What is blendo? Michael Gosney, publisher/editor of Verbum, the Journal of Personal Computer Aesthetics, calls it "the parallel convergence of art forms" combining "anything and everything – type, bitmap paintings, vector graphics, scanned images, animation, 3-D…." School of Visual Arts academic Timothy Binkley describes computer art as the creation of "a prodigious menagerie of things" brought into being "merely by waving a magic wand." It's a fair characterization of the blendo approach. You take whatever elements are relevant (or irrelevant) to your purpose and put them into your picture.
I was in Chicago last weekend for IIT Institute of Design’s excellent Design Research Conference, and spent a day walking around the city. (I’m happy to say I can now use the term ‘Miesian’ with authority.)
I ended the day in Millennium Park eating a hot dog and looking at Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture.
Actually, to say I was looking at the sculpture sells the experience short. I’d seen the giant silver bean from a distance earlier that day, but once I was next to it, the combination of scale, surface treatment, and form made it such an unusual and compelling object that I couldn’t help but start interacting with it. Chicago writer Lynn Becker’s article on Millennium Park sculpture-as-architecture delves further into the interactivity of Cloud Gate.
After a few trips around and under the sculpture, I decided to sit back and watch how other people were responding to it.
I saw people
It was fascinating to see how people reacted to having this functionless object placed in their midst. It struck me as a form of spatial/environmental prototyping, and I’m sure that noticing and examining what people do and what their patterns of motion around this object are and synthesizing that data could produce insights to inform many types of design.
In our research work, we periodically use objects to elicit responses from people to new concepts. Sometimes these artifacts take the form of storyboards, sometimes models, and sometimes we’ll just put something in a person’s hands to give them a starting point, something to react to. One time, I handed a person we were interviewing a CD box set that was on his coffee table, and he proceeded to talk us through a whole design for the product idea we were discussing. “It’d be smaller than this, I think the corners should be rounded, maybe this part could come off . . .”
We’ve been collaborating lately with a couple of our clients on the creation of storyboards and models for this purpose. It’s been interesting figuring out in each case the right balance of detail and abstraction; how to give people enough cues to get the basic concepts, while leaving them enough space to think about how they would like to see those concepts refined.
Of course, what gets created depends on where our client is in the development process and what we want to learn from the people we’re talking to, but I think that what I saw at Cloud Gate is a good model for what one hopes an artifact will spark in a research participant: the urge to experiment, to hypothesize, to test, to interact, to play, to see what’s possible.
Related posts:
On using objects for generative research
On noticing
On prototyping and fidelity
Rack o’ seats, Tate Modern, London, July 2008
This is a nice touch: self-serve portable seating for your journey through an art museum.
Upon entering the Visitor’s Centre at the Battersea Power Station we encountered an enormous graphic, printed on canvas, and mounted on the wall like a work of art.
Here’s a thumbnail (click to see it on Flickr – account required)
or view it full size here.
Here’s a detail:
It looks as if the team working on the redevelopment conducted (or simulated the output of) an in-depth brainstorm session and had someone illustrate the resulting mental map/conceptual framework/jargony-jargon-jargon. But this is a bit of insider cricket, so why is it presented like artwork and the first thing that greets a visitor? An odd, if intriguing, way of using an artifact like this.
Previously on Battersea Power Station
Also: see more of my London and Sheffield pictures here.
Cupid’s Span, under repair. I think cartoonist Don Martin would have liked this.
See all observational ephemera.
AirTran poster, Savannah airport, March 2008
Minipops (an ongoing project, but a big Internet meme in 2005/2006)
There’s been a lot of interesting discussion recently around personas. Part of what’s really being talked about is how to tell an effective story. As in, one party has information they want to impart to another in a way that is impactful, memorable, makes a good working tool, and can be internalized and passed along to others.
