ALL ART BURNS

School is consuming my life, so I’m making notes for future posts to my design journal.   Expect winter break to be a cavalcade of posts on WHY I AM SO AMAZINGLY BRILLIANT…

Today I was talking to a undergrad who is disillusioned with what he’s studying in industrial design studio.  While we were talking, I was reminded of something Papanek wrote that helped me figure out What I Want to do With My Life.

_Design for the Real World_, a book that got Papanek kicked out of the IDSA, really made me wake up and think about what it is I am doing and why.  The revised edition of _Design for the Real World_ is much better than the original, but the first paragraph stays the same:

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second. Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered shoe horns, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. Before (in the “good old days”), if a person liked killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal mine, or else study nuclear physics. Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breath, designers have become a dangerous breed. And the skills needed in these activities are carefully taught to young people.

Technorati Tags: design, life, papanek

When I started off on this whole design reedumacation process a few years ago, RISD was one of the schools I immediately crossed off my list. My perception of RISD was that is was that it was a pure design and art school, almost happy to be a technophobic institution wrapped up in pre-21st century ways and a steadfast supporter of the (arguably correct) tenet that technology is not a part of the design process. I’m honestly in awe of people who can study form for extended periods of time, but that’s not who I am. (I do plan on hiring those people for balance, should I ever start a firm.) I’m interested in the symbiotic relation we have with technology and how that interacts with the design process, and that’s not the sort of thing that RISD is known for, much less being technically advanced in general. They were, the best I could tell, very much in the previous century in all sorts of ways.

Except that now, RISD is leapfrogging.

For those of you too lazy to go read wikipedia, “leapfrogging” is when you go from being way behind everyone else to being way ahead by skipping everything between “behind” and “ahead”. As an example, instead of ~30 years of desktop PCs and crappy software in schools, kids around the world are going directly from chalk and slate to OLPCs and mobile phones .

RISD is going to do the same thing.

Why?

RISD has Maeda.

There’s a 19th century-like hall of wonders called the “Nature Lab” at RISD, where students can look at something like 80,000 specimens from around the world. Which is a really useful thing to have when you need to study the physical structure of some random animal — why look at a book when you can look at an actual skeleton or taxidermy? Problem being, you need good light to study an object, and the Nature Lab is in a building, not outdoors in, well, nature.

Thanks to Maeda, the Nature Lab has artificial daylight and color adjusting lamps from Zumtobel.

That’s rethinking the education process in action. RISD doesn’t need a fancy computerized database with 3D holographs of everything, they just needed some state-of-the-art lighting in their historic building.

Technorati Tags: design, leapfrogging, Maeda, RISD

Way behind on the journaling thing, but I’ve been kinda busy.

This wraps up week 5 of my 32 week adventure in getting a one-year master‘s. Intensive programs are, well, intensive. I’m taking four studios + an elective (the somewhat non-trivial Advanced Japanese) and that accounts for most of my waking hours.

Because mTID is still a new program, the courses I’m taking are relevant to my degree but offered from other departments. This semester, one of my design studios is in the English department and another is in HCI so I’m getting to interact with a lot of people from other graduate programs. The other two studios are basically a single massive studio under mTID where I’m doing a self-directed research project. (If you know the Carnegie Mellon unit system, I’m taking 51 units, 42 of those are studios.)

My research project is going really well so far. I’ll post more details when I’ve got a rigged demo, but I’m basically looking at ways to visualize Hertzian space using tactile and haptic outputs. Like many of my grand schemes, I give it a 50/50 chance of actually working instead of being an example of what not to do. There’s a fair amount of research in haptics for manipulators and engaging virtual worlds, however I’m personally leaning towards personal-level implementations that transmit abstract information. Instead of trying to provide realistic physical feedback to someone teleoperating a waldo I’m trying to provide physical encodings of data/information about an invisible environment.

At the end of week 5 I’m where I should be at the end of week 8 and I have 11 weeks until the end of the semester. I’d really like to have something to show at the CHI ’09 vignettes or alt.chi in April and the application deadlines are during winter break. I’m feeling pretty good about the progress I’m making, especially if I can work on this after the semester is over and have a really good submission for CHI.

Technorati Tags: carnegie mellon, design, haptics, hertzian space, mtid, school

My current distraction is mashups and remixes. I have no desire to make these, but seeing other people be creative often gets me out of whatever stuck state I happen to be in.

The problem is that most (ok, almost all) mashups suck or are at best novelties. You might listen to them once and think, ‘how clever, they made something using “16 Tons” and “Material Girl”’, but you’ll never voluntarily listen to it again or wander around singing it in your head. Simply finding two songs in a similar key/tempo and blending them does not guarantee it’s actually good music.

However, there are a few artists that take songs that sound good, mash them all together, and make a better song than any of the originals. “Gosh, if only this song had a better bridge and this one had a better drumline, hey, I know…” Better still are the artists that don’t stop at two songs, the ones that take three songs, mash them up, and filter/mix them so it sounds like it’s one big band. And then there are the really good ones that make videos to go along with their remix/mashups.

I recently discovered this collective in Japan that works under the name “Orcrec” that does almost everything perfectly. They have a blog filled with work , but it’s on the other side of the pond and the connection is iffy. Lucky for us there’s the Youtube.

First, there’s their Starry Sky YEAH! Remix, which is based on three other songs:

• Beastie Boys, Ch-Check It Out, an ok rap song but the beats just don’t work for me.
• Capsule, Starry Sky, shibuya-k pop with really long stretches of barely audible lyrics. (I have the CD this is from and it’s actually pretty good electronica/pop music.)
• Daft Punk, Technologic,minimalist electro with almost dada lyrics about technology.

But you put them together properly and “holy fuck this is a great song!” Note that they also mixed three videos together as well and also filtered the audio tracks for better transitions.

The second amazing Orcrec track, Gamegirl Master, is based on Underworld’s “Rez/Cowgirl”, Fatboy Slim’s “Renegade Master (Wildchild)”, and Perfume’s “Game”.

I happen to like two of these songs to begin with, and while Orcrec didn’t put as much effort into the mixing as they did with “Starry Sky YEAH!”, they made an all new video for the mix using footage from TRON. Even without the snazzy new video, the mashup they made is still better than the sum of the parts and arguably better than two of the three songs. (Rez/Cowgirl is arguably one of the best 10 electro songs of all time.)

The thing is, you can waste all day on youtube looking at stuff like this. At least %90 of it is crap made by kids who didn’t change the music, they just made a new video (aka AMV) for one of their favorite songs using stuff from anime and movies or video of themselves dancing and lipsyncing. But if you’re lucky, you’ll stumble along someone with the skills of Orcrec and rethink what the limits of your medium are.

Technorati Tags: design, inspiration, mashup, orcrec

Two years ago, one of my professors asked us to complete this statement every year while limiting our answer to 15 words or less.

I want to be a designer because….
…designers can help people solve problems, including ones they might not be aware of yet.

In 15 words and with no qualification statements!

Thanks, Brett. This is one of best questions anyone’s ever asked me in the classroom.

Technorati Tags: design, goals, personal