Mutations Assignment

Here are the cards of the assignment for Mutations of Communications, in case anyone is interesting in trying it for themselves. Or ifyour just interested:

Bach's Suite no. 1

I've recently been listening to slightly more classical music than before, which means about one song a week, instead of none. But I have to say that my ear is coming quickly, I am already recognizing songs, and the different styles of the different composers. I don't know what this has to do with design, but I have noticed that being preoccupied with a theme usually finds it's way into my personal designs. My personal favorite at the moment is Bach's Suite no. 1. The transition between fast, and slow motion of the reminds me so much of life, perhaps how time is flowing, how some moments seem to fly by, while some seem to stand still so that we can appreciate them, or dispise them (seems there is no preference time will slow for either of these extremes). Anyway, very beautiful music, I am excited to hear more from Bach!

Product Love

I am currently in the preparation and research process of writing my Vordiplom (intermediate exam). It will consist of three theses on themes of my choosing, and a final product corresponding to the main theme. Two of my themes are settled. The first of which being "Product Love" about the kinds of relationships that we build with objects, and how they are formed. I am busying myself the most with this theme at the moment, since I now have to prove that I can tackle such a large theme, in showing literature lists, and a partial outline of how I intend to tackle the theme.

The other topic is Eco-Porn. How we may pervert nature, and our perception of nature through idealized images of it. I am going to be writing this thesis in German! Which is really exciting and scary for me, I am not sure what is going to come, but I hope that I am happy with the outcome of it. I also have some information colleced on this theme, it should be very interesting and fun to investigate!

My Library

I expressed earlier my desire to have a library with books and papers, every page of which I had read of written, it would be my brain, and all the literature that influenced it, in one room. Yesterday I was discussing this dream with my boyfriend, and realized that this library will probably never be able to be my own. If I share my library with my future spouse or companion, some of those books and ideas will be his. This thought seems very unattractive to me, and I now get images of separated libraries, or separated shelves of his and my books. Will I ever be able to share my books. When or if I do it will be a meaningful event. It will mean that I am finally capable of sharing my life with someone, and also my thoughts, molding us into a single, and collective mind.

Product photography

How can we create creative evocative pictures of our product designs? You know, not an object on a solid background. Here's a bit of brainstorming, haven't used any of it, but I think I'm going to play around photographing some of my favorite things.

Check out the ID magazine archives, sometimes they have interesting product photography.

Look at exhibition designs for inspirations on how to photograph the products, it's just a still display of the picture.

Remember Ms. Baileys photo class: the assignment where we got an object and had to then make a series of photos with the object in it. Remember Paige's barbie inside kitchen appliances photo series? What did that say about the barbie, and what did it say about the appliances she was jammed into. Take your product and give yourself that assignment. Think of a thorough concept for the shoot, give your object some kind of odd juxtaposition. Give it a life. Give it a different environment than you'd traditionally think of that says something about the object itself, and about the environment around it.

Amelie's travelling gnome. What does this do for the gnome? It animates it in a way you wouldn't expect, with a few hand scribbled notes it seemed like the gnome had taken a vacation of his own.

Check out Philip Toledano's work again, nice photos, you might get some ideas. What about product photographs without the product in it? Like the video game pictures, the faces on the people says enough about the game, you hardly have to show it. Okay, might be too far for a portfolio, but interesting.

Look at other experimental photography for inspiration, take out the subject of the photo, and put your product in it. Check out the lomography website for more ideas.

Possesions

"Let us grant that our everyday objects are in faact objects of a passion - the passion for private property, emotional investment in which is every bit as intense as investment in the 'human' passion.... Apart from the uses to which we put them at any particular moment, objects in this sense have another apect which is imtimately bound up with the subject: no longer simply material bodies offering a certain resistance, they become things of which I am the meaning, they become my property and passion"

-The system of objects

Wabi-sabi

"Artfully obscured exotic concepts like wabi-sabi also made good marketing bait. Obscuring the meaning of wabi-sabi, but tantalizing the consumer with glimpses of its value."

