For those of you that missed Brendan’s talk, we captured it [on poor quality video]:

Design Means… Brendan Walker from Matt Ward on Vimeo.

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Vicarious: performance, psychophysiological monitoring and broadcast technologies to thrill an audience

25th January 2010

4 – 6 pm

Room137a, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths

Brendan Walker is “the world’s only Thrill Engineer”. He originally trained as a military aeronautical engineer, before researching and teaching in Interaction Design at the RCA. Brendan now runs Aerial – a design practice specialising in the creation of tailored emotional experience, with clients such as The Science Museum, Merlin Entertainment, and Disneyland. Brendan is a visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham.

All ‘Design Means…’ lectures are open to the public.

Design Real at the Serpentine Gallery

26th Nov – 7th Feb

I haven’t been yet but this exhibition promises to be good – catch it now before it finishes on the Feb 7th. The exhibition has been curated by Konstantin Grcic and focuses on mass-produced objects designed in the last decade.

The Serpentine are also running a Design Real seminar series discussing themes relating to the exhibition, the next one on Thursday 21st January will be by Alex Rich, who was a collaborator on the exhibition design, and Tim Parsons.

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SIX SPEAKING CHAIRS, OBJECTS FOR GRANDPEOPLE AND THE MUSEUM OF LOST INTERACTIONS

7th December 2009

4 – 6 pm

Room137a, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths

Graham Pullin is an interaction designer who spent 10 years at IDEO which included leading Social Mobiles with Crispin Jones and running a studio.
He moved to Dundee to pursue research into communication aids for people who cannot speak, has published the book ‘Design Meets Disability’ and
leads the Interactive Media Design course there.

All ‘Design Means…’ lectures are open to the public.

For anyone who missed Tim Parsons talk at Goldsmiths the other week you have another chance to hear him talk at a free event at Metropolitan Works as part of their Creative Dialogue series. It sounds like the talk will cover the same ground as for our Design Means seminar. If you don’t go keep a watch on their events anyway – they get a lot of interesting speakers as well as offering incredible digital workshop facilities and training courses.

Creative Dialogue Tim Parsons

Thanks to Albena Yaneva for a great presentation on her ethnographic studies of OMA and architectural practices at the Objects of Design and Social Science seminar series. Audience responses were lively and covered topics including the material resistances of architectural models; ethnography and the anonymisation of visual and material field objects; the procedural shortcomings of ANT; the politics of architectural objects as well as their front-staging. In response to a question posed concerning phenomenology, architecture and ethnography Albena has provided an essay, co-authored with Bruno Latour, entitled “Give me a Gun and I Will Make all Buildings Move”: An ANT’s View of Architecture.

"Give me a Gun and I Will Make all Buildings Move": An ANT's View of Architecture

Download Essay in PDF Format

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IN SEARCH OF INSPIRATION

9th november 2009

4 – 6 pm

Room137a, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths

Dominic Wilcox is an artist, designer, inventor and thinkeruper who works within the territory of the ‘everyday’. Everyday objects, environments, buildings, human interaction, no area of normality is out of reach. His work, which is usually layered with an ultra dry wit, places a spotlight on the banal, always adding a new, alternative perspective on things we take for granted. [Words by Matt Ward]

All ‘Design Means…’ lectures are open to the public.

We have broken your business, now we want your machines

Monday’s ‘Design Means…’ talk, by Russell Davies, was great. Russell’s talk centered around W. Brian Arthur’s book The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. He examined how and why digital technologies are moving into the world and becoming more physical. He took to task the unimaginative use of screens within publics space- ‘posters don’t give you DOS when they fail’- and he described a future a bit like ‘Bladerunner… brought to you by Cillit Bang’.

Although I was familiar with a lot of the content and examples that Russell used, I was still blown away by his humour and presentation skills. One of the most powerful messages was the quote from a presentation he’d given to the Guardian: We have broken your business, now we want your machines. It’s here that we see new forms of media production through novel use and infrastructure leapfrogging. Accessing the highly developed infrastructures of ‘old media’ and opening up well established manufacturing technologies offers new and exciting opportunities – ultimately it could allow for higher levels experimentation and increased innovation. The conversations and questions moved to the pub where we continued to discuss the role and relationship between Design, Marketing and Advertising. I particularly liked the way that Russell described Newspaper Club, although I’m still worried about its ecological impact, I love the way a small idea has become both a viable business and a new medium for social interaction and communication.

Due to the success of it’s primary year, the Design and Social Science seminar series; a collaboration between the two departments, is back this academic year under a new title ‘The Objects of Design and Social Science’.

The first one for the year was Wednesday October 14th with talks by Bill Gaver, Tobie Kerridge, Mike Michael & Alex Wilkie, all from Goldsmiths. The series continues on Wednesday November 4th with Albena Yaneva from the University of Manchester talking about ‘Buildings as Things’.

All seminars run from 4:00pm – 6:00pm and are hosted by the Interaction Research Studio, 6th Floor, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW.

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More information:

This seminar series will seek to bring into view and explore existing objects of both design and social science as well as draw out objects of novelty for both disciplines. In doing so we will seek to engage with emerging issues and topics in both disciplines such as the outputs of speculative and critical design, participation, engagement and publics as well as addressing notions concerning heterogeneity, process and event. This series will continue to serve as a platform for opening up interdisciplinary research futures. [Words by Alex Wilkie]

MATERIALISING AND DEMATERIALISING A WEB OF DATA

26 October 2009

4 – 6 pm

Russell was born in Derby, enjoyed an uneventful childhood, did college, all that. 
After failing as a popstar and a joke writer he ended up in advertising and tried to 
do ‘interactive marketing’ way before anyone was interested. Ended up at Wieden + 
Kennedy working on clients like Microsoft, Nike and Honda. Then he went to work for 
Nike as Global Consumer Planning Director. He went freelance in 2006 and works with 
shadowy organisations like the Open Intelligence Agency and the Really Interesting 
Group. He also writes ‘eggbaconchipsandbeans’ occasionally organises ‘Interesting’ 
conferences, plays with things like speechification, dawdlr and slowpoke and does 
columns for Campaign magazine and Wired UK. If asked what he actually does all day, 
he’ll normally mutter something about ‘post-digital’.

[Words by Matt Ward]

THINKING: OBJECTS

12 October 2009

Tim Parsons kicked of the first in the series of Design Means lectures this year which coincided with the launch of his new book:

Image via www.timparsons.info

You can purchase your copy of his book from Amazon.