Material Beliefs is a group of designers based in London. They might create pieces of furniture and accessories but they are not your usual tables and cups. The result of a close collaboration with scientists and engineers, social scientists but also members of the public, their projects take emerging biomedical and cybernetic technology out of labs and into public space. The members of Material Beliefs use design as a tool for public engagement, a mean to stimulate discussion about the value and impact of new technologies which blur the boundaries between our bodies and materials.

Each of the prototypes they develop is the starting point of a fruitful and much needed debate in public space about the relationship between science and society.

Fly-paper robotic clock © Auger-Loizeau 2008

Lampshade robot © Auger-Loizeau 2008

Their prototypes are questionable and puzzling. They include a series of extremely cruel and useful Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots (think moth-eating lamps and a robotic coffee table that doubles as a mouse trap) and pastel pink or baby blue Vital Signs monitors (a product of the child surveillance industry, they enable data about the body to be communicated across a mobile phone network.) You can encounter them in venues as different as the Dana Centre in London and LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon, Spain.

At the heart of Material Beliefs are Andy Robinson, Elio Caccavale, Tobie Kerridge, Jimmy Loizeau (with James Auger) and Susana Soares.

My victim for this interview is designer Tobie Kerridge whom i wanted to talk with ever since i read about about a project he conceived than actually prototyped together with scientist Ian Thompson and designer Nikki Stott: Biojewellery. The project catapults traditional engagement and wedding rings into the world of tissue engineering and biotechnology research by using bone tissue cultured from human cells in order to create bespoke jewellery.

Tobie at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Imperial College

I must admit that i almost regretted to have asked you this interview. While preparing it, i had a long look through the website of Material Beliefs and found it so complete and so well documented that i felt that there was nothing left for me to ask you. I then had the idea of doing a 'designboom style' interview where the designer is asked all sorts of apparently frivolous questions. So now the idea has become irresistible and here's a question i stole from designboom: I assume you notice how women dress. Do you have any preferences?

Vital Signs monitors © Tobie Kerridge 2008

Vital Signs scenario © Tobie Kerridge 2008

Then I'm going to be cheeky and and steal someone's answer, Inga Sempé's was nice - "no".

I like the name of the project, Material Beliefs, a lot. Where does it come from and which kind of ideas do you want it to convey?

Ah, this is a long story, and it also shows a lack of imagination under pressure. I was writing the funding proposal for Material Beliefs with Savita Custead, and we had to get the thing submitted. Being a bit stuck for names, the project title came about by co-joining the titles of two beloved projects.

One is Materials Library, run by Mark Miodownik, Zoe Laughlin and Martin Conreen. They operate an archive of materials, and take these artefacts into public spaces by staging performative events. They convened a series at the Tate, and then followed on with events at the Wellcome Collection themed around Flesh and one coming up soon will focus on Hair. Their obsessions create new communities that play across disciplines.

The other was a proposal for funding to the ECRC by Robert Doubleday, Mark Welland, James Wilsdon and Brian Wynne called "Material Imaginations". Their proposal followed on from a project I first read about in See Through Science, a report by DEMOS. Doubleday set up an ethnographic project in Welland's Nanotechnology lab, the aim being to work with scientists to imagine the social outcomes of their nanotechnology research. He said "My role is to help imagine what the social dimensions might be, even though the eventual applications of the science aren't yet clear". This made me think about the role of design as a set of speculative tools for working with science and engineering.

I was a student of Durrell Bishop, Tony Dunne, Bill Gaver, Fiona Raby, and other fine tutors at what's now the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art. In this context, my practice emerged through an interrogation of design methods and aims. Material Beliefs is an attempt to make design's association with science and technology more embedded. It takes influence from Doubleday's - and previously Bruno Latour's and Steve Woolgars - encampment in labs. The difference is that the role of that occupation is more than analytical, it attempts to synthesise outcomes - what happens when speculative attitudes to science and technology get located at the site of laboratory research? Well not much sometimes, but other times it works out and you get a fascinating and messy shared practice. Designers and Scientists/Engineers also have to work harder to understand each others roles and offer respect and support - it's difficult and rewarding.

Building fly-eating robots at the Royal Institution of Great Britain

The other aspect is that these collaborations take place in public as much as possible. Taking inspiration from Miodownik, Laughlin and Conreen, it's about doing the work in front of and with audiences. These are not only the audiences you might find at art or design exhibitions. Sometimes the model of public engagement is not top-down, but about getting people into labs and enabling them to do new stuff - making enquiries, building their own prototypes, asking researchers about the ethics of technology, finding out how funding is awarded.

Here design becomes a tool for translating academic knowledge into resources for independent enquiry, and a way of enabling others to access technology. This can be tricky as you have to sneak people into labs, under the radar of public relations departments who might not see the value of access for groups that wont promote the research in a straightforward way. This is not a criticism, it just that some institutions are not yet set up for challenging forms of public engagement. This situation I think is aggravated by an institutional anxiety about campaigning groups, but that is another story.

Finally, when I first Googled "Material Beliefs" it was all about religious practices, and it seemed appropriate, seeing as we were going to be doing so much preaching.


Neuroscope Prototype © Elio Caccavale 2008

Material Beliefs looks like a unique structure. I suspect that many artists and designers would dream of engaging with emerging biomedical and cybernetic technology in close cooperation with engineers and social scientists. Which kind of advice would you give to artists or designers who might want to set up a design lab like yours? How did you manage to get the ear (and funding) of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in England?

It's a good time to extend design practices that ask questions about our relationship with technology and science. In the UK at least, there is an ongoing discussion about how public engagement of science should be done. This is a discussion at a policy level, about democratising access to the research that will have its outcomes in the products and services we use. So while public engagement of science used to be about persuading the public that science produced a benefit, or where it was a strategy for encouraging a new generation of scientists, engineers and mathematicians to keep the nation competitive, it is now also about looking for new ways to involve different groups of people in science. These discussions then filter down into decisions about how funding is awarded. I think Material Beliefs probably benefited from new attitudes about what public engagement of science is allowed to be.

We set out to say that design lets non-specialists respond to science in creative ways, to make their own things out of their curiosities with bioengineering, and to have an active role within the production of research, or at least to play a role in the discussion of what unfinished research might come to mean. Rather than be told that this or that technology is not really risky, or at best being invited into a conversation that decides if a technology is risky, publics can actually have some kind of active role in how technology encountered. That's what design can do, it encourages an active orientation towards materials and processes, it provides a reason to try to do something, rather than sit back passively, then point your finger out of anxiety, for example over the potential effects of biotechnological products and services that suddenly appear on the market - "Where did that come from? Frankenfoods messing up my body, I am even angrier now!". The fact is that science is complex, it is enacted through a relationship between peers and rivals, institutions, markets, funders, politicians, ethics committees. Rather than ignore that, or treat science as monolithic entity, why not try to situate a practice productively somewhere amongst this fascinating network? Material Beliefs is only starting to think about this extended role for design, others have been doing it for some time, and I'm thinking of Natalie Jeremijenko's practice, Symbiotica's lab in Perth, and the thinking that has informed the Design Interactions course.


Group from the Roundhouse interviewing researchers about cyborgs

More generally, how do scientists react to your interests and works? Are they immediately ready to cooperate? Do you have to painfully win them over? How easy is the dialogue with people who seem to have a radically different background?

