Recently in conferences Category

Greetings from lovely San Jose and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference! I'm here for the first time since 2004. The talks have been terrific. I had the opportunity to give an Ignite talk (5 minutes! 20 slides!) on pneumatic tubes.

I'm giving a talk today called "Shared and Sometimes Stealthy: India's Mobile Phone"-- it's the result of a study I did at Microsoft Research India in 2006. If you're interested in the topic, there are two chapters that I've published about it. I wrote "Beyond the Personal and Private: Modes of Mobile Phone Sharing in Urban India" with Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India. It will be published later this month in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices (edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell). And with Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and Carolyn Wei, we wrote "'Express Yourself' and 'Stay Together: The Indian Middle Class Family" in the Handbook on Mobile Communication Studies, edited by James Katz. It discusses of the effect of the mobile phone on several domestic situations: home finances, romance and the domestic boundary.

At South by Southwest, Francesca Birks and I organized a panel called Tangible Interactions in Urban Spaces, where we'll be joined by Ben Cerveny and Mouna Andraos. We're on deck on Sunday at 10 a.m. (early! but very cool!).

Do come to see us -- and if any of these subjects interest you, please follow up with me. I have more material to offer.

I'm a few days out from the fabulous third Design Engaged, so well-organized by Andrew Otwell, Jenn Bove, Boris Anthony and Mouna Andraos. I've talked to so many people at the event about things grand and banal, and now, I've reimmersed in school's more theoretical issues of critique, history and theory.

All of these things leave me thinking about the nature of design as it seemed to be defined by the community surrounding Design Engaged.

There is a real privileging of Making, to the extent that I feel I should capitalize the word. Making includes building something, prototyping, manufacturing a product. Making seems to be particularly valued when it results in something being not only prototyped but manufactured. It relies on tools and materials. Other things go into Making, like sketching, molding, and wiring. But Making does not seem to include writing, researching, or interpreting.

Design is the endeavor of form and forming. What to design and how to do it is the primary, vital question of the designer. Form takes place not only by work in three dimensions and by machines, but through conversation, interpretations and argument, by pencils and words and feedback. Since cybernetics, design has taken on networks and feedback, as a correcting mechanism, to define design problems, to introduce possibilities of the agency of objects.

Design can encompass the forming of things that never get built. This is the realm of sketch, drawing, rendering, model, maquette. All of these involve some manner of imagination, conception, figuration. Their formation may may be pinned up on a wall to be critiqued, may see their way into stacks of construction drawings or business plans. It may also stop at any moment: left in a sketchbook or hard drive, balled up after being spit from a plotter, left in a pile of old models, rejected in a competition, turned down by a client. If the instances of design only matter in their manufacture or construction, much -- or even most -- of design and architectural history must be written off.

The history of design since the founding of the Bauhaus (1918-1933) tackles the questions of building and making within a theoretical and built context. In the education and work of designer, there are many stops on the way: learnings of color and form, practice in a specific field, discovery of how all the fields converge to make the work of art. But also, this same trajectory tries to make sense of itself -- to perform, to write, to photograph, to document, to share.

Does Making leave out interpretation or sensemaking? If it excludes these activities, what does that say in turn for the nature of design? And where does it leave those of us for whom design involves these other activities?

I'm reminded of an e.e. cummings poem:

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                          A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

On Wednesday, May 21, I'm going to be the Design Remixed speaker with the AIGA New York chapter. It's from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Apple Store in Soho. I'm going to be talking about my life as a creative professional -- a definite twist on the more prosaic talks I usually give on architecture, social interaction and technology. It should be a lot of fun. I'd love to see you there. Thank you, Liz Danzico and the AIGA NY chapter for the invitation!

It struck me I've not posted the talk I gave at IxDA's Interaction 08 conference, titled Strategic Boredom. Some of what I had to say I'd published in an earlier blog post. Here, you can see the video.

Greetings from Austin! I've just arrived for South by Southwest Interactive. This marks #11 for me and the 10th year I've attended (as well as my 10th on the advisory board). It is my favorite time of year -- I'm delighted to be here and to be a part of it again

On Saturday March 9 at 11:30, I am moderating a panel called "Meet the Architects" -- one of the few panels that I can think of that's ever happened at the festival that deals with architecture not as a metaphor but as the actual practice. It's an idea that emerged out of a conversation Bryan Boyer started with Hugh Forrest, the conference director, a year ago, and that continued between me, Bryan, and Enrique Ramirez. The official description goes:

A new kind of digital practice has emerged. We see it in our buildings and our cities: new architectural interfaces, new communities, new ways of thinking about the physical world around us. In "Meet the Architects," we'll take on these ripples in physical architecture and urbanism. This panel tracks new directions in architecture culture at the intersection of digital, film and urban environments; architecture zines, blogs and communities; and architectural and urban research.

The panelists are an excellent bunch. We've brought together Bryan Boyer, who will soon graduate with his master's in architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, John Szot, technical director of Brooklyn Digital Foundry, Mimi Zeiger, publisher of Loud Paper and an established architecture critic, and Enrique Ramirez, my classmate, a senior editor at Archinect and the figure behind Aggregat456.

As the panel approaches, I'll be posting information related to the conversation we have (images, recommended books and websites). If you're in Austin, do come. We'd love to see you.