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.

Object Attachment

"One night I found myself taking from the cupboard not one of the plates I normally used but a crackled and worn Spode plate, from a set mostly broken or chipped, in a pattern no longer made, "Wickerdale." This had been a set of dishes, cream with a garland of small rose and blue flowers and ecru leaves, that John's mother had given him for the apartment he rented on East Seventy-third Street before we were married. John's mother was dead. John was dead. And I still had, of the "Wickerdale" Spode, four dinner plates, five salad plates, three butter plates, a single coffee cup, and nine saucers. I came to prefer these dishes to all others. By the end of the summer I was running the dishwasher a quarter full just to make sure that at least one of the four "Wickerdale" dinner plates would be clean when I needed it."

"This alarm clock had stopped working during the year before he died, could not be repaired, and, after he died, could not be thrown out. It could not even be removed from the table by my bed. I also had a set of colored buffalo pens, given to me the same Christmas, in the same spirit. I did many sketches of palm trees that Christmas, palm trees moving in the wind, palm trees dropping fronds, palm trees bent by the December kone storms. The colored buffalo pens had long since gone, but, again, could not be thrown out ."

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Lasting Creation

I just finished a publication for the organization I work for, which I am quite proud of (I will post pics soon) but I can't help but think of the timeline that this publication will have. It is clear that within 10 years some copies of the publication will still exist (since it is an 8 year plan) But after that given time point how many will survive (it will only be a print run of 3500 copies). When will the last copy of this publication be thrown away? How long will it last.

Because, just as this publication was a matter of need, it wasn't something I put a whole lot of heart into, but in a way I did. I spent months working on it (mostly because of numerous tedious changes from the administration), it's not revolutionary or new in the world of design, but in the world of IHDP it is something great and new. And it's undeniable that this publication was there, and followed my thoughts for a long time.

How long will that last, will something change when the last is thrown away, and begins it's process of decomposition in the landfill?

Own it, then change it

The only way to have create influence in a culture (not the uncreated influence that coincidentally happens, but a planned change) is to first own the culture. You have to know exactly how the culture works, fit into the culture and then from the inside you can make the changes. Change can only come when it is relevant to the current cultural climate, and springs from the cultural climate. Pushing a culture from the outside is too hard and foreign. People have to find a change perfectly fitting to who they are, or a part of who they want to be before they will follow it.

Consider Socrates: His persuasion technique was to ask questions. The listener would then give their most logical answer to the question. Each question would be part of a theme, but not a question about the theme itself. They would then build up, and lead to a logical conclusion about the big theme, which is different from the gut reaction the person would have had in the beginning. Through this he would not only get the person to believe what he wanted them to, but would make them find the answer in themselves. Pushing from the inside.

Absurdity

"But above all, [youth] is a haste to live that borders on waste."

"There are races born for pride and life."

"The contrary of a civilized nation is a creative nation."

"To feel one's attachment to a certain region, one's love for a certain group of men, to kow that there is always a spot where one's heart will feel at peace - these are many certainties for a single human life."

"Everything that exalts life at the same time increases its absurdity."

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

I renewed my love for Albert Camus a couple of nights ago in the train, reading the essay he wrote "Summer in Algiers." I was without a pen, a found myself dog-earing the book (which I never do) to point to the beginnings of what I would have underlined, eventually resorting to underlinin with my fingernails, knowing how easily this kind of marking gets lost or the technique forgotten. But I couldn't just go on reading without putting some kind of mark in the book to show my enthusiasm. It is beautiful philosophy, existentialism, it sometimes seems bleak, and is commonly the philosophy of suicidal people, believing there is no meaning to life. But Camus' argues that this life is just so beautiful, there may be no meaning, but this life is so beautiful because of it.

This is where I stand. Life is just so damn beautiful, enjoy it!

Ode to Spencer

"The world fascinates me."

This has to be my favorite thing ever said in the history of mankind. My brother said this one day as a reasoning why he likes pretty much any christmas present he gets, and why he is so easy to shop for. He's the kind of guy you think of when you see that ever so cool, moderately useless gizmo sitting on the shelf.

He died two weeks after he said this, it's something I can appreciate because if he hadn't died, we wouldn't have spent hours and hours discussing him, and I would have never remembered that he said this. We had a great childhood together, and I can't regret anything about his life because I learned so much from him, it's actually difficult to talk about myself, my favorite things, and my interests without creating a connection to him, because he is such a big part of me.

So, now this will be my motto for life. To take his curiosity, and excitement about everything in the world, everything he taught me and keep it alive in myself.

Design for Life, and the Taxonomy of Experience

To design for an experience one must know it. The experience of using a personal timepiece.

The Design for Life project, run by a guest professor, Ian Coxon, from the University of Western Sydney, Australia, was my first project at KISD, and so far my favorite. The main goal was to choose an experience and study it so fully, to learn it's specific vocabulary, and intricacies, in order to better design for it. I chose to study the Experience of Using a Personal Timepiece. The course was focussed around philosophical concepts from Heidegger, and Gadamer, about how to understand and categorize experiences. From this philosopy Ian created a process which he called the Taxonomy of Experience.