One thing learnt from this project is to take the invitations very wide initially, and to rapidly make sense of who might want to collaborate. Material Beliefs is lead by the designers, James Auger, Elio Caccavale, Jimmy Loizeau, Susana Soares and myself, and I must say that all of us broke our backs pursuing eminent, exciting but ultimately uninterested scientists and engineers. If people want to do stuff, then run with them. The hardest aspect was articulating our approach, and making it clear what was expected and what we would be doing. Academics are busy, whatever their discipline, and there are not many academics you could expect to spend time doing activities that are outside of there specialism. That is asking a lot.

Luckily, there is some pressure on science and engineering to do public engagement. Being able to show you have done this helps with funding. This was something we could appeal to. I don't think this is being tricksy, it's just a matter of finding a recognisable space in which to hold the stuff you want to do, that makes sense for everyone, even if it is for slightly different reasons. You all need to take risks, the designer needs to be elastic with their focus as a practitioner, and the engineer scientists need to take into account alternative descriptions of their research objects. It's not easy to make sense of a question about the ethics of a technology that you have been developing intensively for two years.

We are, or I hope were, quite naive in the way we approached science, which of course has a different culture to design. I have a particularly painful memory of filming an interview with a researcher, and not making it clear that the interview was to be put online. He was very angry when | sent him a link for approval, particularly as the first clip was me setting up and dropping the camera, and kind of laughing awkwardly. I thought the clip was charming. He thought I was taking the piss, and sent some quite angry emails. Have a look at some of the interviews that did get approved. This was a way for us to read around the research, to get it from the researchers mouths. Their descriptions are imbued with their excitement, and taken down a notch so we can understand. Perfect. Imaging having to orientate your practice to biotechnology through academic papers, or newspapers - the extremes of possible discourses - that leave you respectively bewildered or sour.


Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots at LABoral

"Material Beliefs blur the boundaries between material culture and bioengineering research, designing speculative products that embody emerging technologies." How does one design a speculative product? And how can a product be "speculative"? How do you avoid the label "Art"?

You design something that you don't mean to manufacture. We all used design methods and processes, and built prototypes, but the emphasis was with the interaction between the prototypes and statements about social life, rather than the prototypes and business. If you want to make a product, you will spend more time specifying materials because unit cost is important, or you will be looking for intellectual property opportunities, and talking to distributors. That's fine, but you can't also then ask public questions about the role of technology. You can try, but I'm sure you will be very tired, and loose some friends and alienate your family.

One place that seems to do sci-art well is the residency programme at Peals, Elio did something there. What often seems to happen, is that there is an assumption that art will benefit from science, and science will benefit from art. That's crap, it's like a small dinner party for two couples, both delighted at the company of one another. What Peals does is address the way the collaboration can be enacted through a much wider network of people.

So it's not about a problem with the label of art, just whose label that is, and what they are trying to do with it. It's worth mentioning SymbioticA again here, who have managed to set up a lab that invites and educates arts practitioners. This is proper, it has been developed slowly and carefully, to the point where it is respected and supported for what it does, by people from many different disciplines. Of note in the UK also is Arts Catalyst.


Design Interaction students isolating their DNA at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering

Do you have pictures of MB working studio? Does it look and function more like a lab or your usual design studio?

Material Beliefs is scattered about the place. There is the Interaction Research Studio and design workshop at Goldsmiths, RapidForm and Design Interactions at the RCA, the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College, Cybernetics and Pharmacy at Reading University, and the Institute of Ophthalmology at University Collage London. Project activities are based at the most appropriate site, and in some cases need to be run across multiple sites at the same time. The Neuroscope project is noteworthy here, with Julia Downes and Mark Hammond working with cell cultures and server side software, Elio Caccavale desiging CAD prototypes and David Muth writing a client application.

Equally important are the venues where members of the collaborations curate public events. These have included The Dana Centre, the V&A, MoMA, the Design Museum in London, The Royal Institution of Great Britain, the National Theatre, The Stephen Lawrence Centre, LABoral and Selfridges. There's a full list here. These forays into public spaces have acted as a cross between work in progress shows, design crits and think-tanks.

There have also been some smaller scale activities that are really messy, and which have transgressed divisions between labs and publics. There was an event at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBE) called Mind the Loop, that had no clear design outcome, it was just too interesting to neglect. The silicon beta cell is designed to behave like an artificial pancreas, sensing blood sugar levels in the body and applying this biometric data to an algorithm which controls an insulin pump to regulate the blood sugar levels. That's the loop, It's a biological system rendered in silicon. Then around this technology you have different people, including the engineer who is making it work, the person who might use the silicon beta cell, and the doctor who negotiates and implements use. Mind the loop was a conversation between these three people, filmed by Steve Jackman.

Stills from Cotton Wool Kids, Cutting Edge for Channel 4 UK TV

Material Beliefs kicked off with a statement about biological and silicon hybrids, looking perhaps for the collaborations to establish a contemporary description of cyborg. The conversation about the silicon beta cell was striking because it showed the model of this hybrid was more extensive, it was more than one person, the technology is not stable, both in terms of its function and meaning and it took on the values of different communities. At the same time, as the collaboration at IBE was being discussed at public events I became aware of lots of discussion about the relationship between biomedical engineering and monitoring, trust and risk. I built Vital Signs to locate this discussion in a product that monitors a child's biometrics. In the UK there's a debate about childhood and risk, Cutting Edges Cotton Wool Kids and the RSA's recent report are examples. The Vital Signs prototypes are not critical of biomedical research, but designed to ask some questions about how technologies reproduce and materialise social relations.

Sorry, that's drifted away from the question a bit! I hope it gives an example of how the collaborations operate across different sites.

I am very intrigued by the role of Andy Robinson. He is the project manager of MB. How does one manage the speculative? What does his function involve?

I'll ask Andy.

Andy Robinson: My approach to managing the specualtive is to combine the essentials of any project management role, aims and objectives, timescales and milestone etc etc. with a very clear understanding of the particularities of the participants and their ways of working. It is a conversation between participant and the aims set up for the project, where review and redirection are always possible within an agreed, often revised, playing field. The funder is crucial in this in setting up the opportunity for such a project in the first place. This is where the important tone is set, and i try to manage the conversion between participants and this tone. My function therefore is to have an overview, be neutral amongst agendas, but support the initial voice of the projects aims to engage with the participants skills and motivations. Ultimately it is to support creativity to flourish, risks to be taken, the unexpected to be embraced, and speculation to thrive.

I had a huge row with my boyfriend a few years ago. And you're the one to blame. He was totally into doing one of your biojewellery rings and thought i didn't love him enough to sacrifice a bit of wisdom tooth to make one. Where are the rings now? Are you still working on the project? What separates them from mass commercialization? The technology is too expensive? People find the idea hard to stomach?

Ha, sorry to hear about your row! At least you didn't end up with a nasty mouth infection like one of the participants. She was very nice about it, despite the discomfort and having to go on a course of antibiotics. I think the project managed to pay for parking fines she incurred while having the operation, which is some small compensation for a rather frustrating series of events for her.

Though it was not the tooth that provided the sample for the rings. Painful wisdom teeth merely provided a medical reason to have a bit of jaw bone removed, "while we're in there, lets just take a little chip of bone". I'm trivialising something that Ian Thompson did a great deal of work on - an application to a medical ethics committee for permission to run and experiment on the in vitro interaction of osteoblasts with ceramic scaffolds. So growing the rings for the couples also contributed to research about how to culture bone tissue into fairly large volumes.

The real rings are with the couples, and there are various models that tour around. Nikki Stott is setting up an exhibition in Spain shortly, and there have been quite a few shows this year. So it's archived and still active.

