Players will even be able to mark the planet as toxic or radioactive, or indicate what kind of life is there and then that then appears on everyone’s map,” says Murray. Experimentation has been a watchword throughout the game’s production. Originally the game was entirely randomly generated. “Only around 1 percent of the time would it create something that looked natural, interesting, and pleasing to the eye; the rest of the time it was a mess and, in some cases where the sky, the water, and the terrain were all the same color, unplayable,” Murray says. So the team began to create simple rules, such as the distance from a sun at which it is likely that there will be moisture,” he explains. “From that we decide there will be rivers, lakes, erosion, and weather, all of which is dependent on what the liquid is made from. The color of the water in the atmosphere will derive from what the liquid is; we model the refractions to give you a modeled atmosphere.” Similarly, the quality of light will depend on whether the solar system has a yellow sun or, for example, a red giant or red dwarf. “These are simple rules, but combined they produce something that seems natural, recognizable to our eyes. We have come from a place where everything was random and messy to something which is procedural and emergent, but still pleasingly chaotic in the mathematical sense. Things happen with cause and effect, but they are unpredictable for us.” At the blockbuster studios in which he once worked, 300-person teams would have to build content from scratch. Now, thanks to the increased power of PCs and video game consoles, a relatively tiny team is able to create unimaginable scope. In this sense, Hello Games may be on the cusp not only of a new universe, but also of an entirely new way of creating games. “When I look at game development in general I think the cost of creating content is the real problem,” he says. “The sheer amount of assets that artists must build to furnish a world is what forces so many safe creative bets. Likewise, you can’t have 300 people working experimentally. Game development is often more like building a skyscraper that has form and definition but is ultimately quite similar to what is around it. It never sat right with me to be in a huge warehouse with hundreds of people making a game. That is not the way it should be—and now it doesn’t have to be.”
Related Links:Thursday, July 24. 2014What Else Could Smart Contact Lenses Do? | #vision
----- Besides health tracking, contact lens technology under development could enable drug delivery, night vision, and augmented reality.
Last week Google and Novartis announced that they’re teaming up to develop contact lenses that monitor glucose levels and automatically adjust their focus. But these could be just the start of a clever new product category. From cancer detection and drug delivery to reality augmentation and night vision, our eyes offer unique opportunities for both health monitoring and enhancement. “Now is the time to put a little computer and a lot of miniaturized technologies in the contact lens,” says Franck Leveiller, head of research and development in the Novartis eye care division. One of the Novartis-Google prototype lenses contains a device about the size of a speck of glitter that measures glucose in tears. A wireless antenna then transmits the measurements to an external device. It’s designed to ease the burden of diabetics who otherwise have to prick their fingers to test their blood sugar levels. “I have many patients that are managing diabetes, and they described it as having a part-time job. It’s so arduous to monitor,” says Thomas Quinn, who is head of the American Optometric Association’s contact lens and cornea section. “To have a way that patients can do that more easily and get some of their life back is really exciting.” Glucose isn’t the only thing that can be measured from tears rather than a blood sample, says Quinn. Tears also contain a chemical called lacryglobin that serves as a biomarker for breast, colon, lung, prostate, and ovarian cancers. Monitoring lacryglobin levels could be particularly useful for cancer patients who are in remission, Quinn says. Quinn also believes that drug delivery may be another use for future contact lenses. If a lens could dispense medication slowly over long periods of time, it would be better for patients than the short, concentrated doses provided by eye drops, he says. Such a lens is not easy to make, though (see “A Drug-Dispensing Lens”). The autofocusing lens is in an earlier stage of development, but the goal is for it to adjust its shape depending on where the eye is looking, which would be especially helpful for people who need reading glasses. A current prototype of the lens uses photodiodes to detect light hitting the eye and determine whether the eye is directed downward. Leveiller says the team is also looking at other possible techniques. Google and Novartis are far from the only ones interesting