The V&A museum in London hosted an exhibition named Power of Making earlier this Fall.

Making is the most powerful way that we solve problems, express ideas and shape our world. What and how we make defines who we are, and communicates who we want to be.

Those whose craft and ingenuity reach the very highest levels can create amazing things. But making is something everyone can do. The knowledge of how to make – both everyday objects and highly-skilled creations – is one of humanity’s most precious resources.

Check more videos and the curator’s text about the exhibition.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/powerofmaking

Too bad it is over now, I would have like to see it. I ordered the book as a consolation prize.

On the occasion of the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona, La Quadrature du Net releases three films to inform citizens and urge them to take action against ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

ACTA is a threat to Internet users’ fundamental freedoms and to EU Internet companies’ competitiveness and free competition. The European Parliament will soon decide whether to give its consent to ACTA, or to reject it once and for all.

Every citizen can help defeat ACTA by spreading this video across the Internet, urging their fellow citizens to mobilize, and contacting their elected representatives.

Learn more about this dangerous agreement at http://lqdn.fr/acta.

The Mill, a special effects and digital media studio, recently built a touch wall kiosk to showcase their body of work internally. The software layer was developed in Cinder, a C++ framework similar to OpenFrameworks. Many organizations and individuals are cranking out their own multi-touch wall thingy, it seems like a de facto thing to have to impress clients and collaborators. Where most of those are very generic and pretty boring touch kiosks, this one is particularly well executed I feel, and explores challenging UI elements farther than any other implementations I’ve seen.

Read more about the development on this article at Creative Applications.

The Mill works on amazing projects, and they have a few Behind the Scenes Videos that reveal the shear amount of work that is necessary to pull some of these projects.

A recent video in English about Umeå University, with many familiar faces!!!

[via umu.se]

The European final will start in just a month’s time so to make sure you have the best chance of winning some of the amazing prizes, get involved right now!

Underneath you can find relevant information around the competition:

-       Competition Video: http://bit.ly/MazdaVideoSVE

-       Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mazdasverige

-       Inspiration:  http://bit.ly/MazdaIdeaSVE

-       How does it work? http://bit.ly/HowItWorksSVE

Be Inspired!

Here is another bit of Microsoft propaganda from me. This time, it comes from Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge (UK). Richard Harper, who is Principal Researcher in the Socio-Digital Systems (SDS) group, recently published a book titled Texture, Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload. I haven’t read the book just yet, but knowing his work and the publications from the SDS group, I’m sure it is super relevant and insightful. Here is a snippet from the MIT Press page of the book:

Harper explores the interplay between technological innovation and socially creative ways of exploiting technology, between our delight in using new forms of communication and our vexation at the burdens this places on us, and connects these to what it means to be human—alive, connected, expressive—today. He describes the mistaken assumptions of developers that “more” is always better—that videophones, for example, are better than handhelds—and argues that users prefer simpler technologies that allow them to create social bonds. Communication is not just the exchange of information. There is a texture to our communicative practices, manifest in the different means we choose to communicate (quick or slow, permanent or ephemeral). The goal, Harper says, should not be to make communication more efficient, but to supplement and enrich the expressive vocabulary of human experience.

I had the chance to work with the SDS group in Cambridge last Spring, and I don’t regret one bit of it. It was a very inspiring and stimulating experience. I’ll go ahead and order Richard’s new book right away. Look for a review here soon.

Available at MIT Press, Amazon US, Amazon UK

Starting Fall 2011 – non-EU students would have to start paying 270,000 SEK (approx $40,000) per 60 credits, inorder to study in Sweden. (This excludes living costs in Sweden.)

At the risk of sounding pessimistic – I believe that if this law is passed, the best and brightest talent from outside the EU, will think twice before considering Sweden as an option to study in. And the decision will be sadly, based on numbers.

I’m trying to understand the short and long term implications of this rather bold decision. I’m trying to compare it with loftier Swedish political thoughts that I’m well aware of – about immigration and other drains on the economy. I’m trying desperately to sympathize with a larger reasoning behind the decision, from a political viewpoint – and a LOT of it makes sense. A lot many people come to Sweden to take advantage of the ‘free education’ system, piggy-back on it and then leave when they’re done. On the flip-side, hard-working Swedes who are paying taxes to let us have our free education are not allowed the same privileges when they’re studying in most non-EU/EU countries. Understood. This is not a fair situation. But is charging fees the solution? Or does it aggravate the problem?

I’d like to take a selfish UID/IxD perspective in this discussion, because that’s what I care most about. Like most of us presently studying or recently graduated from UID, I missed the chance to say something about the ‘Artistic Campus thingie’ while it was being cooked in concealed kitchens behind closed doors in Umeå. I hope this discussion ignites something early with this issue with the hope that it will give the powers-that-be some precious time to understand the Storm that’s coming their way; not just to Umeå and UID, but perhaps to Sweden in general.