Any upcoming projects you could share with us? Either personal or from Material Beliefs?

Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots and Vital Signs are part of the Touch Me festival in Zagreb, so Jimmy Loizeau and I will take some prototypes for exhibition, and I think present Material Beliefs as part of the symposium. The festival theme "arises from the need for artistic and cultural analysis of contemporary forms of violence and systems of control". This is something of a departure from the other weekend, when I was sitting with four year olds in the Royal Institution of Great Britain drawing fly eating robots with felt tips.

I'm then really looking forward to 2009 and getting into my phd, and your questions have given me some things to think about, so thanks for that!

Thanks Tobie!

All images courtesy Material Beliefs.

LABoral, the art center we have come to associated with new media art, has recently opened an exhibition dedicated to new, audacious and thought-provoking forms of design. Curated by Roberto Feo and Rosario Hurtado (El Último Grito), Nowhere/Now/Here aims to challenge the perception of design by questioning our relationship with the environment. Taking the viewpoint that our environment has become part of us rather than us being part of it, as its point of departure, Nowhere/Now/ Here encourages us to see design as an integral component of the world-shaping process.

Troika. Gijón Magnética. 2008 (foto Enrique G. Cardenas)

Nowhere/Now/Here features more than 60 works that challenge the conception we might have of design. Some by designers you may have met in these pages before (Dunne & Raby, Troika, Auger-Loizeau, Eelko Moorer, David Bowen, Pablo Valbuena, Marei Wollersberger, Yuri Suzuki, Noam Toran, etc. ) and in many other publications (Tord Boontje, Assa Ashuach, Paul Cocksedge, etc.)

The design of the exhibition itself reflects the explorative approach of Nowhere/Now/Here. Conceived like a 'mental adventure' and relying on colourful graphics on the floor that guide visitors through the space, it was created by Patricia Urquiola studio and the graphic image and vision of Fernando Gutierrez.

The catalogue of the the exhibition Nowhere/Now/Here, Investigating New Lines of Enquiry in Contemporary Design is gorgeous and its cast is stellar: there are interview with Ron Arad, Javier Mariscal and other important figures of design, essays by Marti Guixe, Santiago Cirugeda, Matt Ward, Dunne & Raby, a description of all the participating projects, loads of photos and beautiful graphics. Almost 300 pages, in both spanish and english for a mere 35 euros. The online shop of LABoral seems to be a bit under the water these days, so until the situation is fixed, the easiest way to get your hands on the precious volume is to write LABoral and ask if they can send you a copy.

The curators of the exhibition are Roberto Feo and Rosario Hurtado. Ever since they founded El Último Grito back in 1997, the designers have kept away from preconceived definitions and prescribed design paths. A perspective that didn't prevent them from teaching at the most prestigious colleges of design and working for renowned companies and institutions: Mathmos, Selfridges, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Lavazza, Budweiser, Style, Metalarte, Hugo Boss, Southwark Council, Arturo Alvarez, the Lighthouse, etc.

I caught up with the Berlin/London-based duo to discuss Nowhere/Now/Here:

Random international. Pendulum Lights.2008 (photo Enrique G. Cardenas)

How did El Último Grito land on the LABoral spaceship? How did two famous designers end up curating an exhibition 'that challenges the perception of design by questioning our relationship with the environment. Taking the viewpoint that our environment has become part of us rather than us being part of it, as its point of departure, Nowhere/Now/ Here encourages us to see design as an integral component of the world-shaping process' ?
Was it a request that came from laboral or your own initiative?

LABoral contacted us to curate and exhibition on 'experimental design' (what ever that means) so for us it was a question of trying to define what experimental meant to us.

We explored different areas of work and try to define a strategic approach for each of them, which lead designers to challenging design's status quo. We identify three basic areas with their accompanying strategies

Material_Intervention: projects that explore material innovation and new material applications, new production techniques, technology, genetic engineering, graffiti,...

Cultural_Resistance: Projects and designers that position themselves in confrontation with the dominant culture, both in terms of the design outcomes, but also in terms of practice within the culture of design.

Psychological_Exploration: projects that analyse the psychological and sensorial experience of the object or that act as triggers of emotions and sensations. And psychological objects that carry the essence of the psychological experience.

Dominique Wilcox, the Glove

This worked for us as a starting point, which provided us a basic structure to classify the researched works. But for us it became apparent that were many other connections between the works, and that such a classification would not allow you to understand. When we started recombining the works in a more intuitive way, for us suggested conceptual connections between really different areas of work. We also felt that this allowed the viewer to find his or her own entry points into the exhibition.

Our intent was to present a collection of objects that would allow you to understand the thinking process of the artists behind them. Presenting them as thinkers who can not only reshape their own particular worlds but that show the potential to transform, re-interpret and re-think industries, production processes, communication strategies, political systems, etc. Challenging our preconceptions of what design can do.

Noam Toran & Nick Williamson. Bra Machine. 2007 (foto Enrique G. Cardenas)

What did this curatorial experience teach you?

It has been a very interesting experience. It has given us the chance (or luxury) to dedicate proper time to lo closely to the work of many other peoples, to understand their motivations and their intentions. And interpret them in relation to each other (including our own work). Creating a bigger pictured that talked about the fantastic potential and diversity of design approaches.

That it's why we treated the exhibition as a project itself, rather of plain review of design today. So in a way is not so much an exhibition on experimental design as much as an experimental exhibition on design. We wanted to create a moment where different aspects of design would collide in a space and something would come up from this experiment. Which in a way has already happened among the participating artists and designers, in terms of friendships and collaborations. But above all, the most incredible feeling is one of 'togetherness' and true interest in each others work, which has become unusual in such competitive world. This is very uplifting and makes us believe that something major is happening within the design world.

Also, it was very interesting to work on the edition of the catalogue, in which we collaborated intensively with Fernando Gutierrez who carried out its design. In a way the catalogue becomes almost more important than the exhibition itself, they have a life beyond the exhibition, so we wanted that the catalogue would be a space that you travel like the exhibition. It follows the same structure of the show, with the works presented according to the six groups created from word associations that connect to the works in an intuitive way:

TYPOLOGY / MUNDANE / ANECDOTE / FICTION / MYTH
SOLIPSISM / EXPANSION / REVEAL / AUGMENTATION
ASSEMBLAGE / ABSORB / DIALOGUE / SUBVERT
LOSS / ABSENCE / TRACE / THE UNSEEN / IDENTITY
SYSTEM / MORPHOLOGY / RECONFIGURE / SYMBIOSIS
SOLITUDE / THE ONE / THE SELF / MEMENTO

The works, texts and interviews have been grouped in order to create moments. Images and stories for the visitor/reader to find their own point of access to the ideas around the works. Very much following the idea of a 'trafalmadorian' book, from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse V:

"Billy couldn't read Trafalmadorian, of course, but he could al least see how the books were laid out- in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams. "Exactly", said the voice. "They are telegrams?" "There are no telegrams on Trafalmadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-describing a situation, a scene. We Trafalmadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."

The catalogue is an assemblage of works, described by the designers and artists, essays from some of the participating artists, which although often linked to personal projects, are surprisingly useful to understand everyone else's work, and interviews to four of our all time heroes: Ron Arad, Javier Mariscal, Daniel Weil and Gaetano Pesce; which contextualise the work of this younger generation of designers.