in upgrading the contact lens with such new capabilities. In Sweden, a company called Sensimed is working on a contact lens that measures the intraocular pressure that results from the liquid buildup in the eyes of glaucoma patients (see “Glaucoma Test in a Contact Lens”). And researchers at the University of Michigan are using graphene to make infrared-sensitive contact lenses—the vision, as it were, is that these might one day provide some form of night vision without the bulky headgear. A Seattle-based company, Innovega, meanwhile, has developed a contact lens with a small area that filters specific bands of red, green, and blue light, giving users the ability to focus on a very small, high resolution display less than an inch away from their eyes without interfering with normal vision. That makes tiny displays attached to glasses look more like IMAX movie screens, says the company’s CEO, Steve Willey. Together, the lens and display are called iOptik. Plenty of challenges still remain before we’re all walking around with glucose-monitoring, cancer-detecting, drug-delivering super night vision. Some prototypes out there are unusually thick, Quinn says, and some use traditional, rigid electronics where clear, flexible alternatives would be preferable. And, of course, all will have to pass regulatory approval to show they are safe and effective. Jeff George, the head of the Novartis eye care division, is certainly optimistic about Google’s smart lens. “Google X’s team refers to themselves as a ‘moon shot factory.’ I’d view this as better than a moon shot given what we’ve seen,” he says.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Design, Science & technology
at
07:50
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, design, design (interactions), design (products), devices, science & technology, screen, smart, vision, visualization
Friday, July 18. 2014Data Cuisine, food as data expression | #data #food
Via WMMNA -----
Have you ever tried to imagine how a fish soup tastes whose recipe is based on publicly available local fishing data? Or what a pizza would be like if it was based on Helsinki's population mix? Data Cuisine explores food as a means of data expression - or, if you like - edible diagrams. More about it oin WMMNA.
Eat Your 3D Prints | #food #print
Via Make ----- The first time someone lays a 3D-printed piece of candy in your hand, you almost feel bad about eating it. The virtuosity of these pieces confuses the senses: stunning hexagonal structures cluster together like a complex chemical construction, full-color starburst patterns curve as if made from fabric, and neon geometrical shapes interlock without a single seam. On first glance, you think each one is a piece of art and meant to be consumed only by the eyes. But then you taste it and realize this is a whole new recipe. Sugar 3D printing is a relatively new development and a fun sense-oriented detour under the “additive manufacturing” umbrella, which has often been largely about function. Not to mention this is a huge development in 3D printing materials alone, especially considering that they’re all edible. No chemicals allowed. If we can 3D print with sugar, you have to wonder how many more materials are out there that we haven’t even considered yet. Most importantly, food 3D printing empowers us to build upon the culinary traditions that are so deeply imprinted on our cultural psyche. Food, as we can all attest, occupies a prominent space in the human experience. After all, we always seem to gravitate toward the kitchen as a gathering place, and one of the greatest pleasures of being human is making and enjoying a meal with someone else, whether it’s to catch up, celebrate, remember, or imagine the future. As culinary practices shift, so too do the experiences that surround them: they become heightened, enriched. This is exactly the kind of progression that food 3D printing will catalyze, as bakers, chefs, and confectioners take hold of capabilities never before realized, giving new shape to the moments of life that revolve around our food culture.
The Sugar Lab The Sugar Lab at 3D Systems is the birthplace of sugar 3D printing. Think of it as our bakery and the place where all the amazing, sweet creations you see here come to life. Liz and Kyle von Hasseln, who began developing 3D printed food out of their small apartment while they were architecture graduate students, founded the Sugar Lab. For this husband-and-wife team, it started as a simple experiment with unusual 3D printing materials. They first attempted to print in wood, using sawdust, and later ceramics and concrete. Those all produced mixed results. But next, motivated by the need for a special birthday decoration, they tried sugar. After a few months spent perfecting the recipe, they realized they were onto something. A bit later, The Sugar Lab took form as a full-fledged business, with Kyle and Liz using a 3D Systems 3D printer that they’d retrofitted to be food safe.
