Category: LookingOutwards-08

Eyeo 2015 – Meejin Yoon from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

J. Meejin Yoon is a Korean-American architect and designer who is both a professor and head of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With a specialty in designing for public spaces and utilizing emerging technologies in ways to encourage and facilitate interaction as well as crafting a specific user experience. Yoon received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University in 1995, her Masters of Architecture in Urban Design with Distinction from Harvard University in 1997, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship to Korea in 1998.

What I love about Yoon’s work is that the technology she utilizes and integrates into her work is not simply a novelty, but is meant to be there and enhances the overall piece. Sometimes it’s more upfront as seen in Double Horizon at the Mexico-US border, which logs the movement of cars through various security checkpoints as ripples of light. Other times it’s subtle, such as in the Sean Collier Memorial at MIT, where there is no visible technology, but the amount of computational precision it took to create that structure with little to no support is staggering.

Sean Collier Memorial at MIT in Boston, MA (Top), and “Double Horizon” at San Ysidro Land Port of Entry near San Diego, CA (Bottom)

During her presentation, Yoon speaks frankly about her work and often mentions when her installations don’t go as planned with a smile, and recognizes that once her work is out in the public sphere, it now belongs to the public, and seeing how people interact with her work is a driving force for her. A lot of her work is very open-ended for people to approach and make the space their own, which is something I’m really interested in incorporating into my own work. It’s really interesting to see how people respond to these public installations, where the user can be as much of a creator as the person who put the installation there, which I think can be a powerful tool in creating these kinds of open-ended spaces. Additionally, her honesty and highlighting the off-beat moments of her process in her presentation helped further convey that idea of playfulness and trust, something that I deeply respect and would like to integrate into my own presentations where I discuss my work as a learning process rather than a shiny final product.

Yoon’s “Swing Time,” an interactive installation where swings lit up according to acceleration and movement, provided a lot of opportunities for play. While not intended to hold more than two people per swing, people would pack into these anyway as the installation permitted this kind of open-ended interaction – it helped that there was a bar next door.

More of Meejin Yoon’s work can be found on the website of her architecture and design firm co-founded by Eric Höweler, Höweler + Yoon, with additional information on the MIT Department of Architecture website.

Meejin Yoon is a Korean-American architect designer that went to Cornell University for a Barch and Harvard Graduate School for Design before before going off to teach at MIT and soon becoming the first female head of the department of architecture there. She created MY STudio to pursue creative works to intersect architecture with art and technology. She is based in several areas such as Boston, Massachusetts and Munich, Germany.

She thinks of herself as someone who wasn’t very inept at technology when she first started teaching at MIT and decided to take a course at MIT, even though she was teaching there, called “How to Make Anything”, which was basically a crash course on micro-controllers and fabrication. Here she created a project that was a defensible dress. This really showed how much she cared about personal space and public space, which are what all of her projects are based on. She has a strong fascination of the invisible line between public and private space.

She works on creating interactive play in public spaces, stating that they “gotta be fun” for the public or they won’t be successful. She also thinks that when creating a truly engaging public space you need to create something unfamiliar, “defamiliarize context so rules of engagement are less clear”. There were three projects that I really enjoyed hearing about: her design entry for the athens olympics, sculpture in roxbury, swing time.

The project for the competition at athens olympics was to really understand how people respond to and move through a public space and created in a public space you don’t know what is going to happen since you cannot predict people’s behaviors, which causes people to want to fool around with something to figure out how it works, which might cause it to break or cause them to just play around with them.

The sculpture reflected the citizen’s engagement with the city through an app that already existed that allowed citizens to engage with the city and tell the city what they might find like potholes, etc. Eventually the city would fix these problems within a specific time. Each part of the sculpture changed depending on the types of reports made and how the city was changing through the lights becoming brighter or dimmer depending on how many people reported a specific type of problem.

Photo of Sculpture in Roxbury

One more project that fascinated me was one where she studied how people interacted with public space to study if they even would interact with it. People seemed to really enjoy it. She wanted to create a project that people could engage with playfully, which was Swing Time. She made it into something more familiar and designed it after a tireswing, which helped adults feel like children again when they interacted with this project and even scaled the tireswing up so that the public really got a sense of being young again.



Three pictures above are of the Swing Time. The second one is of a diagram of the installation to incorporate the main idea of the project.

What I really admire about her projects is that she really cared about how the public reacted from her projects and she also learned from previous projects to better create her next project. She was really thinking about how the public could engage with a space and how to make it really enjoyable for them, which I really love. I also really love how she has integrated different fields of her interests into one specific field because I have the exact same interests: architecture, design, technology, and I wasn’t sure if it was possible to even combine the three. However, after listening to her talk at EyeO it seems that anything is really possible if you put your mind to it.

She gave a lot of examples and background information during her lectures, which was really interesting because it was easy to follow her train of thought and why she did what she did in each of her projects. You could also see a clear connection between her previous project and the next project to see how she has improved gradually each time she creates a new project. She also added some jokes here and there to keep her audience’s focus. I like that about her presentation and I want to learn to incorporate those into my presentations because I understand that lectures could be boring and that you need to engage with the audience in some way to make them want to keep listening and actually hear what you’re saying rather than just zoning out.

Eyeo 2015 – Meejin Yoon from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

Links to all of her projects: http://www.howeleryoon.com/
Her Company “MY Studio”‘s site: http://www.mystudio.us/

Jen Lewin is an internationally renowned light and interactive sculptor based out of New York City, and the director of her own studio; Jen Lewin Studios. She received a BA in Architecture and Computer Aided Design from the University of Colorado, Boulder, before studying Interactive Design at the Tisch School of Arts at NYU. For more than a decade now, she and her team have been fabricating large-scale interactive models that combine light sound, and motion, to encourage community interaction. She is an artist in almost every capacity, and this is a clear translation from her upbringing, which she says was very much centered around the arts and science. Makes sense, seeing has her father was a doctor and her mother a dancer. Lewin herself also engaged in the arts from young age, she drew, painted and was even a classically trained ballerina. She even started learning to program while in the 3^rd grade. She believes that an artist work often reflects where they came from, and in her introduction, describes these experiences, and growing up on Maui, Hawaii as highly influential on her as an artist. Now, she focuses on pieces that are situated within a public environment, made for public use. By moving past the traditional ideals of art hanging in a gallery she can create truly evocative pieces that mesmerize the viewers, and often blur the lines between artist and viewer, by allowing the viewer to become the artist.

She has several fantastic projects, but the three I most admire are the Laser Harp, Pool, and what I call the Dancing Butterfly. Each of these projects are evocative in their own, right and some similarities exist across the board, however, my main reason of admiration is that they represent her as an artist. Her beliefs, interests, hobbies etc. They all managed to reflect a clear aesthetic design and functional sensibility that can be connected directly back to the artist. Be it the reflection of her background in dance, seen in the butterfly which responds to the motion of the user, by recoiling or leaning in at the same speed the user approaches or retreats from the wings. Or Laser Harp and Pool, two public installations that use light sound, and human touch to generate a community feeling; once again integrating her love of music, dance, light, sound, and community engagement. She created truly evocative art, in which her aim is to have the viewers interact with the art but also each other. For example, multiple people playing with the laser harp can be noisy, but when individuals start to respond to each other’s action the result can be beautiful, and rich. In her presentation she clearly defines what she was trying to achieve with the various projects, their inspiration, how she iterated upon them, and where the project could possible go in the future.