Umeå Institute of Design announces 4 new Post-Graduate (PhD) positions. Two of them are have a specific topic around mobile IxD. Deadline for applications is May 12. See the respective official announcements below:
The four new positions are inline with the Institute’s new strategic investment in basic research and post-graduate studies in design. With already two active PhD students and two recently accepted, these new developments show that the institution is committed to support and develop a nationally and internationally leading research environment.
I’m not sure if it has already been posted, but this is a nice approach of how movement can change editorial design with iPads and all the upcoming tablets. However, I’m still not sure magazines will invest that much money on each issue.
Whatever happened to the future? Somewhere along the way imagination from design has gotten lost or disappeared. Everyone just keeps treading the same beaten path over and over again. If you take a look at the stuff from the 50’s on paleofuture.com, you will notice that some of those things have been made some way or another. The scope of imagination they had was way better than what I see today. Everything is just a slight improvement of the previous nowadays, nothing new or futuristic appears. Interaction designers job is to make things more accessible, intuitive and more natural or that’s what is being forced in to our heads. I actually disagree, I think we (or some of us) are dumbing down stuff, leading to the death of abstract thinking. While in some cases intuitiveness is desirable, (driving and other things requiring fast reaction) mostly it is purely unnecessary. Take computers for example. Not so long ago, before Windows, the most popular OS was MS-DOS, where you typed the commands you wanted the computer do. Not very intuitive, but people coped with that. Now we have the iPad, which is extremely simple to use. No commands, no navigation, just a few buttons on a touch-screen. Intuitive? Yes. Necessary? No. Desirable? Yes and no. I can’t imagine what to do with an iPad, I can download stuff, maybe draw something on the screen with my finger. But… here’s the thing, I will never get lost in the device, I can’t solve the problem of man vs. machine, which happens quite a lot with Windows and DOS, because the machine has been made to be on my level. Why is it that interaction designer hmm.. legends say that all interactions should be intuitive and natural. I think they are seeing humans as mindless idiots trying to survive in a world built by engineers, who, by the way, are not humans. What if instead of dumbing things down, we think 40 years ahead and try to imagine what we can do. I don’t want the flattest TV ever made with a one-button remote. I want 3D projections that I can feel and smell and taste, and I don’t care if the remote has 893 buttons on it. And I don’t want the world’s most intuitive screen I can read books from. I already have books. I want a device that can put me in hypnosis and upload entire books direct to my brain in seconds and let me imagine the world their way. I don’t want to be told how to get from A to B by a soft spoken female voice. I, as a human being possess something extraordinary called sense of direction, which extremely seldom fails me. Instead, I want to hear ghosts around me telling me of places most secret. And I want my damn flying car already!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2GWRG8s0s]
Matt Brown, designer and human extraordinaire of IxD 2009 and Design Fancy fame, seems to have done it again. But this time, he charmed no other than Paola Antonelli, of all sorts of fame. With Core77, she’s curating this exhibition for Significant Objects, and assigned Matt the difficult task of coming up with a story around the use of a (past-future?) material.
Here’s a peek:
When I first met Ron Chutney I was 16 and looking to cut a record. Sang a few songs for him at his studio and I remember my voice being horrible and embarrassing, so imagine my excitement when Ron heard the first track and said, “Yeah we can Crumpter that up just fine.†Crumpters. Today auto-tuned vocals are all the rage, but no one remembers the analog version Chutney created back in the late ’50s. It was a way for guys like me to get an acceptable track out. You see, if you sang through it, your voice would be pitch perfect every time, “like an angel,†Ron would say. Nowadays they teach advanced harmonics in the third grade, so I probably don’t have to explain to you how a Crumpter works — but I will anyway. Each one has to be made by hand, in the winter, in Detroit.
You can read the full article, and see a whole lot of additional images, here. Congrats Matt, witty and entertaining as usual.
Now here’s something extra cool. Fluxus is an open-source rapid prototyping, livecoding and a playing/learning environment that interacts with sounds as well as other means of interactions. Basically it’s very similar in function to Processing et.al. except it is live, meaning as you code you see things happening on the screen already. Also it’s completely 3D and has built-in functionality to react to input sounds. I had a brief chat with one of the developers at Pixelache and they showed a lot of interesting (and beautiful) looking stuff people have been doing with it. It communicates via serial as well, so Arduinos can be hooked up to it. It’s based on PLT Scheme, which is based on Scheme, which is based on Lisp. The bad thing is that the Windows version doesn’t work that well. Ah well.. might as well install Linux. (It’s mainly for OSX and Linux) Download it here !!! And Ubuntu users can add: ppa:puredyne-team/ppa to their sources (Launchpad version is more up-to-date, I guess).
To make it more understandable here’s a couple of videos showing the IDE (it really looks like this)
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We set out to create places that borrow from the best of a member’s club, an innovation agency, a serviced office and a think-tank to create a very different kind of innovation environment. Places with all the tools and trimmings needed to grow and develop new ventures. Places to access experience, knowledge, finance and markets. And above all, places for experience and encounter, full of diverse people doing amazing things. We call these places Hubs.
I’ve heard that once you join the network, you are free to use The Hub’s offices all around the world to do your business.
I’m Here is Spike Jonze’s latest short movie. The 30 minutes movie is now freely available online at imheremovie.com in partnership with Absolut (I supposed the only or main financial supporter). It’s nice to see such movie distributed freely and openly on an international scale. Most of the time, you can only appreciate such cinematographic gems in local film festivals. I appreciate the details of the online presentation but I wouldn’t qualify it as “highly realistic” as mentioned on their blog.
It’s always a pleasure to view simple and beautiful film like this. Very nice music too.
Many sessions and presentations from Microsoft’s MIX10 event are available online. A good chunk of them are around web and (Microsoft) technology, but there are a few good ones for people like us. There is one about SketchFlow, a prototyping environment for user experiences and interactive content. I particularly liked Bill Buxton’s session. He discussed a lot of core issues about Design and its place in relation to Business and Engineering. He goes on with many other diverse topics. Definitely worth watching in my opinion.
Last year’s degree site www.dh.umu.se/degree2009 was not perfect, but at the same time I feel it was a good improvement over the 2008 edition. First, it was developed a week before, instead of the weekend before. The graphic identity was different and that we can never compare, but content-wise, each student had the opportunity to show more images, text, links/urls and videos.
I know UID is asking various consultancies this year to pitch-in for the job. I’m curious to know what graduates and current students think of the 2009 degree site. Can I ask you to post (or email me if you prefer) your feedback, comments and overall appreciation or critique of the site. You can bash all you want (it’s the IN-ter-Net), but as always constructive criticisms are highly valued. I’ll try to pass this information to the relevant people who are developping the 2010 site.
I’m posting screenshots here (I don’t know why actually, since the site is still accessible):
Homepage view with random projects
Matrix of all the students
Program view with list of students
Student view with medium image and thumbnails
Lightbox view of fullsize image
So please post your comments and suggestions for the 2010 degree site. Thanks!
We received news that 3rd place doesnt get us any money or medals.
There would be free glory in the form of free beers, but both Lena and I are a bit tied up with work so wont be attending.
On a more reflective note: I think the occassion begs a discussion on what we’re hoping to do more/less of with the blog.
I do believe that recent posts and discussions by Mikko, Camille, Roberto are exactly the kinds of voices we need to be through the blog.
Personally I’d hope to see more personal projects, ideas, reflections (rants of course!) and discussions materialize through the blog.