ChefJet Now as part of the 3D Systems family, their amazing invention has taken the next step with the introduction of the ChefJet 3D printer, the first sugar 3D printer available for restaurants, bakeries, catering companies, and more. We first revealed the ChefJet at International CES 2014, and the excitement has rightfully been through the roof. Since then, candy giant Hershey’s has joined our efforts to find delectable and captivating new ways to print candy. As Kyle and Liz put it at CES, the ChefJet presents a fantastic new outlet for 3D printing to spread throughout mainstream culture. Food being such an integral part of our social interactions, our family gatherings, and our time at home, these edibles have the chance to open a lot of eyes to the personal power of 3D printing and its myriad uses.
How It Works For those familiar with the different methods of 3D printing, sugar 3D printing is similar in principal to other technologies like ColorJet or Selective Laser Sintering (SLS). It uses a bed of powdered materials (in this case sugar), flavoring, and sometimes cocoa powder. A stream of water bonds the sugar together within the material bed to form a single layer, then the build platform lowers, a new layer of sugar is spread over the build area, and the machine builds the next layer. So it goes layer by layer until the sculpture is finished. The results, as you can see here, are just as magnificent as printing with plastic or metal. The ChefJet is virtually unlimited by the geometry or the complexity of the model you want to print. You can create interlocking pieces, perfectly straight lines, and smooth curves, all in full color if you desire. Considering the sugar sculptures that it creates, it makes sense that architects thought it up.
To date, The Sugar Lab and the ChefJet have created everything from customized sugar cubes and structural cake decorations to premium cocktail decorations and exact scale Ford Mustang replicas. Flavor choices are equally delicious with mint, cherry, sour apple, milk chocolate, and others. But what I love about the ChefJet and other 3D printers is that they provide yet another tool and a multitude of other options when it comes to artistic applications. I discussed this in last month’s blog: 3D printing in this respect can supplement the traditional methods, and recipes, that we’ve developed over years and years. In this case, it’s about building on tradition, not overpowering or replacing it. So now bakers and confectioners can match their delectable flavors with never-before-seen visual aesthetics. They can have their cake and eat it too.
Related Links:Monday, July 14. 2014Apple's lost future: phone, tablet, and laptop prototypes of the ’80s | #design #curiosities
Note: it looks like many products we are using today were envisioned a long time ago (peak of expectations vs plateau)... back in the early years of personal computing (80ies). It funnily almost look like a lost utopian-future. Now that we are moving from personal computing to (personal) cloud computing (where personal must be framed into brackets, but should necessarily be a goal), we can possibly see how far personal computing was a utopian move rooted into the protest and experimental ideologies of the late 60ies and 70ies. So was the Internet in the mid 90ies. And now, what?
Via The Verge ----- By Jacob Kastrenakes
Apple's focus on design has long been one of the key factors that set its computers apart. Some of its earliest and most iconic designs, however, didn't actually come from inside of Apple, but from outside designers at Frog. In particular, credit goes to Frog's founder, Hartmut Esslinger, who was responsible for the "Snow White" design language that had Apple computers of the ’80s colored all white and covered in long stripes and rounded corners meant to make the machines appear smaller. In fact, Esslinger goes so far as to say in his recent book, Keep it Simple, that he was the one who taught Steve Jobs to put design first. First published late last year, the book recounts Esslinger's famous collaboration with Jobs, and it includes amazing photos of some of the many, many prototypes to come out of it. They're incredibly wide ranging, from familiar-looking computers to bizarre tablets to an early phone and even a watch, of sorts. This is far from the first time that Esslinger has shared early concepts from Apple, but these show not only a variety of styles for computers but also a variety of forms for them. Some of the mockups still look sleek and stylish today, but few resemble the reality of the tablets, laptops, and phones that Apple would actually come to make two decades later, after Jobs' return. You can see more than a dozen of these early concepts below, and even more are on display in Esslinger's book.
All images reproduced with permission of Arnoldsche Art Publishers.
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Design, Interaction design
at
10:34
Defined tags for this entry: computing, design, design (products), hardware, history, interaction design
Wednesday, June 18. 2014Four Ways to Learn About Architecture for Free | #learning
Via ArchDaily -----
Learning doesn’t necessarily need to be formal – or expensive for that matter. Thanks to the Internet and some generous benefactors, you can further your education for free from the comfort of your own home. Top schools such as MIT and Harvard University are affiliated with free online learning resources, allowing people from all over the globe to connect and audit courses at their own pace. In some cases, these services even provide self-educators with proof for having completed courses. Keep reading after the break to check out our round-up of four free online learning resources.
