Plug and play: the 'new purpose' of physical consumer space
"an effective physical connection is still absolutely imperative to brand success. Rather than assuming that the physical space is being hindered by the growth of digital activity, brands and designers are beginning to embrace the newer channels where consumers are choosing to spend their time and deliver a physical environment that adds value around these. Get the basic understanding of the 'new purpose' of the physical space right and the physical manifestation of the design will boom from there.
The key is to design interiors that can respond and morph with social and cultural shifts, so that the spaces become a form of 'cultural commentary', adding value to the popular activities of today's audiences. Above all, interior design must be approached in a way that ensures that the brand communicates a relevant message through this critical channel. This can be achieved by considering and responding to three key topics: cultural relevance, social context and technology integration."
(Lucy Johnston, Design Week)
Fig. "The Anthropologist", iloveretail.com
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
MediaArtTube Exhibition 1.0: Biofeedback Art
"Biofeedback art is recently emerged interactive art form which applies technologies to capture biological changes of the body and create an artistic meaning through them. Biofeedback interfaces measures EEG, galvanic skin response, facial analysis, temperature analysis, eye-tracking or hearth rate in order to monitor the users bio-philosophical and produce a dynamic psychological/behavioural/emotion-based analysis of the person. The artistic meaning production based on the applications of these qualities which often deals with embodiment, enaction, body awareness, immersion or active/passive bodily engagement. There are a variety of tools can be used by artists which are usually divided to contact (for example EEG) or non-contact (facial analysis through camera). The MediaArtTube Exhibition 1.0 presents a collection of engaging art works and experiments in this hot topic of media art."
(MediaArtTube)
Fig.1 Brainloop interactive performance platform http://www.aksioma.org/brainloop/index.html
Fig.2 Yasushi Noguchi, Hideyuki Ando - Watch Me!, eye-responsive Installation 2009 http://r-dimension.xsrv.jp/projects_e/watch_me/
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Internet of Things: What is a Spime and why is it useful?
"World-renowned Science Fiction writer and futurist Bruce Sterling will outline his ideas for SPIMES, a form of ubiquitous computing that gives smarts and 'searchabiliity' to even the most mundane of physical products. Imagine losing your car keys and being able to search for them with Google Earth. This same paradigm will find you "wrangling" with product-lifecycle- management systems that do for physical objects what the iPod has done for music. These and other radical ideas are delivered in Sterling's latest book`Shaping Things'. This concise book was written to inspire designers to visualize radical scenarios connecting information technology and sustainability in a new ecology of artifacts. Sterling suggests new connections between the virtual world and the physical world that will have you rethinking many of your assumptions about how we relate to products. He will be joined by Scott Klinker, 3-D Designer-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI who leads a graduate design program known for giving form to experimental cultural ideas. Klinker's own design work focuses on digital customization as industry shifts from mass production toward niche production in a networked society. The presentation will include an invitation for Sterlling and Klinker/ Cranbrook to team-up with Google to create a short documentary film that would portray a speculative future of life with SPIMES. Distributed online, this short film would convey the look and feel of SPIME scenarios as a provocation for widespread industry discussion about the new potentials of ubiquitous, ambient, searchable, geolocative products."
(Google Tech Talks, 30 April 2007)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Intertextual Enterprises: Writing Alternative Places and Meanings in the Media Mixed Networks of Yugioh
"The media mix of Pokemon, and subsequent series such as Digimon and Yugioh, create a virtual world that manifests in multiple media forms, and though which consumers can craft their own narrative trajectories through play with video and card games (Allison 2002; Tobin 2004a). This is a networked world of expanding reference that destabilizes the prior orthodoxy of children's media (Tobin 2004a). Rather than spoon-feed stabilized narratives and heroes to a supposedly passive audience, Pokemon and Yugioh invite children to collect, acquire, recombine, and enact stories within their peer networks, trading cards, information, and monsters (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 2004; Yano 2004) in what Sefton-Green has called a 'knowledge industry' (Sefton-Green 2004, 151). These media mixes challenge our ideas of childhood agency and the passivity of media consumption, highlighting the active, entrepreneurial, and technologized aspects of children's engagement with popular culture. They also create a proliferating set of contact points between practice, media, and imaginings, as players perform and identify with media characters in multiple and often unexpected ways.
An early draft of a paper published in Debbora Battaglia Ed. Encountering the Extraterrestrial: Anthropology in Outerspaces. Duke University Press. 2005. This paper was first presented at the 2002 meetings of the American Anthropological Association"
(Mimi Ito)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
newish media: SCOOT GAME
[SCOOT is a LBG/ARG for families to play together… but essentially it is aimed at the kids.
The game is called SCOOT and we have designed it for public places and museums… as a way to introduce everyday places as both a muse for storytelling and a stage for adventure… as well as to demonstrate to kids that basic mobile phone services can be used creatively.]
CONTRIBUTOR
Debra PolsonSHARE