The Process
We were first to experience our chosen experience ourselves, and document that experience as well as possible including as many nit-picky details as possible. I think I learned the most from this step, just inspecting my own behavior was very interesting to me. We were then to use our learned vocabulary for the experience to interview about, and inspect the experiences of others. This ended up for me being about 15 written pages of notes, and plenty of tiny scribbled notes all through my notebooks such as "the lecture no longer interests me, I check my watch." From these documentations we pulled out all the bits of the experience and categorized them under subsets of senses, positive/negative, cognitive, and emotional factors. This was quite a bit of work for me since I ended up with more than 1000 bits.
We then assigned each bit a theme, that was more specific, for example under Sense of Touch I used categories such as cold, heavy, and sweaty. Each bit was then interpretted, in order to document whatever information might be hidden behind the simple words of the text.
We then began narrowing down the information to the essential elements. Cutting my list down to 1/10 of what it was, cutting out overly repetitive elements, and things that did not seem to be essential to the experience.
The most difficult step came next, finding the extraordinary parts of the experience. We chose from the essential elements, the bits that had some surprising aspect to them. We were encouraged to leave behind information on form, and function, and to focus on only the super-ordinary aspects such as feelings, and philosophical ideas. We then gave each of these super-ordinary aspects a title, and sorted them accordingly. This led very quickly to the end product, about 4 words with which you could summarize the experience.
I was extremely excited and pleased to reach the end stage, after having droned through so many bits of information to finally have reached the nucleus of the experience. But I wasn't really surprised by any of the words I had found, because at that point I was so deep inside the experience that they all seemed so applicable to me.

5 Summarizing words
Emotional Attachment
People grow a huge personal attachment to their watch. First, because as a concept, it is a trusted source of information that is important to them. Second, as an object. The watch can represent something about it's past, such as it's former owner, or being a gift celebrating a big achievement. The watch can also become a symbol of you. Because it is a piece that you wear almost every day, it can come to represent your style, showing yourself through a piece of jewelry.

Coordination
Time has become a kind of grid work for the world, a fourth dimension. Just like streets, latitude, longitude and even country borders, are systems humans have created, and implemented to coordinate ourselves with the first 3 dimensions of the world. Watches and clocks are simply establishing a common framework to organize this fourth dimension. We use time to coordinate the flow of our day with those of the people in our society, in creating appointments, such as opening hours, friendly meetings, even train schedules. It's a way for us to coordinate our moments, and in doing so, consolidate our time so that we can get more done with what we have available.

Craving
The need for an answer to the question of "what time it is" can sometimes be very casual, and unimportant, but more often it is urgent, and pressing. It can control you, and cause stress and anxiety just by having the question in your head. This is the reason for having a wrist watch in the first place, a quick and simple satiation to our craving to know the time. It is always there, and can be depended on as a source of the necessary information.

Exactness
Because our own personal interpretation of lengths of time is so weak, the system of measuring and dividing common time has been set into place. The amazing thing about time is that according to our experience it is so inexact. 1 minute can seem to last a lifetime, and an hour can seem to fly by in just a couple minutes. I find it amazing that sometimes a 10 minute exactness is plenty, and at times it is necessary to be exact down to the fraction of a second. But the system of time is designed to function like this, dividable down to the second, every division of time is applicable to measuring different kinds of activities.

Homeostasis
One main aspect of using a personal timepiece is homeostasis. No matter what the form, be it carrying a personal watch, using a cell phone, or even outside sources for the time the user becomes acquainted to, and comfortable with this resource. This can be a physical comfort, in which the watch becomes like a part of the body. Or mental comfort, where you grow a dependance on the watch as a source for the time. After you have grown a homeostatic connecting with your watch an expectation grows, you expect for the watch to be there on your wrist, or not, depending on which side you are on. And when your expectations are wrong, it is always a bit of a surprise, sometimes good, and sometimes disappointing.


Making a Design
Finally we turned our results into a design. Because of time restraints we weren't supposed to make something practical, but more to capture the essence of the experience into a product, or design.

I based the concept for my final product, on the word craving. Quickly put, a watch is a way to strap our the satiation to our craving for time to our wrists. My product is then just a strap, with which one can strap their own personal craving to their wrist. The "cravings" shown in the example are more conceptual than practical, I found however that had I then studied what people currently "crave" a strap-on version of this could have been designed as a more practical application.

Things to add to the ends of words to make them automatically sound cool

-omatic
-omat
-tron

for example:
nerdtron
poopomatic
looseromat

Haha, I'm the postal drone

Core77 blog made a quick reference to one of their message board threads about what you did as a pre-designer. I was very amused to realize that he was talking about me when he said some of us had our former lives as postal drones... Very amusing. I kind of feel famous! Ha ha

http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/yo_c77_board_alert_life_before_design_7589.asp

Baby Stroller

Wouldn't it be convenient to have a baby stroller that could lock up like a bicycle, The body could close up to make a kind of locker, or it could just fold and lock for storing on the streets.

CD Covers

A german friend of mine wanted me to share some American Rock music with him, so I picked him out some of my favorites but when I was done I had 4 hours of music, and only some of it was actually rock. So I cut it down to 2 cd's one of the full of almost purely american rock. And the other with a bunch of other songs that no-one knows about, but I love.

The best part was making the CD covers. For the Amerikanischer Rock CD, I played on the language difference, in German a rock is a skirt, so I did a picture of me wearing a true American rock for the cover. And on the inside wrote the song list, including not just the song title, and the band, but why I picked the song. When I went to print it out I ran into trouble - My printer was out of ink. But the result turned out pretty dang cool. Happy mistake (note: the file color was mostly brown).

I almost gave up in making a sleeve for the other one cause of the ink predicament, but I decided I can't have one with a really cool sleeve and the other with nothing, so I did it by hand. I took the liberty of using my in-the-process-of-being-developed-font, in a gold pencil. Which gives a nice subtle shiny effect, and then for the back, copied off from my person list writing/designing technique, by filling the whole page, and switching handwriting "fonts" constantly. I'm pretty pleased with the result, only problem is, I don't want to give it away now!


Front

Inside

Back

Front

Inside

Back