I’ve been a Swedish tax-payer now for over a year. I’m happy that I got an opportunity to do an MA (yes, for free!) in Sweden. I’m even happier that I’m being able to repay the debt that I owe to a progressive nation like Sweden that allowed such a thing to happen. I LOVE being in Sweden! But hey, I had it good! I dont have a 540,000 SEK debt to repay. If I did, I probably would be way more demanding and result-oriented.

More importantly, the fact that we didnt have to pay fees made me overlook a lot of flaws and loopholes in the education system. It made me value the importance of being small groups of deserving students, tightly-connected and embedded in the midst of a peer group of equals, each of whom had the same expectations and played by the same rules (more or less).

When I was accepted at UID, I had to choose between Art Center (Pasadena) and Parsons School of Design (NYC), but chose UID instead. The decision was dead easy back then. I’ll be honest, a huge part of the reason was the numb€r$. A lot many significant reasons were to do with Scandinavia, exotic locales, European culture and design sensibilities. These were however slightly secondary.

The passing of this new law (the details of which I cannot find yet) changes things drastically. I’m not sure if EU students have to pay at all, or pay a smaller fee. I believe UID is going to find itself cornered as a result of this decision. It will struggle hard to stay afloat in a competitive World, given the current limitations and threats it has allowed itself to be surrounded by and overlooked for the past 20 years.

With the passing of the law – one thing becomes clear. UID and ALL other Swedish universities have put themselves at the same level now as RCA, Art Center, Parsons, NYU Tisch, RISD and a bunch of other international programs that have enormous resources, locational advantages and infrastructure to pull the best students from across the World to it. Is Umeå up for the challenge ?

Location: – Would I want to pay $40,000 a year (plus living expenses) to be in Umeå??? Even if it was Cultural capital for the next 10 years, I dont think so. Not unless I had some serious scholarships and teaching assistant programs that allowed me lessen the blow. Otherwise, I’d happily make such a heavy investment to study in another place where numbers and probability offered better odds. I’m thinking cities like New York, London, Copenhagen, San Francisco, Chicago, Providence, Boston where there’s a lot more going on. The romance of being in Umeå to study just vanished for me with a figure like 540,000 SEK. And it would take more than just scholarships to bring it back for me. It would need a big enough job market in the region to ease the risk on such an investment, for starters.

Infrastructure: Learning from classmates ?? – Hannes Seeberg (APD 2007) brought up an interesting point made by Pete Avondiglio in his farewell speech to the 2009 batch. With such a law being passed and half the students paying fees while others dont – you can forget about learning from peers. You can forget about goodwill, family and all other feelings of shared learning. A system of fees will give rise to grading, competitiveness and expectation. It will put extremely high demands on infrastructure, facilities, staff and curriculum. Students that are going to pay 270,000 SEK per 60 credits will expect appropriate return on investment – and it had better be a lot more than your classmates as teachers. I know this sounds harsh, but that’s the reality that will now need to be dealt with. Charging fees opens the floodgates and the Swedish education system has some serious soul-searching to do. Charging fees throws the ball back in the court of the Umeå University administration – and a sluggish response will damage the situation beyond repair.

Compare some numbers with colleges elsewhere:

• Art Center College for Design = $50,000 per year, excluding Pasadena living costs.
• Parson’s NYC = $37,000 per year, excluding NYC living costs.
• Rhode Island School for Design (RISD) = $38,000 per year, excluding living costs.
• Royal College of Art (fees for non EU) – $40,000 per year, excluding London living costs.
• NYU Tisch School of the Arts – $39,000 per year, excluding NYC living costs.
• IIT Chicago – $32,000 per year.
• Umeå Institute of Design – $40,000 per 60 credits, excluding living costs.

Seriously?

Think of the sheer numbers of gifted students from Canada, U.S.A, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Brazil, China, Japan, India, Pakistan, Mexico and other ‘non-EU’ countries that have all spent years learning at UID, and other institutes in Sweden. Would you all have paid the same fees to study in Umeå?

With the intention of being very pessimistic early on, I’d like to say that I believe the Swedish education system has just shot itself in the foot, in the interest of tax-payer’s preservation. It is a fair decision on paper if you think of profit-loss in a myopic way, but its repercussions are going to be big. And they will not be rosy.

I understand that there are far bigger concerns than UID or a bunch of complaining designers. Just like the Artistic Campus is soooo much bigger than UID. But that’s really not the point.

The point is –
The Swedish Education System now needs to make rapid leaps if it needs to compete internationally, or perish to being mediocre and incestuous in its breeding of talent and skill. No longer will we be able to hide behind the same old excuses, that were generously overlooked in previous years. It’s money talking now, and fikas wont be so sweet anymore like they used to.

Aah, dont even remind of the winter…

TEI (Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction) is a really great conference. For 2011, they are starting a Design Challenge competition only for students. The venue is Funchal, Madeira in Portugal, not bad! Here is the full call for participation:

Always wanted to fly, zap your enemies with lightning, or own an invisibility cloak? Now’s your chance to apply your design and engineering skills to achieve your dreams. TEI 2011, the fifth international conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction, is delighted to announce its first student design challenge, which will focus on superhero costumes and accessories. More information is available below and on the design challenge website: http://www.tei-conf.org/11/participation_/design-challenge/

Looking forward to seeing you (and your superhero alter ego) at TEI 2011!