Yuri Suzuki, Sound Jewellery

You didn't seem to have selected any of your own works for the show. Why not? And if i asked you to point us to the work you developed that best reflects the theme of the exhibition, which one would it be?

Well, for us the exhibition itself is a piece of work, a project that is the result of the collaboration with everybody involved, from the LABoral team, to all the artists, writers and advisors.

There are two video projects that we feel worked well within the themes of NOWHERE/NOW/HERE.

Pedrita. Dog. 2007 (photo Enrique G. Cardenas)

One is 'LINE' which is a video consisting of a horizontal line where words appearing above and bellow. As the words change, your interpretation of what the line is also changes, and as you keep watching you find yourself adjusting your interpretation of the space and the way of seeing it. This is one of the three pieces, dealing with the idea of perception, which we have used as an introduction to the show. There other two are Grao by Pedrita, which reproduces a photographic image using traditional untreated ceramic tiles, to substitute the pixels of the image; and Marc Owens 'Avatar' film, which he reshot as a walkthrough the exhibition, the piece is fantastic as it is always playing with how you perceive reality.

Nowasteeur

The other video is 'NOWASTEEUR, a laborious poem'. This video is a new direction in terms of documenting our work. We started using video to try to document our installations, as we felt that just by keeping a photographic record of the event, did not reflect our ideas about the nature of the work that we call 'design performance, performing design'. But then we realised that the video itself could even had another narrative which would give it an identity of its own and not just being a document of the work. 'NOWASTEEUR, a laborious poem' was conceived as part of a public sitting commission during ARCO at IFEMA. The idea was to utilise all the packaging materials that are thrown away during the setting up of the fair. We came out with the idea of big bags in the shape of letters that would be filled up with all the waste materials. NOWASTEEUR are the ten letters that you need to write NO WASTE and RE-USE which was the main message that we wanted to put across. After that we elaborated a short poem using those letters (plus M which you get out of turning around the W), which you see forming in the video while all the action of the installation is being recorded:

NO WASTE_RE USE_ANSWER ME_NOT US_USER WON'T_WEST_EAST_RAW WAR_NOTE RUSE_USE ART_STEM NEW_SOME ONE TO STEER_SURE MUST EASE TEARS_MEET TEAM NOW_USE _RE-USE_WASTE NOT.

Nic Rysenbry. LandSpace.2008 (foto Enrique G. Cardenas)

'NOWASTEEUR, a laborious poem' is shown as part of the film program, which runs at the exhibition's design cinema (the cinema sitting is a commissioned piece by Nic Rysenbry)

Pablo Valbuena's Augmented Sculpture. Photo: © LABoral - Author Marcos Morilla

David Bowen's Remote Sonar Drawing Device, and Pablo Valbuena's installation Augmented Sculpture Series, have been exhibited in the past in purely artistic contexts. What made you think that they fitted the exhibition's objective to 'encourages us to see design as an integral component of the world-shaping process'?

Design is an integral component of the world-shaping process. Only because design takes many forms, sometimes we 'can't see the forest from the trees'.

In NOWHERE/NOW/HERE we tried to investigate (like the sub title says) 'new lines of enquiry in contemporary design'. Showing a diversity of work, which presented the different ideas and directions that designers are exploring today.

In the case of David Bowen, we find really interesting his work, where both technological research, and robotics collide with the questioning of the nature of drawing. His design translates movement into drawing. He has deliberately chosen make his machine draw 'marks' (like young children when they start drawing and are just interested in leaving their mark) by translating the movement recorded into impulses, which connect with the idea of representation, so central to the idea of drawing. So in fact, is that drawing purely a mark or is it a representation of the circulation of people? Is that drawing artistic or scientific? Is it both? But it not only raises questions in the nature of drawing as a human activity but in the nature of technological research and its applications.

In the exhibition his piece is in conversation with by Javier Mariscal's hand made wooden drawing of a 'VESPA' (2007), one of the surprise little homage's to the 'maestros' object of the interviews in the catalogue.

Javier Mariscal (foto Enrique G. Cardenas)

With Pablo Valbuena, we saw his work at ARCO and we fell in love with it instantly. The way he uses light and video to transform the perception of space and the materiality of the build, it is simply fantastic. In his case, it is obvious that the content of his work comes directly from his training as an architect, and his research into the qualities of space. So his work is very much design, but its materialization and dissemination is through the art market.

Pablo Valbuena.Augmented Sculpture Series. 2008 (photo Enrique G. Cardenas)

These two pieces, like indeed many others within the exhibition are providing a different point of view on how thing are around us. This helps us understand that there is always more than one answer and that by no means we should accept what the market or the designer or the politician or religion or science tell us. There are always alternatives. Most things are not the way they are because of some force of nature that is beyond our control. Things are the way they are because someone decided at one moment that this or that was a good idea, or make them lots of money or be good for humanity or the environment or ... there are no ultimate truths, just proposals that became 'real' and these could and do change.

In the catalogue we refer to Martin Scorsese's film The Departed quoting Frank Costello, the mob boss, who while describing his neighbourhood says 'I do not want to be a product of my environment, I wasn't my environment to be a product of me'. For us this has a resonance within design and acts as a reminder that it is possible to change the rules of the game.

The MacGuffin Library (Photo: Gunnar Green)

The MacGuffin Library (Photo: Sylvain Deleu)

On the other hand some of the works selected openly dialog with the art world (for example The Macguffin Library and cinema). Which are the characteristics that indicate that these works belong strictly to the field of design and not art? And is the difference always strict anyway? Or is there a conscious desire to keep the boundaries as porous as befits the purpose?

We guess that the answer would be in how do you define each one of them. From our point of view everything is design.

A few weeks ago we read a short interview with Vito Acconci where he was asked a similar question regarding the design/art argument and he was saying that a big part of the problem came from the fact that 'art' is the only discipline that is defined by a qualitative appreciation. We share that point of view and we think that the word art would have to be left for any kind of work that excels in whatever area of human activity. Who is to say that the work of Ferran Adria is less art than that of Jeff Koons? Or that a Frank Lloyd Wright building is less or art than an Andreas Gurski photograph? Or that Leonardo's flying machines is less art than his Monalisa?... What are the grounds for comparison and how or why would you do it? This is the eternal argument, from our point of view is easier as we see no boundaries. Maybe this interpretation of design might be confusing or unacceptable for some people who do have a very clear idea of the boundaries of between the two.

The MacGuffin Library, Civilian fantasy machine (Photo: Sylvain Deleu)

The 'McGuffin Library Collection' by Noam Toran and Onkar Kular obviously lives in the edges of what is traditionally accepted as design, and I guess it raise questions in both directions. As they explain, McGuffin is a term invented by Alfred Hitchcock to define an object within a film, which somehow acts as a devise to carry the narrative of the story. In terms of the story, the design of this object becomes, so its conception is a design exercise on its own. For Onkar and Noam this works perfectly well to explore further their ideas around the use of design as a medium that is central to their work. In this case they wrote 14 synopsis for imaginary films for which they designed an object. These objects are primarily talking about the role of objects as mediators in our understanding of the world (in this case of the story). In a second layer, they are talking about the world of technology, production and design. The objects are produced in rapid form directly from 3D computer models. The objects are not unique necessarily unique as they are printed very much like you would do with a computer document. Is that a banal use of technology, design and engineering just because thy are not pursuing 'the grater good' or the commercial enterprise? Would that make it art? For us what makes them good design and good art is exactly the same thing, they are able to broaden and challenge our preconceived ideas of what things are, while being moving and engaging.

