Yoo Jin Shin-LookingOutwards-08

Meejin Yoon

Meejin Yoon is a current professor and department head of architecture at MIT. She received her bachelor of architecture at Cornell and master of architecture in urban design at Harvard. She is also the co-founder of two studios in Boston. A lot of Yoon’s work focuses on interactive public space projects “that bridge issues of technology and play in the public sphere.” Yoon seems to smoothly and effectively blend the appropriate technology and architecture that align with the specific purpose and context of each project. The visuals that she uses in her presentation are mostly full-sized images, animations of the designs, and videos of her works in action. The transitions are smooth and she gives off an overall humble impression.

Out of all her projects, I really admire her “Collier Memorial” in memory of Sean Collier, an officer who was shot in the MIT campus immediately following the Boston Marathon bombings. Yoon initially had a lot of reservation because she was not used to dealing with metaphors and meaning in contemporary architecture. However, she successfully synthesized the ideas that were submitted from the open call, took the essence of these ideas, and produced a meaningful, beautiful memorial through a long, iterative process.

Rjpark – Looking Outwards 08

I’m using one of my late days.

Representation of Differential Growth for FloraForm

Jesse Louis Rosenberg is an artist and programmer who uses a combination of technology, art, and science when creating his nature inspired, computer simulation designs. He studied mathematics at MIT and has previously worked as a consultant for Gehry Technologies. He is now working in his own design studio called Nervous System in Somerville, Massachusetts, which he co-founded with Jessica Rosenkrantz back in 2007. His work consists of understanding scientific knowledge of nature and applying that to design that’s interactive and open. One of his works is the FloraForm, which is the latest generative design that is inspired by biomechanics of growing leaves and flowers. I admire the work because of its beauty and intricacy but I admire his thinking and designing process even more because he studies the science behind his inspiration. He focuses on the growing process of flowers and how that affects the shape and form. He also compares his findings (shapes and forms) to that of other things like jellyfish and sea slugs. He tries to fully understand every possible shape and form that can arise from flowers so that he can create a design that’s not only beautiful but also representative of its inspiration. In the video, you can see how Jesse and Jessica explain their work more in depth. They both explain their work using pictures and sketches which takes the audience through every step of their process. Every step also has an important purpose. In other words, they might’ve sketched or studied something to understand the shape/form or science or intricacy/beauty behind their inspiration and understanding each of these are important for the overall design of their final work. This has taught me that it’s important to have physical evidence or visuals throughout your thinking process. Not only does it help the audience understand your work in the end, but it also helps you analyze everything that you need to thoroughly, without missing any key information.

Looking outwards 8 rrandell

Eyeo2012 – Jake Barton from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

http://localprojects.com/

The speaker and designer that I chose to write about is Jake Barton. He is the founder of an experience design firm called Local Projects that works with museums, brands, and public spaces. The basis of his work is engaging his audience through emotion and technology with storytelling. His firm is based in New York, NY and he describes himself as a user experience designer. In his talk. Mr, Barton describes the creative process like falling in love– just as messy and scary and exhilarating. His projects are very diverse and range from designing parts of the 9/11 memorial Ground Zero to rendering interactive sculptures in Times Square. My favorite work of his is the Times Square interactive water sculpture. The sculpture displays a giant heart inside of a glass cube of water jets. Beside the sculpture is a podium that says touch me and when a person touches it, the sculpture beats to the person’s heartbeat. If the person holds another’s hand, the sculpture beats faster and so on. The message of the sculpture is about the beauty and importance of human connection– a message that really resonated with me. Mr. Barton connects with his audience through humor and using common emotions to relate to one another.

looking outwards 8

Eyeo 2014 – Darius Kazemi from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

Programmer Darius Kazemi’s work focuses mostly on building autonomous bots and generative toys that do random and absurd things. His intention for these projects is mostly to make himself laugh but in the end he finds the bots doing interesting unexpected things on the internet. He has created a twitter bot called “Autocharts” where once a day it tweets an absurd flow chart and he has also created a tumblr bot called “Scenes from the Wire”. His best known project “Amazon Shopper randomizer” is a program that he gives a 50 dollar amazon gift card once a month and the program buys random items, specifically books, cds, and dvds and nails it to his house. He made the bot’s amazon account from scratch and essentially the program works with amazon’s algorithms from the recommended list to create a personality for the bot as he keeps buying every month. Kazemi creates this interesting dynamic between the bot, amazon and himself as the bot delivers $50 worth of content that he can watch, read or listen to each month. In his programming work Kazemi makes a point about composing for infinity – meaning that a simple for loops ( in a few seconds) can generate more information than a human being can consume in a lifetime. This is a fact that creative programmers confront when making art with code and what the difference between the traditional creative process.

