Talk at iMal in Brussels
Currently in Brussels where I gave a talk yesterday at iMal, a center for digital cultures and technology. The presentation entitled “Device art as a resource for interaction design and media art” was about the fading boundaries between interaction design, new media art and academic research. As a matter of fact, the hybridization of digital and physical environments (through locative media, urban displays, augmented reality or mobile games) is explored by a large variety of people and institutions. It’s not only engineers and academic researchers but also artists and designers. The talk looked at why the projects from the new media art/interaction design/device art are relevant and what they tell about the design of future technological artifacts.
Slides can be found on here (.pdf, 20Mb):
In a sense, this presentation emerged from the sort of things that appear on this blog, a mix of pasta (academic or R&D stuff coming from the research world) and vinegar (weirder projects coming form the design/new media art world). It was then about why vinegar is important for pasta. The presentation went through 7 reasons why projects form artists and designers are important, especially for academic researchers and engineers:
“ (1) avantgarde: as they can announce things to come (new practices, new artifacts)
(2) challenge existing practices (for example by highlight new interaction partners beyond the classical and canonical “human computer interaction”: blogjects, animal-controlled video games)
(3) criticize the state of the world by making explicit invisible/implicit phenomena or certain aspects that are hidden (like pollution mapped on cityscape)
(4) address issues in novel way that are not possible in academia or in private R&D: by using fakes, humor or non-utilitarian perspectices.
(5) “breaching experiment”: When trying to predict or design the future of technologies, you can’t just rely on what exist today… you want “disruptions” as the literature about innovation states. So technologies developed in new media art / device art contexts are often DISRUPTIVE platforms that allow to investigate what changes.
(6) arts+design do better to convey desire and emotions (and less mechanistic vision of humans who do not always want automation in their lives for example)
(7) the design process: something is investigated in the construction of hypothetical artifacts, the design process itself is important and bring lessons. A totally different approach than engineering and academic research.“
Thanks Yves Bernard for the invitation.
December 12th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
[…] found out a bit too late that Nicolas Nova would be giving a talk at iMAL in Brussels yesterday. Luckily he always puts his slides […]
December 12th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Great stuff, and your slides bear such a resemblence to my own inspirations and examples I usually show that it’s a good job I wasn’t also presenting after you or I would’ve been in big trouble!
I wanted to pick up this point (from Julian) about Device Art: “Constructing an object that looks as thought it might be a mass-manufactured consumer object — perhaps because it has the finish of a mass-manufactured object, or it is designed for manufacturability.”
I don’t see this as being *necessary* for Device Art, although it is one symptom of work by Mawya Denki (and Ryota Kuwakubo) because he presents himself as a corporation and works within a sphere that actually intersects the commercial world — you can actually buy mass-produced versions of the works. And of course one of the problems we have right now when we want to talk about Device Art is that there are not so many examples to look at.
But I see this engagement with mass production as an *aesthetic* decision as well as one of process…. I don’t see why someone couldn’t be making Device Art in the form of one-offs, regardless of whether that means hand-crafting objects or using industrial processes such as laser cutting and 3D printing. Also whether or not the aesthetics of the artist results in an object which enters into or subverts consumer electronics is their choice, an aesthetic choice. I think it’s the exploration of the aesthetics of electronics and devices that makes device art interesting, and I would be excited to see more radical experimentation.
(OK I’ll stop before this turns into an essay)
Chris
ps: love the CCTV photo in Placa de George Orwell!
December 12th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Device art as a resource for interaction design and media art…
Nicolas Nova, user experience and foresight researcher working at the Media and Design Lab (EPFL) and at the near future laboratory, is currently in Brussels where he gave a talk yesterday at iMal, a brand new center for digital cultures and technol…
December 14th, 2007 at 11:12 am
I agree with Chris, despite what I’ve said in the past. I guess I”m eager for “finish” in device art — things that look like they “could be” because they have a finish to them that you usually see in manufactured devices. So, at least for me, part of the aesthetics is creating candy for the imagination, to make things that suggest other possible future worlds with these peculiar, unusual, thought-provoking devices.
December 14th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
I agree with Julian, I think it’s really great when you come across devices that offer content you’d expect to find in the art world presented through ‘finished’ devices that look like they could be bought in muji or argos. They point towards a parallel world, superficially similiar to ours (industrial, consumer, etc), but embodying a different view of human need and teh role mass produced objects could play meeting those needs. At the same time though, I think it’s important to avoid parody and pastiche, it makes it too easy for the viewer and it can be a bit of a cop out from a design point of view…
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:38 pm
[…] As a first speaker, I showed why and how designers and new media artists are paving the way for the near future. After a quick introduction of ubiquitous computing and a description of the current challenges, the other part of the talk was a rerun of my why art/design is meaningful to HCI research. […]