Stefan Nadelman’s animated short, Food Fight, which I discovered over at Drawn, is a virtuosic example of telling a story through alternate means. Nadelman’s film presents a history of major armed conflicts since WWII, using food to represent the conflicting nations. It’s hilarious, touching and thought-provoking, and it made me want a Big Mac.
Food Fight relies on a set of shared reference points to tell its story, and I think it’s useful to keep in mind that the more we use proxies to convey information, the more we are relying on all of the communicating parties having the same set of reference points. That’s why it’s so important in a design process that any type of information vessel be treated not as a static artifact, but as a material that we can work with to clarify interpretations and surface assumptions.
Rhino art at the Centre Pompidou. Better pictures here and here
Cattle advertisement in the Bankside area of London.
Take the form of some large animal and paint it Ferrari red. Then cover it with layers of gloss. Is the result art or advertising? The context in which we experience it seems to make all the difference. A museum or outside a restaurant?
Note: a more detailed, and impassioned exploration is in I Know It When I See It. But they start with the big red rhino, too.
From the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
The text of warning tells you not to touch the piece, because it’s fragile. But the design of the warning implies that you shouldn’t cross the line. It’s a nice example of persuasive design.
Award winning artist Ken Danby died this week. I could not have recalled his name, but his painting At The Crease was iconic. I still remember seeing the print in my childhood ear doctor’s office. Post-mortem, the long-running mystery of the goalie’s identity has been cleared up.
David Denby deconstructs Knocked Up and the entire sub-genre he calls slacker-striver romance. He considers American culture over the decades and how relationships between the sexes were depicted on screen during those different periods.
Apatow has a genius for candor that goes way beyond dirty talk-that’s why “Knocked Up” is a cultural event. But I wonder if Apatow, like his fumy youths, shouldn’t move on. It seems strange to complain of repetition when a director does something particularly well, and Apatow does the infantilism of the male bond better than anyone, but I’d be quite happy if I never saw another bong-gurgling slacker or male pack again. The society that produced the Katharine Hepburn and Carole Lombard movies has vanished; manners, in the sense of elegance, have disappeared. But manners as spiritual style are more important than ever, and Apatow has demonstrated that he knows this as well as anyone. So how can he not know that the key to making a great romantic comedy is to create heroines equal in wit to men? They don’t have to dress for dinner, but they should challenge the men intellectually and spiritually, rather than simply offering their bodies as a way of dragging the clods out of their adolescent stupor.
Last week’s BayCHI program featured two exciting (if poorly attended) presentations. First, From Counterculture To Cyberculture: How The Whole Earth Catalog Brought Us Virtual Community by Fred Turner of the Stanford Department of Communication, and Be the Ball by Greg Niemeyer and Joe McKay of UC Berkeley.
Fred Turner gave one of those presentations that lulls me into thinking (for a mere moment) that it’d be fun to go back to school and be exposed to fast-moving big-thinking folks who can stream ideas at my head. His talk was a lot of fun and there’s no way to capture much of it. Maybe the associated book (note comments by Stewart Brand) would be the best suggestion? I haven’t read it but will be curious to hear from anyone who has.
Turner provides a highly synthesized historical/social/cultural perspective on the shift in computer technology (and Silicon Valley as the home for said technology) from a military, hierarchical technology to a green, revolutionary, participatory movement. He focuses on a specific set of folks like Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, John Perry Barlow and the connections between them, as well as the connections they had to other parts of culture (i.e., Barlow and the Dead scene). He referred to Ronald Burt‘s notion of a network entrepreneur as a better model for thinking about how these people all interacted.
With the Whole Earth Catalog going back to the 60s (basically a large format print publication that would catalog many items that would be useful to those living in a commune, from tractors, to tools, to how-to books, to fiction, and much more – interestingly picked up in Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools) setting some sort of foundation, a catalyzing event was a retreat that Brand convened right after the 1984 “Hackers” conference, spawned in part by Stephen Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (another point was the inclusion of journalists in these networks was very effective in growing them in just the right way), helped transform the public perception of hackers from destructive geeks to techno-revolutionaries.