Jisoo Geum – Looking Outwards 08

http://thesystemis.com/

Zach Lieberman is a new media artist, researcher, and a computer programmer. In the past, Liberman has worked and launched a variety of projects such as ‘Opneframeworks’, a c++ library for creative coding. He also worked on the Eyewriter project, an opensource hardware and a software that allows people to draw with their eyes (the project that inspired assignment 08 – A). As an artist, Liberman also works with performance and installation art using buildings and also teaches at Parsons School of Design. An interesting fact about his resume was that he has collaborated with Golan Levin, an artist/programmer whom I personally admire. A common topic that shapes Lieberman’s body of work is the mapping of movement and the human body, as can be seen in the first project he showed in the presentation. Lieberman also applied the mapping software into collaborative works with Nike, Golan Levin, Olympic coordinators, and musicians. Although Lieberman stated during the presentation that he struggled with operating the music video project, I thought the project was very admiring. As a student aspiring to work in the fields of cinematography, it was interesting to watch coding merging into a motion picture. Lieberman also talked about how his open source programs – Openframeworks and Eyewriter – are being used as foundations for new software made by students and programmers. Overall, Lieberman’s presentation was very intriguing since he showed various demonstrations of his projects during instead of showing a documentation of his work. I think this method worked effectively in communicating with the viewers due to the nature of his works.

John Legelis – Looking Outwards 08 Eyeo

Professor Meejin Yoon is the head of the architecture department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and she is the first woman to hold this post. She was born in Seoul, Korea and lived and studied in the United States. She has degrees from Cornell and Harvard in urban architecture.

Yoon’s work has often revolved around lighting and the impacts of light pollution on the environment. I am personally supportive of these types of projects because I believe that as society has become more nocturnal, we need to be conscious of our impacts on the environment in non-obvious ways such as light pollution. Her particular work on projects in boston (my hometown) are very inspiring due to their benefits seen to the public space.

Design Competition Winner for Boston Bridge by Meejin Yoon

In her presentation Yoon rarely if ever had slides with text on them. Instead when she was using her slideshow to accompany her talk, she showed visuals that went along with what she was talking about. This caused the listener to not only pay attention to what Yoon was saying, but also created attention grabbing slides that kept the listener engaged. This method of presenting caused Yoon to be a key part of the presentation instead of simply a reader for the slides.

Yiran Xuan – LookingOutwards – 08

Darius Kazemi programs and creates what are essentially meme machines, automated generators of jokes based off of a defined format and filling in the blanks using ConceptNet, a program that links words with each other by their meaning. Kazemi’s projects are interesting as they allow our senses of humor, which we take to be organic and characteristic of human nature, to be emulated by machines; some of the examples generated by his bots are quite funny even.

http://tinysubversions.com/

Hannah Cai—Looking Outwards—08

I was drawn to Brian House’s work while viewing his website, which is filled with unconventional projects such as Tanglr, a chrome extension that links your own web browsing with that of a random stranger, and Conversnitch, a small “lightbulb” that discretely records conversation and posts bits of them to Twitter. Compared to my assigned projects in design, the unexpectedness and unconventionality of Brian’s work is really refreshing. I’d like to try doing exploratory work like that.

Brian has a background in computer science and sound, which results in a lot of experiments that generate sound from data. He describes himself as “an artist who investigates more-than-human temporalities.” Listening to his presentation, it was more dry than I thought it would be based on his eclectic projects, and a bit meandering. He didn’t really describe his work in an exciting or passionate way, and it was pretty objective — which I would expect more from projects that were assigned by others, and not self-driven. The content is interesting, it’s just formatted more like a essay than sharing your own art/work. I would present my own work differently.

Some of my favorite projects of Brian House are Fight Logic, Conversnitch, Animas, and Everything that happens will happen today.

Jenna Kim (Jeeyoon Kim)- Looking Outwards-8

Alexander Chen is a creative director at Google Creative Lab. He did various works including MTA.ME, which altered the NYC subway map to a string instrument, and invented “Les Paul Doodle” with his Google Team. He worked with different companies such as The Barbarian Group, Modernista, and Google, where he currently works in. As a both musician and a creative interaction designer, he does body of work that combine both music and coding. He says that seeing his children discover different instruments and playing around with melody inspires him to create coding that lets him see music in inspiring, new ways. One of his project called the “Pianophase” is a visualization that demonstrates Steve Reich’s 1967 piece Piano Phase into lines with different colors and patterns. He made two pianists repeat the the same note in different speed; one musical pattern draws faster than the other one. I really admire his work because as of lover of both coding and music, he figured out a way to make a harmony between the two. Also, the way he tries to show invisible thing, music, into a visual form is a very fresh idea. He presented most of his work and their descriptions in his main portfolio website. His website is generally very easy to interact because of the simplicity and the visuals that are easily accessible. I learned that simplicity in presenting works can help the audience understand the projects much better.

Link to his website: http://chenalexander.com/

Sarah Yae Looking Outwards 8 Section B

Jessica Rosenkrantz is a MIT & Harvard graduate, who studied Architecture and Biology. After graduating, in 2007, she founded a design studio called Nervous System with Jesse Louis-Rosenberg. They work to bring in the fields of science, art and technology together.

In Nervous System, they produce unique and affordable art, jewelry and household appliances based on patterns found in nature. I admire their Arboreal Pendant Lamp the most because I think it is amazing to portray nature, like light, from the computationally generated nature patterns.

To present their work effectively, they explain their motives clearly and walk through how they created a certain program step by step, so the audience can easily understand. They also reason through every step of why they did what they did; for example, on approximately 18:30 of the video, they explain how they decided their boundaries for their program. In order to present my own work, I should learn to present in a logical, easily-to-follow-along manner.

Her website can be found on: https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com

Her presentation video can be found on: https://vimeo.com/33369209

Nervous System – Eyeo Festival 2011 from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.