Like starbuks coffee, or other so called "lifestyle" products, which give you the feeling that you are getting something more than an object, a collection of molecules - something higher, and better, almost impossible to forge. The secret and success of such products is that the extra something remains undefined, allowing the consumer to redefine it for themselves everytime they consume the product. The consumer then can associate any beauty in the laws of the world, light, or sound, experiences or feelings, things that are inevitably incapturable as a whole, and then bind this with the product itself. You don't have to then bind these beautiful things with with objects, you have to allude that they are bound to the object, and the consumer will do it for themselves.

Ode to Books

A book for me represents a future. I buy the books that I read when I can afford it. I dreamt as a child of having an extensive personal library, in which I had read every book that sits on the shelves. I dreamt of having a library of my own mind. It would be extensive with shelves and shelves of books, but also with card files of all the quotes I had written down from the books. It would have filing drawers full of essays I had read, and written. CDs of all the information radio I had heard.

This is a dream I still intend to uphold.

I love the feeling of buying a new book, it is the hope for myself. That I will become something better. That my mind will stretch further beyond any point I could have imagined. A book holds a future of thought for me, and my book reading rituals exemplify that. I buy a book, and have a special stack of books bought, and not yet read. Some of the books in the stack have been read halfway through, but remain in the stack until the last page has been finished. I mark the margins of my books, not worrying about making intelligent of even complete comments. Sometimes its just a keyword, often, Spencer. When the train of thought from the books runs parallel with, or merges with a path that my own mind has taken. After or sometimes during the reading of the book I go through all the marked passages, and copy them onto notecards. I learned this technique in my senior humanities class. A technique for writing research papers. A way of conglomerating the important parts of the book into tangible, and movable parts, like movable type, the ideas can be arranged and mixed from different sources into a new pattern and order with a different meaning. When the book is finished I put it into my bookshelves. It is a kind of celebratory ritual for me. Celebrating and embracing my new knowledge, and putting aside to rest.

Books have also become an important part of my mind. I often find myself thinking of passages that relate to the events or ideas that I encounter during the day. Depending on the situation I either quote or summarize the passage from the book, or I revisit the passage later that night, pondering on the meaning and connection. Why I made the connection at that point, and how I might be getting closer to understanding the world. I remember specifically having a conversation in my living room during my first date with my former boyfriend. And for some reason, I pulled out the book Walden and read passages to him. What a nerdy, and completely sweet and vulnerable thing for me to do.

I like to have the books after that fact for just that reason, if I have them, I go back to them, they slowly integrate into my life and my thoughts, and become a bigger part of me. Most of my books are stored at my parents home at the moment, for reasons having to do with my semi-nomadic international lifestyle at the moment. And the fact that they aren't here with me makes me sad sometimes. Not a physical sadness that would show in a facial expression, but a really deep and gentle pain and nostalgia for them. Because they are a part of me. They are a part of my mind, made permanent with ink and paper. They are a connection between me and the author that could only happen through this media, as personal sometimes as a letter between lovers. And they are a connection between me and everyone else in the world who has ever read and connected to the book. I belong then in a net of people, we don't even know who eachother are, but when we find eachother by mistake or happenstance it's like a reunion, we know that we are common to eachother, and that if only in some small way, we are connected to eachother without even having known it.

Days like this

It is on days like this that I realize the puny size and capacity of a single human brain compaired to the expanses of information that exist in the universe. I just want to learn everything, and at the same time I know that it is impossible. Isn't this what the human life is about? Wanting what we know that we can't have?

Being and Time

I want to be one of those peoples who dies with an unfinished project on their desk, that at some point after their death people wish that the work had been finished.

Mutations of Communication

In the past week I participated in a short-term programme at the Köln International School of Design, under the leadership of guest professors Tina-Henriette Kristiansen, and Anne-Elisabeth Toft of Denmark. The title was Mutations of Communication, and honestly as the 16 participants gathered in our classroom to begin the project, we didn't know what to expect.

