Design Futures Fall 2008
Design Futures talk series
Most events at Berkeley Center for New Media Commons, located at 340 Moffitt Library, near the Free Speech Cafe (map)
6:00 - 7:30pm.
September 24
Jennifer Bove (HUGE) and Ben Fullerton (IDEO)
designing memorable experiences: an introduction to service design
Jennifer Bove and Ben Fullerton will explore what it takes to design services that keep people coming back for more. They will probe the dynamics of this subject, considering along the way other curious questions, such as: why do people get excited about intangible services in the same way they lust after the latest shiny lump of plastic?
October 8
Scott Summit (Summit ID)
The Changing Role of Designers in a Dynamic, Digital Environment
Scott Summit has designed a wide variety of consumer products, with clients including Apple, Palm, Nike, Silicon Graphics. Recently, however, he has switched focus to researching applications where digital body scanning, parametric computer modeling and direct digital manufacturing intersect. The results include bespoke products specifically tailored to unique needs, digitally fabricated for the individual user. This approach to ‘mass customization’ offers a new hope for many people whose needs have been neglected by mass production
October 22
John Poisson (Radar)
CANCELLED
October 29
George Oates (Yahoo!)
Into the Wild: Breathing New Life Into Collections
Using ‘The Commons’ project as the basis for this presentation, George Oates will show how this innovative pilot program, whereby cultural heritage institutions are invited to share content from their photographic archives on Flickr, can dramatically increase an institution’s profile and online positioning. The motives are straightforward: to increase access to these historic photographs, and to elicit general information and additional context from interested members of the Flickr community. Launched in January 2008, ‘The Commons’ on Flickr has already attracted worldwide attention, and is growing fast. In addition to outlining the program in general, George will talk about some of the new ideas and challenges for museums that are spurred by participation in ‘The Commons’. What does it mean for museums to engage so directly in such an open communication channel? What sort of information has the program generated so far? How can this new interaction and activity be useful?
November 5
Jonah Brucker-Cohen (Trinity College Dublin, coin-operated.com)
Deconstructing Networks
Jonah will discuss his projects and work in the theme of “Deconstructing Networks” in both physical and online instantiations. He will introduce his projects that attempt to challenge and subvert accepted notions of network interaction from software manipulation and rule-based systems to translating virtual processes and conventions into the physical world. Some projects he will discuss include “BumpList”, an email community for the determined, “Alerting Infrastructure!”, a website hit counter that destroys a building, “PoliceState” a fleet of radio controlled policecars who’s movements are dictated by keywords sniffed on a local network, “Wifi-Hog” a portable system for regaining control of public wireless networks, “Wifi-Liberator” an open source toolkit to broadcast free access to pay-per-use wireless networks, “SimpleTEXT” a dynamically generated performance that is controlled by participants through texting messages from their mobile phones, and several more projects.
November 19
Mirjana Spasojevic (Nokia Research Palo Alto)
Mobile Design Principles: Insights from the Consumer Field Studies
Despite significant challenges, a growing number of Americans and Europeans are turning to their mobile phones to access the internet. The promises of faster networks and smart phones suggest that, at long last, the web could become truly mobile. Yet, in order to fully realize potential of a mobile internet designer and product developers still need to overcome expectations built on the PC legacy.
This talk presents insights from several field studies of consumers in the US, Europe and Hong Kong conducted in 2006 and 2007. Through a combination of a diary study, in-depth interviews and deprivation of users to access of internet on their computers, we collected qualitative data illustrating how people currently use their mobile phones and the internet. Using this field data, we develop several mobile design principles to drive product design and strategy.
November 26
Erik Adigard (M-A-D)
December 3
Leah Buechley (MIT Media Lab)
New Craft - A Marriage of High and Low Tech
People knit scarves, build furniture, sew clothing, and solder radios together in their homes and garages. Diverse groups of people–girls and boys, grandparents and college students–lovingly engage in these hands-on low-tech hobbies. In contrast, companies produce high-tech things by high-tech processes, using teams of people and sophisticated machinery to build devices like cell phones, computers, pharmaceutical drugs, and cars. But this clear division between high-tech and low-tech is beginning to blur. A host of new tools is making many of the resources previously available only to companies accessible to individuals, empowering people to design, engineer, and build devices that integrate high and low technology.
This talk will discuss this “new craft”, envisioning a future in which individuals integrate traditional craft, engineering, and web-honed communication skills to build and share information about “high-low tech” devices like temperature sensing scarves, algorithmically generated furniture, and radically customized cell phones. The presentation will discuss burgeoning high-low tech communities, focusing on ways that professional designers and engineers can support and encourage this new creative movement. It will present examples of high-low tech artifacts–including embroidered circuits and paper computers–and examples of tools that empower others to construct high-low tech devices–including the LilyPad Arduino, a construction kit that enables novices to build fabric-based wearable computers.