Pivot

I don't know if it is the actual Pivot technology and capabilities or the music in the movie but I'm optimistic and I really want to get my hands on this thing. I can see now the trajectory of online "searching as consumption" to "searching as therapy" because, in the worlds of Microsoft Live Labs Development Manager Karim Farouki, "by allowing someone to move the data around we are allowing them to build a connection with that data, to feel emotionally involved and to be immersed in the experience itself." Check out my full post to watch the Pivot promo.



Just a curiosity here... where are all the women? Did they not have a woman on the development team?
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Graduate Symposium Re-Cap

Last weekend we pulled off the 2010 North Carolina State University College of Design Biennial Graduate Symposium entitled Design, Community and the Rhetoric of Authenticity. When we first began the discussions around the topic in studio, to be honest, I was less than thrilled. It seemed entirely too nebulous, too vaporous, too undefinable. How could we ever have an entire symposium centered around a topic where we all couldn't even agree on what the words in the title meant??? This was the practical side of me rearing its head. But eventually I began to get more and more comfortable with the idea of un-finish, of verbalizing thoughts in motion and of embracing and celebrating the debate.

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At the end of the symposium we had asked a team of graduate students from a range of grad programs to react to the overall symposium, sum things up and bring it home for us. They got all conceptual on us and did a spoken word routine where they each spoke a particular thought, line or quote that resonated with them from throughout the weekend in order of its happening. This went around and around a couple times before we arrived at the most resonating call to actions found in the final lecture. I had found this particularly interesting because I too was, of course, taking notes all weekend long and jotted down some particular things that spoke to me. I thought I would include some of them here for you in my recap of the weekend...

"Authenticity may not be real, but soul is real." - Elliot Earls

"You can see soul in music. You can see it in art." - Earls

"Authenticity is totally situated." - Brenda Laurel

"I can f@*king feel it when work is authentic." - Earls

"Isn't advertising ultimately a culturally sanctioned form of lying?" - Earls

"Designing for yourself is something I am very wary of." - Laurel

"Who has the capability to design something authentic and in what context." Jon Sueda

"The original recipe is always the most authentic." - Sueda

"We achieve authenticity when the idea is resistant to mutation." - Gary Dickson

"Where do stereo types and nostalgia fit into the rhetoric of authenticity." - Leslie Atzmon

"71% of Americans are online. How does this affect authenticity?" - Q&A Session

"We are insiders." - Maggie Fost on Merge employees

"To be a tourist is being someone who is knowingly having an inauthentic experience." - Unknown, quoted by Maggie Fost

"Designers are fans with access, which situates us to be incredible tour guides." - Fost

"Popular authenticity doesn't free music, it kills it." - Ken Fitzgerald

"All things are subject to interpretation. Which interpretation prevails at the time are a product of power and not truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Technology affords us a way of communicate but it also allows us to isolate ourselves." - Unknown, from break-out session

"In the moment we deem something authentic it ceases to be authentic." - Joerg Becker
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Graduate Symposium

The NCSU College of Design Biennial Graduate Symposium is only a week and a half away and we are pumped!

From the built environment to the virtual realm of interface, design persuades individuals and communities of the truth, honesty, and realness of objects, spaces, and systems. These tactics of persuasion amount to what may be called a rhetoric of authenticity.

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Though designers employ this rhetoric, communities ultimately decide what is authentic to them. Design anthropologist Dori Tunstall describes five requisites of communities: commonality in terms of historic consciousness, life goals, organizational structures, relationships, and conceptions of individual agency. Can considering how the rhetoric of authenticity relates to these defining characteristics of communities help identify points of engagement with complex and discriminating audiences?

This symposium will explore the rhetoric of authenticity within design practices and for community experience. We will confront provocative issues relating to designers’ roles and responsibilities to communities and the individuals who comprise them. Join us in this dialogue.

+ How can we anticipate the ways in which our designs will be read by community members?

+ How can we design to empower community audiences in ways that increase their agency and nurture their identities?

+ What does it mean to appreciate the power of the rhetoric of authenticity in our design practices and considerations of community?

+ How might social, political, and economic constructs influence perceptions of authenticity in design?

+ What constitutes authentic experience, relative to design?

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Fall 09 / Cultural Probe / Findings

Upon explorations and musings on cultural probes getting at ritual I found that I am interested in where the mind wanders during those ritualistic experiences. What are the thoughts beneath the surface of ritual? And how can they be visualized? A "thought catcher" in a way. My classmate Tania, turned me towards a rather compelling photographic study (wish I would have thought of this on my own, and never told that this actually existed, although my photographs couldn't have been nearly as breathtaking). Explore The Thought Project by Simon Hoegsberby. [...]

Summer09 / And the livin' is easy

This summer began with days of sleep to catch up on, long lists of projects to complete and a few meandering lines across my calendar indicating exciting journeys. It was a time to get re-inspired and re-connected with life. One of my plans of attack to achieve this goal included revitalizing another passion of mine, photography. Check out my photoblog here to get a glimpse into my summer happenings, if you like. [...]

Summer 09 / NCSU Design Camp

My fellow classmate, Liese Zahabi and I (along with our awesome TA, Helen Dear) took on the challenge of introducing 80 high school students to graphic design (16 a day for 5 days) during week three of NC State's Design Camp this summer. What did I learn? Well, it is a whole lot of fuss... but definitely worth it.

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For three separate weeks throughout the summer NCSU hosts a Design Camp for high school students in the area and across the country. It is designed as a way to introduce students with interests in design (general or specific) to five varying design disciplines; Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Industrial Design, Animation and Graphic Design. The students in groups of 16 spend a full day exploring in each design discipline rotating through each by the end of the week.

The theme of this year's design camp was "The Music Industry" and activities and projects completed within each design discipline were to relate to this theme. For Graphic Design Liese and I decided to start the day off with an intro to graphic design as well as an visual intro into what happens when graphic design and music collide. Then we moved into a activity in which we explore how music can influence the visual. We played three different pieces of music and the students worked at one of three stations for the entirety of one song then switched to the next station. One station contained tools for creation using just typographic elements, another just image elements and the last just color.

Next we wanted to see how an existing visual design can prompt a whole new design through the art of mashing up different elements. Each student began with one of the compositions they had already designed in the last exercise. This time instead of responding to the music, we wanted them to respond to the visual design that they saw. They were to create a brand new design—using elements from other student’s work, elements from their original composition, and any new elements they wished to create using the tools from the previous exercise.

Critique and Lunch Break at the fabulous cafeteria (seriously we had soft serve everyday)

For our afternoon project the students were creating posters and album packaging designs for a fictitious band or music group. They began by pulling two random words out of a hat, then took some time for individual brainstorming involving a creative brief and sketching. Next they discussed their ideas in small groups to develop them even further then got to work utilizing the same tools we had provided for the mornings activities. The pieces were created by working directly onto a 11 x 17 sheet of paper then scanned in and the students had an opportunity to set type on the computer. They were printed and comped up for the following morning's critique. The work was truly incredible.

You can check out some pictures from my flickr set here.
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