The guest professors were extremely well prepared with a concrete assignment (something traditional KISD professors might learn to do better). We began the project with a short presentation on the concept of bodily mutation. We discussed what could be considered mutation (everyone) and how mutation works in the human body.

We were then paired into teams (I worked with Mathilda Oluoch) and given artefacts to work with. The project was exucuted in steps, with specific rules of mutations that we were requred to follow in each step, with each new mutation building off of the final product of the last step, in order to allow a generational growth of the objects. We were instructed not to think about beauty or function at all during the project, just to follow the principles given.

The steps of the project were as follows:

Photograph the artefact
Name the artefact and it parts
Draw the original artefact, "wildtype", in a detailed and accurate technical drawing (or render in 3D)
Mutation 1: Duplication
Mutation 2: Translocation (switching features of the object with eachother)
Mutation 3: Insertion (duplicate feature, or add features from a nearby object - in other words the area of the body where the artefact meets the body)
Mutation 4: Deletion (can also be fusion of parts)
Mutation 5: Multiple Choice (bring the artefact and the body back together, and Design. Here we were allowed the freedom to think more creatively, use all of the mutation principles and also think about function and form a little bit more. Although the end result was required to make sense in terms of it being a further generation of the product before
Finally, build a model of the final design

To accomplish this all in 5 days was quite a feat. Many of us were in the work room morning to night, every day (I only slept a few hours every night). But the end result was fantastic, the students and teacher at KISD were all very enthusiastic about the results, and we were asked to display our results for the Long Night of the Museums in Cologne.

Original Artefact




Wildtype
We drew the original artefact by hand, but later decided that using Illustrator would be a more simple, and correctable choice.


Mutation 1: Duplication


Mutation 2:Translocation


Mutation 3:Insertion


Mutation 4:Deletion


Mutation 5:Multiple Choice

Presentation Style

The best kind of presentations: short and complete. A verbal presentation should never repeat itself, or repeat itself as little as possible. The audience should have heard everything it wanted to, have a few detail questions in it's head, but should have the whole concept already. It should be surprised that you have reached the end, because they were so enthralled in what you were saying that they weren't thinking about the time moving.

Image Nation

We are so used to seeing the world through images and photos, that we have lost the capacity to see outside of the frame, to find beauty in the world that no-one tells us is beauty.

New and Unexpected

The only way to create something new and unexpected is to work outside of your own mind. Using tools that force you to make something that you haven't ever thought of before. You can't consider style, and beauty, because if it fits into the current style, it's expected. This is something I noticed last year during the Passagen furniture design event in Cologne. Very little of what was there looked new of exciting to me at all. I got explainations of what was actually new and different about it, but it still looked like something I'd seen before.

The only wat to create something that is truly new is to make something that isn't the typical idea of beautiful. It can be beautiful, but it has to be a new definition of beautiful.

Note to Self

This feeling, this really good, weight off your shoulders feeling that you are feeling right now is because you just finished 3 projects that lasted way longer than they should have. You can have the feeling of accomplishment more often if you just finish more stuff. Finish the projects that you begin!

Blue and Red Thought Process

Busy

I'm sorry that I've promised more posts, but I've been pretty busy lately. However, there are things on their way, and they are cool! (namely, the things that have slowed down my blogging in the process of finishing) So just keep holding your breathe.