Mathias Hahn's Imperfect Dolls

Most of the works exhibited in Nowhere/now/here come from Europe. Is that a curatorial choice or is it merely because this way to engage with objects is still confined to our continent?

It was not a particular curatorial choice. We tried to select people and works that we found interesting and that helped us illustrate the ideas behind NOWHERE/NOW/HERE. It is true though, that still Europe is the main centre for design in the world, with some of the most prestigious and influential design schools in the world (RCA, Eindhoven, Domus,...) so it is unavoidable that a lot of the designers (although not necessarily European themselves) who are doing interesting work would come from them.

Like with any other project there are many reasons that contribute to the final decisions and results (most of them are usually quite mundane)

For NOWHERE/NOW/HERE we tried to work with people with whom, despite working in very different areas, we found an affinity and a complicity in pushing the boundaries of what is accepted in design.

Photo: © LABoral - Author Marcos Morilla

Why did you ask Patricia Urquiola to take care of the exhibition design? Why not do it yourself? Did you hand her a list of requirements or did you give her carte blanche? How much did you collaborate and how did her vision of the exhibition influence yours?

We did not want to do the exhibition design for the same reasons that we did not really wanted to show our work. It just did not made sense to us to be curators, exhibitors and exhibition designers, for this we could have just done an exhibition of our work. But at the same time is hard being a designer yourself to surrender control to someone else, but in the other hand it brings an unknown element into play which we think adds to the whole process.

With Patricia Urquiola and Martino Berghinz we were very lucky that we could take advantage of their relationship with LABoral, and were very happy when they decided to participate in the project.

We always had the idea that whoever did the exhibition design we would like it to be or feel like one more piece in the exhibition. So our brief was very open, we showed them the six groups of works which we had assembled and asked them to give us six permeable spaces where you could experience the groups as a one thing and at the same time you would be aware or attracted to the works of the other groups, so that the visitor could break away from the structure and find their own way to navigate the show.

Their response was to create a laberynthic exhibition space that creates many small private moments. It broke our idea of being able to experience each group as a whole, but in the other hand, it work very well in the sense that allows you to find your own experience of the show. So we totally respected their proposal and change the concept and create smaller relationships within the pieces rather that the group encounter. For us was important not to step in and allow these and other inputs take their course

Carl Clerkin. Desperate Measures. 2008 (photo Enrique G. Cardenas)

And how much do you feel that her intervention reflects the spirit of the exhibition, making it maybe another work in itself that does belong to the show?

We think that their idea of dividing the space from the top by hanging fabrics its a very spatial (and material efficient) solution that multiplies the space by creating a very atmospheric cloud of mini spaces which are all inter-connected.

You are both lecturers in London, Roberto teaches Design Product at the Royal College of Art and Rosario at the Design Department, Goldsmiths College. How much does your teaching practice reflect the concepts and ideas put forward in the exhibition? And more importantly which kind of career awaits students who might want to follow the paths of the designers you've invited to the exhibition? Will they end up working exclusively in the hope that their projects will be shown in art galleries and museums or does the industry realize there is a real need of such visions and will companies therefore welcome them with open arms?

As you mentioned, we have been lecturers at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmith University for the last 10 years, and we are also Research Fellows at Kingston University. For us this experience is central to the development of our own ideas and to understand the concerns and ambitions of new generations of designers.

We would like that the works in NW/N/H are viewed not as the object that you can see at the exhibition, but as the potential that these designers have to translate their knowledge and skill into different outcomes. How these objects are the products of inquisitive minds that give nothing for granted but are also responsible and very thorough in the development of their work.

Many of the designers invited to the exhibition are very successful and work across industries, what they have in common is a non-conformist approach to their practices. These designers are changing the scope of the design practice, elaborating new industries and opening new areas of work. Some of the younger designers are still starting to navigate their way but surly in years to come they will be some of the leading figures in art or design or design-art or art-design or science or film...

Cau table lamp by Marti Guixé

At the end the question of where some work lives is purely economical. Today there are more possibilities for designers to find means of commercialisation and dissemination of their work through galleries and exhibitions rather than through the mass market. We have to be aware of the changes to the market and to the industry that we have experience in the last years. And industry is falling behind in attracting talent because it is hard for them to react to new ideas.

We have always worked between the experimental and the commercial, the two running parallel and feeding from each other. This self-feeding process has always been part of our work and we think has enriched it (but we are 'old school' now) and the way we work (or even our drivers) are very different to how our students perceived design today or the kind of work they want to do.

We hope that industry reacts (what ever industry) and tries to be again a leading force in research and creativity. At the end of the day what will determine which avenue designers will follow, or where their work will be show cased is a question of market opportunities and ultimately their cultural influence. At the Design Museum tomorrow, at the V&A in a couple of decade or at the British Museum in a few centuries.

Marta Botas & Germán R. Blanco. Rara de raro. 2006 actualidad (foto Enrique G. Cardenas)

Do you see design meccas like the Salone del Mobile in Milan open up to this kind of discourse?

We do not see why not. There have been times where companies would champion new concepts and ideas. Seeing how markets are evolving industry will have to react and accept that cannot just be playing to an outdated lifestyle ideal.

In Milan you can see lots of the things that are going on right now, but it is hard to see with more than 300 exhibitions in the 'fuori salone'. How would we even know that its even there? In any case, for good or bad, there are many new ways of disseminating design much more economical and accessible.

Toypography, by Dainippon Type Organization

Is El Ultimo Grito already working on new projects? Could you share them with us?

We are working in a book about our work, which we are looking to publish sometime in April. Apart of our usual combination of self initiated projects and commercial ones, some of which will be presented in Milan next April. A bit of everything, like always.

Thanks Roberto and Rosario!

Dunne & Raby. Evidence Dolls (foto Enrique G. Cardenas)

Nowhere/Now/Here runs until Mon, April 20 , 2009 at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon, Spain.

Image on the homepage: Daniel Charny & Gabriel Klasmer. Sports Furniture.2008, based on a photo version from 2003 (photo Enrique G. Cardenas)

Related stories: If you can't travel to Gijon (there are direct flights from London), i would encourage you to visit Wouldn't It be Nice at Somerset House where some of the designers are exhibiting their works until December 14, 2008.

Designing Critical Design - Part 1: Jurgen Bey, Designing Critical Design - Part 2: Marti Guixé and Dunne & Raby, Work in progress show at RCA: Platform 11 (design products), Tony Dunne - Design for Debate, etc.

The Arsenale section of the Venice Biennale of Architecture has many characteristics that makes it stand out from other architecture exhibitions. One of them is that you won't get to see cardboard models and plans. In fact, you can even walk around and inside the 1:1 scale replica of an apartment building with sharing spaces.

All the furniture and appliances necessary have been fabricated from methacrylate and are embedded with microservers. It's the return of the internet of things, baby!

Hyperhabitat. Reprogramming the World is a research project directed by Guallart Architects, initiated at IaaC (the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia) in 2005, with the BCN Fab Lab in collaboration with information designers Bestiario.

The project aims to propose answers to questions such as: Could our world be in habited on the basis of information technology? How could this be organized?

Just like a digital network is made of nodes and connections, Guallart's model is a large-scale attempt to have all the elements of the physical world communicate with each other. The house functions as a small ecosystem, where each object is a piece of a widely distributed intelligence, able to interact with the others. Architecture becomes the interface that enables us to inhabit the world. The connections do not stop at the room level, objects also communicate with the whole building and can even interact with the neighbourhood or the rest of the world.