MIT OpenCourseWare: Architecture In 2003, MIT officially launched OpenCourseWare – an online platform through which absolutely anyone can access the same course content as paying students – for free. The architecture section boasts over 100 undergraduate and graduate level courses, complete with downloadable lecture notes, assignments, reading lists, and in many cases, examples of past student work. Even though you won’t receive feedback from professors or certification for completing coursework, having free access to the oldest architecture department in the United States’ teachings is nevertheless an amazing resource. Below are two of the MIT OpenCourseWare architecture courses, described. Architectural Construction and Computation is for architecture students interested in how computers can be facilitate design and construction. The course begins with a pre-prepared computer model, which is used for testing and investigating the construction process. The construction process is explored in terms of detail design and structural design, taking legal and computational issues into consideration. Theory of City Form is one of the handful of architecture courses offered in audio and video format through MIT OpenCourseWare. The title is pretty self-explanatory – the course presents students with historical and modern theories of city form along with appropriate case studies, helping them build an understanding of urbanism and architecture for future educational and professional pursuits.
Delft University of Technology OpenCourseWare Just like MIT, TU Delft also has an OpenCourseWare platform – albeit less extensive. Even though the website does not have a designated architecture section, designers can still make use out of the prestigious school’s science and technical offerings. Available material for the majority of courses includes audio and video lecture recordings, readings, assignments, and practice exams. Bio Inspired Design ”gives an overview of non-conventional mechanical approaches in nature and shows how this knowledge can lead to more creativity in mechanical design and to better (simpler, smaller, more robust) solutions than with conventional technology. It discusses a large number of biological organisms with smart constructions, unusual mechanisms or clever sensing and processing methods and presents a number of technical examples and designs of bio-inspired instruments and machines.” Wastewater Treatment looks at the development of wastewater treatment technologies and their application. “High-tech and low-tech systems, which are applicable in both industrialized and developing countries, are discussed.” Specific examination topics include technologies for nutrient removal and recovery, such as anaerobic treatment systems and membrane filtration techniques.
EdX, a non-profit online initiative founded by MIT and Harvard University, offers free interactive classes from some of the world’s top universities. If you decide to take a course, you can try for a certificate of achievement – or you can simply audit it, choosing what and how much you want to do. It’s up to you. A huge benefit is being able to connect with like-minded classmates all over the world using the website’s peer-to-peer social learning tools. In addition to categories like computer science, music, and economics, they have a dedicated architecture section. Two of their architecture courses, described below, are currently open to fall registration. The Search for Vernacular Architecture of Asia ”is a comprehensive, dialogue-based course providing an in-depth exploration of the vernacular concept and its applications to the culture and built environments of the past, present, and future. Designed to promote discussion and dialogue while contributing to the discourse surrounding the concept of the vernacular, this five-week course will challenge the perception of tradition and stimulate a deeper analysis of one’s local environment.” As suggested in the title, the course will focus specifically on the vernacular in Asia. “While the development of cities in different parts of the world is moving in diverse directions, all estimations show that cities worldwide will change and grow strongly in the coming years” – especially in the tropics, where “it is expected that the number of new urban residents will increase by 3 times the population of Europe today.” With a specific focus on Asia, Future Cities will explore design and management methods over the course of nine weeks to increase the sustainable performance of cities and therefore, their resiliency.
