design

I’m very excited about this talk. OCAD is running a great series of speakers who give unconventional perspectives on design, for free! I’ve been reading about Natalie Jeremijenko and I am smitten! She has a though training in many science and engineering practices but finds way to use these skills to produce objects that delight in the way art and design can, and also level the playing feild for individuals who want to understand their information environment:

What I’m most interested in is: how do we characterize systems of which we know very little, and have very poor information? Knowledge is very partial, very incomplete, and yet decisions are made. So, I specifically try to design information systems that measure urban environmental interactions.

For instance, I put a camera in Fresh Kills landfill, just a little networked web cam. It went on whenever the background radiation flipped above the so-called safe level.

What was interesting was that Staten Island has a hospital on it, which was also measuring environmental radiation. Medical facilities are required to do that. So they had their dosimeter, I had my dosimeter. We’re both gathering the same data and it’s not that different.

But mine’s triggering a web cam. So instead of presenting me with information so that it looks like science, like a little graph, it’s clips. Every time the background radiation fluctuates above a certain level, you get two seconds of video.

When you look at that, you start to see things you were not looking for. Seagulls are always going past when this is being triggered. Something happens at sundown, there’s a truck going past. That becomes interesting.

This issue of radioactive seagulls?there’s only one other paper on it. I wasn’t looking for radioactive seagulls. I had no idea about radioactive seagulls, or the concentration of radioactive diets that go on within the gullet of a seagull. It has actually been partially documented by some Greenpeace science groups in England, in Sellafield. But there are no publications on it here.

So, I was seeing something I wasn’t expecting to see. That’s discovery. That’s what I call data mining. Not taking corporate databases, and going through people’s social security numbers, classic data mining. What is interesting is having open systems that can tell you something. You learn something.

- http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001450.html

Another great interview here in Salon’s The Artist as Mad Scientist.

If I go to the talk (fingers cross) I’ll report back here.

This is a really exciting example of ways properly applied visualization techniques can help users make sense and use of government collected data. All DC, USA based. Now we need some Canadian examples.

Do you have any?

I like simple aphorisms that make me happy when I say them out loud. I’m not alone in this. I’ve noticed a few sites in my world that started with a simple but idealistic precept — that individual change can be fun and in aggregate can be funner(tm) — have matured and born fruit over the past few years. One is the self-explanitory site changeeverything.ca. Funded by the best damn credit union/bank in the world, Vancity, the evolution of this online community/blog was guided by Kate Dugas.

Then there is the Learning to Love you More website, associated with a book of the same name, instigated by Miranda July (the writer/actor of that excellent Me You and Everyone We Know film). The exercises suggested by the site are designed to encourage participants to engage in simple but intimate ways with their neighbourhoods, the physical place which includes plants, animals and other people. Trish Mau introduced me to this site and she has been completing some of the exercises judiciously.

Then I went to the Creative Activism show last night which was also the inaugural opening of the Toronto Free Gallery (just down the street from me). I got to make a ‘city repair’ request of Urbane Repairs representative Martin Reis, who was sitting behind a desk typing up request slips, claiming to be able to make the ‘city fun’ and ‘do in a week what takes the city 5 years’. I hope my request for a bike lane and local traffic only on St. Clarens between College and Bloor gets some prompt attention.

And just this morning I ran across this lovely site (again associated with a book) Things I Have Learned in my Life So Far which uses typography and video as a creative frame for recording social/environmental interventions that demonstrate what the site contributors have learned so far. Beautiful, thoughtful videos are the result.

So to conclude, there is a trend here: The pithy aphorism comes off the page or out of someone’s mouth. It becomes action, it touches others, touches a place. Then gets recorded, uploaded. Finally it inspires someone else to try her own hand at a living action and to share what she has learned, adding to the community cultural bank.

A very good model indeed.

Khoi Vinh sums it up very well for me in his article.

Still, even these basics are the second step, in my view. The prerequisite for doing something meaningful with any of these skills — HTML, CSS, Flash or whatever — is first embracing the medium as something different from print. Indeed, there’s no point in learning these skills unless as a print designer you’ve made a prior shift in your understanding of how design works in digital media. Specifically, come to grips with the fact that, on the Web, design is not a method for implementing narrative, as it is in print, but rather it’s a method for making behaviors possible.

More often than not, the reflexive approach that I’ve seen print designers take on the Web is to treat it as a vehicle for print-based design practices: fixing type sizes, specifying typefaces, ignoring usability and expediency, and perhaps most notoriously making the assumption that, over time, users will come around to a print-focused way of consuming content.