The microservers embedded in the objects interact with one another to generate relationships that are displayed as a large-format projection on one of the walls. Line codes can be drawn to suggest relationships or 'line codes' between nodes. In addition a special web platform, to be launched on November 24, will enable people around the world to put forward formulas for reprogramming the world.

Image Daniel Aguilar

Hyperhabitat is the biggest Internet 0 (a new microserver technology developed at MIT to generate ambient intelligence by linking a series of miniature computers) network ever created. The project also builds upon the creation of and the theory of the multiscale habitat, an 'urban genome' project developed at IaaC that seeks to introduce new approaches to the generation of buildings and cities by restructuring the functional relationships between the constituent parts.

A key objective of this 'reprogramming' of buildings and cities is to use artificial intelligence in order to save energy and achieve a more self-sufficient model of living. As the architect explained to El Pais, the project tries to materialize the socio-economic changes that the world is currently undergoing, we are moving from a financial economy towards a production economy based on removing the price of objects in order to give them value. Guallart added: 'The way to visualize this idea is to build dwellings which are self-sufficient, applying artificial intelligence to buildings.' The architect is obviously aware that working at the building level is not sufficient if one wants to change the socio-economic structure of the world, action would have to be taken by working at the town-planning level (cf. Guallart's Sociopolis project,a neighbourhood designed with a mind set on efficiency, functionality, digital networks.)

Slideshow of the images i took of the installation:

There's a really nice video interview of the architect with views of the workshop where the installation has been entirely developed and built on 3cat24. But you might prefer a video presentation in english than in catalan:

More images on Daniel Aguilar's flickr set, and on the project website.

Hyperhabitat is on view at the Arsenale, Venice until November 23rd, 2008.

“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is not only the title of a 1966 song by the The Beach Boys, but also the title of an exhibition about wishful thinking in art and design at London’s Somerset House. Before its stop in the UK, the show was on at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva and at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich.

When Brian Wilson wrote the song he was imagining “what you can’t have, what you really want” so, almost in reply, the show proposes a “modest form of utopianism, a whistle of optimism for how things could be, set against a bass note of misgiving”.

Ten artists and designers plus another six in the so-called Studio in which temporary installations and performances take place offer their take on other possibilities.

Alignment

Dunne and Raby are showing a wide range of their work, including the bright, pink installation Alignment, created in collaboration with designer Michael Anastassiades. Their description of it is so good, I’ll just quote it in full: “A small pressure gauge indicates that it is operational. It could go off at any time. When the planets are in the appropriate configuration, the airbag is filled. An explosion of pinkness. It takes seconds, like an airbag in a car crash. Voluminous. Fantastic. A triclinic crystal: a form with no 90 degree angles. Perhaps no-one sees it, only the aftermath. A landscape of shocking florescent pink rip-stock fabric in sharp fractal forms, strewn across the living room floor. When the owner returns home, they decide what it means and what to do. It could be about love, money, or career.”

It means having an explosive piece of furniture to live with which could go off in a pink explosion at any time, associated with something that is important to its owner, however arbitrary and secret. It knows and when it goes off it means that something significant has changed and it will prompt a decision or demand a promise to be kept. It’s a strange and beautiful concept which has a great open-endedness about it in many ways.

MoF 94.7% (Photo: Sylvain Deleu)

Artist Tobias Rehberger is showing a “modular, easily assembled” sculpture called MoF 94.7% that visitors are invited to copy. After seeing the show, visitors can purchase a certificate which will render their replica-to-be an original artwork by Rehberger. If they send him a photo of their work, he will even add it into his own list of works and number it. The visitors’ work technically becomes a real Rehberger is “worth at least a thousand times more on the art market” than it would be as their own. Posing interesting questions about the notion of the original in sculpture and the age of digital reproduction (in a museum where they are really fussy about photography), he likens his sculpture to a mother and the copies to children which will be genetically similar in terms of the idea but all different in their appearances.

Collective Furniture (Photo: Sylvain Deleu)

The work of designer Martino Gamper is interesting in the way that it reflects on the way we treat old things. In Geneva and Zürich, Gamper focussed on the “real needs of its employees and visitors”, scouring the cities’ junk yards and second-hand stores and then creating something new in an on-site workshop in an intense atmosphere that pushes him “towards work that is less conceptual and more driven by intuition and emotion.” At Somerset house, he focussed on ideas about storage and collection, creating huge shelves and hybrid furniture creatures.

The MacGuffin Library (Photo: Gunnar Green)

Lastly, the initial exhibit in the Studio was Noam Toran’s and Onkar Kular’s MacGuffin Library, an intriguing laboratory of materialized narrative devices. Attributed to Hitchcock, MacGuffins are cinematic plot devices, usually an object, serving to keep the story in motion while lacking intrinsic importance in itself: “What everybody covets in the film and what drives the characters to move through space and time.” The mysterious glowing suitcase from Pulp Fiction is a somewhat recent example.

Hitchcock’s MacGuffin (Photo: Sylvain Deleu)

In the exhibition, the MacGuffin Library was presented as a lab-environment where objects are constantly being materialized using a 3D-printer and added to the collection on display. However, the narrative plots which they stem from are not necessarily cinematic. Apart from one nod to Hitchcock, they come “from a disparate range of interests and inspirations. Re-enactments, unorthodox fantasies, Borges and Carver short stories, forgeries, urban myths, high and low-brow cinema, alternative histories, and the relationship between media and memory.”.

Objects taken from Sixteen narratives, created in collaboration with American writer Keith Jones include the original MacGuffin (a lighter from a Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train), Hitler’s tea pot from Buckingham palace in the time of the Anglo-Nazi Reich, custom engine parts engineered for the Enthusiasts’ “civilian fantasy machines” and the carcass of an bald eagle from post-apocalypse America.

Civilian fantasy machine (Photo: Sylvain Deleu)

The MacGuffin Library takes its strength from the fact that a highly advanced fabricating technology as rapid prototyping, which is often being regarded as the future of manufacturing, is being juxtaposed with the imaginary in the way that it gets to create objects from fiction. At the same time, this represents a very interesting approach to experimental storytelling, since in this case the fictional artifact is in a sense leapfrogging its usual role in theater and film and gets much closer to the audience who then takes it as a hook for their own imagination. Here, the objects make the story.

Wouldn’t It be Nice continues through December 7th. Currently in the Studio space is Chosil Kil, upcoming artists will be Dexter Sinister, Åbake, Europa and Ryan Gander and Julia Lohmann.

"Wouldn't It Be Nice" is not only the title of a 1966 song by the The Beach Boys, but also the title of an exhibition about wishful thinking in art and design at London's Somerset House. Before its stop in the UK, the show was on at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva and at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich.

When Brian Wilson wrote the song he was imagining "what you can't have, what you really want" so, almost in reply, the show proposes a "modest form of utopianism, a whistle of optimism for how things could be, set against a bass note of misgiving".

Ten artists and designers, plus another six in the so-called Studio in which temporary installations and performances take place, offer their take on other possibilities.

Alignment

Dunne and Raby are showing a wide range of their work, including the bright, pink installation Alignment, created in collaboration with designer Michael Anastassiades. Their description of it is so good, I'll just quote it in full: "A small pressure gauge indicates that it is operational. It could go off at any time. When the planets are in the appropriate configuration, the airbag is filled. An explosion of pinkness. It takes seconds, like an airbag in a car crash. Voluminous. Fantastic. A triclinic crystal: a form with no 90 degree angles. Perhaps no-one sees it, only the aftermath. A landscape of shocking florescent pink rip-stock fabric in sharp fractal forms, strewn across the living room floor. When the owner returns home, they decide what it means and what to do. It could be about love, money, or career."