Iversity is a similar platform to Edx, offering a wide range of interactive courses in collaboration with independent instructors, universities, and knowledge-based companies. Dr. Ivan Shumkov, one of the website’s educators, is a New York based architect, curator, and professor. He has taught at Harvard GSD, the Pratt Institute‘s School of Architecture, and Parsons The New School for Design – just to name a few. So far, he has offered two free architecture courses via Iversity, described below. Be sure to keep an eye out for his offerings in the future and take a look to see if any of the other courses appeal to you. Contemporary Architecture analyzed “major contemporary architectural ideas, ideologies, and projects in the context of both globalization and specific local contexts” over a 12-week period. Students studied material from the 1990s onwards, submitting weekly assignments and sitting in on virtual classes and tours. Shumkov hopes to offer the course again after nearly 20,000 people from across the globe participated in its first iteration. Designing Resilient Schools was taught by both Shumkov and Illac Diaz, the man behind the Liter of Light project in the Phillippines, which won the Curry Stone Design Prize in 2012. The 7-week course asked students to collaborate on resilient school design proposals for the victims of Typhoon Haiyan, which hit the Phillippines on November 9th, 2013. At the end of the course, which was essentially an online version of design studio, an international jury – including Kenneth Frampton and Giancarlo Mazzanti – selected the best design proposals for future implementation.
Saturday, May 10. 2014Peinture du temps, musique de l’étendue, ou les réversibilités du réductionnisme | #particles
An interesting paper (in French) by Guy Lelong about reductionnism (so as contextual or referential autonomy) and how it possibly have led to its opposite. With words/works by Greenberg, Boulez, Reinhardt, Feldman, Buren, Grisey, Rahm, Hervé.
----- Via Philippe Rahm via Rhutmos.eu
"Au sortir des deux Guerres mondiales, des protagonistes importants de la plupart des domaines artistiques ont réduit leur médium à des constituants ultimes, voire à des éléments essentiels. Je ne me demanderai pas ici s’il y a relation de cause à effet ou simple concomitance entre cette remise en ordre de l’art et ces événements de l’Histoire. Je voudrais plus simplement faire apparaître, en me limitant à la peinture et à la musique, comment le réductionnisme théorisé et élaboré dans les années 1950-1960 a parfois abouti à son inverse. En cherchant en effet à réduire toujours plus les éléments constitutifs de leur médium, certains peintres ont trouvé une temporalité qui appartenait plutôt à la musique, réalisant par conséquent une peinture du temps, tandis que certains compositeurs, en opérant une réduction analogue sur le fait sonore, ont en quelque sorte déployé celui-ci dans l’espace, découvrant une musique de l’étendue. Les disparités observées dans ce cadre réductionniste me permettront, en élargissant le propos, de montrer que la perception des œuvres de l’art se distingue en fonction des déterminants de la réception qu’elles mettent en place. La critique du réductionnisme que certains courants ont ensuite élaborée, contestant notamment l’autonomie contextuelle et référentielle, me conduira à déterminer les interactions de la référence que les œuvres de l’art sont susceptibles de produire, dès lors qu’elles prônent au contraire l’élargissement. (...)" Text intégral ICI.
Friday, April 25. 2014ECAL students create bizarre smart home objects in Milan | #smart?
Before you'll start reading, let me add a missing information: the projects were developed during a full semester by 2nd year bachelor students at the ECAL, under the direction of Profs. Chris Kabel (product design) and Alain Bellet (interaction design).
Via It's Nice That ----- By Rob Alderson
It’s laudable that designers are working on worthy projects that will have a practical impact on building a better future, but we’re big believers that creatives should be engaged in making tomorrow a bit more fun too. Luckily for us, there are institutions like the Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL). At this year’s Milan Salone, ECAL’s Industrial Design and Media & Interaction Design students unveiled a series of weird and wonderful objects that presented “a playful interpretation take on the concept of the smart home.” These included a clock that mimics the gestures of those looking at it, cacti that respond musically to being caressed, a pair of chairs one of which reacts to the movements of the sitter in the other, a tea spoon that won’t be separated from its mug and a fan that is powered by the amplified breath of the homeowner. It’s fair to say that some of these creations are completely impractical, but they all raise questions about our future interaction with household objects and they do so in the quirkiest way possible.
