Craig Oldham recently published 12 IN 12, an accompaniment to a talk where he gave a listing of 12 things he learned in his first 12 months as a graphic designer. In the talk he touched upon hte different cultures of designers, emotional design and logical design, and lists members of each.
What struck me was that locative media practitioners often refer back to the situationists as some kind of ancestors, as if they’re working in the same vein. The situationist love for traipsing about town is shared by locative artists who similarly enjoy taking computing ‘outside’, into ‘everyday life’. Just like the situationists we must reclaim the street, and this time we’ll use computers to do it!
But that, to me, seems to be where the similarities end. As alive-and-kicking situationist muse Jacqueline de Jong pointed out during the evening, the situationists wanted one thing above all else: to destroy and disrupt our cushy society. They were sick of it, vowing never to work a day in their lives. They probably would have laughed if they had seen that their ideas had been cherry-picked for ripe concepts. The derive, the detournement. All simple concepts that they purposefully packaged in complex and artistc jargon. And we fell for it.
So, we have two options. Either we stop pretending the situationists are our forefathers, or we actually do see them as our forefathers, and start using computing to disrupt instead of streamline society.
Locative Media and The Situationists – The Mobile City
A brief survey view of my usual identity, seanaes, across several sites. Please don’t be a username-squatter. kThx.
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I saw the TugBoat Printshop at Craftacular last weekend and I still want this print.
Barracuda (The Deep Blue Sea Series)
Antarctica from Jordan Manley on Vimeo.
From the book Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern, uploaded to flickr by Bre Pettis
See the whole set here.
Google updated Street View in the US today and have expanded the coverage quite a bit. What used to be a series of small puffy blue clouds covering mostly metropolitan areas has now become are sea of blue covering much of the nation.
The idea is great, feeling a bit of mad-libs and a little like – hey I am writing a personal note to this beta website that doesn’t yet have a public signup.
While 3X3 + 1 wasn’t the most popular in the focus groups, that would be IV-B, it eventually won out. Some of the other designs make sense in as much as they have strong similarity to the dial used on phones previously. I do wonder though, if the prevalent use of the number keypad, in similar forms to the telephone keypad now found on ATMs, safes and my desktop keyboard would look different. Was the 3X3+1 configuration in use in other situations before the telephone company made the switch?
Over at Design Observer remarks from Chris Pullman shares the 10 lessons he learned in his 35 years as the VP of Design at WGBH
1 Work on things that matter.
2 Work with people you like and respect.
3 Be nice.
4 Have high standards.
Don’t settle for “whatever.” The corrosive Dilbert mind-set is depressing and demeaning. Wherever you choose to work, don’t give it a foothold. I prefer the “see you and raise you one” escalation of good ideas, even crazy ideas. High standards is something that has set this place apart. Even in hard times, it is important to keep hold of this core distinction, whatever it costs.
5 Have a sense of humor.
6 Design is not the narrow application of formal skills, it is a way of thinking.
7 Variety is the spice of life.
8 Institutions have a character, just like people do.
9 We’re all in the “understanding business.”
10 You are what you eat.
Click over to Design Observer as each of the 10 items has some good insight.
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