Current Stored Information

German course starts at 6:30 ends at 9:30, has a break at 8.
I attend my photoseminar two times, the first on November 5, other people will present their results on November 6th at 3:15.
Pall Mall and L&M cigarettes cost 3.50 euros.
I owe Professor Brandes 93.- euros.
I gave Arne, Michael Marx, Michael Granado (I also gave him the money for Juliette, which was about 7.13 euros, Chris, Maik, Andre, Chantal, Jo and probably someone else wilkhahn money today.
The sum of it all was about 750.- euros.
Someone recieved exactly 110.- euros.
We had about 6500.- euros in the Wilkhahn account yesterday.
The add numbers in Excel one writes SUM=(cellname-cellname) in a cell.
I have a stack of books about a foot tall to read.
I need to read Massive Change by the end of the week.
Ein Julitag can wait to be read until we start as a course.
I want to photograph every monday, because I will have it completely free.
Sleeping against the wall is rather comfortable.
India is 3.5 hours ahead of Germany.
Utah is 8 behind Germany.
It will cost 28 euros per book to print softcover copies of the wilkhahn book on Lulu.de
The tuesday talk today was called "Why being international" which is technically incorrect.
I have not watched the very last episode of the last season of "Are You Being Served".
I had a lot of ideas today, if they're good will decide itself within a couple of days.
My jacket has 2 buttons.
My black skirt can show a little skin between the buttons and zipper if I'm not careful.
The only thing I need to get done at work is Website updates.
My room number is 05-16.

Hmm, this could go on forever I'm sure. But I was justing thinking today about all the little details about my current life that I will forget within a short time-frame after they become irrelevant. So I thought I'd document a bit of my short-term infomation see what I remember in a couple of weeks, or months, or years.

I realized that we store all sorts of little information in our heads, and the more often we use it after that, the more permanent it becomes in our head. This may, however, have been a good realization for my German learning, I just need to go through my flashcards often, and put effort into using what I learn on a daily basis, and it will stick better (so far new stuff isn't really sticking well).

Folding a cut image

I saw this and got lots of ideas. I like the idea of a folded poster that is cut into a certain shape, perhaps the folded shape could be taken into account and played with. Interesting...

Thanks to http://vi11age.com/article/27/heilongjiang_box

Network Gardening

If you have ever had a zucchini plant, or apple tree, you understand the dilemma. Zucchinis coming out your ears. During high growing season you recieve many more ripe zucchinis on your plant than you and your family could ever eat. This usually ends up as a bring a cardboard box full or (insert overly abundant in season fruit/vegetable here) to work, church, or just ditch them on an unsuspecting person's porch.

It could be that your home has one edible-product producing plant, and that you just get so dang sick of eating them, but really don't have the time of the know-how to make a multi-facetted garden that gives of small amounts of what you need on a regular basis.

Perhaps you have a yard full or grass, and you don't do anything with this grass, why not grow a fruit tree, many are ver low maintainence, and you're not really doing much with the garden space.

I guess part of the point here is driving through a suburban neighborhood, (in the US mostly) where there is lots of space between the houses, and lots of green (grass) that isn't actually very useful, and is rather a pain in the butt to maintain. There is a better way to use this space, how could we encourage this.

For environmental reasons, it is better to eat locally grown, in-season foods, but when the land is covered in grass, who's growing locally. Locally could be your, or your neighbors yard.

What if there were a website for garden-sharing. Or a store, or a market, we'll call it a system. Where people can bring their overabundance and trade or give-away the gardening-extras, and to encourage at home gardening in the first place.

The website could arrange neighborhoods of plants, on neighbor could have zucchinis, the other apples, the other peppers, another herbs. You get the picture, each neighbor takes care of one plant that their "good at" and shares the edible-products.

A store could be arranged for exchanging of goods, like a second hand CD store, in terms of fruit and veggies. You bring in what you don't want and get a credit for it. You can then go pick out more useful edibles, or save the credit for when there are fewer veggies growing in your garden, to replace what you've dropped off. Other's could shop there, it could be a central point for locally-grown goods in the area.

A network could be built up for helping newbies grow. Helping them assess what will grow well where they are, giving them tips on figuring out how to grow particular plants. Or showing them combination of things that grow well in the same environment. Also encouraging them to focus on learning how to grow a specific plant, before they just head-first into a full fledged garden. Figure out a certain plant one year, the next year add another to your reportoire.