CaseCamp Benefit for SickKids Hospital

As well, my good friend Eli Singer is producing the latest edition of Casecamp as a fundraiser for Sick Kids Hospital, with the lovely and talented Diana Kimball. The daytime event is held at the Carlu, and tickets sell for $100. The evening event will be an open event with just a sampling of what we’ve come to love about the fantastic events that Eli curates. Go! Go!

easter eggs at sxsw09

this year at sxsw09 tom and i decided to launch a little prototype qr code-based game, something we came up w o the saturday afternoon and deployed over the next 24 hours. our goals were primarily to test qr codes in a large-scale environment, and more than anything to see what would happen.

i shared an ignite presentation (heh… an adventure ;) with matt milan last week at a workshop here in toronto called situate.us – a day long session exploring the applications and design of situated computing. all in all an amazing day, and major props to matt, michael and daniel for organizing ( as well as the other participants for bringing diverse flavours of awesome).

the premise of the project was this: imagine you’re an intrepid explorer who has stumbled upon sxsw09 for the first time, and it is the technological equivalent of the galapagos islands. the media you discover are somewhat familiar, and echo that which you’ve seen before, but some are completely new species, and essentially you think ‘what the hell is this intarweb?’ and you communicate your discoveries via twitter.

the technical side was pretty lowtech – we wanted to use readily available tools due to time and $$ constraints, so twitter, a qr generator, tinyurl & fedex were the basic platforms, as well as qr readers available on smartphones. every time our explorer found something, he twittered about it and linked to the site via tinyurl. each tweet generated a qr code, which we printed out on paper and distributed across the conference.

the results? well, it sort of worked… it was a good learning experience, in that we found out that printing qr codes on glossy paper = reader FAIL. we used tinyurl, when really we should have used bit.ly for tracking purposes. also, we didn’t really talk it up, preferring to see how ppl would react to random qr codes distributed across the conference (taped on streetposts, tables, walls, etc). turns out, with no context, not very well. so it didn;t work as well as it could have, but that’s what experiments are for!

ps – the last slide w the T800 and lentils is from tom’s recent presentation on augmented reality.

design as derivative – weapons of mass disruption

last week torch partnership and sLab hosted the latest edition of the unfinished business lecture series, and we were treated to a robust and inspiring presentation by gong szeto, a new mexico-based designer. recently, gong has been designing derivatives trading platforms for financial services, and his hyperacute knowledge of these systems has inspired a unique perspective towards design, as revealing the meta layers of economics, politics, etc, and the implications around an emerging set of ethics relating towards the products, services and systems we design. As bruce nussbaum wrote last year – did innovation cause the crisis on wall st?

gong gives good reason to believe this, and more importantly, frames why. the blurb from the talk is here as is the slideshow, but be sure to check his notes on slideshare.

What implications does the current global economic crisis have for Design? For Gong Szeto the answers lie in understanding how design has evolved over the last 100 years in parallel with capitalism. We are in the midst of a global economic crisis, one whose contours are barely understood, even by today’s leading minds. This crisis reveals the very underpinnings of how our world works, and it is the story of finance (a classic tragic comedy) and its colossal role in the development of modern society.

Design, the myriad ways it is practiced and consumed, owes its very existence to the thriving of a capitalist political economy. Design cannot claim primacy in this system, but is, instead, a shadow or derivative of the priorities of supply-side and demand-side economics.

Billionaire Warren Buffett has called financial derivatives “weapons of mass destruction.”. Gong Szeto will demonstrate the powerful properties and dynamics of derivatives in financial world, and apply this framework to understanding Design’s origins and future possibilities. He will try to make the case that Design’s complex derivative nature, if better understood, can be combined with the powerful emerging attributes of massively shared social web platforms, and proactively insinuated in a (post) capitalist political economy, taking shape as “weapons of mass possibility.”

finding design frontiers: larry keeley at ocad

larry keeley, ceo of doblin, spoke earlier today at ocad, in a wonderful talk sponsored by torch partnership and the strategic innovation lab – the new incarnation of my alma mater the beal institute for strategic creativity. big thanks to the folks that hosted “the john cleese of innovation.” there were a few key ideas that really stood out for me in his talk.

the thesis of larry’s talk focused on a new emerging discipline of innovation, one that is still in its infancy and will eventually encapsulate the methods and rigour demonstrated in fully or semi-institutionalized disciplines such as medicine, law or business. at a time of great uncertainty, as the systems we have come to rely on for the exchange of economic, physical and political capital begin to erode globally, larry offers that innovation, far from dead, is thriving.

as is often the case in times of turmoil, people innovate when they need to think differently, act differently and make different things. they explore the boundaries of what is possible. however, larry asks “what if everything we thought we knew about innovation was wrong?” especially when we consider that most innovation posts a success rate of less than 4%, worldwide. he then gives the following example of how innovation commonly goes down in a company (which i’m sure will be a bit mucked up in my retelling, but the point will get across ;)

the executives of a major corporation realize that their earnings are tanking, and so product lines are trimmed, teams are reduced and gap analysis is conducted. and the gap analytics indicate that in order to close the gap between the economic projections and the actual company performance, one needs to innovate. so the sr execs comb through the company and pick the best and brightest, and get them all together in the board room. then comes the stirring speech, in which the selected team is inspired and charged to innovate with no margin for error, a super short timeline, no guidance, no resources, threat of termination upon failure and little in the way of exactly *what* they’re supposed to innovate towards. ambiguous expectations and concrete deliverables. however, there will be whiteboards and flipcharts to aid in generating ideas. this is akin to picking a bunch of random people and asking them to perform neurosurgery with a few exacto knives and some rubbing alcohol.

