Yesterday, invited by Maki from Åbäke, we went to the guided tour of the Somerset House’s exhibition: Wouldn’t it be nice? / Wishful thinking in art and design which present a selection of work by Ryan Gander, Jurgen Bey, Dunne & Raby with Michael Anastassiades, Bless, Dexter Sinister, Alicia Framis, Martino Gamper, Marti Guixe, Tobias Rehberger, Superflex and Chosil Kil.
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The tour was guided by Kevin Flude ◊ and was a reflexion on what a guided tour is; from the beginning the main idea was to introduce the interaction with the audience. I was asked to act/play the designer of the guide: i had to choose a concept and design our guide accordingly; this bit was a bit unexpected and it was a rather confusing experience. After this introduction outside of the building, we started the tour and followed the exhibition’s succesion of projects. Kevin introduced us to a whole range of projects, but exhibited at another exhibition which itself too was exploring what Design is trough a specific angle, the purpose: On-Purpose ◊◊
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The experiment was really nice and completely resulting of the delightful improvisation of our wonderful guide. He is going to post a few reflexion on his own blog, following this post in which he is coming back from the tour.
It’s nice to see design reflections can also have their echoes in various other fields like organsiing tour (which is, after all, about presenting informations).
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◊ Kevin Flude is a guide with a blog: And Did Those Feet; Kevin is also closely related with a history museum: The Old Operating Theatre Museum, as well as teaching at St Martins.
◊◊ This exhibition is taking place at Arnolfini in Bristol
◊◊◊ I’m part of the show at Arnolfini — so, there is a due disclosure: Electronest has been commissioned to make an intervention on internet for the exhibition – sadly Kevin forgot to mention the project during the tour and i missed my few seconds of fame :)
November 02, 2008
Categories: art, culture, exhibition, london, offline
Tags: concept, design, distance, exhibition, guide, reflection, tour
Comment (1) - add your comment
Speaking about doing things should remain simple – but explaining design while relating it to aesthetical and technical choices can become really complex.
There was also some ambiguities regarding the fact i’m working mostly in collaboration with various people.
To reduce the apparent complexity, i used an introduction essentially relying on screenshots:
- first i decided to have a picture of the 2 other guys (pierre & fritz) from electronest, and a super simplified schema explaining the interaction in between the people i’m working with;
- then i introduced a short linear serie of works, alternating web and tangible projects, with some keywords and the main idea of the in & out underlying each small presentation.
The in & out topic/title/keyword of the talk was taken from discussions with Pierre Schmidt. This title was there like an anchor all along the presentation, i was reffering to it almost all the time to explain to students the process of the design+code or even design+code+electronic.
The in & out has to be understood as broad as possible: having something at the beginning, creating a process or action, and observing the result.
When you switch a light on, or turn a tap to get a glass of water, you create an action, a process and a result. This is exactly what happens when accessing a dynamic website with a database – you have some unsorted & undesigned content, a script that processes the content and finally a screen with the information organised and designed.
And that’s also what happens in the webjing projects we did in Bruxels (as one of the many examples): you have a set of data (news paper content parsed from websites + a sonor context made by the dj), a process (an application that listens to the sound’s frequencies) and a visual result: typography displayed and sized depending on some specific rules set up in the proccess.
Projects can handle various and complex processes, transforming many sets of data.
The process of design is all about choices and constraints; generating anything is always possible, but the designer’s role (or at least: my understanding of the designer’s role) is to produce meaning out of the raw content. To create an emotionnal interface to the data – this interface can be visual, but can also be an animation, a movement, a sound, …
Once the introduction was over we started to look at projects more deeply, and more hypertextually – linking elements of projects, explaining the links, the stories and the technicalities.
These technical complexities are what I was afraid of: loosing the students to the various complicated details that the scope of those projects generate. Apparently, the informal tone and the variation of various projects kept them on track with what i was talking about – nobody left the conference room before the end: good news.
February 21, 2007
Categories: electronest, teaching, workshop
Tags: choices, complexity, concept, context, culture, info hub, presentation, school, simplicity, talk
What do you think of this?