It means having an explosive piece of furniture to live with which could go off in a pink eruption at any time, associated with something that is important to its owner, however arbitrary and secret. It knows and when it goes off it means that something significant has changed and it will prompt a decision or demand a promise to be kept. It's a strange and beautiful concept which has a great open-endedness about it in many ways.

MoF 94.7% (Photo: Sylvain Deleu)

Artist Tobias Rehberger is showing a "modular, easily assembled" sculpture called MoF 94.7% that visitors are invited to copy. After seeing the show, visitors can purchase a certificate which will render their replica-to-be an original artwork by Rehberger. If they send him a photo of their work, he will even add it into his own list of works and number it. The visitors' work technically becomes a real Rehberger is "worth at least a thousand times more on the art market" than it would be as their own. Posing interesting questions about the notion of the original in sculpture and the age of digital reproduction (in a museum where they are really fussy about photography), he likens his sculpture to a mother and the copies to children which will be genetically similar in terms of the idea but all different in their appearances.

Collective Furniture (Photo: Sylvain Deleu)

The work of designer Martino Gamper is interesting in the way that it reflects on the way we treat old things. In Geneva and Zürich, Gamper focussed on the "real needs of its employees and visitors", scouring the cities' junk yards and second-hand stores and then creating something new in an on-site workshop in an intense atmosphere that pushes him "towards work that is less conceptual and more driven by intuition and emotion." At Somerset house, he focussed on ideas about storage and collection, creating huge shelves and hybrid furniture creatures.

The MacGuffin Library (Photo: Gunnar Green)

Lastly, the initial exhibit in the Studio was Noam Toran's and Onkar Kular's MacGuffin Library, an intriguing laboratory of materialized narrative devices. Attributed to Hitchcock, MacGuffins are cinematic plot devices, usually an object, serving to keep the story in motion while lacking intrinsic importance in itself: "What everybody covets in the film and what drives the characters to move through space and time." The mysterious glowing suitcase from Pulp Fiction is a somewhat recent example.

Hitchcock's MacGuffin (Photo: Sylvain Deleu)

In the exhibition, the MacGuffin Library was presented as a lab-environment where objects are constantly being materialized using a 3D-printer and added to the collection on display. However, the narrative plots which they stem from are not necessarily cinematic. Apart from one nod to Hitchcock, they come "from a disparate range of interests and inspirations. Re-enactments, unorthodox fantasies, Borges and Carver short stories, forgeries, urban myths, high and low-brow cinema, alternative histories, and the relationship between media and memory."

Objects taken from Sixteen narratives, created in collaboration with American writer Keith Jones include the original MacGuffin (a lighter from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train), Hitler's tea pot from Buckingham palace in the time of the Anglo-Nazi Reich, custom engine parts engineered for the Enthusiasts' "civilian fantasy machines" and the carcass of a bald eagle from post-apocalypse America.

Civilian fantasy machine (Photo: Sylvain Deleu)

The MacGuffin Library takes its strength from the fact that a highly advanced fabricating technology as rapid prototyping, often regarded as the future of manufacturing, is being juxtaposed with the imaginary in the way that it gets to create objects from fiction. At the same time, this represents a very interesting approach to experimental storytelling, since in this case the fictional artifact is in a sense leapfrogging its usual role in theater and film and gets much closer to the audience who then takes it as a hook for their own imagination. Here, the objects make the story.

Wouldn't It be Nice continues through December 7th. Currently in the Studio space is Chosil Kil, upcoming artists will be Dexter Sinister, Åbake, Europa and Ryan Gander and Julia Lohmann.

's been a long Summer and i spent it with the usual heap of magazines. Here's some of the best that fell into my hands:

I received the latest edition of Volume over the Summer but it took me a couple of months to go through it. The 16th issue bears the suggestive title Engineering Society and gosh, is it good.

In a nutshell and in the words of the editors: Our society seems to be locked into a position in which the user's and voter's choices determine how we shall live in the future. A disturbing collective urban life in a giant Big Brother House looms, a material and social world in which sensationalistic media and its commercial translation dominate. Our sense of what is real and what is quality is on the verge of collapse. The practice and education of the engineers of this society is determined by short-term effect instead of long-term social responsibility. Culture becomes little more than a market, politics its façade and the city its stage. Instead of reviving old school high modernist social engineering or claiming the need for an intellectual junta, we solicit new forms of social engineering. Where shall this lead?

The wide variety of articles in Volume is brilliant: the potential of gaming to affect architecture with the particular case of SimCity and how it has changed urban planning; a nice essay details a campaign by the Zimbabwean government to forcibly clear slum areas across the country; another shows that the French government is not necessarily much more clever when it comes to dealing with problems arising in 'slums and slabs' areas; a photo gallery about 20th century utopian architecture (with many images that evoke Dubai btw); the obligatory article about Chinese cities adorned with never-gonna-be-tired-of-those spectacular images, etc.

Forecast: Nozone X, edited by Nicholas Blechman, principal of Knickerbocker Design in New York City and art director of the New York Times Book Review (Amazon USA and UK.)

Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says: UN reports and newspaper articles are illustrated with dry charts and graphs predicting technological, economic, and ecological transformations that are already dramatically altering the way we live. Forecast revisualizes these abstractions about everything from our environment to our waistlines, from the stock market to the Middle East through the eyes of cartoonists and graphic designers who have made comics with a conscience: Ward Sutton imagines a nation divided into a red and a blue zone; Paula Scher maps out the Northern Hemisphere of 2100; Elizabeth Amon interviews New Yorker journalist Elizabeth Kolbert on global warming; and Tom Tomorrow looks back on the legacy of Bush-Cheney. Ultimately, Forecast is an optimistic book: using humor, it encourages all of us to take responsibility for predictions of the future and to take action to affect change.

Forecast is the 10th installment of Nozone, a politically-engaged graphic design and comics zine, founded by Blechman in 1990. Published as an independent and zero-profit venture, Nozone features the work of talented graphic designers and cartoonists, spot-on themes, and an abrasive take on contemporary events.

The theme of this edition is our increasingly unsteady and uncertain future. The one of the first edition, back in 1990, was pollution and on its cover was a man wearing a gas mask too. There's another gas mask guy on the current cover. The message is clear: 20 years on, the state of our blue planet is still a cause of concern.

The Morning News has a gallery of some of the drawings (not the best ones i'm afraid) you'll find in the magazine.

The first Meatbook prototype

a minima is a great compact mag about contemporary art and in particular new media art, the magazine follows a methodology which resembles that of scientific magazines: the artists themselves write about their work, the editors leave the text untouched and add photos and graphics. Issue number 24 features a few pearls: Jose Luis de Vicente and Irma Vila discuss their Atlas of Electromagnetic Space, Marta de Menezes shares her experience of bringing artistic creation inside scientific research laboratories, like she did with Decon, a project for which she used biotechnology to create Mondrian-like paintings, Diane Gromala gives the gore details but also the motivation behind The Meatbook, Ulla Taipale from Capsula presents Curated Expeditions, an invitation to experience earthly phenomena through artistic exploration, Geert Lovink writes about blogging as a 'nihilist impulse', there's also a text about Íñigo Bilbao's artistic experiments with biomedical images and an essay by Jonah Lehrer who advocates that science should find a place for art. There are many more articles. A few of them are only available in spanish but most are publish both in english and spanish.

