Category: Interviews and features

MA ID 02: the 2015 Interaction Design show

Last week, students graduating from the MA in Interaction Design exhibited their final projects in the St James Church at Hatcham, New Cross. We’ve already featured a few of these projects on the blog; if you haven’t yet, read our interviews with Karen Barrett, Tom Hoare and Shih-Yuan Huang.

Naho Matsuda’s project focuses on the hidden, dark thoughts and revenge fantasies that most of us indulge in sometimes. Naho collected stories of such fantasies of murder and revenge and then asked some professionals from other fields to make sense of them: a crime investigation specialist, a private detective, a poet, a designer… Continue reading “MA ID 02: the 2015 Interaction Design show”

MA-ID-02 preview: with Shih-Yuan Huang’s Transritual Tools for the Afterlife, death is only the beginning

Shih-Yuan Huang graduation project
Photo by Xie Pei Ying

Death is understandably a topic that most of us would rather not think about or discuss, but it is also an inescapable part of human experience. Different cultures use varied approaches to help us cope with grief and our fear of death; the graduation project of MA Interaction Design student Shih-Yuan Huang combines resources from several religions and beliefs in a new approach to afterlife practices.

Yuan was led towards this subject by her own experiences; two years ago, she lost a loved one to cancer: “I experienced all the funeral processes, and before this he was in pain and went through a very hard period. My family is Taoist Buddhist, so I wanted to bring Taoist Buddhist culture into western funeral systems. I’d been thinking about doing that for a long time, but it never happened because it was really tough for me to face it, but now the time has come to think about it”. Continue reading “MA-ID-02 preview: with Shih-Yuan Huang’s Transritual Tools for the Afterlife, death is only the beginning”

MA-ID-02 graduation show preview: Karen Barrett argues for misery as a vital part of human experience

This year’s MA Interaction Design graduation show (1-4 December) is getting closer and closer, and we’re here to whet your appetite for it by offering a sneak peek at some of the student projects to be exhibited!

Today, we’re talking to Karen Barrett, whose work offers a twist on the dominant neoliberal perspective of our current times, which urges us to pursue constant happiness at all cost. “Instead I propose that misery and suffering are inevitable in the human experience and therefore should be embraced rather than shunned. My project seeks to develop alternative emotional narratives that allow for acceptance and celebration of misery”, Karen says.

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How did you get the idea and what were the challenges in developing it? Continue reading “MA-ID-02 graduation show preview: Karen Barrett argues for misery as a vital part of human experience”

Oliver Blank talked to Goldsmiths Design students about artwork to inspire wonder and design to prevent suffering

Last week, designer and composer Oliver Blank came to Goldsmiths Design to talk about his career path and the milestones that led him to his current commitment to ‘design for the prevention of suffering’. Oliver is currently Senior Designer at Google Life Sciences, and he is an alumnus of Goldsmiths himself (albeit of an MA course in Music).

In his presentation, Oliver took the audience along on a journey through the various cities he has called home, from his native Manchester to Helsinki, New Orleans and San Francisco, and through the experiences that inspired his work. After staying in New Orleans during Hurricane Isaac in 2012, for instance, Oliver helped put together a means of providing information to locals by pairing up the city’s last working means of communication, phone landlines, with an informative Twitter account. And while bedridden in San Francisco after breaking his hip, Oliver reflected on missed opportunities and thought up ‘The one who got away‘, a phone line where callers can leave messages for lost connections from the past.

Oliver shared with Goldsmiths Design students some of the lessons he learned from his successes and failures. Designers should always think beyond building an item- they should consider how it will be used: ‘don’t just design the thing, design for deployment’. It is also important for them to figure out their ‘why’s, what guides them in every step of their activity. Oliver Blank has found his motivation: to create artwork that inspires wonder, and to design for preventing suffering.