Category: Alumni

When lamp posts talk

At the beginning of this year, we found out (and let you know too) that PAN Studio, an experience design practice run by Goldsmiths BA Design graduates Sam Hill and Ben Barker, had won the first Playable City Award for their project „Hello Lamp Post”. Arts venue Watershed in Bristol picked PAN’s entry out of 93 participants who pitched innovative ways of using technology to create playful public spaces. Well, the winning project is finally being implemented, so for eight weeks starting from the 15th of July, people around Bristol will be able to awaken street objects such as lamp posts and post boxes and chat to them via SMS. If you have a look at their website, you’ll be able to get an idea of the conversations that are happening around town.

Here’s a chat with PAN’s Ben Barker about Hello Lamp Post as well as other things. Continue reading “When lamp posts talk”

On craft in modern times with Nicholas O’Donnell-Hoare

Nicholas O’Donnell-Hoare is a graduate of Goldsmiths’ MA in Design: Critical Practice who has returned as a visiting tutor; this summer, he will run “Processes of Making”, a short craft-oriented course for the Design department at Goldsmiths, alongside another Goldsmiths MA graduate, Rebecca Steiner. (You can read more about the course and enroll here.) We thought this would be a good moment to get to know him better, so here we are with an interview of him! Nicholas has agreed to chat with us about his work with the multidisciplinary design group Saint-H, his guiding principles and the meaning and changes of craft in contemporary times. Nicholas is very committed to ecology and sustainability in his practice, and believes that design is capable of overturning the contemporary consumer culture from the inside in a more responsible direction. Continue reading “On craft in modern times with Nicholas O’Donnell-Hoare”

Kaddie Rothe is a Nanodesigner

While experimenting with building objects from all kinds of different materials is a designer’s field, third year BA Design student Kaddie (Katharina) Rothe wanted to go even further: to build new materials altogether. Her project “I am a nanodesigner”, a collaboration with Dr Russell Binions from Queen Mary, University of London, aims to build a bridge between science and design and to provide a different perspective on the emerging and highly hyped field of nanotechnology (as you may already know if you went to their lecture at Goldsmiths last month.)

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Continue reading “Kaddie Rothe is a Nanodesigner”

Evan Boehm on narrative spaces

Between the moment I asked Evan Boehm for an interview after hearing that his interactive short film “The Carp and The Seagull” had won an award from Adobe and the time I got around to publishing this article, Evan already had another success to report: he was nominated for a Webby Award (the Oscars of the Internet!) and shortlisted for another three- in one category, he shared the list with such famous names as Pixar’s Brave and Prometheus. “The Carp and the Seagull” received most of the honours, but Evan’s installation for the hit reality tv show Project Runway also got recognition.

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Evan is a Motion Director and a graduate of Goldsmiths’ MA in Design: Critical Practice; his now famous short, an expansion of his thesis project on narrative spaces and creating a spatial representation of a story, is not just a tale but an experience, allowing the user to interact with it and see different elements of it from different viewing angles while looking at the same geometric space. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is time to do so and play with the 3D environment while learning the story of the encounter between a spirit and fisherman Masato. Then, read the chat we had: Continue reading “Evan Boehm on narrative spaces”