heading to LIFT08

v v happy to be flying back to geneva this year for the ever-awesome LIFT conference. huge props to laurent, nicolas, sylvie and the rest of the LIFT team for putting together another really fantastic program. bruce sterling, bill cockayne,  lee bryant, julian bleecker, fabien girardin, stephanie booth, henriette weber andersen and noel hidalgo will be among the many giving talks, leading conversations and workshopping. tom is also giving what looks to be awesome workshop on the future of wireless. oof, unfortunately with the conference last week and project applications all over the place, i missed the deadline to submit…

regardless, i’m looking forward to catching up with friends, meeting new people and having my mind saturated with absolutely fantastic conversations. a new element this year is the venture night – where new startups give us their pitch! and there’s the threat of switzerland’s biggest. fondue. evar. <cheese glee>

in case y’all were needing some last minute christmas ideas

one of the neatest ways to organize your stuff, if you have stuff and a hankering for the elegance of math…

Equation Bookshelf is a simple idea of to divide things in priority order… put together the books that you need immediately or more important between (parentheses)! Set others between [square brackets] and {braces}.

Courtesy boingboing

i are dunecat, and necessary for space travel

so this was too funny to pass by – thx to michelle for the giggles!! and yeah… i really should be working too ;)

Your Score: Spice Melange

You scored 100% intoxication, 75% hotness, 100% complexity, and 75% craziness!

You are Spice.

You’re not from around here, are you? You’re extremely valuable. While you resemble mundane cinnamon, you are much more interesting. People fight wars over you, but your giant worms protect you.

You enlighten people; make them aware, prescient, even clairvoyant. Your pure essence can reveal people’s true selves, if they survive their encounter with the real you. You’re addictive, dangerous, seductive, and above all else, necessary for space travel.

Link: The Which Spice Are You Test written by jodiesattva on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

all this useless beauty

cali balles, photo

i came across this paper* while researching for my project and prepping for the last lecture of the year before presentations, and it really highlights some of the ideas i’ve spoken about previously as well as given articulate phrasing to some really interesting connections in the relationship between craft, design and digital technology. craft and design have had a schism since the industrial revolution, when, for all intents and purposes, design was born. greg calls design ‘creation for reproduction’ – making with the direct intention of replicating, and thus requiring systems and standards to ensure exactness throughout that reproductive process. and most digital technology reflects this, presenting us with clean and simple efficiencies of form but very little humanity. i think that craft, however, embodies a bit more of our humanity as the unique experience of making by hand can’t be replicated and our tools and processes do not become extensions of ourselves, but rather interfaces in an empathetic relationship with the materials, the ideas, the user and ourselves. and beauty.

jayne wallace and mike press (the latter of whom is speaking this week in halifax at nscad university’s neocraft conference- i SO WISH i was there) express their thoughts on the role of beauty in craft, it’s approximation in design and it’s role in creating better digital technologies.

1st part of the excerpts below (2nd to follow shortly)

Beauty, we argue, plays a vital role in humanising technology and ensuring its cultural relevance… Industrial design can
employ the illusion of beauty to temper the beast of technology by providing a veneer of desire, seduction and usability. But let us not confuse eternal beauty with the passionate but fast fading blooms of desire. We enjoy the delights of the G4 Powerbook as much as the next fashion-conscious academic, but only as a well designed one night stand at the orgiastic party of our consumer culture.

moar

gva’s wiigrano

my colleague greg van alstyne has been up to trouble while pursuing his msc from the integrated digital media institute at brooklyn polytechnic university.

This gestural interface prototype, completed for one of my digital media masters courses, emphasizes an intuitive and performance-friendly interaction model. I’m exploiting the physicality of Nintendo’s Wii controller by aiming to drawing out visceral, subtle, and “quasi-analogue” possibilities.

 

Thanks and shout out to Professor Joshua Goldberg, Brian MacMillan and other classmates at Integrated Digital Media Institute, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn; Masayuki Akamatsu for the aka.wiiremote Nintendo Wii Remote Handler and Les & Zoax for the Granularized Max/MSP patch.

the hack is great, and the added bonus of tweakily conducting douglas adams, among other, is pretty sweet! yay greg!!

stu-stu-studio

i’m super excited that prime gallery, canada’s oldest gallery for craft and the decorative arts, is now carrying my work. check it out! stop by if you’re in the neighbourhood – they carry some of canada’s most renowned artists and have a pretty awesome exhibition schedule. i’ll also be participating in a group show there running from 1-dec to 22-dec, called around the neck. :)

as well, in october i attended two workshops offered by interaccess electronics arts centre as part of their fall schedule. in terms of awesomeness, they were off the chart!!

intro to electronics was a 2-day weekend workshop that, true to its name, covered the basics of electronics, which is great for someone who only sort of understood how the toaster works – ohms and resistors, current, voltage, how breadboards work and how to make motors spin and LEDs blink. taught by rob cruickshank – an awesome guy with tons of knowledge!

intro to microcontrollers was also very cool – tom came to this one to, and learning how to make a series of LEDs blink like KITT with the arduino platform was enough to totally make our day! a fairly simple platform with tons of online resources, i like arduino because of its accessibility. i don’t know squat about programming or building chips/boards, and it’s sort of a tough thing to dabble in, but gord hicks rocked the workshop and i’ll be looking forward to many winter nights spent in the interaccess studio (available to all studio members 24/7), experimenting and making stuff.

they also have a really cool blog!