Iris Andreadis, Nicolas Nahornyj, Jérôme Rütsche: Ostinati (Image ECAL/Axel Crettenand & Sylvain Aebischer)
Romain Cazier, Anna Heck, Leon Laskowski: Bonnie & Clyde (Image ECAL/Axel Crettenand & Sylvain Aebischer)
Anne-Sophie Bazard, Tristan Caré, Léonard Golay: Il Portinaio (Image ECAL/Axel Crettenand & Sylvain Aebischer)
Léa Pereyre, Claire Pondard, Tom Zambaz: Chiaroscuro (Image by ECAL/Axel Crettenand)
Victor Férier, Ludovica Gianoni, Danièle Walker: Windblower (Image by ECAL/Axel Crettenand & Sylvain Aebischer)
Megan Elisabeth Dinius, Timothée Fuchs, Antoine Furstein, Bastien Girschig: Voodoo (Image by ECAL/Axel Crettenand & Sylvain Aebischer)
Pierre Charreau, Martin Hertig, Pauline Lemberger: Cactunes (Image ECAL/Axel Crettenand & Sylvain Aebischer)
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Design, Interaction design
at
08:06
Defined tags for this entry: behaviour, code, design, design (products), electronics, housing, interaction design, reactive, smart, teaching
Monday, February 03. 2014Introducing Archipelago: Podcasting Deinstitutionalized Knowledge | #thinking
----- by Léopold Lambert •
A project created by Léopold Lambert as the podcast platform of The Funambulist.
Featured guests for the current law section of Archipelago. The idea of Archipelago emerged from the will to propose an alternative to the current state of Academia (whether architectural or not). The generalized absence of bridges between disciplines, the petty internal politics, the clear categorization of teachers and learners, as well as the ‘punctualization’ of learning formed the base of this will to propose something different. Disciplines should be blurred, young thinkers should have access to platforms of expression and learning should be a continuous activity throughout life. Archipelago does not have the illusory ambition to replace the university, but more simply to constitute a free place for learning and questioning the politics of the designed environment that surrounds us all. Its medium allows anyone to listen to it in all kinds of situations: while commuting, cooking, resting, working, or any other situation you might think appropriate. Archipelago’s editorial line follows the one constructed year after year on The Funambulist. This line is based upon the predicate that design (clothing, objects, architecture and urbanism) organizes (politically) bodies in space. Such a predicate creates the need to wonder simultaneously what a body is and how design is produced. These questions define the list of guests for the conversation it releases. A significant number of these guests are already part of the network composed by The Funambulist. Some of them took part (or are about to) in the series of curated texts collected in the book The Funambulist Papers: Volume 1 published by Punctum Books in 2013 (Volume 2 will be published later in 2014). However, the project also finds its essence in researching the work of other thinkers and creators to diversify and enrich the discourse proposed on both The Funambulist and Archipelago. An important component in the selection of these guests is their diversity, as well as their relation to the norm from where Archipelago operates. What that means is for the platform to maintain a high awareness of whom it invites, in order to avoid the traditional pattern of domination of a type of academic actor (White Western Heterosexual Male to name only a few of their characteristics). Such practice is the minimum to be done to reduce the violence of normative processes and the ostracisation they create.
Léopold Lambert is an architect and Editor of The Funambulist.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society, Design
at
08:44
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, culture & society, design, interferences, publishing, theory, thinkers, thinking
Thursday, January 30. 2014Shots of China's busy coastline from Zhang Xiao | #photography
Via It's Nice That -----
Zhang Xiao: Coastline
Now we know for sure that the residents of China aren’t watching their sunrise on a giant plasma screen (phew!) we thought it was high time to investigate how the most populated nation in the world actually spends its days. Enter Zhang Xiao, a 32-year-old photographer from China’s Shandong province. Since graduating with a degree in Art & Design from the architecture department at Yantai University he’s been documenting his homeland with an insider’s attention to detail and an unflinching eye for composition. Not only do his images afford a close-up look at a culture so similar, yet unwaveringly different to our own, but they do so with an extraordinary awareness of aesthetics. In Zhang’s images we’re not just looking at the people’s lives within them, we’re appreciating a balance of colour, structure and form captured in the most fleeting of moments. His Coastline series somehow manages to make even the most rubbish-littered stretches of beach look appealing enough for a bit of a paddle.
Zhang Xiao: Coastline
Related Links:
« previous page
(Page 4 of 24, totaling 232 entries)
» next page
|
fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
QuicksearchCategoriesCalendar
Syndicate This BlogArchivesBlog Administration |