IMPORTANT DATES
October 31st: Entry deadline (a simple email with details about your team, nothing actually due)
December 10th: TEI early registration deadline (confirm challenge participation by registering)
Dec. 10th-Jan. 22nd: Project development
January 23-26th: TEI conference: design presentation

PRESENTATION, JUDGING and AWARDS
Projects will be presented at a special runway event held during TEI 2011. Each team will have 5-10 minutes to dazzle the crowd with a demonstration of their costume in action. This presentation will be modeled on a fashion runway show, so teams should arrange to have someone wear and demonstrate the costume in person.

We will award cash prizes of $1000 each in three categories:

• Inventiveness
• Quality of execution
• Presentation and style

All TEI attendees will vote to elect the winners in each category.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

See all the details on the TEI 2011 website

The 3-day event combined a mixture of keynote speakers, student research presentations, workshops, interactive sessions and social events.

We had the pleasure to have Heather Martin, Zachary Lieberman and Erik Stolterman as keynote speakers for the event. The videos of these presentations are now available online for you viewing pleasure.

Visit the Ingredients In Gradients website for the full proceedings and some pictures of the event.

Sponsors

INGREDIENTS IN GRADIENTS
SIDeR 2010 conference • March 24–26 2010
Umeå Institute of Design • Umeå, Sweden
http://www.ingredientsingradients.com

– CALL FOR PAPERS –
Umeå Institute of Design and the Interaction Design Program are thrilled to host in March of 2010 the sixth edition of the Student Interaction Design and Research Conference (SIDeR). Our organizing committee invites design students to participate in this event to inspire and nourish evocative discussions on the subject of interaction design. We aim to receive thoughtfully written submissions and expect the presenters to demonstrate their inspiring visions with either tangible or visually rich (or both) evidence.

– ABOUT THIS YEAR’S TITLE — THE REASONING BEHIND THE WORDPLAY –
Ingredients in gradients: with this phrase we are aiming to communicate the intrinsic playfulness of the process behind the building and thinking involved when designing interactions. Further, our aim is to evoke the broadness and openness of the interaction design field.

We deliberately chose not to have any particular theme for the conference. We feel that the absence of thematic constraints—both for the students that desire submitting proposals and for the invited keynote speakers—will help generate the most passionate, thought-through and critical views on interactivity-related subjects.

– INSPIRATIONAL THEMES FOR ARTICLES –
* Interactivity for the real world – A spin-off of Papanek’s famous book. What is (or could be) “[Interaction] design for the real world”?
* You and me equal interactivity – Discuss the societal implications of ubiquitous gadgetery and embedding technology everywhere.
* One dose of code, two doses of craft, and a sprinkle of wit – Show us what you mean by a true and well thought-through systemic approach to design.
* Design for them or with them – Any luck with co-design? Share your recipes of recent success stories, or life-enhancing failures.
* Long lastin’ interactin’ – Give us your wide (and wild) intepretation on how one make sustainable and viable interactions come to life.
* Freebie – Push the boundaries of IxD and blow our brains out (or in).

– SUBMISSION –
The students who intend to present their work during the conference have to submit a video showcasing their interactive prototypes and systems, as well as an article that supports the video with solid and thoughtful (design) arguments. The goal for the article is for it to contribute both to design research, and to a greater extent, building and sharing knowledge amongst design students about interaction design.

The articles should be of a maximum length of 2000 words, using the Springer guidelines and be submitted by January 24, 2009. We are currently building the web infrastructure to receive all submissions. We should be able to accept submissions online by December 24, 2009.

– DATES –
SIDeR10 : March 24-25-26 2010
Submission opens : December 24 2009
Deadline for submission : January 24 2010
Notification of acceptance : February 21 2010
Deadline for conference registration : March 7 2010

– CONTACT –
For all questions and inqueries, please contact us at recipes (at) ingredientsingradients (dot) com
http://www.ingredientsingradients.com

High quality version: UID20_timelapse_640x480_105mb.mov [Quicktime, 105 MB]

See all the details and links at http://www.dh.umu.se/default.asp?P=2118&naar=2009

Following the success of the Sensing And Sensuality Spring Summit, Umeå Institute of Design invites you to the

IxD Fall summit 2009, November 6-7-8 2009
One full day of talks + an incredible two-day of workshop with Fritzing.
Talks all day Friday. Workshop Saturday and Sunday (200 sek fee)

Preliminary list of speakers
German Leon
Vodafone User Experience (Germany)

David Rose
Vitality (USA)

Karsten Schmidt
PostSpectacular (UK)

Reto Wettach & André Knöring
Potsdam, Interaction Design Lab and Fritzing (Germany)

Jan-Christoph Zoels
Experientia (IT)

Clive Van Heerden
Philips design (ND)

More information to come.

Check them out: http://thishappened.org/talks/