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Sunday, March 14, 2010

Valery Casey sxsw Sunday keynote

Casey, founder and Executive Director of the Designers Accord, works with organizations all over the world to create positive social and environmental impact. She has been named a "Guru you should know" by Fortune magazine, a "Hero of the Environment" by Time magazine, and a "Master of Design" by Fast Company.

[i tried to catch most of her key points, but things were moving rather quickly. i'll look for an official post of her presentation later...]

- the sum is more than the parts
- design trap: when you design for the symptom rather than the problem. when will we stop thinking that less bad is good?
- there is no such thing as a side effect. The Global Taco Shed by ACC (art center college) architecture students.
- creating the right measurement of success. Gross National Product (GNP) is supposed to be our national indicator of prosperity. however, it has nothing to do with health and equality and intelligence, etc. in fact, it often works out of synch and it's full of inconsistencies. thinking of ways to ask nature for new kinds of solutions. Ecological Performance Standards.
- selecting the correct lever for change. Naked Pizza project (she's consulting for). Sometimes, the correct lever may be totally counterintuitive to us.
- enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between...? (urg, slides move too fast) Dana Meadows: systems educator. you can't expect a different behavior from the system without considering its structure, even if you swap an element from the system (i.e. Obama).
- issue-attention cycle: degree of awareness is inversely correlated to the degree of productive....? when people opt out because they believe there's enought critical mass that someone else is taking care of it.
- a system is a collection of elements and interconnections that are highly organized to achieve...goal...?

interactive community is precisely the community to connect all the current parts, to act/serve as the the bridges; "we" are the product desginers, the architects, the communicators all wrapped up into one.

"every profession bears the responsibilty to undersand the circumstances that engage its existence." - robert gutman (architecture sociologist)

interactive community doesn't have the luxury of deciding whether or not we're going to do this (be the bridge/s). and, this is the time to do it.

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Saturday, March 13, 2010

Ashley, Huy & Watson at sxsw

Design Fiction sxsw panel

#defi #sxsw #sxswi

Design fiction is an approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling. The goal is to move away from the routine of lifeless scenarios-based thinking. We will share design fiction projects and discuss related techniques for design thinking, communication and exploration of near future concepts.

(including Bruce Sterling.)

julian bleecker: advertisements from the future. documentary/breaking news scenarios from the future. "how william shatner changed the world?" documentary.

jake dunagan: use other people's work, use what's out there and leverage it. transreality. we can only imagine our future from our experience of the past. meta-cognitive techniques to allow you to imagine what you can't readily imagine. don't break the universe.

stuart candy: dissertation on poli sci on experiental futures, his blog at futuryst.com. the spectrum of experientiality: on one extreme: conceptual. in the middle: role play, games and simulations. on the other far end: the "as if" scenario of games and the hoax (the yes men), i.e. war of the lords (orson wells): an intervention on the level of ontology.

sterling: actually, everything that is believed is about social framing. i would point out that most objects and services are *not* real [objects]. and, they don't have to be believed to be effective. and, most will die in 3 years. they will only be memories, complete design fiction. 95% of patents nobody ever makes. home-made stuff, conceptual art, device art, comical contraptions, etc. - these, nobody finds out about. the sacred, the occult, the physically impossible. these will always be with us, part of the human condition and should not be dismissed. lots of maneuver room.




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#openframeworks

Todd Vanderlin from Arnold
Zachary Lieberman from openFrameworks

Art is a kind of R&D, artists are researchers for a better society.

Some openframeworks (OF) demos:
-Drawing with the pitch of your voice…
-Delicate Boundaries
-eyewriter project: collaboration with old school fantastic graffiti artist Tony Quan, aka Tempt One. Tracking Tony’s eyes, suffering from paralysis in hospital bed. Drawing from bed with his eyes, his work is alive on LA's buildings.

Final message by Lieberman - if we think of art as preaching for a moment, then the question of what are we preaching is:
“Art is not hard, we can be making art together, we can be having fun together, coding is not hard… if you’re not part of the OF community, then we would like to say welcome.”

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Openframeworks panel

OpenFrameworks - A Powerful Creative Coding Library for Artists

#openframeworks

LIeberman: I think of art as R&D. Artists as researchers for a better society

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Crowdsourding panel at SXSW

The Era of Crowdsourcing: Guiding Principles

Scott Belsky from Behance and Jeffrey Kalmikoff from Digg discuss Crowdsourcing.

Crowds vs. Communities - The business of things, how sustainable is your source?
Wikipedia definision of "Crowd:" a crowd may be definable through a common purpose or set of emotions, such as at apolitical rally, at a sports event, or during looting, or simply be made up of many people going about their business in a busy area.
Lets pull some key points from this definition:
1. Common purpose
2. Based around an event
3. Interpersonal isolation

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