Archive for June, 2007
Semi Permanent – Fully Inspiring!
June 12, 2007 11:41 pm
You know that design culture in Australia is coming of age when a Sydney conference gathers together a bunch of truly unique individuals who create everything from Audubon-inspired paintings to stunt films using their best mate as a car seat.
This conference was particularly inspiring because it wasn’t an inward-looking designer’s club. It was very outward looking – much more about ideas than tools. If this is the way design-thinking is going, then the future (or at least part of it) is looking very bright indeed.
Semi-Permanent and Design is Kinky founder Andrew Johnstone (despite his claim that he’s a “lazy, lazy man”) strikes me as a generous and inspiring person and so is his mum who helped out for both (fairly gruelling) days of the Semi-Permanent jamboree. According to Andrew, Design is Kinky was apparently born (as so many great ideas are) in a small flat in Sydney around 1998. One of the first people he interviewed was Niko Stumpo – a truly original thinker and designer responsible for such projects as we are aiko and the ground-breaking remedi project (started way back in 1997).
Highlights from Semi-Permanent for me (because this is, afterall, a blog) are:
Tiffany Bozic and her heartfelt journey as an artist, her inspirations and influences ranging from Audubon to the heart of urban life. She applies multiple layers of paint to maple wood panels creating poetic but surreal images of nature. She exhibits regularly at blkmrkt gallery in LA, along with gallery founder Dave Kinsey, who was another highlight for me. His work has moved from street-based cooler-than-cool-of-the-moment graffiti and skateboard art, to work of enduring substance. BlkMrkt was founded in 2002 after Kinsey observed “the widening gap between corporate marketing techniques and the youth market.”
There’s a whole lot more and I could go on – but I will just mention Nash Edgerton using his best mate the car seat in his film Lucky…
If you’ve missed the two Australian Semi-Permanents this year, don’t despair, there’s one coming up in Auckland in August.
Students from the “Motion Graphics and Emerging Media Design” course of 2006 were engaged in two projects over the 17 week course. The first, a motion graphics based project, was the creation of a short ident for FUEL tv (more about this project in “Student work from 2006: Motion GFX”). With the second project, the students were asked to create an IPTV prototype for either Movie Extra or FUEL tv.
The idea of creating interactivity as a designed experience was a relatively new concept to the students. Over the course of the project, the students learned that the creation of any functional design requires a fair bit of planning, and not least of all, getting under the skin of “viewers” or participants in that environment. One of the benefits of this project was that it introduced students to the concept of a non-linear project methodology. Before anyone could get their teeth into the fun, visual design bit, we needed to establish a project structure which entailed: exploring and creating a user/participant pathway through the IPTV service and revealing this pathway through the creation of a series of wireframes and non-linear “maps”. Out of the wireframes and maps emerged the “bones” of the service. This served as a guideline for creating interactivity, branding and animation. Any other creative inspiration which transpired along the way, now had a nest to live in.
In order to establish the environment and create the interactivity and the “experience” they wanted, students also had to learn Flash (in most cases from scratch). We wanted to prepare people for work in a “real-world” environment, where the experience of creating the front-end of an interface, enables designers to communicate more readily with developers. This process de-mystifies the intention of the interface design for the developer and allows designers to more fully explore creative solutions before entering into a creative partnership with the tech team.