He continued to described the creation of The Well, an early online forum that attracted much of this same culture – DeadHeads, Burning Man people, artists, hackers, and so on.
Underlying this great story was some interesting points about social forms of power versus rule forms of power. In other words, granting access or opportunity through merit versus who you know that is like you (and likes you). It was interesting to see what this group could build through those connections, but Turner himself acknowledged that he preferred the rules over the social power. All of which raises some big issues for me; that our culture claims to be merit-based, but clearly is hugely dominated by social power. How could children of presidents end up so prominently in politics if that were not true?
A final quote from Turner: “To be cool in America is to be granted the power to speak.”
For more academic seduction, check out the interesting course taught by Greg Niemeyer at Berkeley, including podcasts.
Along with Joe McKay (who seemed to play an engaged-but-thinks-before-he-speaks-slow-talking Paul Shaffer to Neimeyer’s fast-talking-can’t-slow-down-yet-collaborative David Letterman), they talked about games, but not as game designers, rather as artists. They showed a variety of interactive environments that were playful in nature and maybe illustrative of some point (i.e., the container filled with bamboo that monitors the oxygen flow in the space and generates jazz music where the energy level corresponds to the breathing pace of whoever is ihe space). It was a refreshing way to think about games and seemed to dovetail with John Seabrook’s recent profile of Will Wright in the New Yorker.
I enjoyed their quick personal history of the games they played throughout their life (no mention of Hotel Room Olympics, however, let alone the Ungame) and especially the demo they set up of a simple game where one stands on a platform and simply shifts weight (subtly) to move an on-screen paddle and shoot a ball into hoops that encircle it (hence the talk’s title Be The Ball). We got to try the game (something I’ve never seen at a BayCHI presentation).
Joe made a reference to Snakes and Ladders which was gratifying since I had recently been discussing the Chutes and Ladders title (more common with the Americans I know) versus the Snakes and Ladders that I encountered as a kid in Canada (where Joe also grew up). Wikipedia confirms that this is a US vs. UK difference.
And finally, Joe mentioned that his mother discovered “The Google” but is disappointed not to see new hits for him when she looks up, so hopefully Joe’s mom will find this!
Our hotel in Washington was just blocks away from The Phillips Collection, a small museum (made up of an old house and a modern extension). I paid $12.00 to see the Klee exhibit (although the permanent collection is free). I don’t remember the last time I went to museum alone; lacking much of a grounding in art and artists it’s that much more of a challenge without someone to talk it over with — even the basics of who these artists were and what they were known for is helpful in order to build up a bit of a vocabulary. Given that, the Klee exhibit was worthwhile since I learned a fair amount about the artist and saw a lot of his work (I remember that he was actively championed in the US but never came here, was insanely prolific, had enormous variety in visual styles).
My favorite pieces were from the permanent collection, although much of it seemed browned and faded and cracked (more than I’ve never noticed in other galleries). Too much of the commentary had to do with the Collection itself (I learned a new word: deaccession, the removing of a work from a collection).
The Luncheon of the Boating Party (Renoir) is very cool. It was given a prominent place at the end of a small room. It’s one of those paintings where you think a light is being shone upon it, but it’s all in how it was painted. It just glowed with light, and with the complex energy and stories of these characters all in place.
Philip Guston, Untitled – 1980. I don’t know why I liked this, I just did. The cartoon-y look certainly appealed.
Approaching a City by Edward Hopper was a familiar and surprising subject for a painting. This would be a great photograph, but who would think to paint it?
Nicolas de Sta?´l (I’m not sure this was the piece I saw; they had a few de Sta?´l and all were amazingly thick-thick-thick with layers of paint, very cool in person but useless to see here).
Obviously these compressed on-screen images aren’t meant to evoke anything except recognition.