You can order the bi-monthly magazine by contacting aminima at aminima dot net. But the best would be to subscribe, right?

Objects of Desire, by Ludic Society which Neural has interviewed in its latest issue

The current issue of Neural paper mag is devoted to games. There's even colours inside and a new design. Exhibition reports, DVD, music, book reviews, artists interviews, all the usual crunchy media snacks. I guess i could do a lengthier paragraph about the magazine but that would be an insult to you, dear readers, cuz you are already subscribed, aren't you?

The latest issue of Cluster is called Transmitting Architecture, it's been created in collaboration with the World Congress of Architecture 2008 and it is very very good. Take my word for it (sorry, too tired to keep on blogging) or check out the online version of a few articles published in the magazine.

Published both in english and italian.

Self Replicating Machine, by Dr Adrian Bowyer and Ed Sells in lab

Good old Turin is currently hosting the third edition of C.STEM. The theme this year is Breeding Objects - Computational Design: from Digital Fabrication to Mass-Customization and while the spotlight is still on generative systems, it is, in many respects, very different from the first edition. This time, the main protagonists are designers, not artists.

Although, i have taken the habit of running swiftly in the opposite direction when i hear the word 'design,' i have to admit that the programme this year is remarkable. Especially because it brings that innovative focus i had hoped to see more widely explored in the schedule of the Torino World Design Capital. C.STEM showcases projects anticipating future developments in design process and technologies. What happens when domains such as design, creative coding and digital fabrication meet the new scenarios of mass-customization?

C.STEM conference on Sept. 20th: Where were the ladies?

The exhibition and conference explores the way design is currently re-considered and shaped through the lens of information society and, more generally, new technologies. The work of young designers today involves a crucial paradigm shift: not only do they use the digital tools provided to them but they also invent, modify and produce new instruments themselves.

Dendrite by Nervous Systems (Jessica Eve Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg)

Another important characteristic of the new design production involves digital fabrication processes such as laser cutting and 3D printing (a few examples in the posts Rapid Products 1 and 2). The impact of digital fabrication is far from marginal: instead of churning out identical products, objects are created which, while they undeniably belong to the same family, are all different from each other. Beyond the creative process and fabrication, the digital tools and new design processes have also the potential to radically modify the marketing of design products and the way consumers engage with the creation of objects. Two projects presented in the exhibition, Nervous Systems and Fluid Forms (see below), have already been launched on the market and as such, exemplify new business possibilities.

Located in an ex-Methodist church in the center of Turin, the exhibition illustrates what is the state of the art of computational design through a series projects that range from everyday objects you can buy online to sweatshirts weaved with newsfeeds, and a 3D printing machine able to 'prints' most of its own components (not the original one but maybe even better, a version fatta in casa by ToDo design studio.)

The list of projects exhibited is online. Here's just a selection:

Ebru Kurbak and Mahir Yavuz' NewsKnitter project comments on the manipulation by the media in Turkey. Live data streams of information are used as an unpredictable base for pattern generation. Web-based information is either gathered from the Turkish daily political news or according to a theme that pervades global news. The data is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: one receives the content from live feeds while the other converts it into visual patterns, a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. The pieces of clothing are not for sale right now but the designers are working on that.

Radiolaria by Nervous Systems

The jewelry designed by Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg of Nervous System, on the other hand, is up for grab. The design is both heavily tech-mediated and inspired by organic forms.

Using two custom-made computer applications --one mimics branching dendrites, and the other the movement of particles--the designers generate forms for bracelets, pendants, and earrings.

The Radiolaria line, for example, is named after the plant cells whose structure was a source of inspiration for Buckminster Fuller. Jewelry from the Dendrite collection takes its cue from the aggregate growth of coral. The Dendrite algorithm both controls the aggregation and allows consumers to participate in the design process

1 of 1 studio tissue collection

Way more beautiful in real than on pictures, 1 of 1 design studio creates one-of-a-kind, made to order apparel. For The Tissue Collection, designer Cait Reas worked together with C.E.B. Reas. The artist generated the Tissue images by defining processes and translating them into images with code and software. Cait used a digital textile printing technique to apply the patterns to fabric.

theverymany contributed as consultants for the [C]space pavilion in London

In case you'd worried that this blog is turning into a geeky version of Harper's Bazaar, i'll have to mention that the best moment of C.STEM for me was to listen to Marc Fornes from theverymany. It's the second time i attend one of his talks and i'm still not sure i understand most of what he says but his work is so awesome that it doesn't really matter.

Aperiodic_vertebrae

His presentation addressed failure. For example, he detailed how the Aperiodic_vertebrae structure that theverymany developed for Generator x - Beyond the Screen (a workshop and exhibition which highlighted the creative potential of digital fabrication and generative systems) in Berlin taught him that while computers facilitate many of the design processes much of the assembly still has to be done by hands. The Berlin version of the Aperiodic Tiling counted some 530 panels and nearly as many connecting components.

One of the many options studied for R&Sie's Loophole bridge

The core of theverymany approach is therefore to use computer to generate, not just many parts, but a logic between these parts. They applied the concept to the woven pedestrian bridge that Francois Roche from R&Sie is building on the boundaries of Poland and the Czech Republic.

My images from the event.

About the 2006 edition of C.STEM: C.STEM conference, Part 1 and Part 2.

Related entry: Generator x - Beyond the Screen, a workshop and exhibition which highlighted the creative potential of digital fabrication and generative systems.

The New York edition of Pictoplasma was as successful as possible: great programme, fantastic speakers and performances and audience getting jaw-ache from constant grinning.

Performance by Friends With You

Peter Thaler & Lars Denicke started to get interested in characters ten years ago. They were fascinated by the very anti-Pixar essence of these characters: they have no background, no purpose nor story to tell. Yet, they have a soul and a clear personality, they manage to communicate no matter the country where they are shown.

My favourite screening session was Characters in Rhythm, a series of music promos and films relying on music. That's probably the trickiest bunch of clips to judge and comment on as the fusion between the music and the animation is usually so strong that a music you loathe might prevent you from enjoying the animation.

A quick selection:

The screening kicked off with the eerie, subtle and gorgeous Sloup by Imery Watson (music Susumu Yokota, Red Swan)

Totally different is Wamono. Character Design: Solobongnu-Sensei, Woog, Maharo. Music: Hifana.

I pasted the youtube version below but this one does more justice to the beauty of the clip.

Lollipop, starring the Lollipop Girl. Production: Passion Pictures. Animation by Bonzom. Music by Mika.

Visit from the Dead Dog was by far my favourite. Designed by Tom Gauld, Chris Debney, Pete Stenhouse. Production: Dirty UK / Draw Pictures. Music by Ed Harcourt.

stay'in alive is one awesomeness. Soandsau. Production: Wizzdesign. Music: La Chose + Mirwais.

Over Time is a tribute to Jim Henson designed by students Oury Atlan, Thibaut Berland and Damien Ferrié. Students? can you believe that?
Production: Supinfocom Valenciennes. Yellow House

And of course, there was a video by Motomichi Nakamura. This time he designed the animation for Temposhark's song 'Blame'.

The festival is over but you can still get your hands on their DVD/books.

Fashionable Technology: The Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science and Technology, by Sabine Seymour (Amazon UK and USA.)

Published by Springer, abstract: The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, wearables for short, and fashion, design and science is a highly promising and topical subject. Offered here is a