Recording the communication between people and things. Curators, Paola Antonelli and Kate Carmody have gathered everything from Interfaces and Diagrams to Augmented Reality and harnessing Brain Waves.
Here are a few examples of what's on show:
Sparkfuns' Botanicalls.
An Arduino-based open-source software gives a voice to our silent everyday companions house plants.
The device, which uses moisture sensors in a plant’s soil to trigger messages sent to its human caretaker over a wireless network, opens up a playful, yet useful, line of communication. The messages are either tweeted or read out by a recorded human voice via telephone, and the plants are polite enough to send both distress calls and notes of thanks. While Botanicalls enables one particular form of inter-species communication, its fresh use of sensor technology could be implemented more broadly.
Media Surfaces: Interactive Media.
I'm a huge fan of BERG as they continue to explore communication, interaction with it and the unprecedented media saturation we live in. Where data bombards us from surfaces as intimate as a smartphone or as intrusive as digital billboards.
BERG’s film, which complements Dentsu London communicative strategy Making Future Magic, imagines that in the future, as Jack Schulze says, “bits of software will be playful at the edges of our lives without necessarily requiring direct and constant input.” In the film, your alarm clock kindly informs you know how late your morning train is running. A TV screen on stand-by acts as a passive feed for all your social media sites. A little like the clock wall, passively keeping you aware of the time. Twitter news updates quietly colonize the news-ticker update interface you see on some TV news programs. The receipt for a cup of coffee is enriched with the very latest breaking headlines, and a store window is animated with digital characters that move and interact with passersby. Ubiquitous but unobtrusive, the surfaces communicate in a manner that is dynamic and context-sensitive but only if we choose to pay attention.
Media surfaces: Incidental Media from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
Baker Tweet by Poke.
Another British company that I follow regularly and continues to be among the vanguard in our interaction with communication is Poke.
If you're not already aware of it, Poke London built, using Arduino technology. A device that lets the baker tweet out his freshest produce to the surrounding shoreditch ad-men and fancily sneakered designers. So they can take a break from Powerpoint and flash coding to gobble a pain au chocolate and a double espresso. A product I first wrote about on my website in 2009, under Top 10 Digital Trends to look out for when it first appeared in 2009.
The small, plain metal box (“bakery-proof,” the designers say, to withstand the heat and mess of the kitchen) is equipped with a dial, a button, and a screen interface, and it sends subscribers real-time notices on Twitter; the system can be customized online every day to reflect what the bakers plan to make. A hungry follower in the neighborhood can stop by right when the goods come out of the oven, and the bakery can let customers know when the treats are at their absolute peak. This seamless line of communication between bakers and customers, in turn, renders the city more intimate.
BakerTweet from POKE on Vimeo.
Out of The Box.
Out of the Box is an easy-to-understand mobile phone instruction manual specifically aimed at senior citizens. Designers Clara Gaggero and Adrian Westaway worked with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, an interdisciplinary design-research unit devoted to projects aimed at improving people’s lives, especially the elderly and disabled.
The outcome was this mobile-phone packaging that doubles as an instruction manual based on familiar non-digital communication. Seniors often find learning new technologies frustrating, especially, the designers explain, “as they apply analogue modes of learning to the digital experience looking in the box for help that is not there.” Here, the box is also a bound book that contains the phone. The new owner leafs through the pages of the book, gradually encountering both assembly instructions and the corresponding hardware parts, which are integrated within the bound book. Once the user is comfortable with the workings of the phone, the package can be stored on a bookshelf.
Out of the box from Vitamins on Vimeo.
Joon Y. Moon’s Augmented Shadows.
Augment Reality continues to excite me, as it heads ever nearer more refined human interaction. Where it will find it's vocation is yet to be decided, but I'm confident great things await it. The more I see of it, the more I see ever expanding potential in human interface with everything we control or manipulate. It literally puts the virtual world in the palm of out hands.
The effect of Joon Y. Moon’s ghostly ecosystem of shadow creatures and objects is created with blocks on a tabletop that functions as a rear-projection screen and has a computer, infrared camera, and light source installed below it. The shadows exist in both a real and fantasy environment; animations transform the blocks into houses and awaken creatures around them. Moving the blocks around the table sets off programmed reactions: people gravitate toward a light source, trees grow around it, and birds fly away from the dark.
Here's MoMA's introduction to the exhibition.
"Whether openly and actively or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us. Tangible and intangible, and at all scales from the spoon to the city, the government, and the Web, and from buildings to communities, social networks, systems, and artificial worlds things communicate. They do not all speak up: some use text, diagrams, visual interfaces, or even scent and temperature: others just keep us company in eloquent silence.
The purpose of design began to shift in the late 20th century from utility toward a more holistic combination of purpose and meaning. Thus far, 21st-century culture is centered on interaction, “I communicate, therefore I am” is the defining affirmation of contemporary existence, and objects and systems that were once charged only with formal elegance and functional soundness are now also expected to have personalities. Contemporary designers do not just provide function, form, and meaning, but also must draft the scripts that allow people and things to develop and improvise a dialogue.
New branches of design practice have emerged in the past decades that combine design’s old-fashioned preoccupations with form, function, and meaning with a focus on the exchange of information and even emotion. Communication design deals with the delivery of messages, encompassing graphic design, wayfinding, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design delineate the behavior of products and systems as well as the experiences that people will have with them. Information and visualization design deal with the maps, diagrams, and tools that filter and make sense of information. In critical design, conceptual scenarios are built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors.
Talk to Me explores this new terrain, featuring a variety of designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale. Designers are using the whole world to communicate, transforming it into a live stage for an information parkour and enriching our lives with emotion, motion, direction, depth, and freedom."
